In Britain in the two decades after the end of the Second World War, the social world of the male homosexual achieved a visibility it hitherto had not enjoyed, for the first time becoming the object of social scientific investigation. This essay is concerned with the various professional practices through which that world was rendered increasingly legible between 1945 and 1968. It will address a series of questions pertaining to a crucial shift in focus that took place in these years, a shift from what many increasingly believed to be a narrow interest in the psychological anatomy of the individual to a much broader interest in the social dynamics of the group and in the larger social world the homosexual inhabited. When, exactly, did homosexuality first come to be viewed as a broad social phenomenon, and how did this help to undermine—or at least supplement—older understandings of homosexuality as an individual, psychosexual pathology? When, and why, did British doctors, psychiatrists, sexologists, social commentators, and social scientists come explicitly to observe an important social dimension to homosexuality and begin to write about homosexuality as a social problem, amenable to social solutions? In this respect, how and when did the homosexual become the object of new practices of social management? How did the homosexual subsequently also come to be conceptualized not only as a “social problem” but as a member of a “minority,” enjoying a distinctive “way of life” that could now be dissected and mapped with some precision?Footnote 1 More generally, how can we understand the transformation that took place, especially in educated circles in Britain, from the view of the homosexual as an atomized and anatomized—and often pathological—case study to an actor in a complex social world, to an individual whose behavior was as much rooted in society as it was in biology or the psychodynamics of the family? In short, what processes were at work by which the homosexual was constituted as a social being?Footnote 2
This essay will argue that the process of uncovering, dissecting, and mapping the social world of the male homosexual and his relations with the broader society took place relatively late in Britain, that it had scarcely begun before the advent of the Second World War, and that it only led to any significant, published studies in the 1950s and 1960s. The focus is largely on the male homosexual, given that the investigative practices and discursive strategies under scrutiny here can only fleetingly be seen to incorporate studies of lesbianism, as we shall see. Furthermore, it will also be suggested that as significant as these early postwar studies and the various questions that had given rise to them were, the extensive paradigm shift in sociological practice that characterized the 1970s, coupled with the advent of a more radical gay liberation movement in that decade, tended to render these earlier works problematic, to marginalize them, or to overlook them entirely, erasing a crucial period in queer British history that needs to be reexamined and recuperated.
To say that the male homosexual in Britain had a relatively invisible social presence prior to 1945 also says much about the relative invisibility of the social sciences in Britain before the Second World War. To be sure, there is a long history of social investigation in Britain, stretching back as far as Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1842, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62), and Charles Booth’s massive study of Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1903). But the formal discipline of sociology came relatively late to Britain. While a chair in sociology had been established at the London School of Economics in 1907, there were no academic positions in sociology at Oxford until 1955 and Cambridge until 1962.Footnote 3 But, as Mike Savage has demonstrated so brilliantly in his recent book on social identities and social science in postwar Britain, the formal establishment of social scientific investigative practices in Britain grew exponentially with the advent of the postwar welfare state. Savage notes what he terms “the remarkable new role for social scientific research” in the 1950s and 1960s and explores the ways in which new investigative practices “mined down to reveal mundane, ordinary life, in miniature,” practices that were central to “a broader process of building a modern, rational, post-imperial nation.”Footnote 4 Writing in 2004, the sociologist A. H. Halsey waxed lyrical about those earlier postwar years: “My contemporaries and I were activists, full of enthusiasm for the reform of British society in the direction of the welfare state”—reform that was in part to be brought about through the practices of modern social science.Footnote 5 It was in that state that the homosexual emerged in the social sphere in Britain, initially as one of a number of problems of management—or, to use the language of that postwar moment, as a “social problem” to be studied and dealt with accordingly—and shortly thereafter as a member of a “minority group,” itself open to the investigative practices on which Savage has focused.
Certainly, the male homosexual had a rich social existence prior to 1945, mapped extensively in recent years by a number of historians, including Sean Brady, Harry Cocks, Matt Cook, Matt Houlbrook, Morris Kaplan, and Chuck Upchurch.Footnote 6 But in virtually all of the published, scholarly writing that appeared before 1945, the homosexual merely had an atomized, psychological selfhood; the object of medical and psychiatric investigation, the male homosexual was rendered clinically knowable as a case study, the heightened interest in the individual and the etiology of his desires coming at the expense of any interest in his social being. Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century, as Charles Upchurch has suggested in his study of the cross-dressers Boulton and Park, a wholesale attempt was made to render their aberrant sexual behavior and the lives they lived socially invisible.Footnote 7 Of course, there were a number of moments when the queer social world erupted into public view, such as during the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s. Indeed, revelations concerning the existence of an entire homosexual underground were so startling at this time precisely because so little was known about it. Nevertheless, that world had not yet become the object of serious investigation. Even Havelock Ellis, who pioneered the study of homosexuality in Britain, retained and advanced the formal apparatus of the individual case study, which largely precluded any broader investigation of homosexuality as a social phenomenon.Footnote 8
Between the wars, trial reports in the tabloid press continued to offer glimpses into an underground world of “sexual deviants.” And amateur social observers in these years bemoaned the lack of focus on the social life of the homosexual and set out to remedy the perceived defect. As Taylor Croft wrote, lamenting the near-exclusive interest in the individual as a case study, “Even such handbooks as [Iwan] Bloch’s Sexual Life of Our Time, treat these matters simply from the pathological and not from the practical point of view. They give cases of abnormal persons, tracing their lives from childhood, but they do not show these people in relation to the rest of mankind, they do not expose their organized activities in a modern city, and the information they give is far too scientific and at the same time too general to be of any purport in studying vice and its manifestations in England today.”Footnote 9 Croft began to map the urban, “organized activities” of London’s homosexual underground, but few followed in his footsteps. Moreover, the contrast with prostitution in these years could not be more marked, for while the social relations and social world of the homosexual remained understudied, the world of female prostitution attracted an army of social investigators, new experts in the realm of public health, and, increasingly, trained sociologists. Even in the United States, there was little writing in the sociology of sex prior to 1945, according to Edward Sagarin, the 1950s American sociologist and homophile activist. This was in part because of the prevailing biological and psychological orientations dominant with respect to sexuality—and particularly homosexuality—at the time, in part because such issues were viewed as personal and individual, unlike prostitution which was often seen to result from social conditions that could increasingly be studied with a degree of sociological precision.Footnote 10
In Britain, prior to 1945, in the space not occupied by a social science that scarcely existed, any encounter with the social life of the male homosexual came largely through the accounts offered of it by the tabloid press. While interwar experts focused first and foremost on the individual, especially on the “homosexual offender,” battling over the various biological or psychological roots of his “condition,” it was largely the tabloids that explored the social world in which the homosexual moved, rendering it intelligible in particular ways via a unique “tabloid discourse” of homosexuality.Footnote 11 Centering on trial reportage between the wars and increasingly on investigative reportage after the war, the popular press presented the homosexual as a social being, not as a technical “social problem” to be dissected with the dispassionate tools of modern social science, nor as a member of a distinctive minority, subject to the sociological investigation of the group, but as a social menace, a member of a disreputable underground. Trading in an older language of sexual danger and moral panic that persisted well into the 1960s, discussed by Matt Houlbrook in his Queer London, the tabloids mapped the social realm of the homosexual, albeit within a very different set of cultural referents from those that were central to the investigative strategies of postwar social science.Footnote 12 This would begin to change in the 1950s when, as Adrian Bingham has shown, tabloids sometimes sponsored and published progressive surveys of sexual life and attitudes in Britain.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, in terms of any explicit coverage of homosexuality, the general representational strategies deployed by the popular press remained very much at odds with the new understandings of the homosexual as a social being that were coming to the fore in the social sciences.
