You are not logged in. Signup to contribute or login! Not recieved your activation email? Click here to send it again.

Wolfenden Report

September 1957

In August 1954 the Conservative Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, appointed a committee under Sir John "to consider the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and the treatment of persons convicted of such offences by the courts".

The report, or the ‘Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’, to give it its correct title, was published on the 3rd September 1957. The committee report recommended that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". The armed forces were exempt from the recommendations. This contradicted the conventional ideas of the day and it was to be another 10 years until homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales with the passage of the through parliament in 1967.

The report also found that homosexuality was not a disease and thus psychiatric care for gays was not needed, although gay men were still routinely offered as late as the 1980s, and the did not remove homosexuality until 1992

Have a memory of this? Signup today and tell us about it! or login!