Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The moves against Colquhoun coincided with the rise of a politically active lesbian culture that grew out of feminism, that was to become much stronger in the following decade, and that was capable of scaring the life out of both the right and the left. Lesbianism had historically received much less attention than male homosexuality, but in 1978 it was to be found occupying large areas of the news pages, when it was revealed that a London doctor was providing an artificial insemination service for lesbian couples wishing to have children. The response was predictable, with press denunciations in every quarter and with right-wing MPs in full cry. Sir George Young demanded that such techniques be made ‘available only to married couples’, Rhodes Boyson called it ‘a sickness of society’, and Jill Knight, later to introduce the notorious Section 28 to the Local Government Act of 1986, explained, with her characteristically curious turn of phrase, that ‘I cannot imagine it is in the interest of children to be born in lesbian circumstances.’ Less expected was the response of the militant lesbians who occupied the offices of the Evening News in London, the newspaper that had first broken the story, in protest at the tone of the coverage. The advent of lesbian activists was a new element in British society, and it did little to reassure those who already believed standards had slipped appallingly, perhaps for ever. It was a small movement, but it augured ill for traditionalists.

  If, for the most part, homosexuals were notable for their low visibility in public life, so too were their fictional counterparts on screen. Camp there was in abundance, but few depictions of gay men and women, save where they were essential to the plotline, where indeed the story centred on homosexuality. So, for example, the movie Sunday, Bloody Sunday saw Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch each having an affair with the very beautiful Murray Head. Directed by John Schlesinger, who had previously made Midnight Cowboy about male prostitution in New York, and who was himself gay, Sunday, Bloody Sunday became briefly controversial for its portrayal of two men kissing, but was mostly celebrated simply for being one of the best films of its era, nominated for four Oscars and winning five BAFTAs.

  Less worthy, and certainly less acclaimed, was Girl Stroke Boy, also released in 1971, in which a young middle-class man, Laurie (Clive Francis), brings his new partner, Jo, home to meet his parents. Played by the even more beautiful Peter Straker – credited here simply as Straker – Jo is so androgynous that his gender is never determined, though Laurie’s mother, Lettice (Joan Greenwood), is outraged by ‘a relationship that is as godless as it is fashionable’. Perhaps the lack of critical plaudits stemmed from the fact that the movie was directed by Bob Kellett and produced by Ned Sherrin, the team who also gave us Up Pompeii and Up the Chastity Belt the same year, or perhaps it was simply that Girl Stroke Boy refused to take itself seriously, and didn’t treat its subject matter with any degree of agonizing or melodrama. Laurie’s father, George (Michael Hordern), isn’t quite sure what all the fuss is about anyway: ‘If he is nightly in the arms of a young man – which, pray God, he isn’t – does it matter?’ To which Lettice retorts: ‘You’ll have to resign from the golf club.’

  With the exception of The Naked Civil Servant, popular television was even less inclined to venture beyond camp, though it did have its moments. Peter Bowles’s character Hilary in Rising Damp inverted the conventions of the genre; playing an actor who had supposedly appeared in I, Claudius in an orgy scene (though you couldn’t recognize him because he was wearing a stag’s head), his performance was an exercise in limp-wristed cliché, but he ended by demonstrating his heterosexuality to Miss Jones’s complete satisfaction. Not all, it transpired, was what it seemed, even in sitcoms.

  The same was true of ITV’s version of the Raffles stories, adapted – as was Crisp’s life – by Philip Mackie. Written by E.W. Hornung, the stories were set in Victorian London and chronicled the disparity between the public and private worlds of the amateur cricketer Raffles, whose social status conceals his true nature as a burglar, and of Bunny, his former fag from school and now his partner in crime. In the TV adaptation, with Anthony Valentine and Christopher Strauli, the idea that their secret double life might actually be little more than a metaphor bubbled mischievously under the surface, with double entendres about batting and bowling, and lines that, taken out of context, had an entirely different meaning. ‘Gentlemen are always open to corruption,’ purrs yet another aristocratic crook, Lord Ernest Belville (Robert Hardy), to Bunny. ‘Come into the bedroom . . .’