Fixed in the public imagination as disreputable and threatening, the social realm of the homosexual had been rendered such an abject space that few homosexuals who began to argue for legal and social recognition wished to be identified with it. When “Anomaly” published his classic study The Invert and His Social Adjustment in 1927, he offered some passing references to the social life of the homosexual. Mostly, however, he offered a conduct manual that instructed his readers how to behave, how to be discreet, how to be respectable, and how to avoid the social realm as much as possible.Footnote 14 Advocates of reform, like “Anomaly,” eagerly detached the individual from his social world, rendering him as the anomalous object of sympathy, a character worthy of pity and toleration; focusing on the dilemmas of the individual, these writers did not call loudly for further investigation into the social life of the homosexual. This attitude persisted long into the postwar years. Even in the 1960s, the focus of the newly established Homosexual Law Reform Society usually remained on the plight of the individual homosexual and the need for tolerance, understanding, and legal reform; the underground, social world of the homosexual was avoided, and when the organization’s outreach wing, the Albany Trust, did undertake a major social survey, it was of the treatment facilities available in the London area for individuals who suffered from “homosexual problems.”Footnote 15 The image of the isolated, solitary homosexual as a “sad young man,” to borrow from the title of an article by the cultural critic Richard Dyer, divorced from any broader social life, given its negative connotations, remained a strategically useful image in the emancipatory politics cultivated by any number of homosexual law reformers during the period.Footnote 16 In this context, activists’ hesitation to focus in any detail on the social realm of homosexuality paralleled academic writing, which concentrated primarily on the psychosexual dynamics of the individual homosexual, largely ignoring his broader environment.
Homosexuality as a Social Problem
It was the veritable explosion of the human sciences during and after the war that would slowly but dramatically shift the representational strategies through which homosexuality was rendered intelligible in Britain. The administrative support given to those sciences during the war—to study such phenomena as the effects of evacuation and bombing on civilian morale, for example—would continue after the war when new investigations would be funded into various “social problems,” including homosexuality, that were perceived to result from the changes unleashed by the war itself. Moreover, building a “New Jerusalem” in the wake of the Labour Party’s 1945 electoral victory required new expertise; the collectivist current in British society that had been unleashed by the war was now harnessed to securing the peace. A new age required new therapeutic approaches to the problems of modern society and to the relationship between the individual and society.Footnote 17 As John Bowlby, author of the important 1953 study Child Care and the Growth of Love, wrote eagerly in 1946, calling for a new social psychology that would address any number of perceived social ills, “the hope for the future lies in a far more profound understanding of the emotional forces,” along with the “development of scientific social techniques for modifying them.”Footnote 18 Or, as Richard Hornsey has put it recently, social psychology was called upon after the war to address a cast of problematic figures who seemed dangerously out of place in the ordered, rational postwar landscape.Footnote 19
Most of all, in the aftermath of the war, the human sciences were called upon to deal with a number of so-called social problems, including the declining birthrate, divorce, anti-Semitism, race relations, juvenile delinquency, and homosexuality. In the context of a series of broad anxieties about family breakdown, demographic decline, and an exponential rise in the number of prosecutions for homosexual offenses, numerous moral issues in particular came to the fore. This culminated in a series of debates about “vice,” especially in London around the time of the coronation in 1953.Footnote 20 As one doctor, Fraser Mackenzie, wrote in 1947, “the problem presented by recent changes in moral standards exceeds, in its possible effects on the well-being of the nation, that of any other problem awaiting solution.” In general, he argued, “there has been a lowering of the standards of honesty, an increase in juvenile delinquency, the loosening of family ties [and] greater promiscuity.”Footnote 21 Mackenzie, like many others at the time, argued that aberrant behaviors resulted from social failures, thereby necessitating investigation and action. Like others, too, he identified a number of distinct social problems, each requiring a unique battery of problem-solving techniques.
Such logic drove homosexuality firmly into the orbit of social investigation. Nowhere can the shift be seen more clearly than at the first ever British conference on “The Social Aspects of Homosexuality,” organized in 1947 by the Royal Medical Society. There, Dr. E. A. Bennett of London’s West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases noted: “It will hardly be disputed that our knowledge of homosexuality as a social phenomenon is fragmentary” and that doctors were apt to propound general “theories of homosexuality without substantial knowledge of the social phenomenon itself.”Footnote 22 Bennett called for detailed studies of the social stigma that surrounded homosexuality and that influenced homosexual behavior, while Hermann Mannheim, the émigré reader in criminology at the University of London, commented on the need to study “social and anti-social homosexual groups” and the various responses of society toward them. He, like others at the conference, also conceived of homosexuality as a “social problem.”Footnote 23 So did Lord Hailsham, who, with respect to homosexuality, wrote in 1955: “In so far as active homosexuality is a problem … , it is a problem of social environment and not of congenital make-up”; as such, he insisted, it is “within the field of social science.”Footnote 24 For Hailsham, as for others after the war, the unalterable, congenital invert of the past was now less the focus of attention than a more modern homosexual, the product of a complex array of psycho-social factors that required serious investigation. While the participants in the 1947 conference might not have shared Hailsham’s belief that homosexuality must “be treated as a socially undesirable activity,” and while they were less apt to argue that homosexual activity resulted from the breakdown of social mores, they agreed that the homosexual was made rather than born.Footnote 25 The tools of the human sciences were thus to be turned to focus on the social production of homosexuality—and, for Hailsham and those who shared his sentiments, to help solve what they perceived to be one of the great social problems of the postwar years.
Social problems seemed ubiquitous after the war, although the term itself had seldom been deployed in Britain before this time. In the nineteenth century, writers discussed the “Social Question” and indeed, in a general sense, “the Social Problem” (in the singular), referring to the general state of society in the wake of industrialization and its resulting social upheavals.Footnote 26 In the 1930s, responding to the publication of the report of the Mental Deficiency Committee (the Wood Report of 1929), the Eugenics Society considered the “social problem group”—a term that had been coined in the Wood Report—and focused on the social costs of low intelligence. According to C. P. Blacker, the general-secretary of the society, some of the conditions characteristic of the social problem group were medico-psychological in origin and others were sociological.Footnote 27 Contributing to the discussion, Sybil Neville Rolfe, secretary-general of the British Social Hygiene Committee, gave an example of the first group, insisting that the “prostitute is a social problem” whose origins could be traced to physical degeneracy.Footnote 28 As Gillian Swanson has suggested, the Eugenics Society in the 1930s was engaged in a series of “experiments in knowledge” that made a “distinctive contribution to modernising the conceptual resources of those forms of social planning designed in the pursuit of national improvement.”Footnote 29 Those experiments, she argues, helped inform the beginnings of interdisciplinary investigations into a range of social problems. Moreover, the conceptual apparatus developed by Blacker and his colleagues—especially with respect to mapping the medico-psychological and sociological bases of different behaviors—would be deployed after 1945 in the growing study of any number of presumed disruptive actors in the expanded domain of the social.
