Wolfenden and Scotland

The publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 followed three years of investigations into the habits and profiles of, and of legal attitudes to, homosexuality and prostitution in Britain. It was the first major investigation by any national authority in Britain into homosexual behaviour and although much research subsequently has focused chiefly on England, Davidson and Davis state that it has ‘figured prominently in the historiography of homosexuality in later twentieth-century Britain’.Footnote ³ The recommendations of the report were recognised in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act but only in England and Wales, and the debates ignited by the Wolfenden Report continued for more than a further decade in relation to Scotland. The Wolfenden Committee had originally included two members of the clergy, the Revd Canon V. A. Demant, an Anglo-Catholic, and the Revd R. F. V. Scott of the Church of Scotland, although Scott resigned from the committee in March 1956.Footnote ⁴ A number of witnesses to the Wolfenden Committee were also drawn from religious organisations across Great Britain, which demonstrated the belief that religious organisations should be a part of any discussions regarding legal reform related to homosexual acts and prostitution. However, it is notable that representatives of Scotland's largest Christian Church, the Church of Scotland, did not appear before the Wolfenden Committee.

The Church of England was, arguably, at the forefront of drives for homosexual law reform south of the border, and, as Matthew Grimley has argued, this institution probably inspired the inclusion of homosexuality within the remit of the Wolfenden enquiry.Footnote ⁵ In 1954 the Church had published The problem of homosexuality, which supported decriminalisation, and which dramatically ended the Church's silence on same-sex love.Footnote ⁶ Scotland's main Churches were to play their role in the processes of law reform with regard to homosexual acts, but their role has often been associated with the failure to implement the 1967 Sexual Offences Act in Scotland. Further, despite the issue of homosexuality emerging in social debate in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Wolfenden Report, the policy of favouring the status quo regarding same-sex love continued for another decade in Scotland. This article will assess the relationships between the major Scottish Churches and homosexual law reform organisations in Scotland and demonstrate that these were often complex and contradictory.

For gay and bisexual men in Scotland during this period the public attitudes of Scotland's main Churches towards non-heterosexuality would have appeared bleak and unforgiving. The Church of Scotland, for example, stood rather isolated: not only did it not send representatives to the committee but it was one of the only major Churches in Britain to oppose the findings of the Wolfenden Report.Footnote ⁷ This Church, Scotland's largest, had for some time maintained ‘that the only legitimate context for sexual activity was through life-long marriage between a man and a woman’.Footnote ⁸ It shared ‘grave misgivings about removing from the realm of law homosexual acts … and support[ed] Mr James Adair's reservations … and [feared] that relaxation of the law might lead to further and greater depravities’.Footnote ⁹ Any argument that the Church of Scotland followed its English neighbour in being proactive about law reform would be erroneous, yet just as there were splits in the Church of England regarding homosexual law reform, similar splits were evident in the Scottish Church.

James Adair was the Wolfenden Committee's most prominent Scot, perhaps in actions rather than reputation, but other than his morally-driven protestations, little is known about him. Born in Barrhead in 1886, Adair became an office boy with a local legal firm at the age of thirteen, before studying law at the University of Glasgow, where he excelled.Footnote ¹⁰ Adair had a long and successful legal career in Scotland, being made depute procurator-fiscal in 1919 by J. D. Strathern before succeeding Strathern as procurator-fiscal in Glasgow in 1937. Adair was no stranger to the intersection of law and sexual morality: as public prosecutor he had led the criminal case against members of the Kosmo Club who were charged with living off immoral earnings in 1939.Footnote ¹¹ Outside of his legal duties Adair would become the world president of the YMCA in 1962, and was a noted public speaker on aspects of Scottish social history.Footnote ¹² Adair had a long history of acting as an advocate for a number of religious bodies throughout Scotland on issues as wide-ranging as bowling on the SabbathFootnote ¹³ to the prevention/salvation of ‘fallen’ women.Footnote ¹⁴

The Wolfenden Report was to recommend the legalisation of homosexual acts conducted in private between consenting adults but Adair strongly dissented and provided a minority report, which disapproved of the committee's overall recommendations. Adair was an elder of the Church of Scotland and in many ways he vocalised not only his own objections, which were related to the fear of moral turpitude, but also the objections of Scotland's main Church. In effect, many of the conservative Scottish criticisms of the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report related to the fear that the recommendations would legitimise, or popularise, non-heterosexual sexual relations. Adair's concerns were related to the popular belief that publicising the existence of homosexuality in Scotland would lead to its spread. Indeed, speaking in 1925, the Gorbals Labour MP George Buchanan, appealing to Presbyterian values, had stated that

