The law before 1967
Until 1967, sexual acts between men were criminal offences in England and Wales, whether they took place in public or in private. The offences included buggery and “gross indecency”, and the latter, a broad charge created in the late nineteenth century, could be applied to almost any sexual contact between men. Prosecutions, blackmail and social ostracism were realities for many gay men. Several well-known cases in the early 1950s, including the prosecution of the aristocrat Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and others in 1954, drew public attention and gave weight to the argument that the law needed review.
The Wolfenden Report
In 1954 the government appointed a committee chaired by Sir John Wolfenden, a university vice-chancellor, to examine the law on homosexual offences and on prostitution. Its report was published in September 1957. On homosexuality, it recommended that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence. The committee’s reasoning was that the law should not intervene in private moral conduct that did not harm others, a distinction between sin and crime that became highly influential.
The government of the day did not act on the report. Public and parliamentary opinion was still mostly hostile, and the Home Secretary at the time was not willing to put it forward. The Homosexual Law Reform Society, founded in 1958, campaigned for change over the following decade, with support from clergy, academics, writers and some politicians.
The political path
By the mid-1960s the climate had changed somewhat, and Labour’s victory in 1964 and its larger majority in 1966 improved the odds. Reform came as a private member’s bill, not a government bill. In the House of Lords it was championed by Lord Arran (Arthur Gore, the Earl of Arran), and in the Commons by Leo Abse, a Labour MP from Wales. Roy Jenkins, who became Home Secretary in December 1965, was sympathetic and helped by allowing parliamentary time and not whipping the vote.
The debates were long, and some took place late at night. Opponents argued that the change would encourage immorality, endanger young people and offend religious belief, while supporters argued that the existing law was cruel and unenforceable, and that the Wolfenden principle was sound. Even among supporters, many framed the reform in terms of tolerance for a regrettable condition rather than acceptance, a tone that looks very dated now. Votes were free votes, and the bill needed to survive several late stages in both Houses. It received royal assent on 27 July 1967.
What the Act did
The Act removed criminal liability for homosexual acts between two men in private, provided both were aged 21 or over and consented. Its limits were important:
- “Private” was defined narrowly. The Act did not apply if more than two people were present, or in a place such as a public toilet, or any setting where others might see.
- The age was higher than for heterosexual sex. The age of consent for acts between men was set at 21, whereas for sex between a man and a woman it was 16.
- It excluded certain services. The Act did not apply to the armed forces or to the merchant navy, where such acts remained offences under their own rules.
- It covered only England and Wales. Scotland followed in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982.
The Act did not make homosexuality legal in a general sense, nor did it prohibit discrimination. It simply removed the criminal penalty for certain private acts. Offences such as importuning and gross indecency remained for acts that fell outside the narrow exception.
The aftermath
A common misunderstanding is that the Act brought immediate acceptance. It did not. Social attitudes changed slowly, and some historical accounts argue that police enforcement of the remaining offences increased in the years after 1967, so that the number of prosecutions for public-related offences rose even as private acts were decriminalised. The precise figures are a matter of research and debate, so it is best to say only that the reform did not end policing of gay men’s lives.
Activists in the 1970s pushed for greater change, and the gay liberation movement, influenced by developments in the United States, grew out of different priorities from the cautious reformers of the 1960s. Later laws progressively removed the inequality: the age of consent was lowered to 18 in 1994 and made equal at 16 in 2000, and the ban on gay people serving in the armed forces ended that year. Many further reforms followed in the twenty-first century. The 1967 law is therefore best described as a first, limited step.
Where it fits in 1967
The Act is often mentioned together with the Abortion Act, passed a few months later, as part of the reforms of that period; they were separate measures with different sponsors, and neither can be described as a government programme. Other countries were approaching questions of private life, rights and the law in their own ways. In the United States, for example, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia in June 1967 struck down bans on interracial marriage, a very different issue arising from the civil rights movement, but one that also dealt with the state’s role in intimate personal life. Taken together with the other laws of that year, the Sexual Offences Act is an important part of the legacy of 1967, and one whose limitations are as instructive as its achievements.