Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain

Abstract

On 25 May 1952, Sunday Pictorial readers awoke to dire warnings of ‘male degenerates’ infesting not only London’s West End but even provincial centres throughout the country. So many ‘normal people’ had already been infected by this menace that it ceased to be simply a medical issue associated with a ‘glandular disorder’. It was now a danger so potent that it threatened the very fabric of the British state. Before the war, there had apparently been over one million known homosexuals, readers were alerted, but ‘both numbers and percentage have grown steeply since then’. The final instalment in the series asked who was to blame. Parents themselves, it declared, were too often ‘responsible for their children growing up to be perverted’.1