  In one memorable scene, the two men return, somewhat symbolically, to Bunny’s childhood home to steal some diamonds. Confronted by a locked green-baize door, Raffles cuts a hole through the baize, and inserts his hand to turn the key from the other side, only to find his wrist gripped fast by the householder. Fortunately the amateur cracksman never ventures out without a small flask of oil, which he gets Bunny to pour down his arm. And, as the camera shot switches to the other side of the door, we see a man’s disembodied fist, slippery with grease, twisting and turning in the grasp of another man, and finally sliding free. It was hard not to see a subtext, particularly since the scene didn’t come from the source material, but was newly created for TV.

  Other variations on human sexuality also surfaced on occasion in the television of the era. I, Claudius could claim historical authenticity, of course, but still it made the most of moments such as Nero going to bed with his mother, Agrippinilla (Christopher Biggins and Barbara Young), or Caligula (John Hurt) groping the breasts of his great-grandmother, Livia. The excesses of Tiberius, however, were, perhaps fortunately, rather played down.

  The series was rivalled in its depiction of confused family relationships only by A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, adapted by Andrea Newman from her own novel. Here a wealthy London publisher, Peter Manson (Frank Finlay), has an incestuous obsession with his married daughter, Prue (Susan Penhaligon), a fact of which she, in her sulky, pouting innocence, is perfectly well aware. Unable physically to realize his lust – even publishers, apparently, had some moral standards in those days – he instead starts an affair with his new secretary, who is young enough to be his daughter, sleeping with her in the flat he has given Prue, while she and her husband, Gavin, are away on holiday. And then the revelations start. Manson is shocked to discover that Gavin has been beating Prue up, and that she rather enjoys a bit of violence; even more shocked when his wife reveals that she too has the same inclinations: ‘Most women like a man to be masterful. Maybe even a little bit rough. You only have to push this a stage further and you’ve got real pain, real violence. The problem is where to stop it.’ Having nurtured his own dark desires for so long, he is horrified that others too might have their secrets. ‘I’m too old-fashioned to appreciate the finer points of sadism,’ he snaps at his now estranged wife, happily unaware that she has meanwhile started an affair with Gavin, her son-in-law, while Prue is recovering in hospital from a particularly savage beating.

  What was most surprising about the series was that every nuance of the novel was reproduced faithfully on mainstream TV, going out at 9 o’clock on a Friday evening to huge public enthusiasm and some critical confusion. Manson and Prue had ‘the most extravagant father–daughter relationship since Herod and Salome’, wrote Philip Purser, but actually it was Manson who ultimately seemed the most straightforward of the four principal characters, a confused man adrift in a world of melodramatic passion over which he had no control. Such subject matter was far from common on British television, but the fact that it figured at all was startling, both at the time and perhaps even more so in retrospect.

  In literature variations on the theme of relationships were becoming familiar. Together, a novel by Ingeborg Pertwee (whose husband, Jon, was then starring as Doctor Who), was billed as being about ‘a man’s need for two women – a mother and a daughter’. But it was in crime fiction that alternative sexualities were really played out, within a familiar environment where the reader could confidently expect normality to be restored by the end of the story. In P.D. James’s
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman a male student is discovered hanging from a rafter by his belt: ‘He was dressed like a woman,’ confides a witness, ‘in a black bra and black lace panties. Nothing else. And his face! He had painted his lips . . .’ (The image of what is assumed to be an act of auto-erotic asphyxiation gone horribly wrong also occurs in Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing. Meanwhile, however, the man who would later become Britain’s most famous victim of such practices, Economist journalist Stephen Milligan – as a Tory MP, he died in similar circumstances in 1994 – was concentrating on the more orthodox concern of trade union power in his book The New Barons.)

  Elsewhere, Ruth Rendell’s A Guilty Thing Surprised featured a sympathetic treatment of a long-standing incestuous relationship. Julian Symons’s The Players and the Game centred on a series of sadistic folie à deux murders, but also found room for a man paying to be humiliated by a prostitute and her maid, and for another man molesting a thirteen-year-old girl. (Neither of them are the killers.) And in Colin Wilson’s The Schoolgirl Murder Case there is likewise a relaxed attitude to sex with underage girls. When it is discovered that another schoolgirl has been the victim of the so-called North Circular rapist, one police officer asks, ‘Was she hurt?’ ‘Not badly,’ replies his colleague. ‘A few scratches. But she was raped.’

