1977 As an instrument of literary persecution the English laws of blasphemy have traditionally pilloried the crazy. (The first blasphemy offender was John Taylor, in 1676. He claimed, inter alia, to be the younger brother of the whoremaster Christ.) Blasphemy prosecutions thereafter were invoked against a series of martyrs to free thought (e.g. Paine and Shelley). Free thinkers have always loathed, and resisted, theocratic laws and (after 1776) point to America where persecution on grounds of religious deviance is unconstitutional.
With the Sexual Offences Act in the UK in 1967, homosexual acts between consenting adults ceased to be criminal. They remained, however, offensive to many Britons – not least those associated with Mrs Mary Whitehouse’s pressure groups and moral crusades: VALA (the Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association); the Festival of Light; the Responsible Society, etc.
In June 1977 a copy of the weekly newspaper Gay News, issue 96, was referred to Mrs Whitehouse (by an affronted probation officer, it was later reported, a member of the Responsible Society).
The paper contained a full-page poem by James Kirkup, entitled ‘The Love that Dares to Speak its Name’, illustrated by Tony Reeves. The illustration shows a conventional Deposition, with the difference that the body of Christ is being lowered by a Roman soldier and features what Philip Larkin, in another poem, called ‘a tuberous cock and balls’. The soldier, as the poem narrates, enjoys himself with some Roman sodomy on the corpse, justifying the act by reference to Christ’s sexual preferences:
I knew he’d had it off with other men –
with Herod’s guards, with Pontius Pilate,
With John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus,
with foxy Judas, a great kisser, with
the rest of the Twelve, together and apart.
He loved all men, body, soul and spirit – even me.
Kirkup was a well known and respected poet. He made no comment in the furore subsequently whipped up by Mrs Whitehouse other than to say that he, personally, found Christians’ versions of the Crucifixion ‘deeply disgusting’. Whitehouse, under the aegis of VALA, ingeniously brought a private prosecution against Gay News, its editor Denis Lemon, and the paper’s distributors not on grounds of obscenity, but blasphemy.
The offence was, most of the legal profession thought, a dead letter in the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, a trial took place at the Central Criminal Court in London, 4–12 July 1977.
Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble were called in by the defence as expert witnesses, to testify to the literary worth of the poem. John Mortimer was the counsel for Gay News. The prosecution line was that the poem was self-evidently ‘filthy’ and its blasphemy ‘too obvious for words’. Mortimer wondered whether they had, somehow, been transported back into the Middle Ages.
The jury, by a majority verdict of ten to two, agreed with Whitehouse. The judge, in passing his verdict, was not sympathetic:
I have no doubt whatever that this poem is quite appalling and is the most scurrilous profanity. It is past my comprehension that a man like James Kirkup can express himself in this way and that the paper should publish it in reckless disregard for the feelings of Christians.
It was ‘touch and go’ as to whether Lemon should go to prison. He was instead fined £500, with a nine-month suspended sentence. On appeal the Law Lords sided, five to three, with the court’s verdict.
Despite an attempt to revive it during the Satanic Verses controversy fifteen years later (on the grounds that Rushdie’s novel blasphemed against Islam), this was the last prosecution for literary blasphemy in the UK, although no government has taken the risk (a certain vote-loser) of revoking the law.