LGBT History Month

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I agree with the hon. and learned Lady about the work that the Government should be doing abroad. To be fair to the Government, they do use and are using diplomatic channels, particularly to try to further decriminalisation in those countries that still criminalise LGBT relationships. While I have to give the Minister 10 out of 10 for his tie at the Qatar world cup, I can give only five out of 10 for his Government as a whole for their work across the world, simply because there are such contradictions between doing good, progressive things in some areas and then contemplating really not very progressive things at all in others. I hope that he will be able to reassure us that sending asylum seekers to Ghana is not on his Government’s to-do list.

No fewer than 300 anti-LGBT+ laws have been introduced by the Republicans in the USA, attempting to create a new era of repression that includes, significantly, the rolling back of women’s abortion rights and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. As I have said, in the fight for equality, we advance together or not at all. If we start losing LGBT+ rights, women’s rights will not be far behind.

After all those warnings, I wish to end on a positive note. There has been an increase in nations decriminalising LGBT+ relationships, and equal marriage legislation has progressed across the world, which means 33 countries have such laws, covering 1.3 billion people. I am already taken, Madam Deputy Speaker, but 1.3 billion people is quite a big pool to fish in.

[Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Are you telling her that?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

No, I certainly am not—I am making a general observation, as my hon. Friend knows.

There is progress in the world, but there is also regression. It is up to us all to put our collective shoulder to the wheel in this House and push our country and the world towards progress and liberation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the honourable, cheeky wee monkey—the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn). I should point out for the record that I am not on Grindr, but I note that he basically admits that he is, because otherwise how would he be able to look at anybody else’s Grindr account?

I will focus primarily on history, for a very important reason that I think will become clear. On 25 September 1810, six men who had been convicted of what was called an unnatural crime were put in a cart at the Old Bailey and taken to the Haymarket, where they were to be put in the pillory. Some 30,000 to 40,000 people turned up to line the streets to watch them being pilloried. When they got there, they were assailed with mud, dead cats, rotten eggs, potatoes and buckets filled with blood, offal and dung. On the way back, they were chained in the caravan in such a manner that they could not lie down in the cart and could only hide and shelter their heads from the storm by stooping. One of them was whipped repeatedly.

This is what happened on 25 February 1823—200 years ago:

“Yesterday morning, at an early hour, considerable numbers of spectators assembled before the Debtors’ door at Newgate, to witness the execution of William North, convicted in September Sessions of an unnatural crime. The wretched culprit was 54 years of age, and had a wife living. On his trial, he appeared a fine, stout, robust man, and strongly denied his guilt. On his being brought before the Sheriffs yesterday morning, he appeared to have grown at least ten years older… His body had wasted to the mere anatomy of a man, his cheeks had sunk, his eyes had become hollow, and such was his weakness, that he could scarcely stand without support… At five minutes past eight yesterday morning he was pinioned by the executioner in the press room, in the presence of the sheriffs and officers of the gaol. As St. Sepulchre’s church clock struck eight, the culprit, carrying the rope, attended by the executioner, and clergyman, moved in procession with the sheriffs…on to the scaffold. On arriving at the third station, the prison bell tolled, and Dr. Cotton”—

the priest—

“commenced at the same moment reading the funeral service, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ of which the wretched man seemed to be totally regardless. On his being assisted up the steps of the scaffold, reason returned; he became aware of the dreadful death to which he was about to be consigned; his looks of terror were frightful; his expression of horror, when the rope was being placed round his neck, made every spectator shudder. It was one of the most trying scenes to the clergymen they ever witnessed—never appeared a man so unprepared, so unresigned to his fate. The signal being given the drop fell and the criminal expired in less than a minute. He never struggled after he fell. The body hung an hour, and was then cut down for internment.”

We have had horrible laws in this country. Sometimes, when we tell children in school this, they find it completely incomprehensible. The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington referred to the 1533 Buggery Act of Henry VIII, which classified sodomy as an illegal act between man and woman, man and man, or man and beast.

Formal court indictments in this country for many centuries used the same formula:

“The detestable and abominable crime, among Christians not to be named, called buggery”.

Often the court records did not even use the full word “buggery”; they just put “bgry” or “sdmy”, because it was not to be named. When Sir Robert Peel introduced the Offences Against the Person Bill in the Commons in 1828, which included a clause aimed at making it easier to obtain sodomy convictions, he did not even say the phrase

“the crime, amongst Christians not to be named”.

He said it in Latin instead, such was the degree of shame.

We were still executing people for sodomy up until 1835—James Pratt and John Smith were the last two—and the death sentence was still pronounced on men, right up until 1861. Then it was penal servitude for life. When it was said in the House of Lords at one point that that meant being sent off to Tasmania or Botany Bay, somebody pointed out that it was perhaps a bit counterproductive to send lots of homosexual men to a single sex colony on the other side of the world.

