Jude Rowley | Lancaster University
1972 was not a peaceful year on Lancaster University’s newly-built Bailrigg campus. The Second Craig Affair (see EPOCH 17) had shaken the foundations of the University, student dissent was rife, and the new institution was struggling to strike a workable balance between the Oxonian-inflected visions of University managers and the radical dreams of a post-68 generation of largely working-class students. Clashes permeated the University landscape and students were never far from a protest, whether against rent increases, the Vietnam War, or, on 10 May 1972, Cliff Richard.
The singer, of ‘Summer Holiday’ fame, had come to Lancaster to perform in the University’s Great Hall at a time when the so-called ‘college circuit’ was an important part of Britain’s music scene, and Lancaster University had a particular reputation as one of the leading music venues in the North West. However, Richard’s appearance was unlike that of other acts who played the Great Hall in this era, such as Black Sabbath, Paul McCartney, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, and Status Quo. Richard had been brought to Lancaster for an evangelical event in support of the Christian organisations he patronised. At the time, Richard was the squeaky-clean poster-boy for the Nationwide Festival of Light, a Christian organisation intent on launching moral crusades against the spread of a so-called permissive society.
Armed with unsubtle slogans like ‘moral pollution needs a solution’, the NFOL was designed to provide young people with a Christian alternative to the apparent cultural excess and obscenity of the day. Despite its youth focus, its leading figures were largely middle-aged and included prominent ‘anti-obscenity’ campaigners like Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford. However, unlike the austere Whitehouse and the eccentric Lord Longford, NFOL leaders saw Cliff Richard as someone who could lend a ‘trendy’ face to the campaign. A decade earlier, this might have been the case. Richard had once been seen as Britain’s answer to Elvis until he swore off the evils of rock and roll after his religious rebirth in the mid-1960s. His role in organisations like the NFOL and wider Christian ‘anti-immorality’ campaigns was a key part of his transition from hip-swinging teenage sensation, once himself charged by the NME with ‘the most crude exhibitionism ever seen on British TV’, to mild-mannered darling of the blue rinse brigade.
He arrived at Lancaster during this transition, having recently released his first ‘gospel’ single, ‘Jesus’. A minor hit, peaking at 35 in the charts, this song called for the return of Christ to ‘save us from the destruction of love’, amongst other things, with somewhat homophobic overtones. Though Richard himself avoided explicit homophobia, the NFOL was hardly a friend to the LGBT+ community. It expounded a ‘Biblical’ view of family life and positioned homosexuality as a threat to society, love, and human dignity.
As a result, for as long as the NFOL existed, it was met with resistance from gay activists across the country. The most famous protest came in London in September 1971, with ‘Operation Rupert’. This saw the inaugural meeting of the NFOL disrupted by a co-ordinated action by gay liberation activists, some dressed as nuns, who infiltrated the hall, heckled the stage, threw talcum powder from the balcony, and released mice into the audience. Cliff Richard watched on as GLF activists unveiled a ‘Cliff for Queen’ banner, referencing long-running jokes in gay liberation circles about his own sexuality.
When Richard arrived in Lancaster the following year, he did so against a backdrop of protests like this. There was also a local context. The second Craig Affair had only been settled the previous week and students were evidently still in the mood for protest. Richard, and the homophobic organisation he represented, marked an ideal target. In this case, however, student protests would not be led by the usual left-wingers but were instead headed by the Lancaster branch of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). When Richard took to the stage in the Great Hall, he was met with a bloc of over 100 GLF supporters, some bedecked in drag, who had infiltrated the auditorium. They disrupted the event and drowned out Richard. Chief among their heckles were attempts to encourage Cliff to ‘come out’, which eventually forced him to snap at the protestors before leaving the stage. Half a century later, there are contrasting accounts of what exactly happened next. Some claim Richard returned to the stage to continue his event once the GLF had left. Others claim he later came back to Lancaster to talk directly to the protestors about their cause, though Richard himself later denied this.
In part, this ambiguity can be attributed to the very limited media coverage of the protest at the time, which has meant the event has endured only in the memory of those involved. Except for the Morecambe Guardian’s condemnation of the ‘shouting and stamping of the Gay Liberation people sitting at the front of the hall’, the protest received very limited coverage even in the local press, which was still devoting much of its attention to the aftermath of the second Craig Affair. The GLF protest, however, was not an isolated incident, but instead a product of Lancaster’s active and growing gay liberation movement in the early 70s.
Founded before homosexuality was legalised in Britain, Lancaster University’s formative years came amidst a struggle for recognition, destigmatisation, and equality for LGBT+ people. Students were at the forefront of this, and Lancaster became a vibrant centre, with the national press reporting fears as early as 1973 that Lancaster University was becoming ‘a paradise for homosexuals’. It was not a paradise in any utopian sense, however, with homophobia remaining rampant both locally and nationally. Indeed, the suggestion that Lancaster was a gay ‘paradise’ was taken from a motion proposed to the Lancaster branch of the Association of University Teachers by David Dew-Hughes from the Physics Department, lamenting that Lancaster University was becoming renowned as ‘the place for Gay Lib’. Though the union refused to discuss the motion, it is indicative of the homophobic backlash LGBT+ students, staff, and activists faced throughout the period. This prevailing attitude of the time was perhaps best captured in Tom Robinson’s 1970s gay liberation anthem ‘Sing if You’re Glad to Be Gay’, which satirises the complaints from anti-LGBT+ quarters after 1967 that ‘the buggers are legal now, what more are they after?’.
