by Andy McSmith
However, another festering scandal was cleared up over time. The pub bombs set off with murderous effect by the IRA in Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham in 1974, led to eighteen men and women being imprisoned on convictions that were scandalously unsafe. The best known were the ‘Guildford Four’ – Paul Hill and Patrick Armstrong, convicted of both the Guildford and Woolwich bombings, and Gerald Conlon and Carole Richardson, convicted of the Guildford bomb. Their innocence had long been public knowledge, after the actual bombers had confessed. They were freed on 19 October 1989 after an inquiry by an outside force had established that the Guildford police tampered with a confession by Armstrong that had been central to the prosecution’s case. They had been in prison for fifteen years. The other fourteen who were wrongly convicted had to wait until 1991.
On 30 July 1990, an IRA bomb killed Ian Gow, who had once been closer to Margaret Thatcher than almost any other MP. He had been her eyes and ears in the Commons until he resigned in opposition to the Anglo-Irish treaty. He had never taken more than the most elementary precautions over his personal safety, so it was not that difficult for his killers to locate his home and attach a bomb to the underside of his car. It was a stark reminder that though the 1980s were over, the civil war in Northern Ireland continued, and it was still an open question as to whether or not British justice could hold up under the strain of a long guerrilla war.
There was impatience in parts of the British state, where individuals thought that it only required the determination to kill a sufficient number of IRA members and sympathizers in order to finish off the movement. This attitude was to some extent encouraged by a convention that required the politicians of the day to voice the platitude that the IRA was a criminal organization, not a political movement, as Thatcher had done on the day of Bobby Sands’ death. This view of the IRA was not, incidentally, confined to politicians, and was popularized in the first British film of the decade, The Long Good Friday, involving a well-organized gang that turns out to be the IRA. It was a good plot line, but in reality, after ten men had starved themselves to death, it should have been clear enough that even if the actions of the IRA were criminal, their motives were not those of common criminals. Yet, as Ken Livingstone’s treatment by the Sun demonstrated, it was dangerous for any politician to utter this thought.
Nonetheless, the British establishment had dealt with civil conflicts before, and had been through the business of vowing never to give way to terrorists, of trying to meet violence with military force and a show of determination, and of eventually opening up negotiations with the enemy, which usually produced a face-saving compromise. It had happened in Kenya, Cyprus, and more recently in Zimbabwe, so there was always the possibility that, sooner or later, the British would be negotiating with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and their colleagues. But not while Mrs Thatcher was in charge.
CHAPTER 13
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO HURT ME?
The reformers who liberalized the law on homosexuality in the 1960s did not intend that gay men or lesbians should be treated equally with the rest of the population, nor even that they should be seen or heard. They continued to be banned from serving in the armed forces; their relationships had no legal status; the age of consent was higher for gays than for heterosexuals; and outside the home, they ran a greater risk of arrest. They were expected to do whatever they did in private, and be grateful to a society that did not patrol their bedrooms. It was not thought to be a social problem that some people were virulently, pointlessly hostile towards gays and lesbians, provided that hostility did not convert to violent or threatening behaviour. It was the government’s view that the basic building block of a stable community was the family, in which heterosexual couples came together to raise children, and that homosexuality was a potential threat to that norm that had to be contained.
