Original script from 1954 referring to ‘troubles of this kind’ to be brought to life on stage for LGBT+ History Month
“All the homosexuals I’ve known have been extremely eager, like alcoholics, to spread the disease from which they suffer,” the barrister Lord Hailsham told the BBC in 1954.
Other contributors to the BBC’s first ever programme on male homosexuality largely agreed. A Church of England moralist warned any “invert” who may have been listening in of “transitory attachments, disillusionment and loneliness in his old age”.
The educationist John Wolfenden recommended “a healthy and normal” home life as “the best sort of prophylactic against all sorts of troubles of this kind”.
The subject of homosexuality, then a crime, was so taboo that the finished radio programme was shelved until a heavily edited version was broadcast on the Home Service three years later.