In 1953, the American journal Social Problems was established, grounded in a belief shared by many in Britain that the “knowledge gained from social science research is basic to wise formulation of policy” and that the careful study of social problems was required for “sound social action.”Footnote 30 For some two decades, the journal remained at the forefront of investigations into homosexuality as a social phenomenon, consolidating the social problem paradigm that already had a long history in the United States, originating earlier in the twentieth century in an emergent social science that focused on particular problems with their own specific procedures for solution.Footnote 31 More recently we have come to understand “social problems,” as the American social constructionists Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse did in the 1970s, as “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions about perceived social conditions which they consider unwanted, unjust, immoral and thus about which something should be done.”Footnote 32 This particular understanding of the concept has informed more recent work on the phenomenon of the social problem in Britain, especially John Hill’s classic study of the “social problem film,” a study that focuses in part on the ways in which some of the films of Basil Dearden in the 1950s and early 1960s constituted the very problems they claimed to dissect: Violent Playground (1958, juvenile delinquency); Sapphire (1959, race relations); and Victim (1961, homosexuality).Footnote 33
Victim took for granted that homosexuality was a social problem that needed to be explored calmly and dispassionately, but it was a decade or more earlier, in the wake of the social dislocations associated with the war and the various anxieties to which they gave rise, that homosexuality was first constituted as a problem “about which something should be done.” As Kenneth Soddy, physician at the Department of Psychological Medicine at University College London Hospital, wrote in 1954, “In settled times, homosexuality does not greatly trouble the community. But social disturbance—and particularly a war—is apt to cause variations in social and sexual practices which engenders attacks of acute public anxiety.”Footnote 34 Homosexuality was configured as a troubling social practice by Soddy and others in the late 1940s and early 1950s in ways that it had not been earlier. Indeed, what is most striking is not only the proliferation of discourse about social problems after the war in general but also the ways in which homosexuality was firmly inscribed in this discourse. This had certainly not been the case before the war, a time when homosexuality was rarely studied as a social phenomenon or imagined as a social problem. As early as 1914, the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology claimed that it would study the “problems” of sex psychology in terms of their sociological aspects, although no such formal studies ever materialized.Footnote 35 Around the same time, the group produced a translation of a 1903 German pamphlet by Magnus Hirschfeld that cannot at all be fit into the social problem paradigm. The title in English, The Social Problem of Sexual Inversion, does not reflect its German title, Was soll das Volk vom dritten Geschlect wissen?, which might better be translated as “What Should the People Know about the Third Sex?”Footnote 36 Furthermore, in 1927 “Anomaly,” whom we encountered earlier as the author of the first book published in Britain about homosexuality by a self-confessed homosexual, exhibited some awareness of the social problem paradigm when he asked, “What exactly is the social problem of inversion?” He proceeded to answer his own question by stating that the “social problem presented by the fact that a proportion of every society is inverted is the problem of adjusting the minority to the condition of the society as a whole.”Footnote 37 Despite this brief mention of the term, however, the focus remained less on the social and more on the practices of individual adjustment. In short, despite occasional references to homosexuality as a social problem before the war, it was only after the war that the concept flourished as an important means for rendering homosexuality amenable to the investigative practices of postwar social science.
Social problems demand solutions, and before that, investigation. The speakers at the 1947 Royal Medical Society conference discussed the need for the kinds of broad studies of attitudes and behavior that were to be found in the United States but that appeared to be sadly lacking in Britain. One cited the importance of Katharine Bement Davis’s Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, published by the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1929, even while cautioning that conditions in Britain differed from those found in the United States.Footnote 38 Mannheim also spoke approvingly of American studies, especially Joseph Fishman’s Sex in Prison, published in Britain in 1935.Footnote 39 Moreover, it was in the context of this perceived deficit in British social science investigations into matters of sexuality that the two Kinsey reports hit readers in Britain like a bombshell, reports that themselves moved radically from the realm of the psychological to the sociological. Their appearance led to further soul-searching about why no similar studies had been undertaken in Britain. At the time the second report appeared in 1953, broadsheets such as The Times, the Telegraph, the Observer, and the Guardian were all engaged in a shared campaign against the sensational coverage of homosexuality that had proliferated in the tabloids in recent years. Contributing to the conceptualization of homosexuality as a social problem, they too viewed it as a phenomenon that required scientific investigation, calling for the kind of “sober” and “rational” discussion they deemed characteristic of Kinsey’s work.Footnote 40 As The Sunday Times claimed in an editorial in 1953, “A Social Problem,” serious investigation was required, not to discover ways of helping the homosexual adjust to mainstream society, as “Anomaly” had called for in the 1920s, but to reduce the overall incidence of homosexuality in general, given that, as the paper suggested, “in public terms, a society with a high or growing proportion of unnaturalness is a weakened and perhaps a decadent society.”Footnote 41
Cast as a social problem in these terms, the human sciences were enjoined to explore those social influences that contributed to homosexuality in various social milieux. This gave rise to a number of studies in the later 1940s and 1950s that charted the effects of single-sex institutions, especially prisons, on the presumed growth of homosexuality in society or that focused on homosexuality in particular contexts, such as that of Oxford undergraduate culture.Footnote 42 All of these works were concerned with the social production of homosexuality, particularly with those conditions that were thought to exacerbate homosexual tendencies in individuals and thereby contribute to the perceived social problem. In pursuing such avenues of inquiry, however, they also began to focus on the social contexts of homosexuality and, invariably, on the group life of the homosexual, shifting the focus away from the more narrow social problem paradigm, as we shall see in the next section. But the primary aim of these works was still to link observation with the development of practical solutions to the “problem,” which, in the case of The Sunday Times, led back from society to the family. Five weeks after the newspaper constituted homosexuality as a social problem on its editorial pages, the paper published “Mothers and Sons,” a lengthy reflection from the wife of a businessman in the Midlands who spoke of the obligations of the family to the preservation of social cohesion and morality. One “of the main causes of sexual inversion is an unhealthy relationship between mother and son,” she noted, a point echoed by a huge number of subsequent letter writers, all engaged in a litany of maternal self-flagellation, most in agreement with one mother who wrote: “We are in grave danger of leaving our children to the ‘experts’ and shirking our responsibilities.”Footnote 43 For such writers, the postwar social problem of homosexuality could be localized in the social unit of the family, which now needed to be the focus of social policy. As the progressive sex reformers Kenneth Walker and Peter Fletcher noted in 1955, the problem of the homosexual was both broadly social and the result of specific interpersonal relationships. “In our experience,” they wrote, echoing those mothers who wrote to The Sunday Times, “the most potent factor of all in the causation of homosexuality is an over-prolongation of female influence on a boy’s life.” The social problem of homosexuality was, for them, “a symptom of arrested personal development”—albeit one that could “be understood only by reference to the social climate in which it flourishes.”Footnote 44
