‘Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society’ by Jeffrey Meek (Palgrave)
When you read about government ministers and other busy folk falling over themselves to be witnesses at same-sex marriages, you sometimes have to pinch yourself to remember that it was not always thus in Scotland. We only need to look back to the bus fare referendum of 2000 for a reminder of what mass homophobia looks like; if we go back further to the Wolfenden Report of 1957, we can see in a Daily Record poll that 85% of its respondents were against the decriminalisation of male homosexual activity. Over time, a whole lot of minds have changed.
Jeffrey Meek’s much needed study, ‘Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society’, provides us with a multi-layered picture of developments in the lives of gay and bisexual men (GBM) in Scotland in the last century. (Perhaps, that should be male homosexual men or queer men – but I’ll leave the discussion about terminology for another time.) It is an academically rigorous, insightful work which also engages with the general reader; it should be made available in public libraries.
He draws extensively on archives to illustrate the debates that were being conducted about GBM within the agencies that were concerned with the law, politics, medicine and religion. He has conducted interviews with 24 GBM about how they lived their everyday lives, about their experiences of popular culture and about how they made sense of things. He examines the role of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) as some kind of mediating body between the agencies of power and the GBM themselves. He highlights the ways in which some GBM attempted to make sense of their situation through belief in religion and participation in religious institutions. ‘Queer Voices’ paints a picture of the social shifts that made change possible in a society where silence was a major instrument in the oppression of GBM.
There was some disappointment in Scotland about the fact that the partial decriminalisation of male homosexual activity in 1967 was limited to England and Wales. But, as the debates here reveal, there were a relatively low number of prosecutions in Scotland. In Scots law, there had to be a public interest in prosecuting a case and that, combined with the need for corroboration, meant that very few men were prosecuted. Between 1966 and 1976, there were, according to the Scottish lord advocate, no prosecutions for homosexual acts committed by adults in private. While the law remained a source of anxiety to those gay men who knew about it or to those men caught in public places, organised religion was a far greater barrier to their acceptance in society.
Meek’s study reveals the octopus-like capacity of organised religion to impact on the lives of GBM. It is well known that the Wolfenden Committee’s minority report, which opposed any decriminalisation of male homosexual activity, was written by James Adair, a former procurator fiscal from Glasgow. Adair was also a Church of Scotland elder and a few months after the publication of Wolfenden, he was fulminating to the General Assembly about the dangers of decriminalisation on the grounds that it gave ‘perverts [the right] to practise sinning for the sake of sinning’.
Adair’s mission seems to have been to ensure that the law remained indivisible from the teachings of the Presbyterian Church. He was the enemy of any moves towards pluralism. Nearly 60 years later, it is possible to see Adair’s behaviour as being akin to Custer’s last stand but at the time he did represent a significant body of opinion. The fact that, in the 1970s, the SMG devoted a lot of energy to establishing a conversation with all the churches illustrates the pervasive nature of religious authority throughout the country.
Many of the men interviewed for the study also attempted to understand their homosexuality within a religious framework. For some that led to the conclusion that their homosexuality was something to feel guilty about. For others it led to a re-interpretation of their relationship with God. Stephen was born into a Roman Catholic, working class, Glaswegian family in 1939 and he concluded: ‘If God made me, then he made me the way I am so therefore that would be between God and me… I felt that God knew me better than the priests did’.
There was a powerful sense of silence surrounding homosexuality. Meek points out that legal cases, such as those concerning male prostitutes, received far less attention from the Scottish press than they might have done from the English press and he suggests that that reflects ‘a general societal discomfort with and distaste of homosexuality’. In 1948, Glasgow Unity Theatre challenged the taboos surrounding homosexuality by putting on a production of ‘The Lambs of God’, a play whose central character was gay. Several scenes were greeted with silence, as if the audience was either appalled by what was going on or didn’t understand it; the Glasgow Herald review does not mention the term homosexuality.
Despite the widespread silence, boys did engage in sexual activity with one another but as Donald, born 1944, explained: ‘I didn’t have a name for it; I didn’t realise I was gay; there wasn’t a name for being gay at that stage’. Nor, as he points out, was there a fully formed vocabulary for expression of homophobic views. ‘Sometimes I would hear somebody would say “he’s a bit of a jessie” or “he’s a pansy” but I cannae ever remember hearing the “poof” word.’ The regime of silence inhibited general expressions of curiosity and hindered debate around themes of legal and social reform.
Queer history has often been associated with metropolitan centres, such as San Francisco or London, where there is frequent migration, a climate of anonymity and a friendly critical mass. The route to understanding queer history in small countries which have no metropolis has been more complex and requires a particularly painstaking approach to research. But 2008 saw the publication of historical studies about patterns of sexuality in Ireland and New Zealand, both of which have smaller populations than Scotland. Why have we had to wait so long for a fully researched study about Scotland?
It is over 20 years now since the first oral history publication about lesbians and gay men in Scotland went into print; there have been numerous publications, exhibitions, websites and community events since then on historical themes but none of them has had any formal support from the university sector. Our universities often like to present themselves as the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment with an outlook that sees everything as worthy of scientific investigation. To some of us, it has felt that the universities, in the field of sexuality, prefer to embody the earlier tradition of Knoxian silence. Meek’s book is a considerable achievement in itself but, hopefully, also represents some kind of change of perception in the institutional mindset of the universities.
This book contains several fascinating stories – as well as some alarming pictures of ‘rough trade’ or ‘whitehats’ from Glasgow in the 1930s – and my favourite story is of a man known as Red Harry. The son of an Edinburgh foreman painter, Harry Whyte was working as a journalist for the Moscow Daily News in 1934 when Stalin recriminalised homosexuality. Harry did what any self-respecting homosexual communist from a Presbyterian background would have done and wrote a 4,500 word letter to Stalin, explaining, from a Marxist perspective, why he was wrong. It’s not altogether clear how he managed to leave the Soviet Union safely but he did. As Meek points out, it was ‘notable that Whyte was more comfortable revealing his homosexuality in a nation overseen by a dictator’ than he was in Scotland.
‘Queer Voices’ is an innovative study that explores the experiences and narratives of Scottish gay and bisexual men throughout the last century, as the country became more accepting of its own diversity. Jeffrey Meek enables us to hear the stories of members of this neglected group as well as the debates in which they featured. He helps remind us that social change, in the field of sexuality as much as anything else, is ongoing. Whatever Fukuyama may have said, we are not at the end of history. There will be more to come.
By Bob Cant | August 2015