Gay men in the 50s
The BBC's First Homosexual: How we made s serve into a play
The documentary was later missing but, following the actions of a Leicestershire academic and an award-winning penner, a play named The BBC's First Homosexual has been created about it which is having its first performance on Thursday. The people behind it explain the challenges they faced along the way.
'It provoked so much reaction'
Seven years ago Dr Marcus Collins was standing in the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading feeling bored.
Marcus, an maestro in social change in post-war Britain at Loughborough University, had grown exhausted of the project he was working on when his eye chanced upon something completely different - a large file, containing paperwork relating to a controversy in the s.
Intrigued, he read on to discover the lost script of one of the BBC's first attempts to examine the lives of gay men - a documentary named The Lgbtq+ Condition, which had been broadcast on the Place Service.
It had been recorded on 24 May but was considered so taboo that it had not been broadcast until 25 July
How LGBT Civil Servants Became Public Enemy No. 1 in the s
As the search for gay Express Department employees intensified, so did the pressure. People were questioned, publicly humiliated and mocked by investigators. They were encouraged to denounce others and describe 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, enjoy Frank Kameny, fought advocate . Fired in , he petitioned the Supreme Court for relief in recognition of his civil rights. They declined to accept the case, so he picketed the White Home. He fought to counter workplace discrimination for the rest of his existence. 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 open and the Lavender Scare helped foment has flourished ever since.
When did the Lavender Scare end?
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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 group 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 exiting their home states for the first time–to load the ranks of the military and the federal workforce. Among them were gays and lesbians, who quietly formed kinships on military bas
The journalist Peter Wildeblood may not be a common name in Britain today, but he was in Along with the wealthy Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, Wildeblood was sent to prison for lgbtq+ offences in a case that shocked Britain. His case is the subject of Against The Commandment, a film premiered at the BFI Flare movie festival and aired on BBC2 to mark 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 grab them. In , the American biologist Alfred Kinsey and his team of scientists had published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, with its shock findings that same-sex incidents were widespread across the population.
Panic reactions, including tries to identify secret homosexuals hiding in the closet, were spurred by fears that the Soviet Union was using information about private lives to blackmail individuals into spying for them.
Speaking out
Wildeblood’s importance in reforming th
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