This, then, was the social problem of homosexuality in early postwar Britain: an apparent rise in the incidence of homosexuality, in need of containment and reduction, brought about by a complex series of factors related to a perceived breakdown in the various operations of society. As one writer noted in a 1947 forum on “The Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality,” the phenomenon was “the outcome of environmental and social disharmonies. It is produced in society and by society.”Footnote 45 Aside from an emphasis placed on various single-sex institutions, its precise location was, however, often only vaguely specified, although maternal failure was common in such writings, and not just in the letters to The Sunday Times, though not to the same extent that it was in American writing on the social production of homosexuality in the 1950s.Footnote 46 This complicates any straightforward story of a shift from a focus on the psychopathology of the individual to a broader focus on the individual in a larger social setting, a shift from the practices of psychiatry to those of sociology. While new calls were being made for the social investigation of homosexuality, they were part of a growing awareness of the various ways in which the individual was embedded in a complex web of both narrow family dynamics and broader social practices, now requiring the attention of both the psychiatrist and the sociologist. Moreover, by the 1950s, progressive psychiatrists and psychoanalysts—medical professionals who cautiously began to champion homosexual law reform—were themselves more and more apt to comment on the social life of the homosexual and the broader social context in which homosexuality flourished than they had been between the wars. Although in the 1930s he had been a pioneer in the clinical assessment and treatment of the individual homosexual, the psychoanalyst Edward Glover increasingly focused not on the social problem of homosexuality but on the problems faced by the homosexual in society, which, he noted, often resulted from what would soon come to be known as homophobia. In short, the problem for him was not homosexuality per se but social attitudes toward homosexuality.Footnote 47 Likewise, the equally progressive psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark, who had himself treated many homosexuals and become an advocate for legal change in the 1950s, once asked “What is it like to be a homosexual?” He noted that he had often been invited by those he encountered “to spend an evening in homosexual London” and find out.Footnote 48 For Glover and Stafford-Clark, homosexuality was increasingly no longer viewed as a menace to society, as a social problem; nevertheless, both for them and for a growing number of social scientists—as well for early postwar homosexual rights activists—the social life of the homosexual certainly merited further attention.
From Social Problem to Social Group
During the Royal Medical Society meeting in 1947, calls were made for empirical studies of the “social aspects of homosexuality” to rival those being produced in the United States. This work in Britain was given a particular boost by the presence of central European émigrés in the social sciences. Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) settled in Britain in 1933 and had turned his attention to the application of the social sciences to social reconstruction before his untimely death shortly after the end of the war. The Polish émigré Leon Radzinowicz (1906–99) was the founding director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and coauthor of a major report on Sexual Offences published there in 1957. Hermann Mannheim (1889–1974) moved from Germany to England in 1934, spoke at the Royal Medical Society conference in 1947, and in 1950 was one of the cofounders, along with the psychoanalyst Edward Glover and Emanuel Miller, of the British Journal of Delinquency. And it was in the pages of their journal that in 1954 Gerrit Theodore Kempe (1911–79), a professor of criminology at the University of Utrecht, offered a very early analysis of the homosexual as a member of a minority social group, subject to the investigative procedures of sociology as much as members of any other social group.
Kempe’s article marked something of a watershed in writing published in Britain about homosexuality. It broke with the normative assumptions of the social problem paradigm and focused explicitly on a relatively new object of investigation, one that had not received serious academic attention before the war: the homosexual group. The article’s importance led to its appearance, in slightly different form, in both the International Journal of Sexology and in One, the American homophile journal, contributing to the practices of international cross-fertilization in the social sciences, an important, albeit seldom studied, feature of this period.Footnote 49 To be sure, in the United States, Donald Webster Cory (pseudonym of the sociologist Edward Sagarin) had already focused on the social and cultural structures of what he termed the “homosexual minority” in his path-breaking 1951 study The Homosexual in America. But the book was not published in Britain until 1953—and only then by a small press, Peter Nevill—and was rarely cited in the United Kingdom before the 1960s, even though it exerted a powerful influence in 1953 on Antony Grey, later secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society.Footnote 50 Likewise, in an important 1956 study of the social organization of a homosexual community in Canada, summarized in the American journal Social Problems, the sociologists Maurice Leznoff and William Westley argued that the social and legal hostility to homosexuality “produced a complex structure of concealed social relations” that now merited rigorous “sociological investigation.” A product of the Chicago School of urban sociology’s new interest in sexual variation, this important subcultural study broke new ground in terms of the object of its investigation. Again, however, this was a North American work, and while such investigations were more and more ubiquitous in the United States, and increasingly called for in Britain, they were still far from the radar screens of the British sociological establishment.Footnote 51
Although doctors, psychiatrists, and criminologists had all called for investigations into the social aspects of homosexuality at the Royal Medical Society conference in 1947, it was Kempe who both offered a new framework in which such work could be undertaken and further specified the new object of investigation: the homosexual “minority group.” As he put it, “Though the homophiles do not form a community as is often supposed, they are a group, the members of which feel themselves strongly and permanently linked together by the circumstances that they are all predominantly attracted to persons of their own sex.” There was among them, he continued, a “consciousness” of belonging together, even if the group was heterogeneous and one could not speak of a cohesive “group ideology.” Furthermore, he insisted, their status was that of a “minority group,” in constant tension with the heterosexual majority in society.Footnote 52 The investigative framework put forward by Kempe was not unlike that being deployed by British students of race relations in the 1950s, sociologists who, borrowing from the interwar work of the Chicago School, also constituted social problems by positing the existence of in-groups and out-groups, minority groups and majority groups. Within this functionalist paradigm, the two groups were positioned in opposition to each other, the minority group always designated as the social problem by the very individuals who set out to study them. Both for race relations writers in Britain and for Kempe, the aim of social science was to understand the logic of these groups, thereby contributing to social cohesion by providing the knowledge that might bring the groups together on terms of mutual understanding.Footnote 53 As Kempe noted, homosexual members of the minority group were constantly made aware of the unwillingness of the majority to accept them, often making them aggressive and hostile to the majority. What was needed, he argued, was “real understanding” between the groups, something that the existing sciences seemed quite incapable of providing: “Homophile man has created a scientific problem with which psychology, psychopathology, biology and sociology are dealing with equal zeal. Up till now the results of these efforts have been so alarmingly small.”Footnote 54
Kempe’s call for “understanding” among individuals who inhabited different social worlds staked out a new position increasingly shared by a number of reformist psychiatrists and doctors who, as we have seen, recognized that many of the personal problems experienced by the homosexual were often a result of social marginalization, that the so-called problem of homosexuality was one of social attitudes and dysfunctional group relations. As the homosexual law reformer Antony Grey wrote in a letter to The Sunday Times in 1954, responding to that paper’s editorial of the previous November, “A Social Problem,” if society were to frown less on homosexuality, then the marginalization experienced by the homosexual would itself decline, reducing “his incidence as a social problem.” In short, improved social health would result from policies derived from the careful study of homosexual group dynamics and the responses of society to them.Footnote 55 Whether or not one accepts the functionalist logic central to this particular paradigm, it was a paradigm that informed much liberal opinion in Britain in the 1950s. It was particularly influential with progressive sex educators at the time, individuals who were more attuned to the social dimensions of sexual behavior than were the conservative psychiatrists and doctors who continued to treat homosexuality as an illness. Eustace Chesser, author of the acclaimed 1940 guide, Love without Fear, differentiated between a psychological approach to homosexuality that isolated it as a personal deviation in the sexual sphere and a “moral and ethical” approach, one more concerned with the social life of the homosexual and his larger relationship with society. Given that the homosexual was perceived as “society’s outcast, its pariah,” he wrote, it was now “essential to deal with the public attitude, for it is this that must be changed if we are to have any solution to the problem.”Footnote 56
By the mid-1950s, then, the social problem paradigm was already giving way to a more expansive, and often more value neutral, call for the study of the homosexual as a social being in a number of different contexts. Now firmly embedded in an expanded notion of the social, the homosexual had assumed a social form and come to merit social investigation. Attention thus began to be paid to the homosexual as a member of a minority social group, to use Kempe’s formulation, and to that group’s relationship with the broader society in which it operated. New arenas were being opened for investigation—not only those specific elements of the social world that were believed to constitute the homosexual, but, in the less judgmental work of writers like Kempe, the actual world of the homosexual itself. Moreover, the investigations of the Wolfenden Committee, appointed by the Home Office in 1954 to investigate prostitution and homosexuality, took place against the backdrop of this new interest by postwar “experts” in the social domain, drawing from their work, especially that of Leon Radzinowicz and the Cambridge criminologists. Most of all, those investigations gave official sanction to the kind of work for which Kempe was calling.