  The casual tone was not untypical, for it was in the 1970s that questions over the age of consent and of paedophilia really came to the fore, despite some earlier rumblings. Back in the mid-’60s the Swedish doctor Lars Ullerstam – speaking, according to his American publisher, with ‘the authentic voice of the boldest of Europe’s young generation’ – had called for the new tolerance being shown towards homosexuals to be extended to other ‘sexual eccentrics’, including paedophiles. Not, he hastened to add, that he thought ‘all grown men ought to be allowed to manipulate children’s genitals’, but rather that understanding should replace criminalization until a better solution could be found: ‘The sexual deprivation of the “dirty old men” is a problem to be solved by tomorrow’s humanely oriented society.’

  It wasn’t solved, of course, but there was at least a brief period when the general culture acknowledged that the lines of what was permissible were on occasion blurred. ‘Sometimes, I’m the new master at a girls’ high school,’ says Terry in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, reflecting on his sexual fantasies. ‘That one seems to come back more and more.’ And Bob knows precisely what he’s talking about: ‘Yes, gymslips. I’ve been worried about that. I think the sexiest programme on television is Top of the Form not Top of the Pops.’

  Politically, the issue began to gather at least a small head of steam in 1976 when home secretary Roy Jenkins asked the Criminal Law Revision Committee to look into the age of consent. The following year a series of widely reported court cases suggested that attitudes might be shifting, not in relation to pre-pubescent children but to those in their early teens. First came twenty-one-year-old Gary Lea who had been given a six-month sentence for having consensual sex with a thirteen-year-old girl after a party; the sentence was quashed on appeal, with Lord Justice Scarman saying: ‘It was not only too severe, but was quite wrong in principle.’ In the wake of this judgment, and in very short order, an eighteen-year-old man was given a £20 fine for having sex with a thirteen-year-old, a thirty-nine-year-old was put on probation for having sex with his son’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend, and a nineteen-year-old was given a two-year conditional discharge for getting a thirteen-year-old pregnant, the judge admonishing him to ‘behave sensibly in future and keep away from young girls’. All of these cases – and there were others – concerned older men and younger girls and received relatively sympathetic treatment; when the roles were reversed and when, for example, a twenty-six-year-old female teacher was accused of molesting an eleven-year-old boy, the press coverage reverted to its more normal approach of salacious reporting, even though the accused woman was acquitted.

  This spate of judgments provoked the Sun to run a week-long series of articles by Jeremy Sandford on the vexed issue of the age of consent. And he found many prepared to suggest that the time had come for it to be reconsidered. Labour MP Colin Phipps called for it to be abolished, while the likes of John Robinson, dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, suggested it be lowered to fourteen, as did Patricia Hewitt, then with the National Council for Civil Liberties and later to become health secretary under Tony Blair. Michael Schofield, a psychologist, claimed that one in six girls and one in four boys were having sex underage. Later in 1977 the News of the World, which would later become the self-proclaimed scourge of paedophilia, gave space to the Catholic priest and child psychologist Father Michael Ingram, who had studied a number of cases of men having sexual relations with boys under the age of fourteen, and who was due to report his findings to the British Psychological Society. ‘If a child has been deprived of love, he can get a lot more good than harm from a relationship with a man,’ Ingram claimed. ‘I’m not saying it is right or wrong from a moral point of view – I’m speaking purely from the psychological standpoint. The real harm to a child can come not from a sex act but from the reaction of other adults afterwards.’

