User:StCrimson667/sandbox

Homosexuality in 20th Century Britain is really a tale of two halves, the early 20th Century and the late 20th Century. In the previous half of the century, the story of homosexuality in Britain was largely unchanged from the previous century. It is with the arrival of the Second World War that circumstances really started to change, though initially for the worse. In the 1950s, the prosecution of homosexuality under the law increased dramatically and homosexuality quickly became tied with the war against Communism, but those in the academic community were beginning to look at homosexuality in a more scientific light and with the releasing of the Wolfenden Report, that circumstances began to change. The 1960s and 1970s saw homosexuality become a treatable disease and many different treatments were used to attempt to cure patients of their affliction and it was the 1990s that the effort was made to help bring same-sex relationship into equilibrium with opposite-sex relationships.

Pre-World War II Era
The social climate, perception and legal opinion around homosexuality remained largely unchanged from that of the 19th Century for the majority of the first half of the 20th Century as much of prosecution of public figures such as Oscar Wilde caused those who remained in Britain to be pushed further down into British subculture :

Homosexuality was invisible in Britain from 1900 to 1945 and everyone had a vested interest in keeping it that way. Since nothing was ever made public, attitudes changed very little during this period of silence. The sole image of the male homosexual remained Oscar Wilde’s public persona, and the stereotyped homosexual…was wealthy, artistic, effete, immoral and sinister.

Homosexuality did become something of a running theme throughout British theatre during this time, but much of it was kept away from the public and heavily censored.

In 1921, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was brought to the House of Lords. The bill would mark the first time in British history that female homosexuality was considered as undesirable as male homosexuality in the eyes of the law, but the bill was thrown out and was never brought forth again.

During the Second World War, homosexuals were sent to the gas chambers by the Nazi regime, along with the Jews and other undesirable minorities such as the Roma. . However, during the war, homosexual acts increased within Britain.

1950s
Previous to the war, homosexual acts between two men were still largely illegal, but the laws that deemed them so were rarely enforced and homosexuals were often left largely alone with the acts were discreet, occurred in private and did not involve anyone under the age of consent, but in the 1950s, the incidence of prosecution of homosexuals increased dramatically. During the last year of the Second World War, there were 320 convictions under the “gross indecency” laws, but 1952, that number increased to 1662 and the prosecution of “attempted sodomy” or “indecent assault” raised from 822 to over 3000. This shift in policy is often blamed on the rise of Conservative politicians during the 1950s and the increasing number of prosecutions were transformed into hysteria by the popular press who ran stories of “wild orgies fuelled by champagne, the corruption of boy scouts and, perhaps worse than all this, of men who had associated with their social inferiors”. It should also is pointed out that this was one of the first times in British history that lesbianism was actively prosecuted, not the public legal system, but in the armed forces.

In the period following the Second World War, however, there also came a rise in the number of psychologists who followed the movement among the medical community from the 19th Century who sought to study homosexuality and transform it from a behaviour that was considered sinful into something that was an actual diagnosable illness. Most notably among these was the founder of the psychoanalytic perspective of psychology, Sigmund Freud, who believed that psychoanalytic theory could explain and work to treat those afflict with same-sex attraction by analyzing the causes of the disorder and resolving them. It should be pointed out that though these beliefs were starting to become more and more common among academic circles, it was not until the later half of the century that these views were expressed anywhere outside of academic circles. Much like over in the US and North America, homosexuality quickly became entangled with the Communist threat during the Cold War Era, partially because of American pressure on Britain to exhibit stricter controls on subversive communities, and the particular focus was homosexuals in public works and government positions. It was the prevailing belief that the homosexual in power lived a double life, was morally weak, moved in underground, subversive circles and was open to someone blackmailing them if their sexuality was ever discovered.

In the early 1950s, after a series of high-profile prosecution of well-known public figures including Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, commonly known as Lord Montagu, journalist Peter Wilde-blood and Montagu’s cousin, gentlemen farmer Major Michael Pitt-Rivers, the Wolfenden Committee was set up to evaluate the laws which dealt with homosexuality and related offences. In 1957, The Wolfenden Committee issued its report that stated the homosexual relations between two consenting adults should not be criminalized and that homosexuality should not be considers a disease since it seemed to many homosexuals were perfectly mentally healthy in all other respects. It would however, take another decade and intensive campaigned before the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee were carried out through the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, which would later be adopted in Scotland in 1981 and Northern Ireland in 1982.

The later half of the 1950s saw the forging to the “permissive” society of the 1960s, which would give rise to the views, believes and movements that changed the perception of homosexual that occurs in the present day.

1960s-1970s
With the rise of behavioural psychology in 1960s, a new stream of treatment emerged that was different from previous treatments. Treatment shift from curing the disorder within the person’s mind, but modifying and rectifying the maladapted behaviour through the use of various treatments ranging from anxiety management to electro-shock therapy. The behaviour aversion therapy was the most commonly used treatment for homosexuality and was used on homosexual man, mostly in their late adolescence to early 20s, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, but many patients would later report various other treatments such as “electroconvulsive therapy, discussion of the evils of homosexuality, desensitisation of an assumed phobia of the opposite sex, hypnosis, psychodrama, and abreaction. Dating skills were sometimes taught, and occasionally men were encouraged to find a prostitute or female friend with whom to try sexual intercourse”.

1980s-1990s
In the 1990s, attempts were made to equalize the age of consent so that same-sex couples had the same legal age of consent of heterosexual couples. In 1994, the age of consent was brought down to 18 and in 1997 worked to bring the age of consent down to the level of opposite-sex partnerships at 16, the motion being passed in 2000.