While the role played by the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations in contributing to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain, and hence to the forward march of homosexual emancipation, is well known, Jeffrey Weeks and other scholars have come to understand the more complex ways in which the work of the committee must be viewed as part of a broader search for “a more effective regulation of sexual deviance.”Footnote 57 But the work of the committee was as much about defining who a homosexual was as what should be done about the problem of homosexuality. And, as Frank Mort has shown, this task required a deep engagement with the actual social world the homosexual inhabited. One of the unintended consequences of the investigations undertaken by the committee, then, was the contribution they made to rendering the social life of the homosexual increasingly visible. Committee members compiled a dossier of official information about sex in London, documenting where men met, how they recognized one another, what they did. The published report of the committee in 1957, excerpted and widely distributed, provided a geography of homosexual acts and a typology of those who committed them, all part of an exercise in the techniques of productive surveillance associated with the exercise of modern state power.Footnote 58 It documented homosexual experience, and while it often relied on medical and psychiatric expertise to explain the etiology and behavioral practices of the individual, it also engaged in the mapping of social types—the rent boy, the guardsman, the respectable gentleman—and their perambulations around the city. In short, the work of the Wolfenden Committee gave particular form to the social life of the homosexual, constituting the homosexual as an actor in the social world. This served as a catalyst for the acquisition of further knowledge about that life. It also legitimated social scientific investigations into the world of the homosexual and made government agency and philanthropic body funding of such investigations acceptable in ways that had hitherto not been the case.
Despite the calls made for the investigation into homosexuality as a social phenomenon—by speakers at the 1947 Royal Medical Society conference, by Kempe, by Chesser—prior to the publication of the Wolfenden Report, there was actually very little work undertaken in Britain along the lines called for. One of the first forays into the sociology of homosexual life was made by Mass-Observation, the organization that “observed” all aspects of social life in Britain from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, in a brief, five-page appendix to what has been called Britain’s “Little Kinsey” report. This was the first major survey of sexual attitudes carried out in Britain. It was paid for by the Sunday Pictorial and in part published by that paper, indicative, as Adrian Bingham suggests, of the ways in which certain newspapers began to use “the prestige of social science to legitimize ‘modern,’ more explicit styles of writing about sex for a mass-market family audience—styles that differed markedly from the court reports and moralistic crusades that typified the press’s usual approach to sex.”Footnote 59 From a random sample of some two thousand people, a postal survey of one thousand opinion leaders, and the written responses to questionnaires sent out to a number of Mass-Observers, social attitudes with respect to sex were charted in the wake of wartime changes. As pioneering as the study might have been in Britain, both in scope and in scale this was a “little” Kinsey report indeed. As its authors observed, “Kinsey in America had already achieved a detailed investigation into the sex habits of the American male. But it seemed likely that English people, less accustomed to questioning, and living in a social atmosphere less heavily charged with the publicity of sex would prove a more difficult proposition.”Footnote 60
For the survey, a number of Mass-Observers collected material on “homosexual cliques,” and the appendix, “Homosexual Groups”—itself a telling title, given that such phenomena had not been the subject of serious investigation before the war—charted the lives of a small group of friends who “only move in ‘queer’ circles,” as the report put it.Footnote 61 Gone was the heavy-handed, sensationalist rhetoric that characterized much investigative reporting on the topic of homosexuality in the tabloids after the war. Voyeuristic strategies of shedding the spotlight of publicity on the darkest corners of vice and depravity in Britain found no place in “Little Kinsey.” Indeed, the report’s restrained matter-of-factness marks a radical rupture with such discursive strategies. What we have instead is a narrative of everyday ordinariness, a story of John, a receptionist in a London hotel (age 30), and Michael (age 28), a private secretary to a prominent public figure, who have lived together for some eight years. We see the world in which they move, their friends, the parties they hold, the sexual partners they have, their weekend outings to Brighton. To be sure there is a fascination with forms of behavioral campiness: in Brighton, for example, we learn that “Michael was rather carried away by the environment in this ‘queers’ bar and was given to draping himself over the staircase railings, smiling around the room, speaking loudly and [exhibiting] exaggerated gestures and mannerisms.”Footnote 62 And yet at the same time there is also a pulling back from attempts to render these men as threatening and deviant, as was the case in the tabloids, along with the invocation of various similarities to heterosexual behavioral norms. While complaining that the “isolationist manner” in which homosexual groups often seemed to function sometimes contributed to society’s ignorance of, and hostility toward, homosexuality, the report’s authors argued that social tolerance would result from greater knowledge of such groups, anticipating Kempe’s 1954 template for the study of homosexual groups and their relationship with the broader society. In this respect, the report also attempted to foster such tolerance through its own discursive practices of normalization.Footnote 63
“Little Kinsey” was certainly no professional sociological study. Indeed, it must be seen as part of a tradition of gentlemanly, amateur social investigation, which Mike Savage claims still prevailed in Britain into the 1950s.Footnote 64 Its observations of the homosexual group were bracketed, ghettoized, relegated to an appendix, and never systematically analyzed. On some level, this confirms Liz Stanley’s conclusions that the report’s authors came close to capturing difference, fragmentation, and complexity but lacked a firm analytic framework for making sense of it.Footnote 65 Nevertheless, the work did mark a radical break both from contemporary tabloid sensationalism and more elite, still hegemonic, discourses that focused narrowly on individual psychopathology. And in its foray into the social world of homosexuality, “Little Kinsey” worked within a much more progressive, emergent framework than the social problem paradigm, one that at least implicitly constituted social groups in opposition to each other and called for greater understanding and tolerance between them. It also contributed to thinking about sexual attitudes and behavior in sociocultural, rather than psychological, terms, and in so doing, contributed both to a conceptual framework and an investigative practice that were carried much further in the work of Michael Schofield. It is in his work that we can further chart the intellectual shifts that were taking place in the 1950s and 1960s as a once hegemonic, primary focus on the psychological makeup of the homosexual was increasingly supplemented by a series of investigative practices into the social world in which he moved.
