Preliminary Programme

Section 28 was an amendment to the Local Government Act 1988, which stated that a local authority, “shall not— (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality,” or, “(b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” It was the first new piece of legislation introduced by a British government on the subject of homosexuality since the Sexual Offences Act 1967. It become law on 24 May 1988 and was successfully repealed in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on 18 December 2003.

In terms of the other measures introduced since Labour’s landslide election victory in 1997 towards gay law reform, which included protection from discrimination, equalising the age of consent, and introducing the civil partnership act, the abolition of Section 28 seems comparatively trivial. The amendment, however, came to represent much more than a prohibition on the promotion of homosexuality, but rather, according to Capital Gay, “the coming of age of the gay and lesbian movement.” Section 28, unlike any previous legislation on homosexuality, did not seek to criminalise acts between consenting adults, but rather to legitimise in law the undesirability of homosexuality. It represented the antithesis of everything the gay rights movement had been campaigning towards and marked a regressive step which many feared would be the beginning of even more oppressive legislation and possibly the re-criminalisation of homosexuality. Its removal signalled an iconic shift in the gay rights campaign, validating homosexual relationships and acknowledging the damage the legislation had caused.

While the gay and lesbian movement had existed in various forms before Section 28, it was only after this legislation that significant legal and cultural change occurred. Law reform is ongoing, but for many the battle has been won. Stonewall, the largest gay rights charity in the UK, which initially acted as a lobbying group for legal change, has now become a charity fighting for equality using the laws they helped implement. This research paper will answer the following fundamental questions: Why was Section 28 introduced? How was the battle for repeal won? How did the gay rights movement modernise? How did attitudes towards homosexuality change between 1988 and 2003? Broken down into three topics: the media, politics, and education, this paper will examine how each changed between 1988 and 2003 and helped make repeal more likely. Using oral testimony from politicians and campaigners, the Hall-Carpenter collection at the LSE archives, education reports, and media stories from introduction and repeal, this paper will chart the lifecycle of Section 28. (Show less)

A former Danish newspaper editor said that never before have the Copenhageners been as free as in 1944-45 – the years the Danish police force was arrested by the German occupation forces and sent to Buchenwald. The statement echoes Sartre’s famous statement about eminent freedom of choice during the German Occupation of France, but the Danish case was not quite as philosophical, just that the police did not patrol the streets, leaving room for all kinds of sexual escapades. The turmoil of World War II opened up for new ways of exploring sexualities.
In 1947 the Danish press begins to echo concern over increasing male homosexual prostitution in the center of Copenhagen. In 1949 the police begin to build up a permanent force to crack down on homosexual prostitution. At the same time homosexuals were starting to organize in the Association of 1948 which also published the monthly magazine, The Friend. These two vectors continue into the 50s; one warning against homosexuals as seducers and destroyers of the youth, the other advocating homosexuality with a respectable face.
The premise of the Danish debate was the Penal Code of 1930 which had decriminalized ‘sodomy’, making homosexual sex legal between adults, however setting a higher age of consent (18) than for heterosexuals (15). Thus homosexuality in itself was rarely criticized by people in influential positions, only seduction of ‘the young’ and male prostitution was vilified – in stark contrast to the general homophobia in the USA in the McCarthy Era.
The growing concern over male prostitution led to the introduction of a law against homosexual prostitution customers in 1961. The police surveillance of homosexuals which peaked the following years probably had a disciplining effect on the homosexual subculture and in the beginning of the 70s male prostitution had died out. Male prostitutes between 14-21 years old had been an integrated, accepted and fetishized part of the homosexual subculture in the 50s, in the 70s they were rather associated with pedophilia, and ‘real homosexuals’ slept with men their own age.
In 1976 the age of consent was set at 15 for all sexualities, and homosexuals and pedophiles, who to a certain degree had seen themselves as fighting the same struggle, parted ways. The homosexuals went on to become a respectable and integrated part of society. Denmark introduced the right to ‘registrated partnerships’ for homosexuals in 1989 as the first country in the world. The pedophiles became the sexual monsters of contemporary times.
Since 1989 practically every law barring homosexuals from the same life as heterosexuals has been abolished.
It is clear that the homosexuality which asked for understanding in the 40s is not the same homosexuality that celebrated equal rights around the new millennium. The growing tolerance of homosexuality has walked hand in hand with a disciplining of an unruly subculture. The unacceptable aspects of the subculture have been weeded out. Instead of seeing the Danish development as a turn from oppression of homosexuality to tolerance, we can learn to see it as different episodes in the shaping of homosexuality by dominant discourses and institutions. Each period with its own limits and categories. Each with its own desires and dreams. (Show less)

