Being gay in the 50s
The journalist Peter Wildeblood may not be a household call in Britain today, but he was in Along with the wealthy Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, Wildeblood was sent to prison for homosexual offences in a case that shocked Britain. His case is the subject of Against The Statute, a film premiered at the BFI Flare film festival and aired on BBC2 to tag the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality.
The post-war period saw a major upswing in the number of such cases coming before the courts in the UK and the US. This was not because men were having more sex with other men, but because the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were acting with increased vigour to catch them. In , the American biologist Alfred Kinsey and his team of scientists had published Sexual Habit in the Human Male, with its shock findings that same-sex incidents were widespread across the population.
Panic reactions, including attempts to determine secret homosexuals hiding in the closet, were spurred by fears that the Soviet Union was using information about private lives t
How LGBT Civil Servants Became Public Enemy No. 1 in the s
As the search for gay Mention Department employees intensified, so did the pressure. People were questioned, publicly humiliated and mocked by investigators. They were encouraged to denounce others and state suspected homosexuals. And in , President Eisenhower signed Executive Order , which defined a laundry list of characteristics as security risks, including “sexual perversion.” This was interpreted as a ban on homosexual employees, and even more firings took place. Publicly humiliated and devastated by the loss of their income and their reputations, some even killed themselves.
Others, love Frank Kameny, fought assist. Fired in , he petitioned the Supreme Court for relief in recognition of his civil rights. They declined to grab the case, so he picketed the White Home. He fought to counter workplace discrimination for the rest of his animation. Kameny wasn’t the only person galvanized by the public targeting of LGBT people—in , the Stonewall Riots made gay rights a front-page issue, and the movement Kameny helped begin an
The BBC's First Homosexual: How we made s work into a play
He decided the new function needed a narrative and a character for the audience to invest in.
"Firstly, there's a actual story, which is of the internal struggle in the BBC to make the documentary," he says.
"There's only one man in the whole programme who talks openly about same sex experiences and he's paraded as a 'cured homosexual'.
"So, I wanted an actual homosexual to be the centre of the play. And that's the second story, which I've invented, of Tom, a working-class shop assistant from Scunthorpe.
"He acts as our window on to the period. Through a series of monologues, he takes us with him as he discovers and experiments with his sexuality.
"He's in a void though as the culture around him tells him almost nothing about homosexuality, except for reports of a few high-profile men creature arrested.
"His journey leads him ultimately to listening to the telecast of the documentary on the BBC Home Service in and we see its life-changing impact
Government Persecution of the LGBTQ Community is Widespread
The s were perilous times for individuals who fell outside of society’s legally allowed norms relating to gender or sexuality. There were many names for these individuals, including the clinical “homosexual,” a term popularized by pioneering German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In the U.S., professionals often used the term “invert.” In the midth Century, many cities formed “vice squads” and police often labeled the people they arrested “sexual perverts.” The government’s preferred term was “deviant,” which came with legal consequences for anyone seeking a career in public service or the military. “Homophile” was the term preferred by some early activists, small networks of women and men who yearned for collective and found creative ways to resist legal and societal persecution.
With draft eligibility officially lowered from 21 to 18 in , World War II brought together millions of people from around the country–many of whom were departing their home states for the first time–to stuff the ranks of the military and t