Writing under the pseudonym Gordon Westwood, Schofield published his first study, Society and the Homosexual, in 1952, at a time when the social investigation of homosexuality in Britain was still very much in its infancy and no full-length study of the phenomenon had yet appeared in print. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, felt that the book’s credibility needed to be secured by a preface from an important medical expert in the field, indicative of the continuing discursive importance of medical accounts of the etiology of individual homosexual behavior. Schofield turned to Edward Glover to provide that credibility, the psychoanalyst he had first encountered in a futile attempt to eradicate his own homosexual impulses back at the outset of the war.Footnote 66 Glover obliged, itself indicative not only of his own, hesitant turn to the social but of the increasing fusion of the tools of psychiatry and sociology in the context of understanding homosexuality as a social phenomenon.
On one level, Schofield’s work in the 1950s would have been immediately recognizable to any educated person at least vaguely aware of the latest progressive thinking in the realm of psychiatry: “the causes of homosexuality are rooted in emotional conflicts acquired in early childhood,” he wrote in a book explicitly indebted to psychoanalysis in general and the work of Glover in particular, focusing as it did extensively on the causes of, and possible treatments for, homosexuality.Footnote 67 Schofield had received his degree in psychology, not sociology; moreover, as he later noted, he “grew up with psychological language,” and when he undertook his research for the book in the Cambridge University Library in the later 1940s, the “psychological language” of the homosexual was largely all that was available to him. Nevertheless, it was a language he was already beginning to question, finding it inadequate for addressing the issues with which he was now concerned.Footnote 68 The book moved uneasily between different registers, something that can be evidenced in the awkward phrasing of its own prefatory blurb: “This is not a medical treatise,” it began, “but an attempt to evaluate the social implications of homosexuality.” Having rescued the study in advance for a newer kind of investigative practice, the blurb immediately and firmly reinscribed the work in a hegemonic medical discourse: “In order to understand the development of this abnormality, it has been necessary to draw upon the papers of practicing psychiatrists.”Footnote 69 Glover, in his preface, saw no contradiction in all of this, praising Schofield for “setting homosexuality in proper perspective as a social as well as a sexual manifestation.”Footnote 70 But Schofield struggled at times, working within an older model of disease, or at least mental aberration, yet attempting to fit this into a newer “social problem” paradigm; homosexuality, he wrote, was a social problem insofar as the “disease” (again, note the slippage here) “is the outcome of constitutional factors aggravated by environment and social disharmonies. It is produced in society by society.”Footnote 71
These slippages—movements between different methodological registers and conceptual frameworks—were widespread in the 1950s and were as characteristic of Donald J. West’s classic 1955 account of homosexuality as they were of Schofield’s 1952 study. In some respects, both works are dominated by a psychodynamic narrative of individual development that their authors struggled to work within and move beyond. West began his book by citing a number of anthropological studies of homosexuality in other societies and, in a chapter devoted to “Homosexual Types,” implicitly admitted his debts to the earlier work of Mass-Observation and the framework being advanced by Kempe when he suggested that, “like any other unwanted minority,” homosexuals reacted strongly “by forming their own special outlook … in defiance of the hostile majority.” Living under the threat of ostracism and persecution, West continued, homosexuals developed their own “little social coteries, their own conventions and slang, their own favourite bars, restaurants and meeting places.”Footnote 72 Moreover, just as Schofield’s work was prefaced—and thus legitimated—by a renowned psychoanalyst, West’s was prefaced by the eminent criminologist, Hermann Mannheim. In 1947, as we have seen, Mannheim had asserted the need to study the homosexual group; here he argued that, despite the book’s indebtedness to a psychoanalytic explanatory framework, West “readily admits the significance of cultural and sociological factors.”Footnote 73 But to admit the importance of such factors was not the same as to study them in detail, and West’s study remained primarily indebted to an explication of the causes and treatment of homosexuality in a loosely psychoanalytic framework. When Norman Birnbaum penned a largely favorable review of West’s book for the British Journal of Sociology, he nevertheless seemed uncertain of the way forward. While he noted that homosexuality was “a problem of considerable potential interest to sociologists,” he also cautioned that before they could make their mark, sociologists would need to “read up on psychoanalysis and biology”—as indeed had West.Footnote 74
The actual society of the homosexual is given short shrift in West’s study and is only slightly more the object of focus in Schofield’s earlier work, for Schofield devoted a mere thirty pages to what he termed the various “levels of homosexual society.” And yet it is here, where he discussed “Street Corners,” “The Queer Bars,” and the “Exclusive Clubs”—along with those “Outsiders” who “do not know the logic of the street corners, cannot afford to become members of the exclusive clubs and don’t know where the queer bars are or don’t care to enter them”—that Schofield avoided the language of both psychological disorder and social problem and discovered a number of men who, he observed, “if not completely adjusted to their situation, at least have recognized it and given up any serious attempt to alter it.”Footnote 75 It is these men—some of whom Schofield knew personally—to whom he gave social form, constituting a genealogy of social types, of actors in the social realm. Those actors are also given a voice in Schofield’s work; his subjects are complicit in their own mapping, in this respect not dissimilar from those homosexuals shortly to be interviewed by the Wolfenden Committee.Footnote 76 Moreover, as Richard Hornsey has recently argued, Schofield’s 1952 study is suggestive of an “uneasy collusion” between professionals “and certain groups of bourgeois queer men.”Footnote 77 Schofield himself might well be considered a bourgeois queer professional who, working closely with his friends and informants, articulated a particular image of respectable homosexuality. In this respect, the turn to the social in early postwar writing about homosexuality was as much a product of the desires of queer men to explore and legitimate the actual world they inhabited as it was of the experts to map its contours. In addition, while Schofield’s 1952 study “offered its readers a panoramic tour through a range of metropolitan queer spaces,” as Hornsey claims, it codified those spaces in particular ways, carving out a realm of respectability intended to assuage the anxieties of those who still held to the belief that homosexuality was a social problem.Footnote 78
Schofield’s second major study of the subject, published eight years later in 1960 as A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain, relied even more than did his previous book on the testimony of his subjects. It also operated more centrally within a “minority studies” paradigm, delving deeply into the social world of the homosexual and paying little attention to the language of psychopathology that had characterized his earlier work. By the time it appeared, the calls that had been made in 1947 for the formal social investigation into homosexuality in Britain no longer fell on deaf ears. Unlike the United States, no British funding body had previously sponsored any social investigations of homosexuality, but the legitimacy conferred on the topic by the work of the Wolfenden Committee and the rise of the sexual survey in the popular press in the wake of the Kinsey reports meant that funds were increasingly forthcoming. The Home Office supported Richard Hauser’s work, published as The Homosexual Society in 1962, while Schofield’s second study was funded by the British Social Biology Council. At the time, the council was chaired by Kenneth Walker, the eminent sexologist and first chairman of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, who was himself increasingly “convinced that neither medical nor psychological explanations alone can account for the sexual behaviour of human beings.”Footnote 79
