The Wolfenden Debate
By RICHARD WOLLHEIM
ON October 9 the Home Secretary announced the Government's intention to initiate some time in the near future a debate in the House on the subject of the Wolfenden Report. It is now over a year since the report was published, and during this period the mood of those anxious to see its recommendations put into effect has fluc- tuated between faint hope and mild despair. It would still be premature to expect too much from the coming debate, the salient features of which are depressingly predictable. On the issue of prostitution a number of strong views are bound to be expressed, particularly by those Members whose constituencies embrace the more fre- quented 'beats.' But whether the far more sig- nificant issue of homosexuality will be treated with the articulateness and the seriousness that It calls for is still an open question. The Home Secretary will deliver himself of a number of mellifluous ambiguities in the margin of this 'sad' and 'distasteful' and 'controversial' subject, and the challenge will then rest m(ith the House. Will the other Members be content to tread warily in his footsteps, or will they judge the occasion better served by giving a controversial subject the benefit of a controversy? This will be their chance to speak out. If they fail to do so; they will fail not only themselves but, in perhaps a minor but at the same time an unmistakable fashion, democracy itself.
This last assertion can be supported on two different counts. In the first place, it is a con- dition of democracy that no issue to which legis- lation is pertinent be deliberately or maliciously kept out of the political forum. Issues, of course, have their fashions, and political life would be an impossibility if this were not so. No democracy could survive if at any given moment everything that could be discussed was in fact discussed. But if any issue is the subject of wide- spread discussion in a democratic country, then. It must also be discussed in the central chamber of that country. There are at the moment a number of arguments on the subject of homo- sexuality and the law that are in general circu- lation in Great Britain : it cannot possibly be right if the HOuse of Commons remains much longer the only important place of rational dis- cussion where these arguments are not aired.
Secondly, the cause of legal reform in this matter is, it seems to me, an issue which, like few others I can think of, is directly and incon- trovertibly. related to the values and habits of behaviour that alone make democracy desirable in principle and workable in practice. The one lesson that recent history holds for us is that democracy cannot be self-guaranteeing. However Ingenious our institutions and procedures may be, however elaborate a system of checks and balances we may build into our constitution, democracy cannot be safe unless it is also wanted. It is not wanted by those who do not love liberty Or admire toleration. Now, I do not see how any- One would reasonably think that the present law on the subject of homosexuality is consistent with an attachment to either of these two values. If this is so, then the law as it stands is inconsistent with the spirit of democracy : hence, to condone it or leave it unreformed is to some degree or other to go against that spirit.
There is, I am aware,• a movement on the part of some young and vociferous people to depre- ciate these traditional values. It is the mark of one kind of 'advanced' person nowadays to regard the values of liberalism as vague or wet or 'nega- tive,' and to claim that it is time that the virtues of 'conviction' were asserted over those of tolera- tion. Perhaps on a point of timing or emphasis, these people have sense on their side.
But if the voice of 'conviction' wishes to be taken quite literally, out of context, as meaning just what it says, then it cannot be pointed out too often that what it says is wrong. Toleration is not a 'negative' quality, nor is it an isolated one. It is, on the contrary, a concomitant, perhaps even a condition, of everything that is most valuable in human life; it lies close, closer I should say than any other value, to the origins of art and morality and science. The objective understanding of nature, which is known as science, begins only when we can lay aside, at least for a while, our acquisitive or destructive designs upon it and consider it and its phenomena in a detached and theoretical fashion. To an even greater extent the objective treatment of humanity, which is known as morality, has its origins in our ability to restrain our aggressive impulses, neither satisfying nor denying them, so that we can then, by an act of sympathy, place ourselves in the position of our victim and see not merely what we demand of him but also what he demands of us. Finally, the various expressive activities which jointly make up the sphere of art, though they are often held to be egotistic in character or at any rate to concen- trate upon self to the exclusion of others, in reality require for their justification as great an acceptance of the multiplicity, of the diversity of life and character, as do science and morality. For why should the expression of a single self be of any interest or value, if it were not for the implicit recognition of the uniqueness of each in a world of many? Such ideas may seem obscure and abstract, but those readers (and there must be many of them), who like myself have still fresh in their minds the reading of a great new Euro- pean novel which affirms in an incredibly moving fashion the value of the individual in, yet against, history, will, I hope, not feel the matter to stand in need of'further argument or proof.
