A Little Gay History of Wales , livre ebook

A LITTLE
GAY
HISTORY
OF
WALES
A LITTLE
GAY
HISTORY
OF
WALES
DARYL LEEWORTHY
© Daryl Leeworthy, 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-480-5
e-ISBN 978-1-78683-482-9
The right of Daryl Leeworthy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The University of Wales Press acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design : Olwen Fowler
For Rhian, David and Christian. It’s one thing to see, it’s another to understand.
Contents
Abbreviations
Preamble
PART I: COMING OUT
Chapter One: Hidden From View?
Chapter Two: Legal Limitations
PART II: COMING TOGETHER
Chapter Three: Seeking Love, Finding It
Chapter Four: Dancing the Night Away
PART III: CHANGING THE WORLD
Chapter Five: Law Reform and Afterwards
Chapter Six: A Lost World?
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Notes
Abbreviations
BP
Bad Press
CHE
Campaign for Homosexual Equality
CLS
Cardiff Local Studies and Heritage Library, Cathays
CT
Cardiff Times
CYLCH
Cymdeithas y Lesbaid a Hoywon Cymraeg eu Hiaith
DT
Double Take
EEx
Evening Express
FRIEND
Fellowship for the Relief of the Isolated and Emotionally in Need and Distress
GA
Glamorgan Archives, Cardiff
GLF
Gay Liberation Front
GN
Gay News
GR
Gair Rhydd
LAGNA
Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive, Bishopsgate Institute, London
LCLGR
Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights
LGBT
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
LGSM
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners
NLW
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
NUM
National Union of Mineworkers
NUPE
National Union of Public Employees.
NUS
National Union of Students
PG
Police Gazette
SWA
South Wales Argus
SWDN
South Wales Daily News
SWDP
South Wales Daily Post
SWE
South Wales Echo
SWEP
South Wales Evening Post
UCC
University College Cardiff
UCNW
University College of North Wales, Bangor
UCS
University College Swansea
WM
Western Mail
Preamble
O n the last Friday of October 1984, a group of lesbians and gay men travelled from London to the Dulais Valley. The following day the group were guests of honour at a social in Onllwyn Welfare Hall organised by the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valleys Miners’ Support Group. One of them, a working-class Liverpudlian, got up on stage and gave a short speech explaining who they were, and how and why they had raised the money donated a few weeks before. At the end of the night, as Rod Stewart’s hit song Sailing played, couples gay and straight danced together in what was later regarded as a turning-point. A few weeks afterwards, Mike Jackson, the group’s secretary, reflected on the journey and the experiences he had had: the trip ‘was one of the happiest moments of my life’, he wrote, ‘and I’m sure I speak for everyone in our group who also had the honour of staying with you.’ Others agreed that it was ‘one of the most moving experiences of all our lives’. 1
When the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) was told in Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride , some of the surviving participants described it as a romance. Siân James told an audience at Big Pit in Blaenafon that the film was about ‘two communities that fell in love with each other’. 2 It was never certain either side would generate such warm feelings; indeed some in the gay community in London were adamant that the miners deserved no support. ‘How many of them [LGSM] have lived in a mining community’, wrote one correspondent in July 1984, ‘I would say not or they would know of the ignorance and false machismo.’ 3 Dai Donovan similarly remembered in 1986 that he
was very nervous when the lesbians and gays came down because I sort of realised how nervous they were and how people down here would react to them, but it was outstanding you know. For the first time they came to a community [where] they were able to live as ordinary members of the community, go to an ordinary club and dance with each other, which is something they couldn’t do even in London.
Donovan first met with LGSM outside Paddington Station in September 1984. He was there to collect a cheque for five hundred pounds, which LGSM were donating. In discussion with LGSM, Donovan came to recognise that working-class lesbians and gays were being exploited even in a place where they ostensibly had the greatest freedom of all. ‘They were’, he observed, ‘as much prisoners in London as they had been in their own communities … [it was a] very sad life in a way.’ Recognition of the situation carried forward to the support group in Onllwyn, challenging their perceptions of gay life in the capital and paving the way for mutual understanding.
LGSM likewise had their eyes opened to local conditions. Writing in the gay magazine Square Peg , one member of the group pondered life as it ‘must have been’ in the coalfield: ‘repressive [and] being the brunt of anti-gay jokes if you ever found the courage to come out’. 4 By the time the Pits and Perverts benefit gig at the Camden Electric Ballroom was held in December 1984, the bond between LGSM and the Dulais Valley was very strong indeed. So much so that teenagers from the area were encouraged to go to the concert. There was no outward sense of division and little sign of hostility. It was at Pits and Perverts that Dai Donovan made his now famous ‘You have worn our badge’ speech alongside Hefina Headon, the support group’s secretary, who announced the belated arrival of women’s liberation to Onllwyn. ‘We had no idea of the power we had’, she declared, ‘that will not be suppressed. We will never go back to sitting at home.’ 5
Dozens of miners from the South Wales Area of the NUM and their families joined the gay pride march through London in the summer of 1985; it was a symbolic gesture towards intercommunity solidarity. Not only was this the first pride march to feature non-gay people; it was perhaps the largest contingent of Welsh men and women that had yet taken part in gay pride events in the capital. 6 As the Valleys Star , the support group’s newsletter, observed:
Last Saturday, June 29, saw a drawing together of the links made by our support group with the Lesbian and Gay Committee in London. Over forty people from this area joined with ten thousand gays and lesbians in their annual Gay Pride March through the streets of London. It was a tremendous feeling to be in Hyde Park listening to the cheers when the support group and lodge banners were raised.
Although LGSM was the largest of the lesbian and gay support groups which emerged during the strike, it was by no means the only link between gay liberation and the industrial struggle in the coalfield. A lesbian and gay group from Southampton joined forces with the NUM lodge in Abercynon and recalled later that
Our best personal experiences were meeting miners who came to the city from Abercynon. After coming down here repeatedly and meeting politically active socialists, seeing them collect money, food and clothing, and generally working in support of the strikers, their attitudes were forced to change just by their own experiences, because they know we are just ordinary people, and people who support their struggle. 7
An LGSM group was also established in Cardiff, and members of the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights living in Swansea and Bristol were active in providing support for the miners through wider networks, although these others had none of the impact in much larger communities that LGSM had in small ones.
LGSM’s story was – and is – an inspirational one and it provided a fillip for local activism for several years after the strike: during lesbian and gay awareness week at University College Cardiff in February 1987, All Out! Dancing in Dulais , the documentary made by LGSM, was shown at the student union. 8 But it was all too easy to imagine that the events of 1984–5 marked a sudden departure in the advance of lesbian and gay rights. They did not. Instead, a light was shone on a form of political campaigning that had been marginal to mainstream politics, to be sure, but never entirely absent. The dynamo of what I have elsewhere called Labour Country had been social democratic politics based on material equality and articulated in a language of class; but this fell away in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, and into the vacuum came the politics of identity. That is, the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and, most especially, national identity and language.
Something of these tensions can be found in a series of films which appeared in the early 1990s and embraced the subject of gay life in a way never previously attempted, at least in Wales. Whereas ‘for many years Welsh people [had] been forced to see themselves on screen as often uninformed visiting film crews [had] seen them’, the advances of this period ensured that the camera’s gaze steadily became more ‘inside-looking-out’ than