by Andy McSmith
By August 1984, AIDS had claimed thirty-two lives out of sixty-one known victims, including one unnamed haemophiliac.13 A second, Terence McStay, died in a Newcastle hospital in November. By now, the renamed Terrence Higgins Trust had grasped that numbers were not important: every death of a haemophiliac had dire implications for public attitudes to homosexuality. The trust suggested that gay men should stop donating blood until a reliable method of detecting infection had been found. The Home Office concurred and put out advice not to give blood, but for some reason directed it specifically at ‘promiscuous’ gay men. This was pointless, because the AIDS scare was having a dramatic impact on the behaviour of gay men, who were settling into steady relationships to decrease the risk of infection, and no longer considered themselves to be promiscuous. Between July 1984 and March 1985, there was a fall of between 30 and 40 per cent in the number of cases of gonorrhoea in gay men reported at the VD clinic at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and no equivalent fall in the number of cases involving heterosexuals – a clear statistical indication that gay men were being more careful in their sexual habits.
But for many, it was too late. More than 90 per cent of British AIDS victims were gay men. ‘In Britain, AIDS is a homosexual problem,’ the head of the VD clinic at St Mary’s told The Times.14 Rather than invoking sympathy for the majority of sufferers, the disease was a golden opportunity for the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun, to give their prejudices a free run. In February 1985, the Sun reported on the death of a young church organist from Bournemouth, who had been a regular blood donor until he was diagnosed with AIDS, under the headline: ‘AIDS donor who infected forty-one people dies.’15 There was no evidence that the dead man named in the Sun had infected anyone, but a complaint to the Press Council was rejected on the grounds that although the headline could be ‘misunderstood’, further down there was a reassuring quote from doctors that the risk that anyone had actually been infected was ‘minimal’.16 In October 1985, when AIDS claimed its most famous victim so far, the former Hollywood star Rock Hudson, the Sun ran a photograph of his wasted body, along with the information that his weight had shrunk to 7st.17
Coverage such as this could hardly fail to have an impact on public behaviour. Though the government’s chief medical officer, Donald Acheson, might protest that ‘you can’t get it from sitting in the same room or sharing a meal with a person with AIDS’,18 many people either did not hear or did not believe him. Early in 1985, with the Royal College of Nursing forecasting that 1m people in the UK would have AIDS by 1991,19 the British Safety Council advised medical staff, firefighters and others not to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to any injured person who might be homosexual. In February, the Prison Officers Association instructed its members to refuse to transfer prisoners to or from Chelmsford prison after the prison chaplain had died from AIDS.20 At about the same time, Rev. Saward, the vicar of Ealing, had a letter from a parishioner who was refusing to take communion, having read in a newspaper that if you had a cold sore, you could catch AIDS from an infected person’s saliva. The vicar protested in vain that neither he nor anyone else officiating at his church was gay.21 When the Gay Sweatshop arrived to put on a performance at a theatre in Swansea, the cleaners refused to work until after they had been issued with rubber gloves, disinfectant and other materials.22
That summer, in Hampshire, the parents of a nine-year-old boy named Peter, who had haemophilia, were informed that he had developed antibodies to the AIDS virus after being given contaminated blood. This did not mean that he had AIDS, but his public-spirited parents nonetheless informed the teachers at his primary school about his condition as the children returned to school in September 1985. As the news spread, a quarter of the school’s pupils were withdrawn by their parents in a cruel, panic-induced ostracism of a blameless child. Peter’s parents said they could not blame people for protecting their own children, and declared that they were touched by the attitude of the majority. The Hampshire Education Authority avoided a repeat of the story when they discovered that a three-year-old haemophiliac had also developed AIDS antibodies by pre-emptively removing him from nursery.23 In the same month, a drug addict bled to death in a bedsit in Kennington, south London. His body was taken to Southwark mortuary, but staff there refused to handle it. Instead, staff at St Thomas’ Hospital, who had enough work to do on their own patients, had to carry out the post mortem. The coroner at the subsequent inquest issued a public plea against ‘hysterical reactions’ to AIDS.24 By September 1985, there had been 205 cases of AIDS diagnosed in the UK and 114 deaths. By comparison, lung cancer was killing 30,000 people a year, but it was AIDS that people feared. In November, police who escorted an AIDS victim to St Albans Crown Court insisted on wearing white plastic hoods and masks for protection.25