Like Buchanan, Adair believed strongly that immorality was infectious and that certain professions within Scotland were rife with predatory homosexuals, unrepentant of their immorality.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, the Church of Scotland's Church and Nation Committee (CNC) viewed any potential legal reform as an attack upon ethical standards that would lead to the spread of immorality.Footnote ¹⁷ The CNC, founded in 1919, investigated and reported back to the General Assembly (the Church's legislating authority composed of ministers, elders and a small number of deacons, commissioned by their presbyteries) on matters of interest to the Church from within civil society.

The CNC's pejorative view of homosexual law reform was shared by a number of Scottish legislators, including Lord Rowallan, who claimed that ‘Mr Adair is much nearer to the truth than the Wolfenden Committee. He knows the temptations of youth … to legitimise practices such as these … is to destroy self-discipline among the citizens, and particularly among the young.’Footnote ¹⁸ Adair addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in May 1958 and stated that within weeks of the publication of the Wolfenden Report, a homosexual ‘club’ in London, offering information on meeting places including public lavatories, had received nearly fifty applications for membership, and in one square mile of London there were more than a hundred male prostitutes offering depraved services. Adair's fear was that any change in the law would enable ‘perverts to practice sin for the sake of sinning’.Footnote ¹⁹ Adair also sparked alarm by stating that there was an organisation operating within England, composed of homosexuals, that had links to an international organisation with a membership of over 14,000, and that there was undoubtedly potential for this to spread to Scotland, despite the fact that in previous three years there had only been three convictions for homosexual offences in Scotland.Footnote ²⁰

Adair's contention that homosexual law reform in Scotland would lead to the emergence in Scottish cities of similar depravities to those witnessed in England was misleading. In the first quarter of the twentieth century Glagow had been host to a well-established network of homosexual prostitutes (named ‘Whitehats’) who operated out of premises in the city centre, including along the riverside street, the Broomielaw – and who were known to the police.Footnote ²¹ The fact that Adair had become a depute procurator-fiscal in 1919 would have meant that he would have been fully aware of the existence of these already established homosexual subcultures and networks.

The CNC had examined the issue of homosexuality in 1956 in direct response to the enquiries being undertaken by the Wolfenden Committee. In 1958, when the CNC reported back to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, there was a deep division between the investigating subcommittee, which was in favour of partial decriminalisation, and the main committee, which viewed a change in law as ‘calculated to increase, rather than decrease this grave evil’.Footnote ²² Despite the CNC ultimately favouring no change to the law regarding homosexual acts in Scotland, they were aware of the potential ill effects of continued criminalisation including the threat of social isolation.Footnote ²³ There was also acceptance that there was ‘convincing evidence that indulgence in homosexual practices [was] much more prevalent in Scotland than [had] generally been realised’.Footnote ²⁴ It was apparent that in the 1950s, when the issue of homosexuality and the law had entered public discourse, the Church of Scotland was publicly opposed to any change in the status quo, but this vehemence disguised a significant split in the Church about how to deal with what was regarded as the problematic issue of homosexuality.

Minor Churches such as the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland had a rigid and unforgiving attitude towards homosexuality,Footnote ²⁵ warning that ‘the fire of unnatural lust [would], if unrepented … be met with the fire of Divine judgement and retribution’.Footnote ²⁶ There was little chance of a schism emerging within that Church. It could be argued that these minor, hard-line, Evangelical Protestant Churches had little interest in examining the experiences of Scottish gay and bisexual men, whether they were members or not. Throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s the Free Presbyterians held to a consistent line towards homosexuality and homosexual law reform: neither would be tolerated. On the eve of decriminalisation in 1980, the Church stated that the legal change was ‘obnoxious to the vast majority of people in Scotland’.Footnote ²⁷

