rivers of history
an ABC of UKLGBT
Good day, readers who are joining me this fine summer’s morning in Sequel Country. For this week’s exploration, I’m going to send a drone high into the air and trace a single theme across the landscape like a river with its tributaries, growing in might as it flows down across the plains of modern English literature. The river is UK LGBT+ history, but I hope this will still be interesting to non-LGBT+ readers, if you want to make sense of LGBT+ concerns or write an LGBT+ character. My aim here is to skim downriver in the briefest possible way to arrive at an understanding of where we are today. In a sense, the aim of every political movement is to make itself redundant, and when people stop trying to persecute LGBT+ people and give us equal rights, this river will flow into the sea and be forgotten.
(In case anyone thinks LGBT+ people are not being persecuted, in the first 7 months of 2023: Uganda has passed a law mandating the death penalty for homosexual sex, 566 anti-trans bills have been proposed by states in the USA of which 80 have passed so far, and Italy has just decreed that same-sex husbands and wives who are not a biological parent must have their name removed from the birth certificate of their children, a rule which will not apply to heterogendered couples; to name just a few of the legal attacks on LGBT+ people around the world in the first half of this year).
So, LGBT+ history: in the beginning were the Greeks. Well, they weren’t the first, it’s probably been going on forever, but they were the first to beautifully illustrate the joys of gay sex on all those vases and cultural stuff. Having gay sex was fine, for a citizen, as long as he was the top; being “passive” was for lesser men, since acting a woman’s role somehow makes you more like a woman, or something. I guess this works in the same way that sympathetic magic was supposed to influence the world, through what The Golden Bough calls the “Law of Similarity”.
Which is all very well, and this sort of thing went on throughout history across all cultures, but doesn’t explain how we came up with the idea that doing gay sex makes the people who are doing it something different from “normal” people.
Where I think this came from, and this isn’t my original idea but one synthesized from a number of sources, is the Englightenment. The period when we discovered that Reason can be employed to understand the world much more effectively than the haphazard mix of the laws of similarity and imitation proposed by most religions, was a turning point; and one of its consequences was that all kinds of interests turned into scientific fields of study. And the dominant mode of study, at first, was a drive to classify things. Everyone from botanists to metallurgists started to systematically write down and classify everything based on their inherent properties: they built taxonomies of everything. And by the 19th century, I believe, this way of seeing the world had become so widely understood that it took over as the way society understands pretty much everything, including people. Now, enjoying gay sex (for example) became seen as not just an activity done by a person, but an attribute of that person, a way of classifying them, like race and nationality: cultural judgements which those who benefitted from the idea of nations and colonialism were keen to promote as inherent, objective attributes, to justify national wars and colonial subjugation. The idea being that it’s all right to discriminate against someone if they can be shown to be inferior, preferably by science, or at least by something that sounds a bit like science. So now, instead of seeing the world in terms of doing, we see it predominantly in terms of being.
This, I think, is what led to the pathologisation of LGBT+ people, and the coining of words such as “homosexual” (late 19th century) followed by “heterosexual” and soon “bisexual” meaning both hetero and homo, “bi” referring to those two things, same and other; not the gender binary, a point which is widely misunderstood. (“Pansexual” was also coined in the early 20th century, but rather than the meaning it has now, which is almost the same as bisexual, back then it was used to denote the idea that the sex instinct drives all other thoughts and desires – weird, eh?) Gender, too, was seen as something purely inherent, obstinately ignoring the wide variation of gender roles outside western culture; the discovery of the X and Y chromosomes was seen as supporting this, as if the presence of a Y chromosome could somehow influence the wearing of trousers vs skirts.
But that was still a long way downriver. In the UK, in 1885, the confluence of these streams of thought led to Parliament passing a law criminalising all sexual activity between two men, whether in private or not. This law superseded a law made by Henry VIII against anal sex regardless of gender; a law against an activity was replaced with a law against a group of people identifiable by an attribute, which is the very definition of prejudice. Indeed, the 1885 Act was Britain’s only anti-homosexual law as such, until 1988’s Section 28, which prevented local authorities (and therefore schools and libraries) from telling children (and therefore anyone) anything positive about homosexuality. This, I hope, puts Clause 28 in a historical perspective and may help to explain why it was so hated and feared by the LGBT+ communities, and why the current fervour of “anti-woke” discourse against trans people in the UK media is so worrying: it sounds exactly like the anti-LGB posturing leading up to 1988.
The 1885 act was used to punish gay and bisexual men and also trans people, since the courts were apt to assume that anyone defying gender norms was doing so in order to facilitate same-sex sexual activity (and that an affectionate letter between two men was enough evidence to prove intention of such). By the 1950s, this river had swelled, leading to huge numbers of prosecutions, and eventually in 1967 certain homosexual acts were decriminalised if done in private, meaning that people could live openly homosexual lives – so long as they never showed affection in public, which would still often lead to arrest, if not actual charges. By the 1990s, arrests for gay sex in private had become rare, limited to the military and people (i.e. gay/bi men and trans women) who had sex in the bedrooms of student housing and hotels, which the courts did not interpret as “private enough”.
What caused this reversal in attitudes, together with the growth of the LGBT+ river? People might point to the UK becoming post-colonial and more multicultural, and the globalisation of the western world leading to greater tolerance of people with different cultural values as well as different racial or national attributes. But my theory (and this is my own idea) is that it was mostly the rise of what I think of as the Information Age. Books were censored in the UK until 1960, but what we now call “globalisation” meant that books and all kinds of media were already passing around the world increasingly freely, making it difficult to prevent the spread of subversive ideas. As the cost of spreading information falls (and it is still falling, thanks to the internet) attractive ideas will spread, and the idea that LGBT+ people can lead happy, healthy lives is an attractive one (to us).
So I see tolerance and eventual acceptance of LGBT+ lifestyles as being fundamentally about the spread of information, and with it understanding that people are not all the same. The main setback to this linear story was in the 1980s, when the river was poisoned by the AIDS pandemic and once again people were tempted to believe that gay and bi men were “disgusting”, a disgust driven by fear. But history only flows downstream, and the current of progress was too strong to turn back. In 1997, New Labour got elected and swept away 1988’s crude attempt to dam the river, repealing most of the remaining homophobic laws, equalising the age of consent and introducing civil partnerships. After two decades of this, same-sex relationships have become normalised, a fact I was reminded of last night when I went to the cinema. Next to me was a young gay couple on a date, and when the film ended, they kissed, with fifty or more people present (it was a PG film with no LGBT+ angle). When I started going to that cinema, around 1990, such a thing was unthinkable.
This radically changing nature of the LGBT+ river is something which anyone writing a novel set in the UK at any time in history would need to understand – unless every single character was purely heterosexual, which has been done to death surely? Even a present-day novel with an LGBT+ character would be informed by the age of that character, the expectations and sensibilities of a character in his fiftes very different to those of one born this century, to use my cinema example. So I hope this over-brief and opinionated history is of use to a reader some day, or was at least interesting.
Next week there’s a holiday to be banked, and I’ll be leaving the rivers of LGBT+ behind, though I don’t guarantee never to return. See you downstream. In the meantime, I would love it if you could share this series with anyone who might be interested, so here’s a widget for that: