“Bath porn case JPs rule: This one’s not obscene” proclaimed the Bath Evening Chronicle in its front page headline on Wednesday 17 April 1974. It went on to explain, “An issue of Gay News, one of 10,000 magazines seized by police in a raid on a Bath wholesale newsagents, was not obscene, the city magistrates ruled today.”
To those Bath citizens who regularly read Gay News, this would have seemed blindingly obvious. However, this was not the case for many in the police and judicial establishment. Most people interested in LGBTQ+ history have heard of the Gay News trial for blasphemy, which resulted from a private prosecution brought by the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse in 1976 and dragged on until 1979. Surrounding this, however, was a long-running effort by parts of the state to restrict and control the access of the burgeoning gay movement to the public sphere. This had started with the prosecution in 1969-72 of the alternative magazine IT for publishing male contact ads and culminated in the prosecution of the Gay’s the Word bookshop for importing books about homosexuality in 1984-85. In between, the police carried on a campaign against obscene publications, one of the major issues of the period equivalent to today’s anxieties about internet pornography, and regularly raided bookshops and newsagents, seizing publications, including gay magazines, which they considered pornographic.
The Bath case resulted from one of these raids on a wholesale warehouse owned by Johnson’s Central Newsagency on 31 October 1973. The case had elements of farce, since among the titles initially seized were issues of the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, Railway Modeller and The Lady. However, for a serious community newspaper like Gay News, which always struggled with its finances, the matter was deadly serious. The prosecution was brought against the distributors and Gay News only found out about it through them, meaning that it could have been condemned as obscene without even knowing about it. The newspaper hired a barrister to defend itself in court. When the magistrates asked to see the offending issue, the police took a quarter of an hour to find it and it then emerged that no-one had actually looked at it. Gay News was included in the prosecution simply because of its title. Once the magistrates had examined it, they immediately ruled that it was not obscene. Gay News headlined the outcome as a “Triumph”, but when it asked the court for its costs, it was awarded only £250 against legal bills of £1715. It then appealed to its readers and raised over £1500 within three weeks, a sign of the high regard with which it was held.
The case had important legal consequences. This and a similar case also involving the lesbian magazine Sappho in Bournemouth in February 1975 relieved Gay News of further legal pressure from the state and helped establish that publications produced by LGBTQ+ people were entitled to address the subject of homosexuality in the public sphere. Locally, there were also some interesting repercussions. A Bath branch of the national campaign against censorship was set up to publicise the case and the Bath Gay Awareness Group (BGAG), which was founded in Autumn 1971, sent some of its members to the convening meeting, seeing it as an opportunity to extend its activism. The Bath Co-ordinating Committee of the censorship campaign held a small protest outside the Guildhall, where the trial was taking place, handing out free copies of Gay News. Gay News was vital to the LGBTQ+ movement in the provinces, listing pubs, clubs and local groups and so enabling newcomers to find their way onto the gay scene and become involved with activist organisations. In Bath, it was available in a small number of newsagents and in the Garrick’s Head, the city’s longest-lasting gay pub. The BGAG ran a lengthy campaign to get Gay News into the local public library. Initially, this was rejected by councillors but in 1981, when Labour took control of Avon County Council, which then ran the libraries in the area, the leisure committee reconsidered and agreed that the three main libraries in Bath, Bristol and Weston-super-Mare could stock the paper, provided the activists paid for it. The subscriptions were jointly funded by the Bath Gay Group and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) Bristol group.
The prosecution also throws interesting light on the role of the local press. The Bath Evening Chronicle recognised that it was a newsworthy event and gave it front page billing. It also published a sympathetic, half-page article on the Bath Gay Awareness Group, complete with a photograph, in July 1972, some months after the group was founded. Yet while it featured LGBTQ+ issues in its news pages, the paper’s Managing Director steadfastly refused to accept advertisements for the group, explaining that he thought that homosexuality was a gross abnormality. In contrast, the Bristol Evening Post raised no objection to printing advertisements for LGBTQ+ groups, reflecting a pattern of inconsistency across the provincial press at this time. The Bath Evening Chronicle reversed its policy in November 1978 and from then on accepted advertisements from the BGAG.
This episode illustrates how, for years after the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act that partially decriminalised male homosexual acts, restrictions continued to be placed on discussing homosexuality in the public sphere. These restrictions were contested and finally overturned by LGBTQ+ activists working at both the national and local level but it was a long struggle, involving years of hard and often disheartening work before this was achieved.
Robert Howes is the author of Gay West: Civil society, community and LGBT history in Bristol and Bath, 1970 to 2010. He is also a member of OutStories Bristol, a voluntary organisation which aims to record and preserve the LGBTQ+ history of the Bristol region. OutStories Bristol organised the ground-breaking Revealing Stories Exhibition at the city’s M Shed Museum in 2013 and has recently co-operated with the University of Bristol in the Mapping LGBT+ Bristol project, which produced a multi-layered digital map of the region. The Bath Guildhall, where this Gay News trial was held, can be found on the map, available on the Know Your Place site.