The Free Church of Scotland, another small and conservative Protestant entity, attacked not only the concept of homosexuality, describing it in 1968 as a ‘curse and a cancer’,Footnote ²⁸ together with the possibility of homosexual law reform in Scotland, but also the Church of Scotland, whose changing attitudes to law reform in the 1970s would ‘lead to the breakdown of society’.Footnote ²⁹ In the eyes of this minor Church, the Church of Scotland had been instrumental in the nation's declining standards of morality. Even by the 1990s, a decade after legal reform, little had changed in the Free Kirk. Moderator Alasdair Gollan linked the declining influence of the Church in Scotland with the increase in marriage breakdown, heavy drinking, the failure of discipline and the increasing tolerance of homosexuality. At the General Assembly of the Free Church in 1990 he stated that:

In an interview conducted in 2007, ‘Simon’, a former minister of a similar Scottish Church, observed that when he ‘came out’ to his Church's hierarchy in the 1980s they were somewhat supportive but totally unaware that any man could be both sexually and emotionally attracted to a member of his own sex. For them, homosexual acts were simply perversions that could be committed by anyone, just like any sin.Footnote ³¹

Secularisation and Scotland

The 1960s has been identified as a period which witnessed the emergence of new social movements, and significant shifts in discourses of morality and sexual and reproductive rights. Callum Brown has argued that the 1960s was a significant era for Christianity in Britain and posits the rise of secularisation during this time. Thus the 1960s saw the end of excessive moral censorship, according to Brown, as well as the introduction of legal measures to end the criminalisation of private, consensual gay sex; the granting of easier divorce; the legalisation of abortion; the emergence of women's liberation movements; and a radical youth culture incorporating rebellion and resistance.Footnote ³² Such changes inevitably had a significant impact upon Scotland's religious institutions which were witnessing, as Brown suggests, the collapse of the ‘salvation industry’ with a young generation no longer subscribing to ‘religious discourses of moral identity’.Footnote ³³

Brown's thesis is controversial; however, even if it is accepted that ‘the salvation industry’ was collapsing, there was still a stubborn resistance in some quarters to new, egalitarian discourses of sexual morality, even during and after the 1960s. Some of the shifts that did occur appeared to reject wholly moralistic objections to homosexuality and were replaced by a somewhat confused medical/degenerative model, with still just a whiff of religious bombast. Parliamentarians such as Barbara Huddleston Abney-Hastings, countess of Loudoun, appear to have viewed homosexuality as a medical issue and alluded to its psychological basis, although describing something rather more pathological:

Even those medical professionals who were sympathetic to the plight of Scotland's homosexual population recognised that there were two major institutional powers in Scotland which had a significant influence upon public opinion on matters of sexual morality. In a letter to an SMG committee member, Professor G. M. Carstairs, professor of psychological medicine at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that it was important that the SMG engage with both the police and the clergy in efforts to inform public opinion.Footnote ³⁵ In the 1950s the objections of Scottish policymakers to homosexual law reform had accorded roughly with religious objections. Lord Mathers, a Labour peer and former MP for West Lothian, Linlithgowshire, and Edinburgh West, and former Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, on the one hand supported psychiatric intervention in homosexuality, but on the other hoped that homosexuals would ‘strive their utmost against all that separates them from normal companionship and sympathy’ and saw it as a Christian duty to pray that they ‘set before them, steadfastly and prayerfully, a truly Christian life as their goal’. In doing so ‘they are certain to raise themselves in their own estimation and also in that of their fellow-men, and they will rid themselves of the bonds that have hitherto held them in thrall’.Footnote ³⁶

Thus, it was inevitable that, faced with new and emergent medico-legal discourses on homosexuality, Scotland's major Churches would be tempted to revise their hellfire and brimstone sermons about same-sex desire at least to acknowledge alternative discourses, as was occurring south of the border within both the Church of EnglandFootnote ³⁷ and the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ³⁸ According to the Church of Scotland Assembly Report of 1967 the CSMWC was attempting to encourage ‘a more sympathetic understanding of the difficulties and handicaps of those suffering from homosexual tendencies’ and felt regret that there was ‘a lack of psychiatric and medical treatment available’.Footnote ³⁹ However, religious discourses of sexual morality were to stand steadfast in the face of secularisation and egalitarianism as the Assembly decided to reject this approach and adopted a less sympathetic attitude, stating that it ‘deplored the prevalence of homosexual practices as a source of uncleanness and deterioration in human character, and of weakness and decadence in the nation's life’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite the similarities between the positions adopted by the Church of Scotland's Moral Welfare Committee and the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council – that homosexuality was a psychological problem – the former's parent body was vehemently opposed to any public proclamations of empathy.

