Homosexuality, Psychiatric Liberalism, and the Politics of Expertise in Britain, 1945–69

At the end of the Second World War in Britain, medical experts dominated the discussion in educated circles of the ‘problem of homosexuality’. Medical expertise, however, had already been challenged by the rapid rise of psychiatry in general and psychoanalysis in particular from the 1930s onwards. Certainly by the 1950s – a time when liberal expertise in Britain was central to both the intellectual justification for, and the development of, the postwar welfare state – the liberal psychiatric expert claimed to offer the most up-to-date and enlightened attitudes to what they, too, admitted was a ‘social problem’. By the mid-1950s, liberal experts in the psychiatric profession were claiming the moral high ground. Nevertheless, their very liberalism was rendered increasingly problematic when homosexuals, often assisted by more radical sociologists, questioned the very logic of the paradigm that inscribed them as a ‘social problem’ to begin with. Developing these themes, this paper will unpack the many paradoxes of psychiatric liberalism in early postwar Britain. It will focus on a number of individuals, but especially on Edward Glover, founder of the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency in the 1930s and in the forefront of the calls for the liberalization of the laws against homosexuality in the 1950s. It will argue that his liberal, progressive stance was increasingly marginalized by the 1960s, a decade in which psychiatry itself was now being relegated more and more to the sidelines in the naming and classification of homosexuality, and in setting the terms of public debate about the phenomenon.