However, throughout the 1970s there had been a few people prepared to identify themselves in public as gay and to protest that homosexuality was a normal occurrence deserving respect. By the 1980s, such thinking had even infiltrated the Church of England. In February 1981, the General Synod was startled to hear Rev. Peter Elers, the openly gay vicar of Thaxted, Essex, put forward the proposition that there was no ‘problem of homosexuality’, because ‘the problem lies in the dislike and the distaste felt by many heterosexuals for homosexuals, a problem we have come to call homophobia’. Thus confronted, the Synod steered a middle course between tolerance and bigotry. Archbishop Runcie warned that anyone who ‘obsessively’ campaigned for gay rights must be considered unfit to be a vicar; but he added: ‘We are learning to treat the handicapped not with pity but with deep respect and an awareness that often through their handicaps they can obtain a degree of self-giving and compassion which are denied to those not similarly afflicted.’1
In September 1982, the airwaves were filled with the song ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ by an unknown group from London who called themselves Culture Club in recognition of their ethnic mix. Soon, the walls of teenagers’ bedrooms were decorated with photographs of Culture Club’s lead singer, causing approving parents to remark on how well-turned out she looked, until they learnt that this was no ‘she’, this was the androgynous Boy George. George O’Dowd, as he was originally known, was the son of an Irish factory worker from Eltham, south London. He had held only one dream-like ambition since his troubled schooldays: to dress up and be photographed. When he was nineteen years old, in the spring of 1979, he admitted to his mother that he had been having an affair with an older man. After that emotional conversation, he hitch-hiked to Walsall, where he had a fearlessly gay friend named Martin, and lived for a time in a kind of gay teenagers’ commune with Martin and two wild-looking women. Martin philosophically accepted that his way of life meant ‘a whack in the face at least once a month’, in addition to such hazards as being strip-searched by the police. A more open-minded police officer called around after local yobs had taken to passing slowly by the house in a van, shouting that they were going to kill the ‘queers’ living there. ‘I think he admired us. We were the first poofs he had ever met,’2 O’Dowd recalled.
In the autumn, George hitched back to London with no sensible ideas in his head about how he might make a living. He found a job as a cloakroom attendant at the Blitz club, caught the attention of Malcolm McLaren, and by the age of twenty-one, was living the drug-fuelled life of an international rock star. Even in the USA, his popularity was unaffected by his practice of dressing like a girl; yet he disappointed his more committed fans by not making a public statement about his sexuality. ‘I wanted people to know I was gay. It went against every corpuscle of my body to deny it,’ he later wrote; but ‘those around me, management, record company, were worried about sales potential’.3 Boy George was a lead vocalist on ‘Feed the World’, but by then drug abuse and the public’s fickleness were taking their toll, and once he started to fall, he fell a very long way, until he was arrested for assaulting a rent boy. It was almost impossible to equate the sad, overweight, middle-aged man who went to prison in 2009 with the glamorous New Romantic star he had once been; but in his heyday, Boy George had helped to make it be cool to be effeminate.
His professional advisers had good reason to be wary of how the industry might treat an artist who identified himself as gay. Holly Johnson, lead singer of the Liverpool dance group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was prepared to take that risk. In January 1984, the BBC disc jockey Mike Read was playing the group’s debut single ‘Relax’ when he began reading the lyrics and examining the record cover; he was so shocked that he stopped the record, pronounced that it was obscene, and vouchsafed never to play it again. An outright ban in all BBC outlets quickly followed. The fans’ reaction was to send the single straight to No. 1. By June, this hymn to gay sex was threatening to be an even bigger seller than Culture Club’s mega hit, ‘Karma Chameleon’. Meanwhile, another group, Bronski Beat, had a huge success with their debut single ‘Smalltown Boy’, about a young homosexual leaving his home
town in frustration. Bronski Beat’s lead singer, Jimmy Somerville, was part of what Boy George called the ‘new gay wave’, for whom it was a matter of principle that they were honest about their sexuality, but who could also be disapproving of camp behaviour that played up to heterosexual notions of what gay men ought to be like. Jimmy Somerville told the New Musical Express, ‘For us the music comes first, not our gay image. For Frankie Goes to Hollywood, it’s all like theatre, messing around with these outrageous images and shocking people.’ Somerville left Bronski Beat in 1985 to form the Communards with a keyboard player, Richard Coles, another young ‘out’ gay who would later achieve a different kind of prominence as a Church of England priest and Radio 4 presenter.