  And then there was a perceptible turning of the tide. The Paedophile Information Exchange, the principal campaigning group for those who sought reform of the laws concerning sex with children, received increasingly hostile treatment by the press, much of it centred on its most prominent figure, Tom O’Carroll, then a press liaison officer at the Open University. The first public meeting of PIE was held in Conway Hall, London – the traditional home of alternative thought – and the few attendees were attacked both by the National Front and by a bussed-in mob of two hundred women, armed, in the words of one of them, with ‘stinkbombs, rotten eggs, tomatoes, apples and peaches’. Ingram was invited to attend but had to send his apologies, having been instructed not to do so by the Catholic Church, presumably fearful for its public image. The previous month, on the other hand, a conference of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality had condemned the media treatment of PIE and called for ‘objective rational discussion of paedophilia and child sexuality’.

  Instead the focus of debate was shifted sideways towards the question of child pornography. The law at that stage meant that it was not illegal to take photographs of naked children nor to sell them, so long as no sexual assault had taken place. And there was, so it was claimed, a massive and sudden increase in the number of publications exploiting this situation. ‘It is this furtive network of amateur photographers now cashing in on child-sex that is our biggest headache,’ a senior Scotland Yard officer was quoted as saying, and Mary Whitehouse, who swiftly made the cause her own, had no doubt about the scale of the problem: ‘We know that 200,000 children are involved in the “kiddie porn” industry in the United States,’ she declared, though the evidence to back up such a startling assertion was not forthcoming.

  Margaret Thatcher, alert to the prospects of a populist cause, met with Whitehouse to discuss this latest outrage against public decency, and emerged with the perfect soundbite for the occasion; child porn, she said, was ‘a crime against innocence’. Meanwhile Tory MP Cyril Townsend was busy launching a private member’s bill, which Whitehouse urged politicians to support, though she couldn’t resist slipping in a dig at those on the left who opposed racism: ‘It is a matter of great regret,’ she said, ‘that our government, which takes such notice of black exploitation in South Africa, takes little notice of child exploitation in Britain.’ In the face of overwhelming media opinion, Jim Callaghan ensured that parliamentary time was made for the passage of the bill, which duly became the Protection of Children Act 1978. At which point all discussion of reform to the age of consent ceased.

  It was not Whitehouse’s first success. Following her failed attempt to invoke the Vagrancy Act in the suppression of Blow Out, she discovered an even more archaic law in 1976 with which to attack the publication Gay News. In a June issue of the magazine, its editor, Denis Lemon, had published a
poem titled ‘The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name’ by James Kirkup, being the fantasy of a Roman centurion lifting Christ off the cross and having sex with him. It was not a great work by any means, but it had an impish vitality with its Carry On puns about ‘my spear’ and being ‘well hung’, and it did have some genuinely transgressive images (‘that great cock, the instrument of our salvation’) and thoughts: Jesus, the poem suggests, had already had sex with – inter alia – Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist and Judas Iscariot (‘a great kisser’), and His first thought on His resurrection was to continue where He had left off. This, Whitehouse decided, was all a bit strong and, exhuming the long-neglected law of blasphemous libel, she launched a private prosecution against the magazine and against Lemon himself.

  The judge, Alan King-Hamilton, refused to allow any expert testimony as to the literary or sociological value of the piece, but his own thoughts were unequivocal once the jury had found the defendants guilty as charged. ‘This poem is quite appalling,’ he shuddered, pronouncing himself horrified by its ‘scurrilous profanity’. He fined both Gay News and Lemon, with a suspended sentence of two years for the latter, adding that it was ‘touch and go’ whether he should be sent to prison immediately. On appeal, the suspended sentence was quashed but the fines, and the legal costs, stood.

  The case attracted widespread coverage. The journalist Bernard Levin and the novelist Margaret Drabble went into the witness box to testify to Gay News’s character, while Enoch Powell, amongst others, saw it as an opportunity to celebrate the counter-charge against ‘the movement which started about the middle-’60s and swept around the world like an epidemic, taking a multitude of forms but always with essentially the same end and aim: The destruction of organized society, not for the sake of replacing it with a different and supposedly better one, but for the sake of destruction itself.’ This movement, he insisted, employed ‘the deliberate use of obscenity of every kind as a battering-ram – or rather one of the battering-rams – to break down the walls of civilized society’. Whitehouse would undoubtedly have agreed, and was herself jubilant: ‘I did what I did,’ she said, echoing the thoughts of the fictional centurion, ‘out of love for the Lord.’