‘Tory-normativity’ and gay rights advocacy in the British Conservative Party since the 1950s
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148118815407 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Martin Monahan |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
815407BPI0010.1177/1369148118815407The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsMonahan
research-article2018
Original Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
‘Tory-normativity’ and gay
2019, Vol. 21(1) 132 –147
© The Author(s) 2018
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rights advocacy in the British
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118815407
DOI: 10.1177/1369148118815407
Conservative Party since the
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
1950s
Martin Monahan
Abstract
Gay rights advocacy in the Conservative Party since the 1950s played-down its difference from
Conservative beliefs by emphasising pragmatism over emancipation; discretion over celebration;
and responsibility over rights. This positioning was allied to a construction of gay men and women
in the image of the idealised conservative citizen: law-abiding, entrepreneurial, and ultimately
familial – a process I label ‘Tory-normativity’. Tory-normativity introduced gay rights advocacy
into the party in an acceptable form and consequently caused party policy to develop. Ultimately,
the construction of Tory-normativity has been used to depoliticise gay identity: initially gay men
and then from the 2000s onwards, gay men and women.
Keywords
Conservative Party, gay rights, homosexual law reform, institutionalism, party change,
progressivism
Introduction
Since the 1950s, the Conservative Party has repeatedly impeded gay rights legislation.
Yet at times, individual Conservative politicians, and recently the leadership, have led on
reform. The Conservative MP Humphry Berkeley in 1966 introduced a private member’s
bill to propose decriminalising male homosexual acts; the Conservative Lord Arran intro-
duced this same Bill in the Lords; the Conservative Lord Boothby introduced the Bill in
1977 to decriminalise homosexuality in Scotland; in 1994, it was MP Edwina Currie who
introduced an amendment to The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill attempting to
have the age of consent for gay men set at 16; and it was a Conservative-led government
who oversaw the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. With other gay rights legisla-
tion such as the Sexual Offences Act 1967; the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000;
Department of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Corresponding author:
Martin Monahan, Department of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham Trent University,
Nottingham, NG1 5LT UK.
Email: martin.monahan@ntu.ac.uk
Monahan
133
the Adoption and Children Act 2002; and the Civil Partnership Act 2004, we see a number
of Conservative MPs speaking in favour of progressive legislation. It is of interest, there-
fore, to examine how a Conservative strain of thought has encompassed issues of gay
rights, and how members of the party are able to advocate progressive positions from
within an anti-progressive institutional framework – (the meaning of progressivism, like
so many political words, is contested: here I take Griffith’s (2014: 29) understanding that
progressivism is a set of policies that is guided by optimism, is accepting of rupture, and
seeks social justice.)
There has been much study on the discourse of opposition to gay rights legislation
(Baker, 2004; Burridge, 2004; Ellis and Kitzinger, 2002; Findlay, 2017; Love and Baker,
2014; Smith, 1994; Waites, 2000, 2003). This work empirically documents the numerous
instances of gay rights legislation being opposed by Conservatives. Many Conservative
MPs spoke vociferously, and often vulgarly, against decriminalisation in 1967 and 1977;
age of consent parity; civil partnerships; and marriage equality. The range of the literature
on Conservative opposition to gay rights legislation rightly reflects the extent of that
opposition. Yet, as a consequence, Conservative gay rights advocacy has remained some-
what under-examined. There has been an excellent historical account conducted by
McManus (2011), a Conservative Party advisor. Yet, the same language analysis regularly
applied to the opposers of reform has not been applied to advocates. To address this
absence, this article examines Conservative gay rights advocacy since the 1950s as evi-
denced in House of Commons and House of Lords speeches, as well as reflections in the
media, diaries, and memoirs. These data are accompanied by archival analysis of the
papers of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality held at the London School of
Economics and Political Science.