Emerging medical/psychological theories regarding homosexuality at least enabled some Scottish legislators to broaden their attacks on same-sex desire with the emergence of oppositional discourses, which shifted from religious-based morality to medical/psychological variants. Lord Ferrier, speaking in 1977, claimed that that were a number of homosexual ‘types’, ranging from ‘the mentally ill through to the compulsive lecher to the decadent pervert’.Footnote ⁴¹ Lord Galpern, the former Labour MP for Shettleston in Glasgow, also viewed homosexuality as a medical concern, going as far as to label it an addiction:

Such opinions were not limited to those with Scottish connections; the general mood amongst parliamentarians in the UK after the publication of the Wolfenden Report was still firmly against law reform,Footnote ⁴³ but their persistence amongst Scottish legislators was telling. However, it was not only the Scottish political class that was guilty of conflating morality with sickness when discussing homosexuality. On the 20 September 1980 The Scotsman carried the headline ‘Police book angers homosexual group – handbook for police a “smear” on Homosexuals’. This referred to the revelation that the Grampian Police handbook, Scottish criminal law, police duties and procedure, contained a section on police beat duties which stated that

Even in 1980, the year that the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act would bring Scotland into line with England and Wales regarding homosexual offences, a police force was using highly moralistic language to describe a sexual minority. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the text was written in 1936 and, according to Chief Inspector George Esson of Grampian Police, the section was still included because it related to crimes ‘which are still crimes in 1980’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Thus, any organisation emerging in Scotland in the post-war era to promote homosexual law reform would undoubtedly face a difficult struggle to contend with the apparent moral conservatism of Scottish society and the obvious resistance to change evident amongst religious organisations and the political class.Footnote ⁴⁶ The ‘radical restructuring of Christian Britain’, which is alleged to have occurred during the 1960s, does not appear to have had as significant an effect in Scotland as elsewhere, and certainly not within religious hierarchies, which, publicly, held rigidly to a religiously-inspired version of sexual morality. Scottish rejection of the findings of the Wolfenden Report appeared uniform thanks to coverage in the Scottish media being dominated by Adair's condemnationsFootnote ⁴⁷ and the reluctance of Scotland's main Church, the Church of Scotland, to relax its stance towards homosexuality.

This coverage may well have elevated Adair's objections and those of the Church of Scotland to a position that they did not warrant. Undoubtedly, such coverage would have been influential in the failure to include Scotland in the 1967 legislation. The reality was much more complex, with the peculiarities of Scots law playing a significant role in this decision. Under Scots law corroboration lay at the heart of all successful criminal convictions: a minimum of two separate sources of evidence was required to convict. Therefore, in cases of private, adult, consensual homosexual acts, which lacked witnesses or any other form of corroboration, a guilty verdict would be impossible to achieve. Initially, the Church of Scotland was not concerned at the low levels of prosecution for homosexual acts committed in private in Scotland as they viewed sexual behaviour as a moral concern. The Church initially viewed total celibacy as the only valid condition for Scottish homosexuals if they were to be welcomed within their Churches and communities. However, the CNC was more sympathetic to those men who were actively homosexual and did not breach the law, stating that they were ‘entitled to unqualified sympathy and respect’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Further, there was a growing concern, especially within the CNC, that low levels of prosecution masked another serious threat to Scottish homosexuals: blackmail.Footnote ⁴⁹

The problems of corroboration had led successive Lord Advocates in Scotland to invoke an unwritten rule that there would be no prosecutions for homosexual offences committed consensually and in private.Footnote ⁵⁰ This led to the situation where only acts committed in public, or against minors, or with force, were prosecuted in Scotland, situations which, even with limited decriminalisation, would still fall under criminal law. Effectively, if the law was not broken, why fix it? Indeed, following the publication of the Wolfenden Report, Scots law and its dealings with private homosexual acts were lauded in parliament and forwarded as a model against which English and Welsh law should be measured.Footnote ⁵¹ The strict separation of public and private realms instituted within Scots law was important and accorded with the desires of English lawmakers in the post-Wolfenden period.Footnote ⁵²

The publicity afforded to moral objections was powerful. The average Scot would be forgiven for believing that his welfare, and that of his children, was being protected by Scotland's champion on the Wolfenden Committee, and the principled position of the Church of Scotland. Yet such public proclamations obscured considerable ambivalence and contradictions within some Scottish religious institutions.

