"Heterosexual Dictatorship offers a provocative challenge to the cosy and genial portrait of post-war Britain that has dominated most people's perception of that era. Laws which prohibited all homosexual activity and a press which established a tradition of vicious antipathy towards male homosexuality created a climate in Britain which was characterised by Tom Driberg, Labour MP and journalist, as a 'heterosexual dictatorship'. In this book, historian Patrick Higgins tells the story of the infamous inquiry established by the British government in 1954 under the chairmanship of John Wolfenden to examine these repressive laws. The report of that committee published in 1957 eventually produced a reform of the law in 1967." "By using the records of numerous trials for homosexual offences he has been able to trace an extraordinary campaign by the British legal establishment - most notably provincial police forces - to persecute homosexual men since the First World War. Higgins shows that hostility to male homosexuality was deeply ingrained in the press and all legal institutions by the 1950s, a tradition which has remained largely unchanged to the present day."--BOOK JACKET.

Log in to favorite or list