No change in attitudes 1967
1967
Trevor talks about the lack of change in peoples attitudes after decriminalisation in 1967. “Nothing really changed, I don’t think people grasped it at first, if you were caught cottaging you were still in trouble, so really the law didn’t change that much, it was just that they couldn’t come along and break their way into your bedroom, which I suppose they could have done before. There was no sense that this is a freedom. We used to go to Amsterdam a lot, once or twice a year and there was a lovely freedom over there, this was before it was made law in England. You used to come back and think to yourself, wouldn’t it be nice if we could go to a tea dance and just be what you were but you couldn’t do that. Really with the law changing, it didn’t make that much difference at all, it was a couple of decades later that it became real freedom and you couldn’t care less what happened. After that law changed, you were still in the closet, there was no such thing as coming out, the attitudes were the main thing, they didn’t take to you, I met one or two people who were happy to be the friend of a gay man, but it wasn’t widespread.”
Contributed by: Trevor Hall, 76