A Minority was similar to Schofield’s earlier work insofar as it was presented to its readers as a scientific account of an understudied problem; John Wolfenden—of all people in Britain, one of the most knowledgeable about homosexuality—prefaced the book, declaring somewhat disingenuously that very “little is known about homosexuality or those who commit homosexual acts.”Footnote 80 But it differed from his previous work given that its starting point was not the individual life of the solitary homosexual but the group life of a minority, a life meticulously reconstructed through a quantitative sampling of the lives of over one hundred self-confessed gay men—a much more formal work of professional sociology than his earlier study. Schofield claimed that most works by doctors, psychiatrists, or criminologists took as their subjects the individual prisoner or the patient, while he aimed for a comprehensive picture of the ordinary and everyday, of those who had evaded the clutches of the law and medicine, situating their lives in the broadest possible context: “If the purpose of research,” he wrote, “is to lead to social action, the homosexual must be studied in the wide context of the whole community.”Footnote 81 In this respect, Schofield’s work was absolutely central to what Mike Savage has identified as the key practice of British sociology after the war, a focus “on eliciting accounts from which sociologists could unravel how people’s ordinary situations shaped their lives, actions, thoughts, and endeavours.”Footnote 82 It also drew from and developed further those attempts made in the 1950s to conceptualize the homosexual as a member of a minority group, attempts that had been evident in the work of Donald Webster Cory in the United States a decade earlier but only slowly entered the conceptual repertoire of British social investigation. While throughout the 1950s the term “minority” had been applied in Britain to ethnic, racial, and religious criteria, Schofield was the first boldly to consolidate its use in the study of the social life of the homosexual.
Two years later, the social investigation of the homosexual as a member of a distinctive minority was continued in the work of Richard Hauser, an Austrian sociologist who had come to Britain in 1957 with the intention of “investigating several neglected social problems in Britain, one of which was homosexuality.”Footnote 83 In many respects, The Homosexual Society, commissioned by the Home Office Research Department, was a throwback to an earlier era, with Hauser arguing that psychological immaturity was characteristic of the homosexual, an individual who needed to be urged to develop more socially useful roles. Like earlier postwar thinkers, he also argued that homosexuality could be “environmentally produced” and that, consequently, “there is a great need to understand the issues primarily in order to contain the evil” and “handle it properly when it occurs.”Footnote 84 For this he was roundly attacked by increasingly vocal advocates of homosexual law reform. And yet, like Schofield, Hauser was interested in the social life of the homosexual and was the first in Britain to conceptualize and explore that life in terms of subcultural theory, understanding a subculture to be “a section of a major culture (or of a minority culture) which has its own particular way of life, its rites and taboos, its common interests and enemies, its ‘secrets’ and often its free masonry or loyalty between members.”Footnote 85 He was also interested in mapping the various social types he discovered in that subculture—forty-six in all. Although both contemporary writers and subsequent sociologists often found these types to be of “dubious value,” his survey relied on, and gave voice to, the evidence of hundreds of men, which, taken together, offered the most detailed depiction of the social life of the male homosexual published in Britain to date.Footnote 86
By the time that Hauser’s The Homosexual Society and Schofield’s A Minority appeared in print—the very time that Britain was entering its “permissive” moment—research that led to social action was increasingly called for by a reformist state. It was also much more generously funded than it had been in the 1940s and early 1950s. Schofield himself realized the growing importance of sociological investigation for these endeavors and called for greater precision in the studies being undertaken “because people with power and authority are making more and more use of them and the results are going to impinge upon our lives.”Footnote 87 It was in this context that his third and final study of homosexuality was published in 1965; it was also funded by the Home Office in the lead up to the penultimate parliamentary debates that resulted in the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1968. Schofield still claimed that the difficulties of undertaking sociological research into homosexuality in Britain were enormous, in large part because of a continuing “tendency to see homosexuality only in medical terms, as a sickness or as a mental disorder, while ignoring the more important social aspects.”Footnote 88 Certainly by this time, however, Schofield had severed his reliance on those discourses that had pathologized the homosexual. Again, to borrow from Savage’s characterization of the new sociological studies that appeared in the 1960s, applicable to Schofield’s work too, any “overt psychologizing has given way to the language of social relationships, roles, networks, and norms, the evidence for which is extracted from people’s own accounts.”Footnote 89
Not only did it mark a radical break from his earlier interest in the psychology of sexual deviation, but Schofield’s work in the mid-1960s is also suggestive of the distance that had been traveled since the social problem paradigm first opened up the world of homosexuality for social investigation after the war. While in A Minority he had still thought of homosexuals as a potential social problem insofar as social hostility expressed toward them tended to drive them “away from community-integration into secret minority groups” that threatened social cohesion, the rhetoric of the homosexual as a potential social problem was wholly lacking in the later study.Footnote 90 Any social problem that existed was now seen by Schofield as manufactured by society through processes of social labeling: “It is important to realize that as society is condemning the homosexual, simultaneously it is creating a social problem.”Footnote 91 While in 1952 Schofield had very few works of sociology to draw upon for guidance (although he did refer fleetingly to a number of important American works from the Culture and Personality School, including John McPartland’s Sex in Our Changing World [1938] and Margaret Mead’s Male and Female [1949]), by the mid-1960s he was influenced by Erving Goffman and Howard Becker, borrowing from the latter’s 1963 study, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, the notion that deviance was only that which society labeled as such; deviance, he argued, “is not necessarily a quality of the homosexual act.”Footnote 92 Even the term “minority” was used less frequently in 1965. Schofield adopted the more recent language of the subculture that had found its way into British studies of homosexuality through Hauser’s 1962 study. By this time, more enamored of the new work on labeling theory and the sociology of deviance, Schofield had moved far from the social problem paradigm that was ubiquitous when he published his first book in 1952.