The Scottish Minorities Group and Scottish Churches

Whilst there is ample evidence for conservative and homophobic views amongst the religious and political establishments in Scotland, there was a counter-strand within the Scottish Churches. This rarely attracted public scrutiny in the post-Wolfenden era in Scotland largely as a result of the overwhelmingly negative reactions of the legal profession to Wolfenden and the public proclamations of the main Protestant Churches in Scotland.Footnote ⁵³

The Scottish Minorities Group, Scotland's foremost homosexual law reform organisation, was formed in the spring of 1969 with the aim of educating, informing, counselling and challenging existing laws governing homosexual acts in Scotland.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Davidson and Davis have noted, the name chosen could be perceived to be closeted as the term homosexual is absent.Footnote ⁵⁵ Through the 1970s most SMG committee members used pseudonyms to protect their identities and those of their families. ‘Walter’, an early committee member, explained that, with the fear of exposure removed, it enabled members to be much more involved and active.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even by 1969, after the change in the law in England and Wales, there was a reluctance to engage in bold or confrontational campaigning in Scotland. This in itself was an indication that the cultural temperature in Scotland was markedly different from that in England and Wales, where a few months later the Gay Liberation Front – a mass movement rather than a discreet lobbying body – would enter the social arena.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, by the time of the first meeting of the SMG, contact had already been established between Ian Dunn (who could be labelled the group's instigator) and the Revd Ean Simpson, an Argyllshire minister of the Church of Scotland. Simpson was also associated with the charitable wing of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, the Albany Trust.Footnote ⁵⁸ In response to apparent criticism over the SMG's relationship with religious institutions, Dunn noted in 1989 that ‘You'll have remarked, I'm sure, on the Christian input into our early years. As a Humanist, this never bothered me. I've always held a strong regard for those Christians who are rebels, spliced, of course, with a tolerant outlook. I've never though it smart to snort at Christians and their faiths.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Dunn was also patently aware that religious/moral discourses on homosexuality held powerful sway in Scotland and his keenness to work with the country's main Churches was as much a political decision as one of solidarity. From the outset, Simpson was keen to act as a representative to the SMG on behalf of the CSMWC, and to encourage the SMG to adopt a policy of counselling and welfare towards Scotland's homosexual population:

What is noteworthy here is the lack of moral judgement imposed upon the homosexual by this Church of Scotland representative: there is no mention of perversions, immorality or sin. It is important to acknowledge that Simpson was aligned with the CSMWC, which had for some time held a more liberal attitude towards homosexuality than its parent body. Indeed, as part of its investigations regarding the legal status of homosexuals within Scottish society, the CSMWC had written to the Law Society of Scotland in an effort to ascertain why Scotland had been omitted from the 1967 legislation.Footnote ⁶¹ Additionally, there was a feeling within the Church that its vocal anti-gay denunciations during the 1950s and 1960s had fatally damaged its pastoral work with non-heterosexual members.Footnote ⁶² Fostering a close relationship with Scottish Churches had been an early desire of the SMG and Dunn's communications with this arm of the Church of Scotland were regular and supportive in the formative years of the group. Indeed, many early meetings of the organisation were held within church properties and members of the religious institutions were keen to offer pastoral care and counselling to homosexuals.

The initial relationship between the SMG and the Church of Scotland was friendly and supportive. In 1969 Simpson was able to suggest that the Church's attitude to homosexuals was softening and that he was reasonably optimistic that a shift in position was underway.Footnote ⁶³ Simpson was sympathetic to the position of homosexuals within Scotland and was privately critical of attitudes within both Scotland and his own Church:

However, despite the apparently ‘friendly’ nature of this relationship there were conditions attached. Whereas the CSMWC saw the responsibility of the SMG to lie in counselling and pastoral care, the SMG were promoting a ‘social’ side to their activities. In a discussion document written in 1970 by Ian Dunn, it is suggested that ‘clubs, coffee and licensed bars should be considered … to enable … escape from … social isolation’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ultimately, it was this move to act as a social support group that was to damage the relationship between the Church of Scotland and the SMG. Simpson had reminded Ian Dunn early in their association that the Church would not countenance being associated with the SMG if it were to publicise itself as a ‘club’ for homosexuals.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was to become clear to members of the SMG that the Church of Scotland was scrutinising their activities closely and attempting to veto activities that might embarrass the Church. ‘Walter’ reflected in 2007 on the growing distrust between the Church of Scotland and his group by 1970: ‘We got frozen out of the Church of Scotland for that [offering social activities for members] … I remember one fairly nasty meeting with the Secretary of the Church of Scotland Moral Welfare Committee … it was like being threatened by someone from the Mafia!’Footnote ⁶⁷

