When the Sexual Offences Act (1967) was passed by the UK parliament, homosexual acts between men were partially decriminalised. Initially, the law only applied in England and Wales (decriminalisation was extended to Scotland in 1980, and to Northern Ireland in 1982), and only applied to men over the age of 21 (the age of consent for homosexuals acts was lowered to 18 in 1984, and then in 2000 was harmonised with the age of consent for heterosexual acts, at 16), and did not apply to men serving in the armed forces (although it was extended to include them in 2000). Homosexual acts between women were never legally prohibited in the UK and therefore did not need to be decriminalised. This Act formed part of a slew of progressive legislation in the late 1960s, which also included the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of capital punishment, and the relaxation of the divorce laws, all championed by the Labour Party’s then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins.
Not everyone in British politics welcomed the advent of the permissive society. In the mid-1980s public anxiety about the spread of AIDS provided the chance for opponents of liberalisation to campaign for new laws that proscribed ‘the promotion’ of homosexuality. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), passed by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, required that local authorities in England, Wales, and Scotland shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, nor should they promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. While many local government employees and many teachers worried about the meaning of the term “promotion” – did buying copies of books by Oscar Wilde for libraries count as promotion? What about playing music by Benjamin Britten? Was visiting Hadrian’s Wall problematic? – many UK newspapers conducted aggressive and intrusive reporting of the lives and behaviour of well-known gay men. It appeared, for a short time, that twenty years of progress had been reversed.