Legalisation was the beginning, not a final resolution. The 1967 act that had legalised homosexuality had introduced an unequal age of consent of 21, meaning that it remained illegal for most students to be in homosexual relationships. Unsurprisingly, as Lancaster reckoned both with the formation of the new University and changing legal status of homosexuality, tension over LGBT+ equality became a prominent feature of local life in the early 1970s. Students, activists, and allies like Anna and Bill Corr publicly clashed with local homophobes like the vicar, Rev. Frank Ockenden, who had declared that ‘homosexuality, like prostitution, is a moral disease’. A prominent sociology lecturer, Carol Riddell, had come out as transgender in May 1972 and had been subsequently harassed by the local press. Local tensions had also gained national prominence when the ‘Morecambe Affair’ saw ultimately unsuccessful attempts by Morecambe Town Council to block the first national Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) conference from taking place on Morecambe Pier in 1973 after highly publicised complaints.
There was thus a need for activism and resistance, but also spaces of queer acceptance, and this was a role filled by the GLF. For example, on 7 July 1973, the Lancaster GLF organised a march through the town centre, sandwiched between a disco in the Town Hall the night before and a ‘gay day’ in Williamson Park later that afternoon. This combination of socialisation and protest, self-expression and resistance, captures the spirit of the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. This movement also had strongly political overtones and intersections, which even Cliff Richard could recognise.
Beyond claiming that his encounters with the GLF convinced him that ‘Satan is very much alive and well’, in his memoirs, Richard suggested that an unholy alliance between the Gay Liberation Front and Lancaster University’s resident communist ‘Rent-a-Mob’ were to blame for the disruption in the Great Hall. This is indicative of the intersectionality and overlap between the gay liberation movement and the student left at this time.
At the centre of this, in Lancaster and beyond, was a sense of a common struggle. Carol Riddell captured this in suggesting that ‘the reactionary tendencies symbolised by the Festival of Light will move onto the offensive against gay people, and possibly begin to link up with the fascist/racist movements into a really dangerous diversionary threat’. There was a shared opposition to capitalism that made the student left, gay liberation, and growing feminist movements natural allies, even if the relationship between them was not always the easiest.
Embodying the overlap between left-wing and gay liberation circles, offshoots from the Lancaster GLF group saw the emergence of Gay Marxist in 1973. This offered a socialist perspective on matters of gay liberation, and though short-lived, would eventually see readers as far away as New York City. It would be succeeded by the London-based Gay Left after 1975 and marked an important landmark in the history of a distinctly left-wing gay liberation movement.
However, intersecting interests also meant intersecting fault lines, and in the true spirit of the queer art of failure, the GLF would ultimately split and collapse soon after its formation. The left was already particularly prone to fragmentation, and existing splits between Trotskyists and Maoists were transplanted into gay liberation circles. The relationship between the GLF and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was similarly uneasy, not least because the former saw the latter as insufficiently political. Within the GLF itself, there was also a more significant and damaging split.
This was one that was played out in the Lancaster group as much as any other. Reflecting a wider division in the movement from its early days, some lesbian feminists started to become disillusioned, feeling that they continued to experience sexism from gay men in certain gay liberation spaces, where they felt their interests were ignored and they were not treated on an equal footing. The Women’s Group had broken away from the main GLF over this in February 1972, and a national ‘think-in’ took place at Lancaster in an attempt to reflect introspectively on this division. Splits and setbacks such as this would come to define the GLF from its birth to its eventual collapse little more than three years later.
As this suggests, the story of the student gay liberation movement in the early 1970s is a complicated one. In part, this is because the gay liberation activists of this era were pioneers: the first generation after the legalisation of homosexuality, with no precedent to follow but plenty to fight for. Subsequent years would see the scene at Lancaster continue to evolve, such as with the emergence of the Lancaster Gay Switchboard in 1976 (see EPOCH 12), but the GLF was the first co-ordinated attempt to build a lasting movement. In shouting down Cliff Richard, as well as in their other activities, early Lancaster GLF pioneers were not afraid to push boundaries, and ultimately to make mistakes, reconstitute, and reflect. As a result, though they had no precedent before them, they left a lasting precedent behind to be taken up by the generations of student activists at Lancaster and elsewhere who have followed in their footsteps.
Further Reading:
Lisa Power, No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front, 1970-1973 (Cassell, 1995)
Gay Left Collective, Homosexuality: Power and Politics (Verso, 2018)
Aubrey Walter (ed.), Come Together: The Years of Gay Liberation, 1970-73 (Verso, 2018)
Dan Glass, United Queerdom (Zed Books, 2020)
Jude Rowley is International History Editor at EPOCH Magazine and a PhD candidate in International Relations (IR) based in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University. Beyond his PhD research on the disciplinary history of IR, he is also interested in revisiting the forgotten histories of Lancaster University.