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by: David Govier
David Govier uncovers the oral histories of a range of people from LGBTQ communities and others who fought for sexual equality.
What was it like to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer during the course of the last century? The British Library’s oral history collections can offer a unique insight on this, with interviews from people recounting their personal experiences – many of which are not recorded in official records and cannot be heard in any other way.
The earliest lesbian experiences recorded in the collections include those of Mary Wilkins, a pacifist born in England in 1907 who worked as an ambulance driver during World War II.
Meanwhile, many gay men found that their service in the armed forces during World War II allowed them to meet and support people just like themselves. John Alcock was in his late fifties in 1985 when he was interviewed for the Hall Carpenter Oral History Project.
The decades following World War II saw massive changes in the social fabric of the nation. They were times of national and local political campaigning for gay rights. Oral history allows us to compare people’s experiences of campaigning at different levels of political debate, and to trace links between different strands of the campaign.
The Wolfenden Report, published in 1957, opened the ground for legal reform but was not implemented by the Conservative Government at the time. Allan Horsfall, a National Coal Board clerk based in Atherton, a coal-mining town in what was then Lancashire, decided to do something about it.
Meanwhile, in London, MP Leo Abse was also frustrated by the government’s lack of action following Wolfenden’s recommendations. He repeatedly presented private members bills to the House of Commons for five years before what became the Sexual Offences Act finally passed in 1967.
After the social and legislative changes of the 1960s, the 1970s saw the rise of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the continued fight for social equality, as activist Mary McIntosh discusses in this extract.
Transcriptions of the GLF manifesto can be read online but this oral history recording gives us access to the arguments behind the birth of the document, and the context within which its authors were working.
The GLF were radial in their demands, and marked a departure from previous battles for sexual equality which focused on law reform, to question the very nature of society and its structures. They would raise the consciousness of gay people and help them understand how and why they were oppressed. They saw the most powerful strategy to changing attitudes amongst LGBTQ peoples, and society at large, as ‘coming-out’, organising and being visible.
In 1972, the GLF organised the first Gay Pride march and many of its members would go on to create and bolster LGBTQ organisations that would fight to bring about massive social change over subsequent decades. However, when the GLF disbanded in late 1973, the legal and social situation had changed little, and wouldn’t for many years to come. 1988 for example, saw the passing of Section 28 (also known as Clause 28) of the Local Government Act, which represented a turn for the worse in sexual equality.
Testimonies such as this highlight that the story of gay rights in the UK, is not one that builds on one success to another. Sometimes a backward step legislatively has the ability to mobilise a community and make their voice more coherent and louder. The LGBTQ rights organisation Stonewall was born out of the campaign against Clause 28.
The internet as a source for information and support may be a new development, and the gender identities the teenagers discuss may be unfamiliar to many, however the stigma and misunderstandings faced by people living as a minority are familiar and can be traced, interrogated and claimed, if desired, through the collections at the British Library Sound Archive. Sometimes being able to locate and find someone ‘like you’ in history can have an enormous galvanising effect for an individual.
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This post was previously published on bl.uk and is republished here under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0.
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