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'It provoked a fierce public debate': The 1957 homosexuality report that divided the UK

When the Wolfenden Report was published 68 years ago this week,bingo bags it pushed for decriminalising male homosexuality – but it also led to a crackdown on sex workers.

Sir John Wolfenden was unprepared for the backlash that his dry, academic 155-page government report would provoke. "All sorts of people said all sorts of things, and all sorts of people wrote all sorts of things on the pavement outside our house," he told BBC radio. "I have from one religious sect an official curse. Typed." He was surprised by how "violent" the press reaction was: "I didn't expect it to make as much splash as it did."

When The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution – better known as the Wolfenden Report – came out on 4 September 1957, it flew off the shelves, selling out its first print run of 5,000 copies within hours. It also provoked a fierce public debate in Britain, contrary to what the government had hoped.

Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had been prompted to set up the committee by the government's discomfort with two issues. The first was the visibility of sex workers on London's streets, the second was the rising number of men arrested for homosexual acts, which were illegal at the time in the UK. This rise had been triggered by Maxwell Fyfe's own policy of the deliberate entrapment and arrest of gay men by the police.

"You knew what could happen," Rex Batten, a gay man who lived in London at the time, told the BBC's Witness History in 2010. "You knew the cases that had come up, the people who were in jail for a year, two years, three years. Did you want that? The answer was no."

Maxwell Fyfe's intensive crackdown led to a number of high-profile men being prosecuted for homosexual behaviour, including Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952, the recently knighted actor Sir John Gielgud in 1953, and the Conservative peer Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1954. These cases had, in turn, generated extensive press coverage and embarrassed the establishment.

In setting up the committee, Maxwell Fyfe aimed to find new ways to regulate these cases effectively, so that they would stop generating press interest and public debate. As Sir John was at pains to make clear to the BBC on the day the report was released in 1957, the committee's remit was not to judge the morality of such behaviour. "We're concerned primarily with public order and not with private morality," he told the BBC's Godfrey Talbot.

From 1954, Sir John chaired the committee of four women and 11 men, whose expertise ranged from the law, medicine and religion to the Girl Guides, the UK's largest organisation for girls and young women. Over the course of three years, they heard evidence from the police, psychiatrists and religious leaders, as well as the testimony of some gay men whose lives had been affected by the law. One of the people they spoke to was The Daily Mail's former royal correspondent Peter Wildeblood, who had been convicted of so-called "gross indecency" alongside Lord Montagu. They did not, however, take evidence from any sex workers.

Their finished report recommended that consensual homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 in private should "no longer be a criminal offence". It didn't address homosexual acts between women, since there was no UK law in place prohibiting such acts. The report was far from pioneering. At the time of publication, homosexual sex was not considered a crime in many other European countries, such as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Spain.

When it came to prostitution, the Wolfenden Report's recommendations were much more punitive. Rather than advocating a move toward decriminalisation, it recommended lowering the burden of proof for soliciting charges. It suggested that sex workers convicted more than once should face increasingly harsh penalties, with three months in prison for the third offence. It also recommended bringing male prostitution on to the register of chargeable offences.

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The recommendations were not intended to make sex work safer for those concerned, but, as Sir John explained to Talbot, just to make it less visible to the general public. "My hope and our endeavour is this. At the present time there are in London, and there are in other places, streets where, if I'm walking through them with my 14- or 15-year-old daughter, I have to make a detour to avoid those places. And I honestly don't think that I ought to have to."

Sir John said that the Wolfenden Report could be "a contribution towards the ordinary person's understanding of these complicated and rather difficult matters". However, from today's perspective it makes for uncomfortable reading. While it rejected the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness, it still condemned it as "immoral" and "psychologically destructive", while urging more research into its causes and possible so-called "cures". This was despite the fact that Sir John's own son Jeremy had come out to his father as gay before he was asked to chair the committee.

The government's hope of decreasing public debate backfired. The Wolfenden Report was accused by elements of the press, some religious groups and certain politicians of being a "threat to public morality". Sir John told the BBC: "It was called, for instance, 'proposals to legalise degradation in our midst'."

The Daily Mail lambasted it, declaring, "Great nations have fallen and empires decayed because corruption became socially acceptable," while the Scottish Labour MP Jean Mann said: "There's no knowing where it will end. We may even have husbands enticed away from wives."

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The report also received a frosty reception from the very home secretary who had commissioned it. Maxwell Fyfe had expected the report to advocate stronger policing of homosexual behaviour, and rejected the proposal to decriminalise it. This was despite the report's recommendations being endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Medical Association and the National Association of Probation Officers. But the government did readily adopt Sir John's recommendations on prostitution. The Street Offences Act which came into law in 1959 gave the police wide powers to arrest women suspected of soliciting, and prompted an aggressive crackdown on visible sex work.

The discussion around the legal persecution of homosexuals did not end with the report. In March 1958, The Times published an article by academic Tony Dyson – co-signed by prominent personalities such as former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the writer JB Priestley and the philosopher Bertrand Russell – that called on the government to look again at decriminalisation. The same year the Homosexual Law Reform Society was formed to campaign to bring about change. But it would take a decade from the Wolfenden Report's publication for its recommendation to become law.

In 1967, Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act, meaning that homosexual men would no longer be prosecuted for having consensual sexual relationships in private. The law would only apply to England and Wales. It would take until 1980 for sex between two men to be decriminalised in Scotland, and another two years for Northern Ireland to follow suit. Even in England and Wales, the law did not apply to members of the armed forces; and the age of consent for gay men was set at 21, compared with 16 for sex between men and women. In 1994, it was lowered to 18 and then equalised with the age of consent for heterosexual adults six years later.

The Wolfenden Report, while flawed, triggered a public debate about equal rights, morality and the role of the state. As Sir John told the BBC in 1957: "If our recommendations are accepted on the homosexual offences side, there would be, I think, an amount of justice done in bringing this particular form of behaviour into the same category and treated in the same way as other kinds of private behaviour of adult persons."

This debate would eventually enable gay men such as Batten to live freely without fear of police persecution. "What we wanted was really to be able to live together as partners, as two 20-year-olds can do now," he told BBC Witness History. "We just wanted to be left alone to live our lives."

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