In November 1981, Gay News recorded a political breakthrough when Peter Tatchell, an active member of the Gay Liberation Front, was adopted as the Labour candidate for Bermondsey in south London. The Labour majority there was so substantial that it could be assumed that Tatchell was on his way to Parliament, once he had been through the formality of being endorsed by the party’s National Executive. But 1981 was the Labour Party’s year of turmoil. Tatchell was a supporter of the Bennite Left, and an immigrant from Australia, whose adoption was bitterly resented by the socially conservative Labour right, including Bermondsey’s sitting MP, Bob Mellish, who had intended to hand his seat to John O’Grady, the leader of Southwark Council. As a former government chief whip, Mellish was used to getting his own way. It quickly reached the ears of those who either had defected or were about to defect to the SDP that there was trouble afoot in the Bermondsey Labour Party. During Prime Minister’s Questions on 3 December 1981, one recently departed Labour MP taunted Michael Foot by reading an extract from an article by Tatchell advocating a ‘siege of Parliament’. Foot could have ignored the provocation, but to everyone’s surprise, rose to his feet to announce that ‘the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party, and as far as I am concerned, never will be’.4 He repeated those words ‘endorsed member’ very clearly, which was odd because there was no question about whether or not Tatchell was a member of the Labour Party. Foot may have confused him with someone else. His office affirmed later in the day that the word ‘member’ had been a slip of the tongue, and that he was referring to Peter Tatchell.
From that day, Tatchell was hurled, unprepared, into the full glare of national publicity. Every aspect of his past was on display and there was plenty there to excite disapproval. Homosexuality was a criminal offence in Australia when Tatchell was a teenager, and the country was at war in Vietnam, so he had fled to Britain to avoid the multiple risks of prison, enforced psychiatry and the draft. His sexuality, nationality and political radicalism were gifts to the Sun, Daily Mail and other newspapers on the lookout for any evidence that the Labour Party was infested by people with alien views and lifestyles. Within hours, if not minutes, of being made aware of Tatchell’s existence by that exchange in the Commons, national newspapers were on to the fact that he was gay. That evening, about 70 to 100 journalists piled into the Bermondsey Labour Party office in London’s Lower Road, where Tatchell and other local party members convened a hastily organized press conference. He was asked then if he was homosexual, to which he replied that he was ‘against discrimination’ and ‘for gay rights’. From then on, he was routinely described as having ‘campaigned for gay rights’.
In September, the Sun ran a story headed ‘Red Pete Went to Gay Olympics’, falsely claiming that he had been at a gay event in San Francisco. The Sun knew this was not true long before it printed it.5 Not to be outdone, the News of the World ran a story headed ‘Gay Row Rocks Labour’, complete with a retouched photograph of Tatchell which made it appear that he was decked out in eye-liner and lipstick. Writers of anonymous hate mail took up the case. One wrote to Tatchell, to say that ‘the people of Bermondsey have no intention of electing a cock-sucking, arse-fucking communist poof as their MP’. Another said that ‘when I lived in Bermondsey [it] was a place where men were men and women counted as “manholes” and members of the “Middlesex Regiment” would not be tolerated’.6
Had Michael Foot had the ruthlessness required of a major party leader, he would either have resisted the pressure to renounce Tatchell in the first place, or having renounced him would have seen the campaign against him through to the end; but after he had met Tatchell, his innate kindness prevented him from contributing to the victimization that he had inadvertently started off. As Foot relented, Mellish vengefully resigned his seat to take up a well-paid post that Michael Heseltine had offered him as vice-chairman of the Docklands Development Corporation. Mellish knew that it would plunge Labour into an extremely difficult by-election at the worst possible time, just months before a general election, with a candidate who had been subjected to twelve months of brutally hostile publicity.
