Richard Smith talks about the British Medical Association’s “official” stance on heterosexual and homosexual “indulgences” from the 1950s on, and also explains why British use of deodorant always lagged the rest of the western world:
I was once responsible for Family Doctor Publications, which were a series of booklets owned by the BMA, had titles like You and Your Bowels, and sold in huge numbers in the 1950s because they were almost the only information on health available to the public. I was much amused that in the 50s the BMA agreed that the booklets could include advertising for cigarettes and alcohol, but under no circumstances could they advertise contraceptives. And at about the same time thousands of copies of one booklet had to be pulped because it seemed to accept the possibility of sex before marriage. Now I’ve learnt more about the prudishness and “severe, restrictive morality” of the BMA.
[. . .]
The BMA was also happy to ignore science and evidence when it launched into explanations of what at the time was perceived as “an epidemic of homosexuality.” “Many men see in homosexual practices as a way of satisfying their sexual desires without running the risks of sequelae of heterosexual intercourse. They believe, for example, that there is no danger of contracting venereal disease in homosexual activity. Other men adopt homosexual practices as a substitute for extramarital heterosexual intercourse because there is no fear of causing pregnancy or emotional complications as in the life of a woman.” The idea that “women” equals “emotional complications” was a very 50s idea.
It was unsurprising, thought the BMA, that the public would be hostile to homosexuals because of the propensity of its practitioners in “positions of authority to give preferential treatment to homosexuals or to require homosexual subjection as an expedient for promotion. The existence of practising homosexuals in the Church, Parliament, Civil Service, Armed Forces, Press, radio, stage and other institutions constitutes a special problem.” Medicine is conspicuously absent from that list. God (heterosexual, of course, even though capable of insemination without intercourse) forbid that the BMA would have homosexuals in its membership.
The BMA found sexual acts between men “repulsive” and that “homosexuals congregating blatantly in public houses, streets, and restaurants are an outrage to public decency. Effeminate men wearing make-up and using scent are objectionable to everybody.” Born in 1952 I was infused with this kind of thinking and didn’t use a deodorant until I was 45 for fear of what people might think. My father, born in 1922, didn’t like me to buy half a pint rather than a pint of beer in case I be thought homosexual.
Having made its position clear, the BMA concluded that “if degenerate sodomists” persist then “it would be in the public interest to deal with them in the same way as mentally deranged offenders.” In other words, commit them to state lunatic asylums.