Of course, there will be those who subscribe to the value of toleration who are even ready to admit with me that toleration is not an orna- ment but a prerequisite of human culture and who yet cannot see that in this particular matter it demands that the law be changed. To maintain themselves in this position they are likely to adopt one or other of two further premisses. They may claim that homosexuality is evidently wrong and that toleration relates only to matters of moral indifference or to matters whose moral character is uncertain. Alternatively, they may claim that the matter is too insignificant to call for any , immediate action in that it affects only a few people who are by and large in a position of being well able to look after themselves.
In an article I contributed to these columns about seven months ago I argued that the cause of legal reform was not likely to go far until the moral issue of homosexuality was faced : for it is always possible for people to retort that the problem of homosexuality is not, and should not be treated as, an ordinary minority problem— like that, say, of the Jews or Negroes or Catholics —because the homosexual is defined by reference not to a mere characteristic or belief or habit but to a vice. I argued then that I knew of no rational argument—as opposed, that is, to argu- ment from authority—that established or even appeared to establish the evil character of homo- sexuality. All arguments, I claimed, either start from false premisses or involve invalid reason- ing : and some do both. Since then I have not been presented with any argument to make me change my mind : and so I maintain that though there certainly are genuine offences connected with homosexuality, there is no genuine offence of homosexuality.
Those who argue that the problem of homo- sexuality demands no action because of its rela- tive insignificance are no less wrong. It seems plausible that there are in Great Britain some- thing between half a million and three-quarters of a million adult males whO indulge either regu- larly or occasionally in some form of homosexual activity, and (as the Wolfenden Report made clear) there is no reason at all to believe that the allocation of these numbers between the various classes of society deviates from a normal • distribution. It is certainly not true that homo- sexuality is the preserve of the privileged or 'pampered' classes who can be relied upon to keep themselves clear of gaol. Ironically enough, the homosexual's best hope for safety lies in numbers, for, if the law were applied in its full rigour against all who had reason to fear it, the prisons of this country would be full twenty to thirty times over. Does not the 'utopian' charac- ter of this implication of the law make us wonder whether the law is, after all, well adapted to human beings as we know and have them?
But, of course, it is not prison itself that is the main cause of the unhappiness experienced by homosexuals over and above that to which their condition condemns them. A more potent source of misery than prison is the fear of prison. And stretching out beyond this is that general degradation of existence that in differing degrees for different people, dependent upon factors out- side the power or knowledge of the law, over- comes those who, for reasons that we do not fully understand, are impelled along lines of behaviour that run counter to the enacted rules of the State. Anyone who has not led an ex- cessively sheltered life in this respect must have heard, if not at first- then at second- or third- hand, stories of threats and extortions. of other- wise ordinary people living in continuous terror or under the fear of blackmail acting as though they believed the whole of their nature to be rotten in its essence. And then there are the squalid forms of liPo to which people, already (perhaps) tortured by guilt or despair, are reduced in order to find others endowed with the same sexual tendencies : the sordid world, for instance, of the all-night lavatory, which for some homo- sexuals is the only knoWn meeting-place and becomes, by the same token, the obvious hunting- ground for the police.
Homosexual behaviour is, of course, only a small sector of the vast continuum of sexual life open to man : another such sector is the 'con- ventional' sexual life talked of in schools and confirmation classes. Exactly what determines a person's place'in this continuum is something we do not as yet know with any exactitude, and in consequence we are still in the dark about the best or even the possible ways of changing his Place, should We want to. In time we shall know more: • but if and only if we adopt towards the whole subject the method of science, which :n turn entails the virtue or habit of toleration. To understand or to modify homosexuality, we must first accept it.
And, of course, so in the last ghastly resort We do. And that, it is arguable, is the worst of it. We enjoy the novels of A and B, we are by the poetry of C and D, we are entertained by '1, E in the theatre and outraged by F on television, we benefit by the discoveries of G and H, we support the political policy of I and we learn about the past from J—and all the while we stand by and collaborate with a legal system that would condemn these men to prison, and we reconcile ourselves to this situation by knowing that the law is administered partially and with discrimination. The law has one evil eye and one blind eye, and it knows which to turn on whom. Well, whatever is right this cannot be. And I cannot believe that society would collapse and morals disintegrate if this system of intoler- ance tempered by hypocrisy were made the sub- ject of thoughtful and reasonable reform.
As in all cases where much is wrong, there are many ways of putting it right. It is the duty of Parliament that the country should hear of these various ways in a calm, thoughtful, objec- enriched tive yet unambiguous fashion.
Previous page
