![]() The gay scene was almost non-existent even in major towns and I remained an outlaw – albeit a closeted one. Now 19, I paid rather more attention to the legal wrangling this time. Then, in 1979, a Home Office group recommended lowering the age to 18 because that was the point when “society deems a young man to be an adult and responsible”. I was seven years old at the time, so, not surprisingly, this passed me by - I’m afraid I was more interested in football and jumping off high things. Harold Wilson’s administration passed the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, making gay sex legal between two consenting men in private. Nothing changed until 1966, when Labour MP Leo Abse’s Private Members’ Bill caught the changing mood in the country: a poll in the Daily Mail a year before had revealed that 63 per cent of readers who responded did not believe homosexuality should be a crime, although a stunning 93 per cent still thought gay men “needed medical or psychiatric treatment” (homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness in the UK right up until 1973). ![]() But, fearing a public backlash, the Tory government under Harold Macmillan hesitated. It recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults’ be decriminalised, with an age of consent of 21. The first chink of light appeared in 1957 with the Wolfenden Report.
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