It has been something of a cliché that although female sexual pleasure and satisfaction were increasingly being discussed as desirable in interwar Britain, this was very much within the context of monogamous heterosexual marriage. This paper sets out to complicate this assumption by considering the potential for female empowerment and knowing subversion of existing paradigms enabled by this new discourse. Marie Stopes’s vision of female sexual desire, first articulated in her best-selling marriage manual Married Love (1918), powerfully contested existing models of women’s sexual feelings, if they existed at all, as being merely responsive to and reflective of the desire of the male. Stopes also conveyed radical messages about the reworking of marital dynamics in her popular and relatively depoliticized works of marriage and reproductive advice. It can plausibly be argued that she could only get away with her startlingly explicit writing about sexual praxis in the context of improving marriage in the interests of national well-being and that she was acutely aware of exactly how much she could get away with in published writings as opposed to private correspondence. Other writers were less publicly explicit about the mechanics of the sexual act but articulated new ideas about relationship structures. The most radical revisionings of female sexual possibilities were being advocated by Stella Browne, who was advocating lesbian maternity in the early 1920s and praising the bisexual female ‘sexual epicure’ by 1930. Her contemporaries and allies, such as Dora Russell, Vera Brittain, Janet Chance, Margaret Cole and Naomi Mitchison, were also critiquing orthodox models of marriage, suggesting ‘semi-detached’ relationships to cater for dual-career couples, and even extra-marital attachments. Mitchison had a famously open marriage with her politician husband which endured until his death. In her immensely popular historical novels she presented sympathetic and positive portraits of female sexuality, homosexuality male and female, and non-exclusive relationships, and in a number of non-fictional works she explored issues around sexuality, desire, and marriage in extremely radical terms. These women were exploring the boundaries of female sexual possibilities, both in their own lives, and in various genres of writing, in ways which were both critical of existing arrangements, and optimistic about the potential of heterosexual relationships to change to accommodate the needs of women as well as men . (Show less)

The project is inspired by ongoing discussions about citizenship and exclusion. We contend that research on sexuality and disability can contribute in important ways to debates about autonomy and inclusion in society. In order to analyse the complex problems around these questions we study discursive and political differences between Denmark and Sweden from 1925 to the present. In Denmark, it is possible for disabled people to get support to buy sexual services – in Sweden this would be a crime. How did these differences originate and what do they mean concretely for people with disabilities and for those who work with these questions?

One central tool of analysis is gender theory. Is it possible to interpret the Danish attitude to sexuality – sex as a human right – as a ‘male’ project? How are the differences linked to the different developments of feminism in Denmark and Sweden? This is one of the central questions we will discuss from a historical perspective. Another central problem is how men and women with disabilities think and discuss around their need or their right to sexual fulfilment, and finally how women and men in positions of power define those questions from a gender perspective. Another approach that we want to develop is Crip Theory as a means of understanding disability in a sexed and sexualised way, and to see how ableism has worked in various ways to confer persons with disabilities to distinct areas in society, where autonomy, sexuality, and full citizenship has been out of reach.

From this gender perspective, we will compare how disability and sexuality has been dealt with in Denmark and Sweden from 1925 until today. The sources are governmental reports, laws, and archival material and membership press from disability organisations and sex reform movements, as well as interviews with a number of key persons. Before the 1960s there was not much talk about sex in connection to disability, but more about autonomy and work. The sexual revolution in the 1960s opened the debate and in the 1970s seminars and workshops were organised around this theme both in Denmark and Sweden. But state policies regarding prostitution and the regulation of sexuality have been remarkably different in the two countries. The project will compare state policies and the attitudes from the disability organisations and the sex reform movements in Denmark and Sweden. (Show less)

The first lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations in Portugal emerged in the early 1990s. It was after 1995 that these organizations became a social movement, with recognizable regular intervention in the public sphere and a vast array of social, legal and political demands.
After fifteen years of LGBT activism, socio-legal outcomes are more and more visible. Some of the changes include same-sex de facto unions (2001), sexual orientation amongst the grounds for prohibiting discrimination in the Constitution (2004), and an anti-hate crime law (2006). Those impacts, in turn, have operated several changes in the social movement which, as I explain, offers an example of syncretic frames of activism particularly visible in the sphere of family-related claims.
According to the Eurobarometer (2003), 93% of Portuguese citizens say ‘the family’ is the most important aspect of their lives. But defining what a family is or what it is not is a difficult task. The Portuguese Civil Code, under Family Law, states that there are four juridical sources of family relationships – marriage, kinship, affinity and adoption (Article 1576). Each of these sources of family relationships is influenced by the premise of heterosexuality (Butler, 2002). In the Portuguese context, as this paper will highlight, this has been a central field of contestation on the part of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism, with impact on “law’s families” (Diduck, 2003) or how LGBT relational claims – i.e., those related to the recognition of relationships and parenthood – contribute to widening the legal understanding of ‘the family’.
In this paper I explore the ways in which legal definitions of ‘the family’ in Portuguese law and social policy have been object of dispute by the LGBT movement over the years. After discussing the heteronormative value-discourse of ‘the family’ as particularly important in Portuguese legal and political texts, I argue that LGBT rights face a situation of ‘normative ambiguity’ (Krieger, 2003) – on the one hand, the Portuguese Constitution provides protection from (individual) discrimination; on the other hand, specific laws mirror the heteronormative value-discourses of the lawmaker, preserving the law as a site of (relational) discrimination. This opposition is counterbalanced by a recent shift. The following section of the paper explores signs of socio-legal change and examines the underlying reasons for them, placing emphasis on activists’ proactive engagement with political parties and the media in recent years. Finally, I discuss whether achievements in the field of LGBT relational claims contribute to (un)queer collective action. I question the split between radical and institutional activism, in order to suggest the notion of syncretic activism as a political ‘in-between’ based on historical specificities, shared targets and a multilayered agenda. (Show less)