Simpson withdrew from his role as liaison between the CSMWC and SMG in 1970 citing the SMG's willingness to offer an ‘open door’ policy which would inevitably lead to the ‘infiltration into the group of predator-type troublemakers’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ian Dunn remarked that the Church of Scotland had been ‘supportive in the manner of a terribly anxious and respectable mother, [who] took fright and told us to go away’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Close co-operation between the SMG and the CSMWC therefore ceased, but ironically at the point when the Church of Scotland's attitude towards homosexuality was softening and it finally accepted the CSMWC's 1967 advice.Footnote ⁷⁰ By the 1970s the Church appeared to have adopted a more liberal approach to issues of morality and social responsibility. Unlike other Scottish Churches the Church of Scotland was cautiously supportive of attempts to liberalise legislation on abortion during the late 1960s,Footnote ⁷¹ and recognised the need for Scottish divorce laws to be relaxed and aligned with legislation in England and Wales.Footnote ⁷² The Church had first admitted women to its ministry in 1968, having permitted them to acts as elders two years previously.Footnote ⁷³ By the 1970s the Church had taken significant steps towards reaffirming the centrality of presbyteries within the structure of the Church, and to attempt to replicate within the Church the democratic structures of civil society. The Anderson Report, commissioned by the Assembly in 1969, sought to overcome the apparent malaise within the Church and modernise an institution which was backward-looking and ignored significant social changes within Scottish society.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although ultimately unsuccessful in its aims, this move underlined the Church's commitment to acting democratically and appealed to the central thesis of the Reformation: reform.

However, despite the shift in attitudes towards homosexual law reform from within the Church of Scotland, the CSMWC's prior failure to influence the public position of the Church, combined with Simpson's increasing meddling, had already seriously impeded any further close association with the SMG. Whilst the SMG continued its policy of questioning the contradictions in Scots Law policy and practice and the lack of legal equity between Scotland and its southern neighbours, its relationship with the Church of Scotland did not progress although contact was maintained.

What prompted the Church of Scotland's less conservative attitude towards homosexuality and the possibility of homosexual law reform is difficult to measure. Public opinion throughout this period in Scotland had seemed to be in line with the stance initially taken by the Church, but simply preserving the status quo would sit uncomfortably with the more proactive position that the Church would take on a host of matters during the late 1960s through to the 1980s. Undoubtedly, concerns over declining membership during the 1960s and 1970s,Footnote ⁷⁵ coupled with the realisation that strongly condemnatory rhetoric did little to help non-heterosexual members, and a recognition that significant splits had appeared within the Church regarding homosexuality, all played their part. The Church's growing public role should also be considered; as the 1970s progressed the Church became involved in the devolution debate, strongly supporting a Scottish parliament, and was to become a fierce critic of Thatcherite economic and social policies during the 1980s, highlighting their individualistic and divisive effects.Footnote ⁷⁶ If the Church was to rail against attitudes and policies that led to division and marginalisation, it could hardly maintain such a policy towards a significant minority within Scotland.

Filling some of the void left by the breakdown in the relationship between the Church of Scotland and the SMG was left to the Scottish Roman Catholic Church. Fr Anthony Ross, the Catholic chaplain to the University of Edinburgh, offered the SMG use of a meeting room from the end of 1970.Footnote ⁷⁷ Born out of these initial meetings, the ‘Cobweb’ developed into a social group where the chaplain's ‘gaze’ may well have ensured the introduction of a no kissing, no petting and no dancing rule.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ross developed close links with the SMG, becoming a vice-president in 1971:Footnote ⁷⁹ he represented a more liberal wing of the Catholic Church. In the early 1980s he claimed to have offered relationship and moral advice to gay people, encouraging them to develop monogamous and lasting relationships.Footnote ⁸⁰

There were, in fact, a number of Roman Catholic clergy who worked with the SMG, with the apparent support of the church hierarchy. At the University of Strathclyde, in 1971, Fr Columba Ryan, the Roman Catholic chaplain to the university, was central in the creation of a homophile student organisation which met at ‘The Ark’, a university meeting centre. Despite reports in the Glasgow Herald that the group had been disbanded by the chaplain when he learnt that its true intent was to facilitate ‘dubious homosexual associations’,Footnote ⁸¹ the group continued to meet with the knowledge and support of Ryan,Footnote ⁸² who addressed at least one meeting of the SMG.