Such was the scare that heterosexuals began to consider the risks of partaking in random sex. A student visiting hospital in the summer of 1986 noticed:
two things that made this visit different from the last. The waiting room was much busier and all the new patients were obviously gay men. And I suddenly knew precisely why they were here and it made my blood run cold. They were getting HIV tests . . . AIDS had been in the news for a while, but this unsettling glimpse of the panic that had clearly taken hold among London’s gay community gave me a real scare . . . Sex didn’t seem so sexy with a gravestone at the end of your bed.26
The government had by now realized the need to act. In February 1986, full-page advertisements appeared in newspapers bearing the slogan ‘Don’t aid AIDS’. They also sponsored a programme of needle exchanges for drug addicts, despite the political risk that they would be seen to be condoning the use of hard drugs. The first publicity campaign, though well intended, was weakened by the coy language; it warned, for instance, that AIDS ‘can be passed by intimate contact from one person to another’ – advice that was at once useless and unnecessarily alarming. In the autumn of 1986, however, Mrs Thatcher’s long-serving secretary of state for health, Norman Fowler, recruited a new departmental head of publicity, Romola Christopherson. Fowler probably did not know it at the time, but as well as being a competent public servant she was also lesbian, which may have coloured her attitude to the kind of thinking that preferred to let young men die of a fatal disease rather than risk offence by warning them in plain language how to avoid it. She persuaded Fowler that the publicity budget for AIDS should be raised from £2.5m to £20m, and that the material it produced would have to be more specific.
Fowler was of the generation that had left university before the sexual liberation of the mid-1960s began, yet to his credit, he accepted her advice – and out of that came the rare humorous aspects of the grim story of the AIDS epidemic. For instance, one task that befell Fowler was to go to Margaret Thatcher to forewarn that every household in Britain was going to be sent a leaflet, paid for by the taxpayer, containing the term ‘rectal sex’. ‘Mrs Thatcher took a lot of persuading to let that happen. She really did not like the idea of elderly ladies in Bognor receiving such material through the post,’ Christopherson said. Another story she told was that she was the only woman at a departmental meeting that was shown draft publicity containing the term ‘oral sex’. She claimed that a bemused secretary of state had to ask ‘What’s oral sex?’, whereupon every man in the room turned to her, expecting her to explain. Once enlightened, the minister exclaimed: ‘Crikey!’ For the sake of truth and balance, it should be recorded that Fowler disputed Christopherson’s version of the story. He confirmed that he expressed surprise, but said it was at an estimate of the number of people who practise oral sex. ‘There is a wonderful and totally untrue story that I had never heard of oral sex. Curiously enough, I had,’ he insisted.27
Another government poster, warning drug addicts against sharing needles, bore the caption ‘It only takes one prick to give you AIDS’. For this and other offerings, Fowler was deluged with complaints from fellow Tory MPs, but from the public there were surprisingly few. There was,
however, the reported reaction of the Conservative leader of South Staffordshire Council, Bill Brownhill (whose name is perpetuated in the Bill Brownhill Room at the council offices in Codsall), to an education film about AIDS: ‘Those bunch of queers that legalise filth in homosexuality have a lot to answer for and I hope they are proud of what they have done. As a cure, I would put 90 per cent of queers in the ruddy gas chamber,’28 he said. James Anderton, chief constable of Manchester Police, was of much the same mind. He described AIDS as a ‘self-inflicted scourge’ and the majority of its victims as people ‘swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making’. His words were applauded by the Sun: ‘What Britain needs is more men like James Anderton – and fewer gay terrorists holding the decent members of society to ransom.’29 Subsequently, Anderton’s daughter came out as a lesbian.
