Play revives BBC’s shelved 1954 programme on male homosexuality

A new stage play, The BBC’s First Homosexual, will open in Salford and tour England in February as part of LGBT+ History Month, bringing to the stage the original script of the BBC’s first programme on male homosexuality from the 1950s that was shelved. The script, rediscovered by historian Marcus Collins, records contributors who largely condemned homosexuality.

Lord Hailsham is quoted as telling the BBC: "All the homosexuals I’ve known have been extremely eager, like alcoholics, to spread the disease from which they suffer." A Church of England moralist warned of "transitory attachments, disillusionment and loneliness in his old age," and 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, 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.

Playwright Stephen M Hornby worked from the original script and BBC archive material and said the script showed either "naked, foaming-at-the-mouth homophobia" or voices urging conversion or abstinence; the only remotely gay voice was an anonymous "reformed homosexual" who believed in the value of "sheer will power." Collins found attempts to involve the anonymous Sunday Times writer later identified as Mary Whitehouse, who did not participate but will appear as a character in the play.

Key Topics

Culture, Stephen M Hornby, Marcus Collins, Lgbt History Month, Wolfenden Report, Mary Whitehouse