Originally appeared in the Times of London, November 20, 1999.
Peter Wildeblood, diplomatic correspondent for a British newspaper, was convicted and imprisoned in 1954 for homosexual relations, his case a cause c?l?bre in the United Kingdom. His real crime was that he refused to be ashamed.
"I DID NOT BELIEVE such things could happen in England, until they happened to me." Thus wrote Peter Wildeblood 44 years ago, his name then a household word. He died last week in Vancouver, aged 76, forgotten. Today I doubt whether one Briton in a thousand would know a thing about him.
Our obituary page this Tuesday summed up accurately if bleakly: "In March 1954 Peter Wildeblood, then diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail, was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment for homosexual offences, together with Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. The Montagu case, as it came to be known, was a cause c?l?bre. It had a direct influence on the Wolfenden Committee, whose report in 1957 recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private be legalised, proposals which were finally passed into law in 1967."
I learnt the name of the man who had exercised so profound an influence on my own and others' lives three years ago, when asked to review for The Times a somewhat luridly entitled book, Heterosexual Dictatorship. The book, a study of male homosexuality in postwar Britain, by Patrick Higgins, proved careful and scholarly - and gripping. Wildeblood irritates Dr Higgins, as he irritated many of his contemporaries, but his story is recounted fairly.
He did not irritate me. So when, earlier this year, the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson asked me to write a new preface to Wildeblood's book, I was eager to read it.
Against the Law, first published by Weidenfeld in 1955, had long fallen out of print. It caused a sensation in its time. Even The Daily Telegraph of the day thought it "a very courageous, honest book which can do a great deal of good," though public libraries declined to stock the book, while many bookshops kept it out of sight.
Weidenfeld has republished now as part of its 50th anniversary - as it turned out, almost on the day the author died.
Though undoubtedly a partial account (and though, like Higgins, I doubt Wildeblood's conspiracy theories) the story is remarkable. Remarkable, of course, for the tale it tells of arrests, harassments and police persecution; of the trial and of the imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs which followed. But more remarkable for the snapshot it gives us of attitudes to homosexuality in 1950s Britain, a world in which the judge in the trial, summing up to the jury, could call Wildeblood's (seized) correspondence "nauseating" and imply that anyone who admitted to being homosexual was so vile that the chances were that he was a criminal as well.
The case involved consensual behaviour of an unexceptional kind between adults, all over 21, in private, at Beaulieu. That one of the accused, Wildeblood, was not prepared to slink off into the release of the shadows afterwards but determined to tell his story in an unashamed way, was considered incredible. This book made publishing history - and as late as 1955, when half my readers today will have been alive. It was not long ago, yet almost another world. That is what is most remarkable of all.
"That night, a woman spat at me," Wildeblood wrote. "She was a respectable looking, middle-aged, tweedy person wearing a sensible felt hat. She was standing on the pavement as the car went by. I saw her suck in her cheeks, and the next moment a big blob of spit was running down the windscreen.
"This shocked me very much. The woman did not look eccentric or evil; in fact she looked very much like the country gentlewomen with whom my mother used to take coffee when she has finished her shopping on Saturday mornings. She looked thoroughly ordinary, to me. But what did I look like to her? Evidently, I was a monster."
Around this time, the Daily Mirror printed a photograph of Wildeblood, his lips touched up by the newspaper to make him appear to be wearing lipstick. What so troubled the Establishment of the day was not that homosexual practices went on - everybody knew they always had and always would - but that anybody would openly declare himself to be "a homosexual." At the time (Patrick Higgins explains) the ruling wisdom on these matters was a kind of pseudo-science. Once discredited, science is always renamed "pseudo-science," but it seemed as solid then as our science on social questions - such as drugs - may be today.
According to that science, a homosexual act was something into which almost any man might fall if exposed to what experts believed could become an epidemic unless suppressed. Those who did sometimes fall were called "perverts." A smaller group (it was held) were born homosexuals with no potential to be heterosexual, and were the victims of a sort of medical misfortune. Such unfortunates were classified as "inverts." There was some sympathy for inverts, none for perverts, these latter being in some sense the spreaders of the rot.
To such a view, outgoing Peter Wildeblood, willing to trumpet his sexuality and (worse) to claim that there were many like him, and to speak the language of rights, was an infuriating phenomenon.
Sir John Wolfenden did not care for him at all. The name Wolfenden has become associated with liberal reform but from Higgins's scrupulous account of the Wolfenden Committee's work, Sir John emerges as a cold and ambitious man with an eye to the main chance. He and his committee, charged with reviewing the law on homosexuality and prostitution, found it distasteful to name either, so, taking their cue from a biscuit of the same name, dubbed the objects of their inquiry "Huntleys" and "Palmers."
"What about our Huntleys," Wolfenden wrote to the secretary of his committee, "...they are not likely to come as official witnesses and if they did they would hardly be at their best when cross-examined by a committee." But he did want some of his committee to talk to some Huntleys, off the record, about their lives.
Wildeblood (now out of prison, his book published) wanted to talk on the record. A reluctant Wolfenden conceded. Nobody knows (though I doubt it) whether Wildeblood's evidence itself influenced the final report as much as his earlier trial and book had, by troubling public opinion, influenced the climate which triggered the whole inquiry.
Wolfenden's son, Jeremy, admired Wildeblood and it is said they later became friends. Before winning a scholarship to Oxford, Jeremy had told his father he was gay. John Wolfenden was horrified, writing to suggest "we stay out of each other's way for the time being." Jeremy died, probably of alcoholism, about twelve years later.
These are strange tales. Wildeblood and Wolfenden are gone. Other figures - Kenneth Tynan, who acted as surety for the arrested Wildeblood; Peter Rawlinson, his defence counsel; John Gielgud, whose own trial in 1953 stirred public anxiety alongside Wildeblood's; Lord Longford, who greeted him from prison; Lord Montagu himself - flourished into a new age.
For a while Wildeblood enjoyed something of a second career as a scriptwriter, but never shook off the suspicion that he had been a bit of an attention-seeker. His last years were spent, after a stroke, quadriplegic and speechless. The modern gay establishment has been no kinder to him than the 1950s, regarding his plea for tolerance for "good" homosexuals as Uncle Tomism. Like so many human bridges between eras, he is charged with insurrection by the old, dismissed as a compromiser by the new.
And attention-seeking? The same words were chosen by Alastair Campbell to describe me last year when I mentioned something known but for some stupid reason not acknowledged about Peter Mandelson.
Attention-seeking is what irritates us about Peter Tatchell. It is an often unlikeable quality, but I wonder where many just causes would be without it?
In saluting Peter Wildeblood I prefer to remember the courage which accompanied the self-advertisement. Everyone counselled silence, and he chose noise. He did not choose to be exposed but, placed at the mercy of events, he chose to become their master.
His book was a voluntary act. "Very faintly," he wrote, "as though at the end of a tunnel, I could see what I must do. I would make a statement ... I would simply tell the truth about myself ... I would be the first homosexual to tell what it felt like to be an exile in one's own country. I might destroy myself, but perhaps I could help others."
Peter Wildeblood had a difficult life. I would like to think I might have spoken in his cause even at the risk of being called an attention-seeker. From one attention-seeker to another, Peter, rest in peace.