Once we got rid of the death penalty, we added other laws on importuning under the Vagrancy Acts, which were introduced after the Napoleonic wars. Anybody caught was called a rogue or a vagabond. Repeat offenders were known as incorrigible rogues—which is how I often think of myself. The 1898 Act added another clause, which was importuning for immoral purposes, under which hundreds and hundreds of men were sentenced right up until 2003. Two men were sentenced to nine months of hard labour and 15 strokes—corporal punishment was a part of it too—in May 1912. The appeal court at that time pronounced

“if ever there was a case for corporal punishment it is for that particular class of offence of which these applicants have been guilty—soliciting men for immoral purposes”.

All they had done was hold hands.

And of course gross indecency was introduced by Henry Labouchère at the very last minute in an amendment in a late-night debate in 1885, under a catch-all clause that applied to events not only in public but in private. It was later interpreted as meaning as an attempt to commit any of those things as well, which meant, for instance, that during the second world war Sir Paul Latham, a Member of Parliament, tried to take his own life when letters of his were found that suggested he wanted to have an affair with another man.

In 1926, a 61-year-old vicar—I am 61 and I used to be a vicar—was sentenced to six months on eight cases of gross indecency, even though the judge recognised that the time might come when such cases would be treated medically. Of course, that is what happened next: it was a sin and then it became a medical condition. If there is one thing I feel more strongly about than any other in the trans debate we are having at the moment, it is that I do not think we should be treating it as a medical condition. I do not think that the allocation of a certificate should be done by a medical practitioner, because that makes people leap through a medical hoop and implies that what is intrinsic to them is somehow a physical disorder. We can, of course, count many instances of versions of so-called therapy that were inflicted on people —medical castration, actual castration and all sorts of different therapies—of whom Alan Turing is the perhaps most renowned instance.

Homosexuality remains a criminal offence in 34 out of 54 countries in the Commonwealth—a pretty bad record for British exports—in large measure because we exported our strict laws around our empire. Homosexual acts still carry the death penalty in Iran, Brunei, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar—several of us have been to Qatar and told them this; I think it came as a bit of a shock to those running the World cup when it turned out that more than half the British delegation was gay—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan. Two men were hanged in a prison in the north-western city of Maragheh in Iran in February 2022 after spending six years on death row. Even in the United States of America, the land of the free, Pastor Dillon Orrs of Stedfast Baptist church in Texas believes that homosexuals

“should be sentenced with death. They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head”.

I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington that all the advances we have made today are not something we should take for granted. I have said before in this House that, in the 20th century, the most liberal place in the world for gay men was Berlin from 1928 to 1931. By 1936, gay men were being carted off to concentration camps, and we do not even know how many lost their lives under the Nazis. It is one of the reasons I have always felt a very strong alliance with Jewish people, who suffered that same appalling holocaust.

The new French penal code of 1791—in the 18th century, not the 19th—did not even mention sodomy, and nor did Napoleon’s version in 1804, which rapidly spread around the globe. Yet we did not achieve that in this country for nearly two centuries. Most other nations never executed people for homosexuality at all, and those that did abolished the practice long before the 19th century—Germany’s last case was in 1537, Spain’s in 1647, Switzerland’s in 1662, Italy’s in 1668 and France’s in 1750. Only the Netherlands kept going until the 19th century and their last execution was of Jillis Bruggeman in 1803. Yet between 1806 and 1835, 440 men were sentenced to death for sodomy in England and 56 of them were hanged. Peru and Paraguay legalised homosexuality fully in 1924, Uruguay in 1934, Iceland in 1940, Switzerland in 1942, Greece in 1951, Thailand in 1956 and even Hungary in 1961. We only did it partially in 1967. It did not really come until the Labour Government in 1997 that we fully legalised homosexuality and introduced an equal age of consent.

The gays have phenomenal powers, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have been blamed for all sorts of things. In 1978, the drought in California was blamed on that state’s liberal attitudes towards LGBT people. After 11 September 2001, Jerry Falwell said:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle…all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Hurricane Sandy, which hit the east coast of America in 2012, was described by a US rabbi as a divine justice for the state of New York legalising gay marriage a year earlier.

At the same time, a press release from Pastor Steven Andrew of the USA Christian Church stated:

“God’s love shows it is urgent to repent, because the Bible teaches homosexuals lose their souls and God destroys LGBT societies”.