Once Tatchell had been formally endorsed, despite that ‘never’ from Michael Foot, officials from party headquarters moved into Bermondsey to see him through the by-election. They included Monica Foot, a press officer who had married into the Foot family. One of the first discussions between candidate and press officer, in the atmosphere of cold mutual distrust engendered by a year of tension, concerned the delicate matter of Tatchell’s sexuality. He wanted to make a short public statement identifying himself as gay; she persuaded him not to. He recalled:
Although Monica said the decision was up to me, she gave me the strong impression that Labour Party head office thought it was a bad idea. The national officials were not ready for an openly gay candidate. They feared that, if I came out, the by-election would end up being all about my sexuality and not about local and national issues. A similar concern was shared by local Bermondsey party members. I had some sympathy with this view.7
In retrospect, it is difficult to see how an open statement by Tatchell could have made the outcome any worse for Labour. So much innuendo had been served up to the public that there can hardly have been a voter left in Bermondsey who was not in the know. Just in case anyone had missed out, John O’Grady, fighting the by-election as the ‘Real Labour’ candidate, allowed himself to be televised touring the constituency with a loudspeaker chanting ‘Tatchell is a poppet, as pretty as can be . . . He wears his trousers back to front’.8 Meanwhile, Liberal canvassers were seen with badges saying ‘I have been kissed by Peter Tatchell.’ The upshot was the worst defeat suffered by the Labour Party in any parliamentary election in the entire second half of the century, in which a swing of more than 44 per cent converted the 1979 Labour majority of 11,756 into a Liberal majority of 9,319. The victorious Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, would hold the seat for many, many years. He always denied rumours that he, too, was gay, until he was ‘outed’ as bisexual by the Sun, twenty-three years later. Tatchell, meanwhile, gave up any hope of becoming a Labour MP and became a militant campaigner for gay rights.
Although the Tatchell affair was a festival of homophobia, it was homophobia with a purpose, a means to an end: the real target was the left of the Labour Party. In other respects, gays and lesbians could feel that they were making progress. In November 1984, less than two years after the Bermondsey by-election, the newly elected Labour politician, Chris Smith, created a sensation when he opened a speech at a protest meeting in Rugby with the words: ‘I’m the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, and I’m gay’. Smith had taken the precaution of being elected before declaring himself; it would take until 1997 before an unelected candidate dared do what Tatchell had considered doing in 1982, and for all those years Chris Smith remained the only ‘out’ gay in the Commons, which did not stop him being re-elected in four general elections.
Something worse than homophobic prejudice was threatening gay men. In 1981, a forty-nine-year-old man who had recently returned from the USA died in Brompton Hospital, London, from a rare disease associated with a damaged immune system. A year later, on 4 July 1982, Terrence Higgins, who worked for Hansard by day and as a barman in the evening, also died after his
immune system had broken down. The cause appeared to be a frightening new disease known in the USA as GRID, or ‘Gay-Related Immune Deficiency’. A small group of Higgins’ immediate friends met in December 1982 and founded a new organization, the Terry Higgins Trust, to raise money for research into the new disease. By then, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had noted that GRID could also attack people who were neither male nor gay, and had renamed it Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. There were, as yet, only seven reported cases in the UK, compared with more than a thousand in the USA, but it would not be long before the very word ‘AIDS’ would be a trigger for panic, loathing and terror.
It did not seem to matter to a certain section of public opinion if the sexual practices of gay males opened them to the risk of a fatal wasting disease. To some people’s way of thinking, it was something they brought upon themselves. In the spring of 1983, the BBC’s Horizon programme broadcast a film called ‘Killer in the Village’, about AIDS in New York, which caused a sudden rise in the volume of calls to London’s Gay Switchboard – from 800 a week, to 5,000 – but provoked very little reaction from the rest of the population. However, in May, it emerged that a number of haemophiliacs had developed AIDS from transfusions of infected blood. The Mail on Sunday greeted the news with the headline ‘Hospitals using killer blood’. On the second page, there was a related piece headed ‘Spread of the “Gay Plague”’.9 The next day, the expression ‘gay plague’ appeared in headlines in three national newspapers.10 Suddenly, AIDS was very big news. Its victims, by inference, were in two categories – the innocent and the guilty. ‘The infection’s origins and means of propagation excites repugnance, moral and physical, at promiscuous male homosexuality,’ a leader in The Times opined as it called for any men who volunteered to give blood to be interrogated ‘succinctly’ about their sexual practices. It continued, ‘Many members of the public are tempted to see in AIDS some sort of retribution for a questionable style of life, but AIDS of course is a danger not only to the promiscuous nor only to homosexuals.’11 A reader of the same newspaper wrote in complaining that: ‘A self indulgent minority whose practices endanger the lives of innocent people, e.g. blood recipients, highlights the inseparability of private and public morality.’12