Sixty-five years on: how the Wolfenden Report emboldened Britain’s LGBT+ Movement

“Homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.”¹

With these words, a landmark piece of legal work began to reshape the movement for gay rights in the UK. The Wolfenden Report recommended the decriminalisation of male homosexuality for the first time in over 400 years. With the report’s 65th anniversary on 4th September approaching, it’s time to assess whether it was a revolutionary turning point for the LGBT+ movement, or a small step on a very long road to equality.

Led by Sir John Wolfenden, the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution spent three years assessing the degree to which homosexual acts and prostitution should be punishable by law.² Although the work on prostitution was significant, there were much wider social repercussions from its finding that sex between consenting male adults should no longer be a criminal offence. However, the discrimination that LGBT+ people continue to face today raises the question: did the Wolfenden Report truly reform gay rights?

The Wolfenden Report, 1957, source: Wikimedia Commons

To fully appreciate the significance of the Wolfenden Report, we have to understand how ingrained anti-homosexual sentiment was in both British society and law. The first piece of discriminatory legislation, the Buggery Act, was passed by Henry VIII in 1533 and specifically targeted homosexual men for partaking in sodomy. In 1885 the next significant law, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, made any act of homosexuality illegal and criminalised gross indecency. In addition to this, the ‘offence… could be committed “in public or private.”’³ Notably, all such legislation targeted only men, leaving lesbians with great uncertainty about the legal status of their sexual lifestyles. 

By the 1950s, society was starting to become more permissive but gay men were still being prosecuted; one key figure who was prosecuted in 1952 was Alan Turing, who developed the software that broke the Enigma Code. In response, the Conservative government formed the Wolfenden Committee in 1954 to consider homosexuality and prostitution. The committee was not intended to be radical. As noted by the historian Ferdinand Mort, the government wanted to ‘neutralise scandal and controversy’⁴ surrounding homosexuality and prostitution.

Alan Turing, source: Wikimedia Commons

However, Wolfenden and his team went further than the government expected. In line with increasingly permissive public opinion, the report concluded that it was not the law’s role to interfere in private matters of personal responsibility. However, the committee did not actively support homosexuality and said that society was to be protected from public indecency and upset of the public good.

That does not sound remotely radical today, but the report genuinely made waves when it was released. The first 5,000 print copies sold out within hours and the report was reprinted several times. There were many voices in support, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, various MPs and members of the Lords. However, many religious leaders and politicians strongly disagreed, arguing that the law should protect public morality. The report was repeatedly called “controversial” during a televised press conference with Wolfenden.

This led to paralysis. Although the government responded swiftly to the recommendations on prostitution and the Street Offences Act became law within two years, the 1960s arrived with no sign of legislation on consenting homosexual acts. One of the earliest UK gay rights groups, the Homosexual Law Reform Society, was formed in 1958 as a response to the lack of progress and in 1960 more than 1,000 people attended one of its public meetings.

Finally, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 – commonly heralded as a watershed moment for the British gay community – meant that homosexual acts became legal if they took place in private between two consenting male adults aged 21 or above. However, gay people still faced prosecution if there were more than two parties involved, if the men were under the age of 21, if the act took place in public, or occurred within the military or navy.⁵

The campaign for gay rights had a lot more work to do and activism increased significantly. In 1970, the Gay Liberation Front held its first meeting in the UK. Its first manifesto demanded an end to discrimination against gay people and for the homosexual age of consent to be the same as for heterosexuals. This implies that the movement thought the Wolfenden Report did not go far enough. However, it is important to acknowledge that it could only call for equality in the age of consent because there was a homosexual age of consent and that this was a consequence of the Wolfenden Report.

Gay Rights Demonstration in London, source: Wikimedia Commons

Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, 1971, source: Wikimedia Commons

Since then, an abundance of activist groups and protests have carried on the campaign for furthering gay rights in the UK which has, very slowly, led to further reform. The age of consent for gay people dropped to 18 in 1994 and to 16 six years later. In 2013, England and Wales saw same-sex marriage legalised, with the same change happening in Scotland just one year later. It wasn’t until 2020, however, that Northern Ireland legalised the practice, after a fiercely fought referendum campaign – to many, an uncomfortably recent development.

From today’s viewpoint, the Wolfenden Report can seem tame, but its impact should not be underestimated. It redefined the concept of sexual morality in private, led to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality and emboldened gay rights groups to campaign for greater equality and reform. There is still a way to go in Britain when it comes to gay rights. This has been revealed by a 2017 study of hate crime in Britain which showed that one fifth of LGBT+ people in Britain had been victims of a hate crime because of their sexuality in the previous two years. 

There is a need for further campaigning to bring change in some other countries. As of December 2020, there are, horrifyingly, six countries which impose the death penalty on gay people, and sixty-nine countries where homosexuality is criminalised. Angola decriminalised homosexuality in private last year; an almost direct mirror image of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, more than half a century after the UK adopted the same moderate reform. 

Sixty-five years on from the Wolfenden Report, we can assess it as a turning point for gay rights, but not a revolution. The fight to eradicate discrimination against the LGBT+ community for ever continues.

[1] Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution [‘Wolfenden Report’], (London, HMSO, 1957), p. 25.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Fize, W., ‘The Homosexual Exception? The Case of the Labouchère Amendment,’ Cahiers Victoriens & Édouardiens 91 (2020), p. 5.

[4] Mort, F., ‘Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offence and Prostitution 1954-7,’ New Formations 37 (1999), pp. 96-7.

[5] Sexual Offences Act, (London, HMSO, 1967), pp. 1-2.