The Secret Lovers

In 1950, a young researcher called Michael Schofield began to set up interviews across the UK with people from a world that was so illicit, many people in the country could hardly bear to think about it. Schofield’s research was intended to uncover what it was like to be gay in Britain. The interviews he conducted were with men from three broad categories – those who had been imprisoned for homosexual acts; gay men who had been made to attend psychiatric care; and those who lived out their homosexuality in secret. On the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, using the original testimony of Schofield’s interviewees, this will use a mixture of drama and documentary to cast a light on what life was like before the passing of that revolutionary bill. All these men lived in an Orwellian world where merely the suspicion of homosexuality would be sufficient for the police to detain them for questioning – and where interrogations often led those under suspicion to provide even more names of gay friends and lovers. Schofield’s work, collected in three books published between 1952 and 1965, acted like a lightning bolt on the national consciousness, illuminating a world that had been entirely hidden from view. Homosexuality had been illegal in the UK for more than 400 years – now Schofield’s books would be frequently referred to in Parliament by those MPs seeking to end the ban on homosexual relations.