In the early 1980s, Glasgow University’s student union closed down its Gay Society. The explanation was that as the legal age of consent for same sex relations at that time was 21 – they couldn’t have a society encouraging men or women under 21 to have relationships with their own sex. They would be breaking the law.
As was common at the time, LGBT issues were boiled down to what people did in bed and whether the police should be getting involved.
This ban wasn’t accepted in most of the student sector. I was at Liverpool University and relations with Glasgow were ended over this issue until they changed their minds. However, there were people within the university at Liverpool who also thought that our university should shut down its gay society as well. In fact, it did suddenly disappear and I was told at the time it had fizzled out due to lack of interest.
Conflating gay rights with child protection issues
Sadly, LGBT issues were very often conflated with child protection and abuse. Gay people were characterised as a danger to children. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that in the early 1980s – and it beggars belief to write this – there was an organisation campaigning for the rights of paedophiles.
The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) even sent material to our student union asking for support. Horrifically, they presented their dreadful aims as a civil rights issue! Nobody – and certainly not most gays and lesbians I knew at the time – supported this odious organisation.
But it was easy to conflate the issues to present gay people as abnormal and that old favourite of homophobes….’predatory’.
Gaysoc ban and LGBT rights
Meanwhile, at Liverpool University where I was a student and then sabbatical officer, the debating society in the spring of 1985 discussed the motion: “This House would relax the laws regulating homosexuality”. The gay president of a local college spoke first detailing how he had been beaten up in his first year by a group of rugby players. The opposition to the motion was led by somebody from the university’s officer training corps (OTC) – who was about to transfer to Sandhurst, the military academy – who called gay sex “disgusting acts”, followed by this bonkers statement:
“We fought in the last war (Second World War), sadly against the wrong enemy”.
Aside from the fact that he was far too young to have fought in WW2, his comment ignored the fact that thousands of gay men were sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. In other words, his point of view was closer to the enemy than our own side. But what did he mean anyway? That gay people are worse than the Third Reich? This was how appalling the level of debate on LGBT rights was in the 1980s.
His seconder plumbed new depths by stating that “the anal cavity is not meant to take a penis”. It always intrigued me how homophobes in the 1980s were obsessed – if not fascinated – by the act of anal penetration. Far more so than most gay men. They reduced same sex attraction down to the genitals and nothing else.
There was actually a very good turn out for this lunchtime debate and it surprises me now that 187 students voted in favour of the motion, twelve against, while 78 abstained – in other words, didn’t have the guts to vote against in public.
Reading gay students
In October 1983, gay students from Reading attending a conference on gay rights organised by the National Union of Students. The Reading Evening Post ran the headline: ‘Student gays get expenses paid weekend’. Guaranteed to boil the blood of readers. Berkshire university’s student union was paying for the trip and its gay society had enrolled thirty members that term.
