AIDS, Mass Observation and the Permissive Turn

Abstract

This article re-examines the 1980s anti-gay ‘backlash’ using the testimonies of around 600 largely heterosexual Mass Observers (MOers) in the UK writing in response to a directive issued on the AIDS crisis in 1987. It explores the political, generational and geographical divisions that emerge through these testimonies. It also considers the near consensus amongst MOers about promiscuity and the terms on which homosexuality was deemed acceptable. This pivots on a rhetoric and rationale familiar from the Wolfenden report of 1957  and ensuing debate in the 1960s. It contrasts sharply with testimonies on the AIDS crisis submitted by around 160 gay men to the parallel (and similarly formulated) National Lesbian and Gay Survey. The tension between these two bodies of testimonial evidence underscores and further nuances Stuart Hall’s argument about the limits of the much mythologized sexual revolution and ‘permissive moment’ of the 1960s. The biggest contention relates to the gay ‘trespass’ on the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public resources’ in the mid-1980s as the scale of the epidemic and intimate details of a purported ‘gay lifestyle’ were gaining ever increasing coverage. This to many was a clear breach of the Wolfenden ‘accord’. The article thus addresses the fate of permissiveness and of an uneasy post war moral settlement in the pressing context of the AIDS crisis.