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“All the homosexuals I’ve known have been extremely eager, like alcoholics, to spread the disease from which they suffer,” the barrister Lord Hailsham told the BBC in 1954.
Other contributors to the BBC’s first ever programme on male homosexuality largely agreed. A Church of England moralist warned any “invert” who may have been listening in of “transitory attachments, disillusionment and loneliness in his old age”.
The educationist John Wolfenden recommended “a healthy and normal” home life as “the best sort of prophylactic against all sorts of troubles of this kind”.
The subject of homosexuality, then a crime, was so taboo that the finished radio programme was shelved until a heavily edited version was broadcast on the Home Service three years later.
Then it was forgotten until the original script was rediscovered by the historian Marcus Collins. The script has been brought to life for a new stage play titled The BBC’s First Homosexual, which will tour England in February as part of LGBT+ History Month.
The play tells the story of the radio programme, shines light on the experience of gay men in the 1950s and explores themes that still resonate today, including so-called conversion practices.
Collins, a professor of contemporary history at Loughborough University, said there were a number of gay “scandals” in the 1950s that made headlines and led to debates on whether there was a need to clamp down on the “immorality” or to decriminalise.
“The BBC saw this ruckus and thought that as the BBC, the voice of balance and authority, it should say something definitive about homosexuality,” Collins said.
The playwright Stephen M Hornby had access to the script and other archive materials, including internal BBC memos and letters from the public after the edited broadcast in 1957.
“The overwhelming message I got from reading it [the original script] was either naked, foaming-at-the-mouth homophobia of people like Lord Hailsham. Or the more liberal voices who say conversion therapy works, you ought to give it a go at least – and if not you can live a quiet life of abstinence and not do anything which would scare the horses,” Hornby said.
The programme was presented by CR Hewitt, later chair of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, who in the programme described homosexuality as “a sort of infantilism” and “a state of arrested development”. Wolfenden, one of the participants, would later author a report recommending decriminalisation.
The only remotely gay voice on the programme, titled The Homosexual Condition, was an anonymous “reformed homosexual” who believed in the value of “sheer will power” to sort people out.
Collins has also discovered that programme makers attempted to involve the author of a big, albeit anonymous, article for the Sunday Times about the subject.
The writer of the article was described as the “wife of a businessman in the Midlands and mother of three sons”. It was in fact Mary Whitehouse, who wrote: “It may seem a strange thing that a woman should write about homosexuality. But I think many mothers suffer from the fear that, through no fault of their own, their boys may be tempted or warped.”
Whitehouse, who later became a household name for her crusades against “filth”, did not participate. But she will appear as a character in the play, which tells the story of Tom, a 19-year-old who works as a Burton’s tailor in Manchester.
The BBC’s director general decided not to broadcast the programme after internal debates, including over whether it might increase homophobia. Another argument made, Collins said, was simply “that the BBC doesn’t talk about sex”.
When the edited version was broadcast in 1957, the backlash was such that bosses took the decision there should be no more programmes on the subject “except for special purposes and special occasions”, Collins said. “They say we’ve covered the Wolfenden report, that is the end of discussing homosexuality … there’s nothing more to say.”
The play will open in Salford before touring. The plan is to have Q&A sessions afterwards.
It is a story from 70 years ago but audiences may see contemporary resonances, including on the topic of conversion practices, which is, tangentially at least, back on the BBC with the participation of Matthew Hyndman on The Traitors. Hyndman experienced it and helped found a group campaigning for conversion practices to be banned.
Hornby said: “Hopefully we’ll have some really interesting conversations with our audience about conversion therapy and why government after government has announced they are going to ban it. And nobody has.”
The new play was a development of a “tiny script-in-hand proof of concept 30-minute piece” done three years ago, Hornby said. It will premiere at the New Adelphi theatre at the University of Salford on 4 February before a tour to Birmingham, Brighton, London, Liverpool and Loughborough.