Under such pressure, it was almost inevitable that political action would follow. The first blast was sounded by Margaret Thatcher when she addressed the party conference that followed the Conservative victory in the 1987 election. ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay,’ she warned, adding that those children were being ‘cheated of a sound start in life – yes, cheated’.30 The challenge was taken up a month later by a Conservative MP, Dame Jill Knight. A local government bill had been introduced in the Commons, and Dame Jill proposed to add a clause, which became Clause 28, specifying that no local authority should ‘intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ nor ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.
Jill Knight and those who supported her appear to have been blindly convinced that homosexuality went together with left-wing politics. Actually, there were then, and have always been, a great many right-wing gays, including Conservative MPs as eminent as Enoch Powell, all of whom felt the need to conceal their sexuality, and some of whom entered into what must be virtually sexless marriages for self-protection. In the early 1980s, Harvey Proctor, the pro-hanging, anti-EEC MP for Billericay, was one of the most right-wing politicians in the land. After the Brixton riots, he addressed an anti-immigration meeting, with known fascists in the audience, and called for ‘compulsory repatriation for those foreigners who riot, loot and commit serious offences’. He suggested that 50,000 should be deported.31 In 1981, his constituency party supported him against rumours that he was actively homosexual, but his career was brought to an end at the 1987 general election after the police called at his Fulham flat and found a near-naked youth screaming with pain. Proctor admitted that he liked to hire rent boys and cane them. Being a sadist was not a criminal offence, but gay sex with men under twenty-one was, as Proctor’s solicitor, Sir David Napley, pointed out in court. ‘If this man had performed equal acts of gross indecency with a female prostitute under twenty-one he would have committed no offence,’ he said. Proctor was fined £1,450.32
By this time, the warnings and the publicity about healthy sexual practices had made an impact. The number of new diagnoses of HIV per year had fallen in 1985–8 from 3,000 to 2,000. In fact, all sexually transmitted disease was on the decline. The number of diagnoses of gonorrhoea in England and Wales, for instance, dropped from around 50,000 in 1985 to just 18,000 in 1988. This restored some confidence in the gay community, while Jill Knight presented them with a cause around which they could unite and fight. As Clause 28 passed into law in May 1988, 10,000 people turned out to protest in London and 15,000 in Manchester. One of the many events organized in opposition to the clause was a gig in Manchester on 30 May 1988 by The Stone Roses, a local band with a growing following (they released their first album in 1989, kept the fans waiting five years for the second and then disbanded). The brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher were in the audience for that gig, and were so knocked out by it that they resolved to become rock stars. The legislation also motivated Boy George, out on his own after leaving Culture Club, to produce his first solo single, ‘No Clause 28’, and the Shakespearian actor Ian McKellen to appear on Radio 4 and announce that he was gay. He, together with the Eastenders actor Michael Cashman and the former Tory MP turned TV presenter Matthew Parris, were among the co-founders of Stonewall, the gay rights lobbying group, which was set up in 1989 in reaction to Clause 28. It also inspired some stylish direct action from lesbians, who until 1988 had kept themselves largely out of sight. On 2 February 1988, as the House of Lords was in the process of voting 202 to 122 in favour of Clause 28, three women unfurled thin twine ropes that they had smuggled in and tied to the ornate ironwork, then abseiled down into the chamber shouting ‘Lesbians are out!’33 One woman reached the ground and the other two dangled uncertainly before they were whisked away by the retired naval officers in charge of Commons security. Six hours before Clause 28 officially became Article 28 of the Local Government Finance Act, Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell were reading the national news when lesbians burst noisily into the BBC studio in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘We have rather been invaded,’ Lawley announced, as the viewers heard muffled shouts and thumps, and the picture began to shake. Witchell said afterwards: ‘I found that one of the women had chained herself to the base of Sue’s desk so I sat on her and covered her mouth with my hand.’34
Clause 28 was a pointless piece of legislation. No prosecution was ever brought under it because there was never any plausible evidence that any council was intentionally promoting homosexuality. Nor was it explained how they ever could ‘promote’ it had they wanted to. Material promoting safe sex was specifically exempted from the clause and, in the very week that the clause became law, it emerged that it did not apply to sex education in state schools either. Such was the government’s distrust of elected councillors that they had already transferred responsibility for sex education from local authorities to the Department of Education, which was not covered by Clause 28.35 Generally, it did more good than harm to the cause of gay rights, and more harm than good to the Conservative Party. The stigma of being the anti-gay party lingered for twenty years, at least until David Cameron apologized for Clause 28 at the time of Gay Pride event in 2009.
