The interview that kick-started the idea of gay rights

IT is the kind of article that if it were printed in a newspaper today would not seem shocking at all - four gay men sitting in a room, talking openly about their lives.

- BY MATT ROPER

But the story that appeared in the Sunday Pictorial - the paper that would become the Sunday Mirror - 65 years ago this month was both brave and revolutionary. And it would help change the course of history.

Back then, homosexuality was considered both a crime and a mental illness, and gays and lesbians were vilified, attacked and pitied.

The only time gay people were mentioned in the press was in reports of "gross indecency" trials - sometimes men were hauled before the courts just for holding another's hand in public.

FRANKNESS

It was unthinkable, then, that a national newspaper might allow a group of homosexuals any column inches to speak about their lives, loves and feelings.

But when readers opened their Sunday Pictorial on June 26, 1960 that's exactly what they saw.

And there's a nice synchronicity in the June timing, as June is now the month many cities celebrate Pride.

The interview - published as The Men in the Wolfenden Report - was conducted in a Harley Street consulting room in the wake of a 1957 government-commissioned report that recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual acts.

"One man in every 25 in Britain today is a homosexual. A shocking figure?" the story began. "These men live in towns and villages all over the country. The problem of homosexuality is not confined to the big cities."

It went on: "What are homosexuals like? Can they be cured?

"Would a change in the law free them to increase in number? Are they a basic danger to society?"

The newspaper chose not to use the men's real names or show their faces, even though three had already bravely come out publicly by writing a signed letter to several newspapers two weeks earlier.

The Sunday Pictorial assigned the men different names, ages and jobs.