This excerpt from a few paragraphs on “The English Experience” is in The Challenge and Progress of Homosexual Law Reform, a document written by “the homophile organizations of San Francisco” in 1968:
In the early 1950s England was shocked by allegations, repeated by the British Medical Association, (1) that “practicing homosexuals” are found “in the Church, Parliament, the Civil Service, the Forces, the Press, the Radio, the Stage and other institutions,” (2) that homosexuals tend “to place loyalty to one another above loyalty to the institution or government they serve,” and (3) that they give “preferential treatment” to other homosexuals and “require homosexual seduction as expedient for promotion.”
I’m not sure, always, whether to laugh or to be shocked and appalled at prejudicial attitudes from earlier in the 20th century. I have concluded that this is one of the times where it is appropriate to laugh. Because, I mean, what else are you going to do? Better to get angry about the present, where you can actually make change. (Besides, in the case of this particular QOTD, there are all the English public-school jokes I’m trying desperately to refrain from making.)
Emily Rutherford 