CHAPTER 14
LIKE A GHOST TOWN
Whatever lingering reputation the Church of England had as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’ was finished off just before Christmas of 1985 when the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas produced a document called ‘Faith in the City’. The dereliction, decay and general hopelessness in the inner part of old cities where traditional industries had withered away had been part of public discourse from the start of the Thatcher years. The worst of the desolation was to be found in northern cities, and inner London. In the twenty-first century, anyone walking south over Tower Bridge sees an array of tasteful new architecture, expensive riverside flats and commercial premises, but that was not how the area looked in 1980, after the wharves had closed down, leaving what Robert Elms aptly described as ‘an endless array of disused hulks lining the old abandoned docks’.1 Inner-city decay made its way into Tops of the Pops via the extraordinary song Ghost Town, by The Specials, with its warning of desolation and doom – ‘This town’s becoming like a ghost town . . . government leaving youth on the shelf . . . no job to be found in this country . . . too much fighting on the dance floor’. It was this wailing, harrowing sound that topped the charts in the week that Toxteth went up in flames. Another cultural phenomenon that focused attention on inner-city life was the highly acclaimed six-part television drama series Boys from the Black Stuff , by Alan Bleasdale, which followed the adventures of a group of Liverpool bricklayers in their search for work. They included the immortal anti-hero Yosser Hughes, played by Bernard Hill, whose catchphrases ‘gizza job’ and ‘I can do that’ passed into everyday language.
But by 1985, the Conservatives believed they were entitled to some recognition for having got over the worst. Unemployment would peak in spring 1986. Other e
conomic indicators showed that recovery was under way. What people needed, in Margaret Thatcher’s view, was not sympathy or public investment to help them find work, but a jolly good talking-to about pulling their socks up. Visiting the recession-ridden north-east of England, she let loose at a local television journalist who challenged her about local unemployment, to which she had contributed so much. ‘Don’t you think that’s the way to persuade more companies to come to this region and get more jobs – because I want them – for the people who are unemployed. Not always standing there as moaning minnies. Now stop it!’,2 she said.
Then, just as Thatcher thought she had won the argument, the Church of England produced its long, meticulously argued report, with its sixty-one recommendations. Of these, thirty-eight were directed at the Church, which was exhorted to identify ‘urban priority area’ parishes and to direct its efforts to improving parish work there, in reaction to which the Church launched a fundraising programme that delivered £18m to the parishes in question. The other twenty-three recommendations were aimed at the government, which was exhorted to improve its record on housing, homelessness, child benefit and other forms of support for children in poverty, and to support local councils grappling with inner-city decay, instead of undercutting them by constantly reducing the Rate Support Grant.3 Their findings were irritably dismissed by one anonymous cabinet minister, who described them as ‘pure Marxist ideology’.4 To Norman Tebbit, the party chairman, they were ‘muddle-headed’. Another Tory MP, John Carlile, suggested that it was the work of ‘a load of Communist clerics’, whereas Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, that drunken adulterer, proclaimed that since its authors ‘do not understand the Kingdom of God’, it was no surprise that they did not understand the kingdom of England.5