Episode four: Born of Mary | LGBT rights and humanism in Britain | Unholy Histories podcast

In 1977, the campaigner Mary Whitehouse won a private prosecution against Gay News for blasphemous libel, after the paper published a poem imagining a Roman centurion’s love for the crucified Christ. It was the first successful blasphemy case in England for more than fifty years. In the backlash that followed, Whitehouse blamed her critics on an ‘intellectual gay humanist lobby’ working against her. There was no such group. Two years later, in 1979, a handful of activists decided that, if such a lobby did not exist, perhaps it should – and the Gay Humanist Group was born. Its founders called themselves, born of Mary. The phrase captures something of the long, often surprising relationship between humanism and the movement for sexual freedom that this week’s episode of Unholy Histories sets out to explore.

The fourth episode of our podcast focuses on the entangled histories of humanism and LGBT rights activism in Britain; tracing how, time and again, the fights for freedom of conscience and freedom of sexuality have drawn on the same arguments, the same allies, and the same insistence on human dignity over religious or moral authority.

Joining hosts Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall this week are Lesley Hall, historian and retired archivist who has written extensively on sexuality and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain; and Peter Parker, cultural historian and biographer, whose two-volume anthology Some Men in London documents gay life in the capital between 1945 and 1967.

Together, the panel discusses the writers, reformers, and campaigners who linked early sex reform to the wider freethought tradition. At the heart of the conversation are three literary figures whose rejections of religious authority were bound up with their sexuality. Laurence Housman – playwright, suffragist, and a leading voice in the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, founded in 1913 to break the silence around homosexuality, contraception, and censorship – emerges as one of the most open and cheerful figures of the early movement, and as the editor who, after his brother’s death, brought the late and openly homoerotic poems of A. E. Housman into print. 

A. E. Housman himself appears as a more reluctant figure in the same tradition, but one who gave the cause one of its sharpest rejections of religious authority over private life in the lines beginning ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’. The third figure threaded through the episode is E. M. Forster, described in the mid-twentieth century as the heart of the humanist movement and who gave quietly but substantially to the Homosexual Law Reform Society and the campaign that would eventually lead to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. 

A recurring theme is how the language of reason, science, and shared humanity ran through the humanist contribution to reform – from the Ethical Union’s uncompromising submission to the Wolfenden Committee, to the famous 1958 letter to The Times signed by Forster alongside Bertrand Russell, Barbara Wootton, Julian Huxley, and A. J. Ayer.

As Copson notes in the episode, humanists came to the cause not by special pleading but by application of first principles: that this was a natural phenomenon, observable across cultures and species; that it harmed no-one; and that social policy should rest on evidence rather than scripture. The discussants also reflect on the simultaneity of struggle and celebration in LGBT humanist history – campaigning against Section 28 while organising the first televised humanist affirmation ceremonies for same-sex couples – and on Hall’s warning that progress in this history has never been linear. The battles thought won, she cautions, are seldom truly settled; the rights gained can be chipped away. Vigilance, like joy, remains essential.

New audio episodes of Unholy Histories arrive every Wednesday, followed by video versions on the Humanists UK YouTube channel every Thursday.