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It allowed the law to go on punishing us for things heterosexuals took for granted – the freedom to have sex at 16, the freedom to express our love in public, the freedom to be ourselves. Finally he got to sleep with his partner in a double bed!īut it was also very limited. For men such as my old friend Tom, it meant a change of life. I’m not saying that the 1967 Act wasn’t revolutionary. The drag queen Lily Savage – also known as Paul O’Grady – encouraged everyone to resist arrest. At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern one night there was a raid by police wearing rubber gloves. “Disorderly house” charges were pressed against gay bars and nightclubs. Manchester’s police chief, James Anderton, penned a tabloid column about Aids in which he described gay men as “swirling in a human cesspit of their own making”. Policing in the 80s and early 90s was virulently homophobic, whipped up by hysteria around Aids and gay-baiting newspapers such as the Sun, Daily Mail and News of the World. By 1974, that number had soared by more than 300% to over 1,700 convictions. As research conducted by Peter Tatchell recently found, in 1966 some 420 men were convicted of the gay crime of gross indecency. In the years that followed, gay sexuality was policed more aggressively than before and the number of men arrested for breaching those conditions actually rose considerably. It partially decriminalised it under certain conditions. It’s a commonly held misconception that the 1967 act legalised male homosexuality. Every time he told me this story, my eyes would fill with tears. As he told me, “You could be put in prison just for loving someone.” The day the act was passed he and his partner went out and bought a double bed. He and his partner had been together for many years but slept in two separate single beds. And soon a big disease with a little name would claim the lives of many of my closest friends.Īround this time I had a friend called Tom, who was in his 60s and who would often tell me tales of life before the 1967 act. Section 28, with which the Thatcher government outlawed the promotion of homosexuality in schools, was just around the corner. The age of consent for gay men was 21, which meant the law was being broken on a regular basis. There was a lot to be angry about in the mid-80s. “Give me a G! Give me an A! Give me a Y! What does it spell? Gay! What is gay? Good! What else is gay? Angry!” In 1985 I attended my first Pride march and I heard my first marching slogan. I left Wales in 1984 and moved to London to study and become the person I knew I wanted to be.