The Homosexual Law Reform Society was an organisation that campaigned in the United Kingdom for changes to the set of laws which criminalised homosexuality at the time.
In 1954, the Conservative government set up a Departmental Committee to look into aspects of British sex laws. The resulting report, the Wolfenden Report, was published on 3 September 1957.
On 5 March 1958, the academic A.E. (Tony) Dyson wrote a letter to The Times, published on the 7th, calling for reform of the law by the implementation of the Wolfenden Committee's recommendations. The letter was signed by many distinguished people including Clement Attlee, A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Trevor Huddleston, Julian Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Donald Soper, Angus Wilson and Barbara Wootton. [1]
The correspondence that this letter generated helped bring together supporters of the Wolfenden Report, and this led to the Homosexual Law Reform Society being founded on 12 May 1958 with members including Victor Gollancz, Stephen Spender, and Kenneth Younger MP. [2] Most of the founders were not homosexual.
Advertisements inviting people who supported the Wolfenden Report to contact the Homosexual Law Reform Society resulted in Tony Dyson being joined by Antony Grey, businessman Nigel Bryant and architect Duncan Wright.
In May 1958, the related charity, the Albany Trust, was set up.
In October 1958, the Albany Trust opened an office, and the HLRS was able to use these facilities for its campaigning work.
The pamphlet Homosexuals and the Law was sent to MPs in preparation for their first debate on the Wolfenden Report. The first parliamentary debate was initiated on 4 December 1957 by Frank Pakenham (Baron Pakenham, later known as Lord Longford); however, it had become clear that the government had shelved the report and was not planning to implement any reform. The Lord Chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir, had said, "I am not going down in history as the man who made sodomy legal." [3]
On 12 May 1960, over 1,000 people attended the first HLRS public meeting in Caxton Hall in central London. [4]
In 1962, Antony Grey became acting secretary of the HLRS. In the spring of 1963, this became a full appointment. Some people questioned the appropriateness of this appointment since Grey was a homosexual who was living with another man; there was concern that he might be subject to the same type of police attention that the organisation was campaigning against.
In 1963, the HLRS expanded to become a nationwide campaign, forming the North-Western Homosexual Law Reform Committee (NWHLRC) in Manchester under the leadership of Allan Horsfall. The North-Western Committee was the most radical and proactive of the HLRS’ groups, targeting trade unions and industrial workplaces and raising awareness of the Wolfenden Report. The NWC eventually formed the Committee, then formed the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.
The HLRS was most active during the campaign which led to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. For example, they provided advice and support to the Dorian Society of New Zealand; however, many (in particular the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and the Gay Liberation Front) considered that the new law did not go far enough and blamed the HLRS for what they saw as a weakening of the Wolfenden Committee's proposals, calling the HLRS/Albany Trust "a conformist outfit of Uncle Toms".[ citation needed ]
In March 1970, the HLRS became the Sexual Law Reform Society (SLRS) in order to campaign for further legal changes, particularly relating to the age of consent. In 1974, it produced a report for the Criminal Law Revision Committee on lowering the age of consent to 14, with the requirement that below the age of 18 the burden of proof that consent for sexual activities between the parties existed would be the responsibility of the older participant. [5]
Professor A. J. Ayer was President of the HLRS for a time; he remarked that "as a notorious heterosexual I could never be accused of feathering my own nest."
The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was published in the United Kingdom on 4 September 1957 after a succession of well-known men, including Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, John Gielgud, and Peter Wildeblood were convicted of homosexual offences.
Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford,, known to his family as Frank Longford and styled Lord Pakenham from 1945 to 1961, was a British politician and social reformer. A member of the Labour Party, he was one of its longest-serving politicians. He held cabinet positions on several occasions between 1947 and 1968. Longford was politically active until his death in 2001. A member of an old, landed Anglo-Irish family, the Pakenhams, he was one of the few aristocratic hereditary peers ever to serve in a senior capacity within a Labour government.
The homophile movement is a collective term for the main organisations and publications supporting and representing sexual minorities in the 1950s to 1960s around the world. The name comes from the term homophile, which was commonly used by these organisations. At least some of these organisations are considered to have been more cautious than both earlier and later LGBT organisations; in the U.S., the nationwide coalition of homophile groups disbanded after older members clashed with younger members who had become more radical after the Stonewall riots of 1969.
