On this day in 1967, homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, sparking a golden age of gay liberation struggle...

It was in 1533 that male homosexuality was first officially outlawed in England and made punishable by death.

This brutal legal regime was then applied to all the societies conquered by England as it pursued imperial expansion around the world.

It was a grotesque project, fuelled by bigotry and hatred, which made life perilous for countless generations of gay men.

It wasn’t until 1861 that the death penalty was removed in Great Britain. But even then, homosexual activity between men continued to be persecuted by the state. 

Homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain in 1967, but the struggle for equality and acceptance continues

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In some ways, the persecution became worse under the reactionary moralism of the Victorian era.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 actually expanded the scope of criminalisation.

Men could now be arrested for entirely private acts of homosexual love, whereas the previous legislation had required a witness.

And the new law was so vaguely worded that men could be prosecuted just for expressing affection to one another in writing.

The British state used this hateful apparatus to inflict pain and even death on many prominent radicals.

Oscar Wilde was one of many victims of the homophobic legislation and social mores of Victorian Britain

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Oscar Wilde was convicted in 1895 for “gross indecency” – that is, consensual homosexual acts with another man. He was sentenced to two years of hard labour, an experience which wore harshly on his health and contributed to his early death.

The British government also circulated evidence that Roger Casement was gay, to help legitimise his execution for taking part in the Easter Rising of 1916.

After World War 2, despite having just fought a global war for human dignity and rights, the state continued to persecute and convict men for being gay in Britain.

The gay war hero and mathematician, Alan Turing was convicted in 1952 under the same “gross indecency” law as Wilde. He was offered a monstrous choice between prison or probation on the condition that he undergo chemical castration.

Taking the latter option, Turing died by suicide just two years later.

Under the so-called 'Alan Turing law', Turing and many others convicted under homophobic legislation were retrospectively pardoned in 2017

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But an opportunity for change was coming.

Some in the government and Parliament began to question the criminalisation of gay men.

Between 1954 and 1957, a government committee produced the Wolfenden Report, which recommended decriminalising private and consensual homosexual acts between men over the age of 21. Homosexuality between women had never been formally outlawed in Britain.

The report argued:

“Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.” 

The sitting Tory government, full of aristocrats and reactionaries, refused to consider the measure. But in 1964, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party was elected.

Wilson’s Labour would prove much more suggestible when it came to liberalising social reform – of which Britain was in dire need.

Encouraged by Wilson’s liberal Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, a cross-party coalition of MPs and Peers began pushing a bill through Parliament which would enact the Wolfenden measures.

A key member of this group was the Welsh Labour MP, socialist, and RAF veteran, Leo Abse, who was also active in pushing other social reforms, including a law to make divorce more accessible.

56 years ago today, the ‘Sexual Offences Act’ of 1967 became law. It decriminalised homosexual activity between men in England for the first time in more than four centuries.

But the Act was far from egalitarian. Following Wolfenden’s advice, the new legal terms for homosexual activity between men were far more restrictive than for heterosexual partners, with a higher age of consent.

And the whole ideology of the law shied away from any vision of gay liberation. Its framers often accepted the homophobic premise that homosexuality was a negative aberration, arguing merely that it ought not be subject to criminal prosecution.

But whether or not the Sexual Offences Act was intended as an act of gay liberation by the politicians who signed off on it, it was turned into one by radical activists over the next decade.

Decriminalisation made it possible, for the first time, to organise politically against the homophobic practices and norms of British state and society.

In 1970, off the back of the Stonewall Riots in New York, the Gay Liberation Front was formed in the U.K. It would be the first of several LGBTQ movements on the radical edge of British politics, emerging in the wake of the 1967 Act.

And it was the courageous activism of these groups which both expanded gay rights and defended them against reactionary backlash, especially under the Thatcher government.

Decriminalisation was only the beginning, paving the way for a golden age of gay liberation struggle in Britain.

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