Glad to be Gay?

Abstract

Like women’s issues, gay rights was not on the Left’s early agenda when they took control of the first wave of Labour councils. Indeed the more establishment figures on the soft Left, such as David Blunkett and Margaret Hodge have always treated the issue with circumspection, cautious that a high profile might undermine support from the traditional working-class communities, while sections of Militant and the ‘workerist Left’ have positively espoused the hostility and prejudice which they assume the ‘working class’ would feel. Several factors led to a growing concern by the new Left with lesbian and gay rights. First, there was a wider concern for civil liberties and equal rights, aimed at tackling discrimination. Second, feminists were challenging assumptions about the ‘normal’ family and proposing changes in service provision which reflected the needs of a diverse range of household types, including single parents, single people and extended families. Trying to meet the needs of lesbians and gay men was necessary to reverse past exclusion and, it was argued, councils should cease to regard any household structure as normal, or to enforce conformity to any particular lifestyle. At the same time, sections of the Left believed that a new politics could only be constructed by abandoning a simple reliance on the traditional working class, and constructing instead a ‘rainbow alliance’ of oppressed groups, which would also include women, blacks, young single people — and lesbians and gays — groups which, added together, would form a majority for socialism.

I looked up the ‘Book of Genesis’ again … ‘But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly.’ And the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. I thought of altering those words and saying ‘But the councillors of Haringey were gay and corrupted the children of the borough exceedingly.’ And I should like to add after this Bill ‘The Lords destroyed those councillors.’ (Lord Denning, House of Lords, November 1986).