Planet Cardigan: Magazine

Homosexual acts between consenting adults (only two at a time) over the age of twenty-one and conducted behind closed doors were finally made legal in England and Wales in 1967, ten years after the Wolfenden Report had proposed it.

The legislation was promoted in parliament by its sponsors, Leo Abse and Lord Arran (named after a species of cardigan, he could never have imagined...) as an act of kindness to the poor homosexual whose preposterous sexual urges were certain to lead to a life of abject misery and quite possibly to incarceration in a closed institution with other men, which for some probably lifted the abject misery a bit. Prison isn't for everyone, though, so decriminalisation was quite the radical idea.

Before this time, to society at large, gay men didn't exist. I used to meet people who claimed it was better before 1967. I'm pretty sure they'd never been to prison or they might have thought differently. There were also those who told us young radicals that we shouldn't rock the boat and that having pubs and clubs that were only occasionally raided and friends who were only occasionally beaten up, was something for which we should have been grateful; that sticking our heads above the parapets was counterproductive. Of course, the very existence of such limited freedoms was entirely due to people sticking their heads above the parapet, but they never really understood this.


Arran Cardigan, worn by gay cardigan enthusiasts to recognise Lord Arran's contribution to law reform.

Wearing a cardigan has never been a radical act, unfortunately. It is however nice to think that Lord Arran's efforts on our behalf have been commemorated by the Arran cardigan.

Before and even after the '67 act there were subversive activities going on. There were code words used in ads in the straight press (I met a very nice man back in 1978 through the NME personal ads which were awash at that time with “Tom Robinson fans”, all, as I was, under age and excluded from other media). The radio, or as we used to call it back then, the radio, had requests for records on Housewives Choice to celebrate ruby weddings, which was code. There was also Julian and Sandy on Round the Horne whose outrageous polari went over most people's heads. And who could forget the Jimmy Savile Violent Non-Consensual Sodomy Hour on the Light Programme on Saturday mornings (only kidding, he did a lot of great work for charidee...).

There were also magazines, not many though. One was called Jeremy and ran for a while, available hardly anywhere. For the cardigan aficionado there was Men's Cardigans, four issues a year of men wearing knitted cardigans, smoking pipes and looking frightfully normal. It could have been mistaken for knitting patterns but there was not much knit-one-purl-one going on, just a load of code amid a sea of innocuousness and, naturally, tobacco advertisements as well as ads for car coats and driving gloves.