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Sir John Gielgud (right) with the ‘very macho’ Sir Ralph Richardson who was among friends who coaxed him back to the West End stage – to robust applause by the audience |
The long march to sexual freedom...
...from jail for homosexuals in the 1960s to today’s equal rights for gays. But Illtyd Harrington urges us to be vigilant about
any backlash
WISE, grey-aired sages often tell their indolent students that “those who ignore the past are doomed to relive it”, an aphorism attributed to at least half a dozen philosophers. Well, yes, but it did come back to me at last Thursday's reading of Nicholas De Jongh’s play Plague Over England in the Royal Court Theatre.
It is an account of the arrest in October 1953 of Sir John Gielgud, then our leading Shakespearian actor, for importuning men for an immoral purpose in a public toilet in Chelsea.
Britain at the time was seized not just by Cold War paranoia, but a determined effort by home secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe and an over-eager Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police determined to stamp out what they thought of as a plague.
Young, handsome policemen acted as agent provocateurs and many men of all ages and backgrounds suffered disproportionately. Marriages were wrecked, careers ruined. A virtual blackmailer’s charter had been written for the ruthless.
The “Establishment” had seen two stars of the foreign office, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – as well as Kim Philby, the glamour boy of counter intelligence, defect to Russia. This was explained away as homosexual decadence.
Burgess was undoubtedly a predatory homosexual, Maclean enthusiastically bisexual while Philby by all accounts was a dedicated hetero lecher.
The hysteria continued when Lord Montagu, Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers, a Hampshire landowner, all did time for corrupting some RAF NCOs who never complained about the carnal and rural pleasures of Hampshire offered by their upper-class betters.
De Jongh, the feisty theatre critic of the Evening Standard, has ingeniously taken what could have been a personal disaster and turned it into a stimulating political landmark which occurred before the inevitable political and social changes brought a more tolerant attitude.
Many of the current generation have little understanding of the depression and vindictiveness plus sheer hypocrisy which crushed gay men. The Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard was reputed to have sexual gratification while delivering the death sentence. He was a zealous enemy of homosexuals as well as proclaiming the redemptive use of the lash and the birch.
Gielgud, riven by fear and guilt, was about to open in a new play, A Day by the Sea. He had to be coaxed on to the stage of the Theatre Royal Haymarket by his friend Dame Sybil Thorndike and a very macho Sir Ralph Richardson. When the audience broke into robust applause, sexual taboos were being challenged by this public disapproval of his prosecution.
As De Jongh’s contemporary characters – mainly middle-class Londoners – show, fresh roadmarks were being drawn. But it took almost another 20 years, followed by a further 30, to get more equality and civil partnerships.
Hard to believe, sitting in the Royal Court, that more than 40 years ago I had to join a private club to see John Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me, about a high-ranking homosexual Austrian army officer.
We had to repeat the process to see A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller, all because that most bovine of actors, Anthony Quayle, forces a contemptuous kiss on a young male.
Marilyn Monroe, sex goddess, came with her husband Arthur Miller. There was drama on the Comedy Theatre stage and farce in the foyer. Quayle, by the way, did the pompous voiceovers for Tory television broadcasts.
After a drink and conversation with De Jongh, I gave a brief history lesson to one of the brighter members of my family.
Think of shame, the public humiliation of Oscar Wilde and a last-minute amendment to the Criminal Justice Act of 1885.
It forbade same-sex relationships and aging and staid Queen Victoria refused to sign the act in its entirety because she did not believe that women did it with women. They were exempted.
Men, sadly, endured another century of stigma, social ostracism and, too often, lives marked out by terrible misery and fear.
About 45 years ago I was invited to a private gathering of some then-current establishment figures – Lady Diana Duff Cooper, a close friend of Winston Churchill; the writer Lord Kinross; Pat Trevor-Roper, the leading oculist; Sir Lennox Berkeley and his friends Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. We were joined by the roguish, irreverent Lord Bob Boothby and the formidable Dame Rebecca West, a former mistress of HG Wells.
They came together to plan pressure on their friends Anthony Eden and subsequently Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s government.
De Jongh’s Plague Over England will, I hope, make people aware of a long march and be vigilant about a backlash. It set me thinking and concerned.
Sex please, we’re British
ON July 28 1967 the Sexual Offences Act passed into law, partially decriminalising homosexual acts in private in England and Wales. Remarkably, Scotland had to wait until 1980 and Northern Ireland until 1983 before homosexuality was decriminalised there.
The Wolfenden Report, which recommended that homosexuality be decriminalised, was published a full 10 years prior to the 1967 Act.
On Saturday evening, Channel 4 launches 40 Years Out – a series of programmes celebrating the liberalising of the laws.
A drama documentary called A Very British Sex Scandal opens the series on Saturday night at 9pm, focusing on the trial in 1955 of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Peter Wildeblood, the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail who had been arrested after a concentrated effort by the police. The programme dramatises the meetings of the Wolfenden Committee offers a picture of what it was like to be gay in Britain in the 1950s, with contributions from Lord Montagu himself and veteran gay rights campaigners Allan Horsfall and Michael Brown.
On Sunday night at 10pm, Clapham Junction, a drama by Kevin Elyot, centres on the mixed experiences of several gay men during 36 hours in London, and the devastating consequences that unfold when their lives collide. |
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