London — The men were convicted — tens of thousands of them — of crimes like buggery, gross indecency and loitering with intent. They had been arrested in bars, coffee houses and public bathrooms, and sometimes in the privacy of their homes and with their partners. In many cases, their only offense was seeking intimacy with another man.
Decades after homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain, the government announced on Thursday that it would posthumously pardon thousands of gay and bisexual men who were convicted, in essence, of having or seeking gay sex. Since 2012, men with such convictions who are still alive have been able to apply to have their names cleared.
The law providing for the pardons, which could take effect in a matter of months now that it has the support of the Conservative government, is named for Alan Turing, the mathematician who made a major contribution to Britain in World War II by cracking Germany’s Enigma coding machine and was a central figure in the development of the computer.
Turing was convicted on charges of homosexuality in 1952 and committed suicide in 1954. The government apologized in 2009 for its treatment of him, and in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II formally pardoned him. In April, the head of Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, also apologized, for its past discrimination against gays.
Alan Turing, Enigma Code-Breaker and Computer Pioneer, Wins Royal Pardon DEC. 24, 2013
While Britain, like many countries, has experienced a sharp turnabout in its attitudes toward homosexuality — same-sex marriage has been legal since 2014 — the announcement did not meet with uniform enthusiasm. Stonewall, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, said it did not go far enough because it still requires a case-by-case review of pardon applications by living men. Others said they wanted an apology, not a pardon.
“I was not guilty of anything,” George Montague, 93, a gay activist and author who lives in Brighton, England and was convicted in the 1970s of gross indecency, told the BBC program “Newsnight.” “I was only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. My name was on the ‘queer list,’ which the police had in those days. And I will not accept a pardon.”
Mr. Montague described Turing as a hero, but said he opposed the posthumous pardon. “What was he guilty of?” Mr. Montague asked. “He was guilty of the same as what they call me guilty of: being born only able to fall in love with another man.”
Consensual sex between men over age 21 was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967, in Scotland in 1980 and in Northern Ireland in 1982. The age of consent for homosexual sex was lowered to 16, the same as for heterosexual sex, in 2001. (Lesbian sex was not specifically outlawed in Britain, although lesbians were occasionally prosecuted under vice statutes. The pardon applies only to men.)
The Turing Law was put forward by John Sharkey, a member of the House of Lords who championed the pardon for Turing. He estimated that 15,000 of 65,000 men convicted under laws that criminalized gay sex were still alive.
Among the deceased who might be eligible for a pardon is Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright who was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895 after being accused of sodomy, although the complexity of his case makes it difficult to know for sure. He was tried not once but twice, and only after he withdraw a criminal libel lawsuit against his accuser.
Since October 2012, men who were convicted of sexual offenses that are no longer illegal have been able to apply to the Home Office to have those crimes expunged under what is known as the “disregard process.” So far, 335 applications have been received, and 84 granted.
Under the plan announced Thursday, those men also will receive an automatic pardon.
“It is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of any crime today,” Sam Gyimah, the parliamentary under secretary of state for prisons and probation, said in a statement.
Under the Turing Law, the pardons would apply only to offenses that are no longer crimes. Men who had sex with someone who did not give consent, or who was not 16 or older at the time, will not be eligible for a pardon, nor would men whose crime would now “constitute the offense of sexual activity in a public lavatory,” which is still a crime.
The last provision could be a significant obstacle to a pardon for many men, given that as recently as the 1970s, public bathrooms were often a destination for men seeking same-sex intimacy.
John Nicolson, a member of Parliament from Scotland, has put forward a bill that would offer an automatic blanket pardon to men convicted of having gay sex. That bill, which Parliament is scheduled to debate on Friday, has support from Stonewall, the advocacy group, but appears likely to be blocked by the Conservative majority in the House of Commons.
Mr. Gyimah said the Nicolson proposal was too broad. “A blanket pardon, without the detailed investigations carried out by the Home Office under the disregard process, could see people guilty of an offense which is still a crime today claiming to be pardoned,” he said. “This would cause an extraordinary and unnecessary amount of distress to victims.”
Matt Houlbrook, a professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham and the author of “Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957,” said he was worried that the pardons might help oversimplify both gay history and the identities of men like Turing. His book describes urban gay life in the early 20th century as more vibrant and open than is commonly understood, and as a world in which sexual behavior and sexual identity were not yet fused.
“The most remarkable thing about queer urban culture is that it was, to a large extent, composed of and created by men who never thought themselves queer,” Mr. Houlbrook wrote.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Houlbrook said the government’s announcement could have “symbolic and practical importance” for men still seeking to clear their names, but he argued that the pardons were somewhat beside the point.
“A retrospective pardon doesn’t do much to atone for the realities of what it was like to be arrested and prosecuted at the time,” he said.
George Chauncey, a history professor at Yale, said he was not aware of any similar blanket pardon being offered in the United States for sodomy, degenerate disorderly conduct or other charges commonly used against men caught trying to pick up other men. The closest, he said, is the Obama administration’s policy, since 2011, of allowing military veterans who were discharged for homosexuality to apply to have their discharges reclassified as “honorable” rather than “undesirable.” But those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.
by Sewell Chan
Source – The New York Times