The analysis is divided into three attitudinal eras, following (mutatis mutandis) Page’s
(2014a) typology of Tory progressivism: One-Nation progressive conservatism (running
from the 1940s to the 1970s); neo-liberal (anti-progressive) conservatism (through to the
1997 election defeat); and progressive neo-liberal conservatism (since 1997). Significantly,
Page identifies the contingent nature of Tory progressivism: the immediate public order
issues at hand are what dictate responsible action rather than values. As Page (2014b: 18)
writes: ‘actions (for the progressive Tory) are pragmatic responses to existing problems
rather than part of some broader, transformative “progressive” goal’. This observation is
key to understanding Conservative gay rights advocacy: it was continually necessary
(though the means change) to lessen the ideological agenda. Rather, the issue was pre-
sented as common-sense practicality. There is no awkward liberal telos of emancipation.
Consequently, Conservative gay rights advocacy has applied rather than challenged
Conservative ideas. That is to say, fundamental conservative principles of tradition,
responsibility, individuality, pragmatism, respectability, privacy, and order have not been
overhauled, rather these principles have been extended and cemented by being applied to
new groups.
Furthermore, this tactic is aided by the construction of gay men, and latterly (though
less strongly) gay women, around a Conservative exemplar: a process I label ‘Tory-
normativity’. This term borrows from work on ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan, 2002;
Stryker, 2008), but here I emphasise a particular Conservative Party version of this activ-
ity. ‘Homonormativity’, writes Duggan (2002: 179), ‘is a politics that does not contest
dominant … assumptions and institutions … but upholds and sustains them …’. It is a
term that sees the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community internalis-
ing the values and hierarchies of the heterosexual hegemon, leading to the production of
134
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(1)
an idealised image of the acceptable LGBT individual. Therefore, following this defini-
tion, Tory-normativity sees the ideal LGBT individual in specifically Conservative terms.
Consequently, inclusiveness by the party becomes itself a form of normalising control:
for excluded groups are included on the understanding they will behave in a conservative
fashion: middle class, discrete, economically productive, and eventually, nuclear family
producing. There has been no great restructuring of dominant thinking: rather, a mere
correction has been made, wherein a group previously seen as outside of acceptable
Conservative behaviour has been identified as ‘one of us’ all along.
Tory-normativity has been applied by gay rights advocates in the party to both gay
men and lesbians, though it has been heavily skewed towards gay men. In part, this bias
was because legislation debates up to the 1990s concentrated solely or disproportion-
ately on gay men – including Section 28, which though non-gendered in its intention
evoked discourse (often linked to the AIDS crisis) that referenced gay men more than
gay women (Jeffery-Poulter, 1991: 6, 220, 222). Consequently, although the LGBT com-
munity are advocated for and discriminated against across a number of intersectional
identities, in this article, I concentrate on the Tory-normativisation of gay men, singu-
larly, up to the 1990s; there is then a change to include both gay men and women as
advocacy shifts, especially since the 2000s, from a focus on issues around sex to a focus
on issues around relationships and families.
Tory-normativity has acted as the central facilitating construction in the process of
institutional change concerning gay rights advocacy in the Conservative Party. An insti-
tutional actor can only argue for change in a non-crisis environment using a mix of new
ideas and accepted old ideas. The ‘bridge’ of Tory-normativity (as will be empirically
demonstrated) has allowed the new idea of gay rights advocacy to meet old ideas of con-
servatism. This process of institutional change is labelled by Mahoney and Thelen (2010:
17–18) as conversion: ‘[it] occurs when rules remain formally the same but are inter-
preted and enacted in new ways …’. Tory-normativity allowed for a reinterpretation of
the rules of conservatism (be it traditional conservatism or neo-liberalism) to serve new
purposes. The success of the conversion of beliefs to incorporate new purposes relied on
specific actors using appropriate discourse: at first to convince themselves that their
advocating was not apostasy, and then with time to convince all or part of the institution
as well. This function of discourse in institutional change is highlighted by Schmidt
(2008: 313):
Discourses succeed when speakers address their remarks … at the right times in the right ways.
Their messages must be both convincing in cognitive...
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