Heterosexual dictatorship : male homosexuality in postwar Britain

Patrick Higgins

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.