Though he escaped prison, he was forced to undergo hormone therapy and lost his security clearance he later committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.įor all that the law was draconian, it was also unenforceable. In 1952, he reported a break-in and was subsequently convicted of gross indecency. This was what happened to Alan Turing, the mathematician and Enigma codebreaker. We knew from experience that if you called the police and they suspected you were homosexual, they would ignore the original crime and concentrate on the homosexuality.'
When a drunk coach driver crashed into their car outside their house in the night, 'the first thing we had to do was make up the spare bed. In the early days, they tell me, living together was a dangerous business. But his memories of the period are precise. Grey is tall and used to look distinguished he has had leukaemia and is gaunt now. I met them at their house in north-west London, where we talked in a room overflowing with books.
Grey is now 89 and has a civil partnership with that same man (Grey's partner has always remained anonymous and prefers to do so now). Grey, a middle-class boy, fearful of breaking the law, remained 'solitary, frustrated and apprehensive' until he met his partner at the age of 32. The one thing he did manage to pick up was that 'there was a hideous aura of criminality and degeneracy and abnormality surrounding the matter'. 'Some newspapers reported court cases but they talked of "gross indecency" because they couldn't bring themselves to mention it, so young people were lucky if they could work out what was going on.'Īntony Grey, who later became secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS), describes having to make 'painstaking circular tours through the dictionary' to articulate the feelings he'd had since he was nine. 'It was so little spoken about, you could be well into late adolescence before you even realised it was a crime,' says Allan Horsfall, who campaigned for legal change in the north west, where he lived with his partner, a headmaster. It is hard for us to imagine now how repressive was the atmosphere surrounding homosexuality in the 1950s. But it did transform the lives of men like Antony Grey, who had fought so hard for it, meaning that he and his lifelong partner no longer felt that every moment of every day they were at risk. It didn't stop the arrests: between 19, 30,000 gay and bisexual men were convicted for behaviour that would not have been a crime had their partner been a woman. It didn't come close to equalising the legal status of heterosexuals and homosexuals (that would take another 38 years). It was a battered old thing and, in many respects, shabby. Homosexuality was illegal and hundreds of thousands of men feared being picked up by zealous police wanting easy convictions, often for doing nothing more than looking a bit gay.Īt 5.50am on 5 July 1967, a bill to legalise homosexuality limped through its final stages in the House of Commons. Smiling in the park could lead to arrest and being in the wrong address book could cost you a prison sentence. Forty years ago in Britain, loving the wrong person could make you a criminal.