Patrick Dacre Trevor-Roper was a British eye surgeon, author and pioneer gay rights activist, who played a leading role in the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in the UK.
The Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) was a membership organisation in the United Kingdom with a stated aim from 1969 to promote legal and social equality for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in England and Wales. Active throughout the 1970s – and becoming a mass-membership organisation during this time – CHE's membership declined in the 1980s.
The Albany Trust is a British organisation which describes itself as a "specialist counselling and psychotherapy charity, focusing on a positive approach to sexuality and relationships". It was founded as a registered charity in May 1958 to complement the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS).
The rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have developed significantly over time. Today, lesbian, gay and bisexual rights are considered to be advanced by international standards.
Anthony Edward Dyson, aka Tony Dyson was a British literary critic, university lecturer, educational activist and gay rights campaigner.
The Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986 is a New Zealand Act of Parliament that broadly legalised consensual sexual practices between men as well as consensual anal sex regardless of partners' gender. It removed the provisions of the Crimes Act 1961 that criminalised this behaviour. The legislation established a uniform age of consent, setting it at 16 for both same-sex and opposite-sex partners.
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 is an act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It legalised homosexual acts in England and Wales, on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21. The law was extended to Scotland by the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 and to Northern Ireland by the Homosexual Offences Order 1982.
Harford Montgomery Hyde, born in Belfast, Ireland, was a barrister, politician, prolific author and biographer. He was deselected by his party in 1959, losing his seat in the House of Commons, as a result of campaigning on homosexual law reform.
Restrictions on sexual activity involving minors in the United Kingdom and its predecessors have existed since medieval times. During the 1970s, there was some political advocacy in favour of significantly reducing the age of consent, supported by various 'youth liberation' organizations and mostly by members of the Paedophile Information Exchange. Meanwhile, over a similar time period, the unequal age of consent for straight and gay young people was campaigned against by the LGBT rights movement. More recently arguments have occasionally been made in favour of reducing the age of consent, generally to an earlier point in adolescence.
The Hall–Carpenter Archives (HCA), founded in 1982, are the largest source for the study of gay activism in Britain, following the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957. The archives are named after the authors Marguerite Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943) and Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). They are housed at the London School of Economics, at Bishopsgate Library –, and in the British Library.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place worldwide in the 1950s.
Peter Wildeblood was an Anglo-Canadian journalist, novelist, playwright and gay rights campaigner. He was one of the first men in the UK to publicly declare his homosexuality.
The Dorian Society (1962–1988) was the first New Zealand organisation for homosexual men. It was founded on 27 May 1962 by a group of men including Cees Kooge, John McKay, Brett Rawnsley, and Claude Tanner, the latter of whom would be elected the Society's first President-Chairman. It was primarily a social club that avoided political action. In 1963, it took the first steps towards law reform by forming a legal subcommittee that collected books and other resources. It also provided legal advice to its members. By 1967 it sought advice from the English Homosexual Law Reform Society and Albany Trust on the legislative changes occurring there. This led to a New Zealand society dedicated to law reform. Its first project was a petition, signed by 75 prominent citizens, that was presented to Parliament in 1968.
Anthony Edgar Gartside Wright, better known by his pseudonym Antony Grey, was an English LGBT rights activist. Grey was credited by Lord Arran to have "done more than any single man to bring this social problem to the notice of the public".
Major Michael Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers was a West Country landowner who gained notoriety in Britain in the 1950s when he was put on trial charged with buggery. This trial was instrumental in bringing public attention – and opposition – to the stringent laws against homosexual acts as they then stood.
This is a timeline of notable events in the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the United Kingdom. There is evidence that LGBT activity in the United Kingdom existed as far back as the days of Celtic Britain.
Allan Horsfall was a British gay rights campaigner and founder of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. Horsfall was also the co-founder and leader of the North-Western Homosexual Law Reform Committee (NWHLRC), a regional and provincial branch of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) in Manchester.
The house was held utterly absorbed by the Primate's 'haunting examples' of men who, once caught, were held by an 'octopus of corruption'.
