The True History of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act

The law few remember, but why it matters

Fifty-nine years ago this week, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act became law – a moment few people now remember, and fewer still could describe. Most accounts of its passing run like this: Wolfenden recommended reform in 1957, and ten years later Parliament passed it. It's a slow but tidy story, and it leaves out almost everything that matters – including the parts I found myself writing a novel about.

 

A history of discrimination

Homosexuality had been criminal in England since 1533, but the law that did the most damage came later. In 1885, a late-night amendment created the offence of “gross indecency”: drawn so loosely that almost any intimacy could be prosecuted, needing no complainant and no victim. It became known as the blackmailer's charter. It convicted Oscar Wilde in 1895 and Alan Turing in 1952, and it was still intact when my character Daniel Poole began practising at the criminal bar.

In 1957, the Wolfenden Report recommended that homosexual acts in private between consenting adults should no longer be a crime. It was a radical conclusion, and it was comprehensively ignored. With no political majority for reform, it was left to individual MPs and peers, who forced debates in 1958 and 1960 and introduced a bill in 1962. Every attempt failed.

 

1965: the year things shifted

This is the year my novel is set, and the year that vanishes from most retellings. That May, the Earl of Arran introduced a bill in the Lords, deliberately early so that the Lords could give a lead before the Commons debated the subject that same week. Arran – known as “Boofy” – was a Conservative peer who had lost a brother he believed to be homosexual.

Two days later, Leo Abse's Ten Minute Rule Bill was voted down in the Commons, 178 to 159 – a margin of nineteen, and evidence that opinion was shifting.

Arran's Bill passed the Lords that October by 96 votes to 31, with the Archbishop of Canterbury among its supporters. A Conservative MP, Humphry Berkeley, took the cause up in the Commons and won a second reading the following February. Then Parliament was dissolved for the 1966 election, and the Bill died.

When the Act finally passed

Abse tried again in 1966, with Arran steering the Bill through the Lords and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins making sure it got parliamentary time. The final Commons debate ran through the night. Royal assent followed on 27 July 1967.

But the Act was narrow in its definition. The age of consent was 21, against 16 for heterosexual couples. Acts had to be “in private”, defined tightly enough that a third person anywhere in the building removed the protection. The armed forces and merchant navy were excluded altogether.

 

The opposite intended effect

The Act passed but convictions went up. In 1966, the year before partial decriminalisation, 420 men were convicted of gross indecency. By 1974 the figure was 1,711.

Police attention sharpened rather than relaxed: stake-outs in parks and public lavatories, raids on clubs and saunas, charges brought against venues where men danced together. More men were convicted of gross indecency in the thirty years after the Act than in the thirty years before it.

The rest came slowly. The age of consent was equalised in 2000. Gross indecency was not repealed until 2003. Civil partnerships were introduced in the mid-2000s, and same-sex marriage became law in the early 2010s. And it was 2017 before men convicted under the old laws could be pardoned.

 

Why I wrote my historical novel, Poole of Honour

Between the Wolfenden Report and the final passing of the Act, there was a decade of knowing better and doing nothing, a bill that passed and then evaporated, and a reform that made a great many lives harder before it made them easier.

It was never the beginning of this story, and it wasn't the end. Edward Carpenter was writing about it decades before Wolfenden. Peter Wildeblood spoke to the committee about his own life at real personal cost. Antony Grey, Allan Horsfall and many others spent years pushing at a door that opened only an inch at a time.

Poole of Honour begins in February 1965, while the argument is still being had. My character, Daniel Poole, is a criminal barrister drawn into the work of reforming a law that would not have protected him, and could still destroy him. While Abse, Arran, Grey and the Wolfenden Committee were real, Daniel is invented. But as I mention in the Afterword to my novel, he represents ordinary men, going about their daily lives, refusing to hide. Ordinary people simply trying to make sense of the world they lived in. For we are all the same.

Poole of Honour, Book Two of The Poole Legacy, publishes on 15 September 2026, and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Sources

House of Lords Library, Sexual Offences Act 1967: 50th Anniversary; Hansard; legislation.gov.uk; Peter Tatchell Foundation (conviction figures); Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.