In the UK, in 2014, the UK Independence party councillor David Silvester said that floods had happened after David Cameron had acted “arrogantly against the Gospel” by legislating for same-sex marriage. And, of course, most recently Patriarch Kirill blamed gay pride marches for the war in Ukraine.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sorry this is slightly different from what others may talk about, but I want to talk about the Bible arguments about homosexuality because this is still a very live debate in many communities up and down the country and it worries me. Some people point to Leviticus:

“You must not lie with a man as with a woman; that is an abomination.”

It is true that that is in Leviticus. But other things thought of as abominations are eating shellfish, touching the skin of a dead pig, which would make lots of sports quite difficult, combining fabrics—I’m looking at you, Madam Deputy Speaker—and sowing crops side by side. I do not know if any of us have done that. Many of those things we see very differently today, but there is a bigger point.

First of all, the Bible is a bundle of books that were written by different people at a variety of different times. There have been lots of rows about which books should be in and which books should not be in. Different versions of Christianity have rowed about that. A man told me once that the Bible was written by King James in 1605 and we should all get used to it. Ignorance is a blessing sometimes, I suppose, but the truth is that the Bible is a translation. Often, it is a translation of a translation, and it may be a translation of a translation of a translation. It has to be read very closely. If I were to ask you, Madam Deputy Speaker, how many commandments there are, you would probably say 10. But if I asked you to delineate which the 10 are, you would find it difficult because different versions of Christianity lay them out in different ways. That is one of the reasons why we have a different view about what craven images constitute and why Orthodox churches do not have three-dimensional imagery. For that matter, if I asked you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I know this is not a quiz for you—who were the 12 disciples, you would find it difficult because there are different versions of the names of the 12 and you would have thought that that was an important thing to get right.

My point here is that the Bible has to be read carefully. We cannot just pick little bits because they fit what we like. We have to read it in its context and then hold that up against the context of today. I do not think the story of Sodom is about homosexuality at all. It is about rape. It is probably also about how you should behave towards foreigners and strangers coming into your community—even if they were angels, so it is obviously a slightly different story.

We obviously do not today sanction selling daughters into slavery, which is a good thing, but Leviticus does. Likewise, we do not sanction slavery at all, yet most of the Bible thinks that slavery is a perfectly acceptable system. Jesus actually said that there are two commandments:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”,

And:

“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Some might think, “Oh, neighbour just means my next-door neighbour,” but of course that is not what it means, because Jesus tells whole parables, including that of the good Samaritan, about how your neighbour is all sorts of people you might not think of as your neighbour. Incidentally, the point about the good Samaritan is not that he is rich, but that he is a good neighbour to someone who is not actually his neighbour.

All of that is to say that I just hope every Christian person who cares about their faith will look again at this question of same-sex love, because if they read the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the form of solemnisation of matrimony, they will see that three reasons are given for matrimony, namely

“the procreation of children…a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication…the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.”

Is that not what every single marriage and relationship of love between two people is all about? You cannot do either of the other two things unless you have the third, too. I just hope that every Christian person in the land will think long and hard about where the Church goes in the near future.

We look around the world and we see so many people still living under the conditions of 200 years ago that I referred to at the beginning of my contribution. I hope that one of the things we can give back to the world, having been one of the nations that gave the toughest laws on homosexuality to many other countries, is to be the country that gives hope, liberation and a sense of joy.

If I may, I will just end with RuPaul, because it is always best to end with RuPaul. RuPaul says:

“If you can’t love yourself, how you gonna love somebody else?”,

and it is true. I think one of the things that has become possible for so many gay men, lesbians, trans and non-binary people over the past 30 or 40 years is that they have felt able to love themselves, even though they were brought up to hate themselves. When I was a child, all the teaching at school was, “It’s moral delinquency, a perversion, a medical condition—it’s something to be erased.” “Out, damned spot” was the feeling. So many people tried to overcome it by marrying, because they wanted to inflict it on somebody else, or they crammed themselves into a straitjacket of their own life, which meant that they never managed to have any joy or give joy to other people.

I knew so many priests in the Church of England when I was training who had devoted their lives to the Church. If they went on holiday to Sitges or somewhere like that, they would probably have a fumble somewhere. They might have an occasional lover. They could never bring them into the vicarage or rectory. Then, when they got to 60, they would become terribly, terribly bitter, because they felt they were not able to share their life with somebody else. They were not able to be honest and open. They were not able to know the love and the fullness of life that the Christian faith is meant to be all about. Then, they became quite nasty people sometimes. I just hope that the future will be very different from what we were brought up with. Frankly, there are almost too many of us in this House these days—and yes, it is great.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Shame!

[Sir Chris Bryant]

There are not enough of you lot! [Laughter.] It is a great joy that things have changed dramatically, but there is still so much more to change.