Perhaps more crucially, the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland prevented the SMG from folding in 1971 after the Church of Scotland had evicted it from its Edinburgh premises in Queen Street as a result of the growing schism between the two organisations. In January 1971 the Catholic Church offered the SMG use of its premises in George Square, which, according to Ian Dunn, saved the organisation from ‘abandonment’.Footnote ⁸³ The relationship between the Church and the SMG, and its later incarnation the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG), continued well into the 1980s, with Catholic priests not infrequent speakers at SMG and SHRG meetings.Footnote ⁸⁴ Indeed, at an open day for the Paisley branch of the SHRG in the summer of 1981 all the major Churches sent representatives; the Catholic Marriage Advisory Service was also in attendance.Footnote ⁸⁵

Another link between the SMG and the Catholic Church in Scotland was Fr ‘Daniel’, a member of SMG and a Catholic priest. According to Daniel, there has always been a ‘public’ and ‘private’ attitude to same-sex desire within the Catholic Church in Europe, and this has not changed in the past few decades. Daniel explained that ‘everything coming out officially from the Vatican to the local hierarchies maintains that line that homosexuality is disordered … [but] there has been a lot of helpfulness at a pastoral level’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In reality, according to Daniel, homosexual acts were not viewed any differently from any other sexual sin that could be committed, and these were not particularly important to parish priests, not least because of the embarrassment to the priest that such a confession would encourage.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was the parish priest's responsibility to inform any parishioner of the official Vatican attitude to homosexual relationships, while at the same time explaining that a ‘priority of conscience’ was in operation. According to Daniel, this ‘priority of conscience’ was a matter for the individual not the Church, and it was the duty of the homosexual to determine whether he believed that God would judge him harshly or kindly.Footnote ⁸⁸

Despite the more recent proclamations from the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland that homosexuality is a form of ‘perversion’, the Church maintained a relatively close association with homosexual law reform in Scotland during the late 1960s and 1970s. Ultimately, this association would falter as the 1980s progressed and the Vatican began more forcibly to condemn non-heterosexual practices.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a 1986 pastoral letter to bishops from Cardinal Ratzinger, approved by Pope John Paul ii, it was stated that ‘Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an intrinsic disorder.’Footnote ⁹⁰ The ‘party line’ had become much stronger and allowed less flexibility at a pastoral level for parish priests counselling non-heterosexual members.

The demise of the near twenty-year relationship with the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland had followed the demise of the close bond between the SMG and the Church of Scotland, yet SMG members still believed that an active association with religious organisations was important to their success in changing attitudes in Scotland. Whether these relationships were fruitful is difficult to measure. The sometimes fractious relationship with the Church of Scotland during the late 1960s, coupled with the Church's focus on pastoral care and the liberalising of its attitudes to wider issues of sexual morality, suggests that any changes is the Church's attitudes were unconnected to its relationship with the SMG.

For those gay and bisexual men in Scotland during this period who had no contact with or knowledge of the SMG and its relationships with both major Churches, the public attitudes of those Churches towards non-heterosexuality would have appeared overtly hostile. Such men would probably have been unaware that, despite the moralising discourses on homosexuality publicly espoused by the main Churches, these attitudes were by no means universal. There is evidence that both Scotland's main Churches, the Protestant Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church, engaged sympathetically with the Scottish homosexual law reform campaign and offered pastoral and substantive support to Scotland's foremost gay rights organisation, the Scottish Minorities Group, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. The demise of these relationships was linked to more explicit homosexual rights campaigns, which, in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, caused a hardening of the party line towards non-heterosexuality. In the case of the Church of Scotland, there were concerns that the activities of the SMG, in promoting a social side to their campaigning, might reflect badly on the Church and limit their own opportunities to counsel homosexual members.