Forming an alternative sexual identity in post-war Britain
To understand the present, it is necessary to interrogate the past. Whilst it is impossible to compress years of history into a couple of pages, it is
essential to establish a sense of the times and changes experienced by older LGB individuals. There have been significant attitudinal changes
towards sexuality over the past 30 years. The British Social Attitudes Survey of 1987 indicated that 75% of people thought homosexuality was ‘always or mostly wrong’. By 2008 this had substantially reduced to 32% (Ward and Carvel, 2008) (although it is noteworthy there is still uneasiness with same-sex intimacy in the media; a BBC survey found 18% 'uncomfortable' with the depiction of LGB characters, with men and the over 55s particularly likely to
be offended).4 A move towards a broader understanding of equality initiated by the post-1997 Labour government and confirmed by the 2010 Coalition government’s commitment to equal marriage, resulted in the introduction of sexualities and transgender equalities legislation. The Adoption and
Children Act (2002), Sexual Offences Act (2003), Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (2003), repeal of Section 28 (2003), Civil Partnership Act (2004), Gender Recognition Act (2004), Equality Act (2010) and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act (2013) alongside profound attitudinal changes mean that individuals’ experiences will differ greatly depending on the era into which they are born and come out. Rodríguez Rust (2012) identifies the historical time period within which an individual comes out and the age at which s/he does so as having ‘profound and lasting effects’ (p.163).
Born in the immediate post-war period, the current generation of LGB elders in the UK were mostly socialised and came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s, a time when homosexuality was seen as deviant or disordered behaviour that must be vilified and ‘normalised’. In an environment where the heterosexual assumption prevailed, the LGB community was vulnerable to ridicule, physical and mental abuse, harassment, and employment and health care discrimination, resulting in many people living lives of full or partial self-concealment. Some are still hidden; Traies (2012) reports that almost 10% of her sample of 370 lesbians aged over 60 were not out to any family member, a quarter were not out to their neighbours and 49%
4 Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People on the BBC, Research Report, (September 2010).
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/pdf/diversity_research_300910.pdf
(including all those over 80) were not out to any social service professionals.
Stonewall (2008a) reports that only half of lesbians and bisexual women are out to their GP or health care professional. The recent EU LGBT Survey (2013) reported that many respondents were still not out to family members and ‘a majority avoid holding hands with their same-sex partner for fear of victimisation’ (p.15).
Although from the vantage point of the twenty first century, the pace of change over the past 50 years appears to have been rapid, it may not have seemed that way to those who lived through the worst excesses of
homophobia and the tentative development of a gay liberation movement.
The 1960s witnessed many demands for social and legal reform and the LGBT community were amongst their number, with campaigns in the USA and UK seeking tolerance and civil rights. Richardson and Monro (2012) point out that whilst the sixties were generally conservative, by the early seventies a more militant politics emerged. However, lesbians were often alienated and excluded from the main campaigns for change. Weeks (1990) describes early membership of political organisations such as the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) as small and predominantly male; in 1972, only 6-8% of the 2,800 CHE members were women. Initially, there were few alternatives for women; some joined the Women’s Liberation Movement, which became increasingly separatist at this time, and Sappho, which became the focus for London lesbians, holding discos and weekly meetings in Notting Hill Gate. Several smaller organisations emerged in response to generic LGBT issues of loneliness and isolation; these included ‘London Gay Switchboard’, set up in 1974, ‘Friend’ and ‘London Icebreakers’. Gay
social centres in cities including London, Bradford and Manchester offered an alternative to the developing commercial gay scene. Anderson (2006) suggested that the ‘imagined community’ of nationalism became possible because shared discourses were facilitated by ‘print capitalism’ which,
‘made it possible for […] people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’ (p.37). Similarly, the
establishment of an imagined sexual community was aided by the emergent gay press in the 1970s; although this was predominantly male focussed, Virago Press (1973) and The Women’s Press (1978) were committed to producing work about women’s diverse lives and relationships. Lesbian events and campaigns were small in number and divided in strategic
direction; 500 women attended a National Lesbian Conference in 1976, but there was little unity on discussion of issues such as abortion, wages for housework or the essential nature of lesbian identity. Although there were lesbian groups and activists, the small numbers of women involved in public campaigning suggests that many stayed ‘under the radar’, perhaps because they feared exposure or possibly because the organisations that did exist did not appear sufficiently diverse to accommodate or represent them.
The 1980s brought two key threats to the UK’s LGB population. The decade witnessed the onset of a global AIDs crisis, which whilst devastating the gay male population, also served to bring the LGB community together, although bisexuals, already characterised as ‘traitors’ by some gays and lesbians came under increased attack as potential ‘carriers’ of the virus back into the
‘general population’ (Rodríguez Rust, 2012). In the UK, the introduction of Section 28, outlawing the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality and ‘pretended
families’ as well as other attacks on equal opportunity policies and funding by the Thatcher administration also served to unite and mobilise
communities, desperate not to lose the gains of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1988, an anti-Section 28 rally attracted over 20,000 people and the following year’s lesbian and gay Pride rally over 30,000. Far from silencing them, Section 28 had galvanised supporters of LGBT equalities into action in numbers never previously seen in the UK. Weeks perceives that by the end of the twentieth century, the lesbian and gay community were:
[E]mbattled, but resilient, politically vulnerable but socially and culturally more vibrant and visible than ever before. (1990: 231) However, older lesbians are still far from visible in a range of familial, social and professional situations. Visibility brings its own challenges as
demonstrated by Morales et al. (2014) who compared the experiences of LGBT adults aged 50-64 (the baby boom generation) with those born
between 1925 and 1945 (the so-called Silent Generation). Their study found that the ‘boomers’ perceived significantly more barriers, for example, to health and care services, felt less safe than the ‘Silents’ and experienced a greater degree of harassment, almost certainly as a consequence of higher levels of sexual identity disclosure. Despite the trend towards the
‘normalisation’ of LGBT lives and equalities in the UK and many other parts of the world, discrimination, stigmatisation and public invisibility have by no means been eradicated, particularly for bisexual and trans communities.
Hostetler (2013) suggests that while LGBT ‘baby boomers’ have certainly benefitted from societal changes and increased visibility, ‘the course of their middle (and late) adulthood has been shaped in indelible ways’ (p.121) by events including involvement in movements such as feminism and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the AIDS crisis. Whilst it is evident that many
LGBT people have participated fully and openly in society and been active and successful in seeking equalities, I suggest that for some individuals, predominantly (but by no means exclusively) elders, changed attitudes and apparent equalities have come too late to transform lives blighted by
exposure to homophobia and the complexities of concealment, self-hatred and shame associated with homonegativity (Szymanksi and Chung 2001).
2.2 Identity and difference: The intersection of multiple inequalities