By the later 1960s, Schofield was not alone in disentangling his interests in the structure and organization of gay lives in Britain from the psychological discourses of homosexual selfhood that were so common in the world in which he received his education in the 1940s. For him—and for an increasingly vocal number of gay activists—it was clear that the tools of psychiatry no longer seemed appropriate to the study of homosexuality. In 1964, Antony Grey, secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, penned a review of two recently published books by fairly liberal psychiatrists: Ismond Rosen’s edited collection of essays, The Pathology and Treatment of Sexual Deviation, and Anthony Storr’s Penguin paperback, Sexual Deviation. In his review, echoing a number of Schofield’s concerns, Grey bemoaned the continued medicalization of homosexuality and the lack of attention paid to the social sphere. Even though he praised Storr for including a section in his book on sociology, he noted that “the really important problem of how to improve society’s attitudes towards the sexually deviant is virtually ignored” and that the “obvious need for a British Kinsey report remains as urgent as ever.”Footnote 93 Meanwhile, those still deeply committed to the study of homosexuality as an individual deviation from the norm were actively hostile to the new attempts to inscribe the homosexual in the social. In a review of Schofield’s Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality, Irving Bieber, one of the American psychoanalysts most associated with the still prevalent view of homosexuality as a treatable condition, roundly condemned the study. Faulting his research methods, Bieber insisted that when “Mr. Schofield attempts to fit various interesting pieces of his investigation into a coherent statement about homosexuality, the work misfires.” He added that Schofield wrongly viewed homosexuality as “non-pathological” and had implied that psychiatrists who did view it as such were primarily influenced by “prevailing social attitudes,” an implication that Bieber firmly rejected.Footnote 94 Bieber’s, however, was increasingly a voice in the wilderness.
Throughout the 1960s, new currents of social activism, coupled with the anti-psychiatry movement of that decade, fueled the rejection of psychiatry as a social analytic, leading Britain’s Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to publish in 1972 its “Interim Statement of the Counter Psychiatry Group.” The pamphlet pilloried psychiatrists, disputed their knowledge claims, and accused them of attempting blatantly to lend scientific credibility to widespread public hostility toward homosexuals. Attacking what it deemed the continuing pathologization of homosexuality, the GLF reified the lived experience of gay men and lesbians themselves in the face of psychiatric expertise.Footnote 95 It was that lived experience that had already been rendered increasingly visible through the varied practices of postwar social investigation in Britain; it was also a heightened interest in lived experience more generally that was central to the new social history that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the new universities. Moreover, in 1971, a year before the appearance of the GLF’s diatribe against psychiatry, Charlotte Wolff—herself a practicing psychiatrist—published her seminal study, Love between Women. She, too, was indebted to those newer practices, both in her focus on the ways in which individual lives were molded by group membership and in her reliance on oral testimony to reconstruct collective behavior.Footnote 96 Even H. Montgomery Hyde, in the first published history of homosexuality in Britain (1970), was indebted to the social turn of the 1960s and borrowed extensively from the work of Michael Schofield in the survey of contemporary gay life that opened his book.Footnote 97 The turn to the social was now commonplace, and the homosexual had come to acquire the status of a social being.
Goodbye to All That
This article has only scratched the surface of the emergence and consolidation of a number of new discourses of homosexuality as a social practice in postwar Britain; it has only offered an overview of those shifts in the material practices of research through which the homosexual was rendered knowable as a social object. By the end of the 1960s, a radical shift in the object and methods of investigation had taken place, both fulfilling and moving beyond the agenda set forth by the speakers at the 1947 conference of the Royal Medical Society on “The Social Aspects of Homosexuality.” Jeffrey Escoffier, the American critic, has commented perceptively on the similarly important shifts that were taking place at roughly the same time in the United States. In 1969, he argued, in the year of the Stonewall riots in New York City, “the psychiatric discourse on homosexuality was hegemonic.” And yet throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a new, counter-discourse emerged, shaped by a body of literature that began to map the social dimensions of what was coming to be known as gay life. This, according to Escoffier, “initiated a process that potentially disrupted the hegemony of the psychiatric discourse of individual pathology.”Footnote 98 The story of this shift has not been told in detail, either for the United States or Britain, although in Britain, too, as Jeffrey Weeks has noted, by the 1960s, “the long tradition of discussing homosexuality simply in terms of aetiology, which of course emphasized its deviant nature, was giving place to discussion of homosexual roles and categorizations.”Footnote 99 By the end of the 1960s, it is indeed clear that in Britain, as in the United States, a significant space had been carved out in which the study of homosexuality as a social phenomenon could now flourish, in part the result of a radical change in the intellectual climate that generated increasing attacks on the science of the individual.
It was in this context that the British sociologist, Mary McIntosh, published her often-cited 1968 article, “The Homosexual Role,” in the American journal Social Problems. Celebrated as an ur-text in Britain, taken up by gay activists, sociologists, and historians, its importance, according to Jeffrey Weeks, was that it asked an entirely new question—not the question posed from the late nineteenth century onward, “What are the causes of homosexuality, but rather, why are we so concerned with seeing homosexuality as a condition that has causes?”Footnote 100 Weeks suggests that her question opened up a new research agenda by positing homosexuals as a social category rather than as a medical or psychiatric one. It certainly created opportunities for historians, encouraging them to study the mechanisms by which various homosexual identities and roles emerged and to delineate those historical and social forms in which homosexuality came to be organized. Two seminal works from the 1970s have been hugely influential in that project, and indeed on our own practices today: Weeks’s Coming Out, published in 1977, and Kenneth Plummer’s Sexual Stigma, published two years earlier. Both authors have admitted their own profound debts to McIntosh—and, more broadly, to the new constructionist strains of sociology that, in the realm of sexuality, were pioneered in the United States by John Gagnon and William Simon. As Weeks and his colleague Janet Holland wrote with respect to their 1973 work Sexual Conduct, it “was for many of us a revelation. It made the now widely accepted, but then revelatory observation that sex, far from being the most natural thing about us, was to an extraordinary degree subject to socio-cultural moulding.”Footnote 101 Weeks has rightly continued to insist on the importance of this moment, as has Steven Epstein in the United States, who reminds us of the need to pay careful attention to the “continued relevance” of pre-Foucauldian sociological approaches to the study of sexuality.Footnote 102
Celebrating the intellectual moment of 1968 and the new sociological practices that emerged around that time, both Plummer and Weeks tended to overlook or denigrate those earlier contributions that rendered the social domain of homosexuality visible in Britain. In Sexual Stigma, for example, Plummer called for a serious sociology of sexuality, which, he argued, would be hampered “if it remained on the Schofield and Kinsey level of social book-keeping.”Footnote 103 A few years later, Plummer praised the importance of Schofield’s work in the 1960s, and even McIntosh had, in a footnote to her 1968 article, acknowledged the work of Donald Webster Cory and Evelyn Hooker in the United States and Michael Schofield in Britain, which she characterized as marking an “interesting beginning,” full of “valuable descriptive material.”Footnote 104 Nevertheless, amid the new, radical climate of the 1970s, dominated by impatience with the cautious earnestness of earlier reformers, the desire to move beyond the various intellectual frameworks in which they operated was great. Certainly few of the writers discussed in this article, with the possible exception of Schofield by the time of his later work, shared the agenda that drove the very different concerns that inspired the work produced in and after the 1970s.Footnote 105 But while it is indeed easy to dismiss the work of earlier postwar writers, it was then that a space was first carved out for the study of homosexuality as a broad social phenomenon rather than merely as an individual psychological aberration; it was then that the homosexual in Britain first assumed social form.Footnote 106
