History casts long shadows

[sparkindarkness]

This video dropped upon in my to do pile from several sources.

It’s a CBS ‘documentary’ from 1967 on the “HOMOSEXUALS” naturally, it’s triggery and down right unpleasant.

For once Beloved actually looked over my shoulder to see what I was watching, cringed and said “don’t we have enough shit today without looking at past shit?” (I didn’t marry him for his eloquence. Or his fish. Or him not putting milk on the shopping list). Why did I want to look at a video showing how bad things were?

Except, this isn’t just history. This isn’t the Norman Conquest or the Civil War. We’re not talking an event that happened over 3 centuries ago.  This video was made in 1967 – that’s hardly a long time ago. In fact, it was only in 1967 that gay sex became legal in England. That cannot be said enough – sodomy laws in the UK were still on the books in 1967. Gay sex was illegal in 1967. This was within living memory – and I don’t mean in a World-War-1-some-extremely-old-people-with-the-Queen’s-Telegram-can-remember-it, living memory (though, certainly historical events that are centuries old can have major present effects). I mean in the lifetime of my parents.  Scotland didn’t legalise gay sex until 1980. Northern Ireland not until 1982 – I was born in 1981, this happened in my relatively short lifetime. It wasn’t until 2000 that the age consent was equalised (and the bizarre restriction on gay threesomes was removed) I remember that. I remember the SCREAMING MEEMIES the haters had over it. I remember mainstream newspapers printing stories about gay predators seeking out children.

There are people alive today who were arrested and convicted under this law. These people were persecuted by this law, their lives derailed and damaged by this law. How different would their lives have been – lives of people still living. There are literally people today with “buggery” on their criminal records – who have to declare that. Consensual gay sex is STILL appearing on criminal records. That’s not ancient history. That’s not something we can brush over. That’s not something we can pretend happened in a different time to different people.

You can’t pretend it’s a long time ago. It wasn’t – and not only does it leave stains of vileness like that faced by Mr. Crawford, not only does it cause heroes like Alan Turing to be largely removed from the pages of history – but it is still very much a part of our daily lives.

Major, virulent and legal homophobia was not a thing of the past – its vilest forms were common within our lifetimes. This isn’t a historical context – this is today’s context.

We’re not so far away from these times of acceptable hatred to be safe. We’re not so far away from them that we can be so sure we’d never go back to them. We’re not living in a new age or a new era. We’re not looking at the quaint vagaries of a more backward age. We’re looking at our lifetimes, our parent’s lifetimes, the lifetimes of the people in power and the people who are trying to destroy us. This isn’t a distant THEN, this is still very much a relevant NOW.

When the haters spout off their vile rhetoric, they are speaking in this context – because such hatred was the norm such a short time ago – and this is what they wish to return to. Because this is what they remember. And pushing us back to it wouldn’t involve going back all that far.

And that is frightening. We’ve come a long way in a short time – but the time is short and we haven’t left the hatred behind. This isn’t yesterday’s hatred. This isn’t yesterday’s bigotry