Within the collective memory of queer Britain, the Wolfenden Report – a 1957 publication that recommended the decriminalisation of private gay sex between men – could be seen to have lost much of its widespread recognition in recent years. Compared to the still-active awareness and discussion of Section 28 – Margaret Thatcher’s regressive clampdown on the “promotion of homosexuality” by local government that came three decades later – the report which led to the first steps towards legislative equality for gay men in the UK has been little discussed, either with support or criticism, amongst the average queer person today. The potential reasons for this are numerous: it would be another ten years after the report’s publication before decriminalisation – under certain criteria – came into law, and the report recommended a higher age of consent for homosexual acts, which remained in place until 2001. However, the importance of the findings of the report, and the discussion it provoked, are worth consideration. So where does the Wolfenden Report fit into the long, erratic, and often contradictory history of Britain’s slow acceptance of homosexuality? 

At the time of the commissioning of the report by the British government, the nation had been shocked by numerous scandals surrounding homosexuality in the public eye. Following the Second World War, there had been a large swell of arrests and prosecutions for gay sex, then termed “gross indecency”, including the now infamous case of Alan Turing and several high-profile cases involving members of high society, such as the Montagu/Pitt-Rivers/Wildeblood case that scandalised the nation in 1954. The furore and moral panic that followed led to the Conservative government establishing the Wolfenden Committee to suggest a plan of action for dealing with the issues of homosexuality and street prostitution. Both issues were seen to be muddying the genteel, respectable self-image that the nation wished to portray and putting communities still recovering from war at risk of instability. The aim of the report was, above all else, to bring these “deviant” elements of society under control. 

The committee, composed of judges, politicians, professors, ministers, and psychiatrists amongst others, deliberated for three years before publishing their findings. Their views often clashed and contradicted each other. In a rather progressive move for the time, testimony was heard from gay men themselves who had been victimised by the strict anti-gay laws in place – including Peter Wildeblood, one of the defendants in the Montagu case mentioned above. In a controversial and pioneering move for the time, the report concluded that homosexuality was not a disease and was instead a private matter for consenting adults, against the almost unanimous public and medical view that homosexuality could be cured by therapy.

However, this does not mean that the committee necessarily sought to make life better for gay men in any real sense. The main recommendation of the report was that private acts were decriminalised while penalties for public offences, both gay sex and sex work on the street, were dealt with more harshly. This again showed that the overriding purpose of the report was to reduce scandal and to minimise the perceived negative effects of homosexuality and sex work on the general public. 

Parliamentary debates following the publication of the report were heated and highly contentious, and the impenetrability of the taboo surrounding homosexuality led the matter to be shelved by the government almost instantly, with Lord Chancellor Viscount Kilmuir exclaiming that he was “not going down in history as the man who made sodomy legal”. Even when Harold Wilson’s government passed the Sexual Offences Act ten years later, implementing the report’s recommendations on the decriminalisation of gay sex, its argument mainly centred around the belief that gay men’s “disability” was punishment enough, showing the limited impact of the report’s more progressive findings on political discourse. 

Considering the role that the Wolfenden report played in the struggle for gay rights, and its place within the history of homosexuality within British culture, its main positive impact was its support for a pragmatic approach based on values of individual freedom. This approach at least managed to gain some leeway with religious conservatives and helped to open space for discussion within an almost entirely hostile society. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke in its favour, defending the “sacred realm of privacy” outside of the law, and the importance of the “preservation of human freedom, self-respect and responsibility”. At a time when traditional Christian norms dominated public attitudes, influencing the opinion of the Church of England at all was a huge step towards helping to build public acceptance. 

By tracking the history of public attitudes towards homosexuality through opinion polling, the decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967, as a direct result of the Wolfenden report, was the starting point for the upward trend of public acceptance of homosexuality. This trend, despite temporary setbacks during the regressive government of Thatcher and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, has led to a huge majority in support of gay rights today. Therefore, while it was certainly not the aim of the Wolfenden committee or the government at the time to open the doors for the queer activism and visibility that has led to the LGBTQ+ community’s position today, the publication of the 1957 report should still be recognised for its role in opening up discussion and granting LGBTQ+ people our first step towards freedom under the law.