Progress - of sorts

The current row at the Tory Party conference, where various gay worthies have been protesting about the Party's association in the European Parliament with homophobic East European politicians, prompts the reflection that we have indeed moved on somewhat since 1946, when Lord Denning in an appeal court judgement pronounced that homosexuality was "an abomination", and cited approvingly the words of another judge, Lord Sumner, who had declared in 1918 that "Persons who commit the offences now under consideration, seek the habitual gratification of a particular perverted lust, which not only takes them out of the class of ordinary men gone wrong but stamps them with the hallmark of a special and extraordinary class, as much as if they carried on their bodies some physical peculiarity."

This was the dire atmosphere in which young gay men such as myself grew up in pre-Wolfenden days.