Britain will posthumously pardon thousands of gay and bisexual men

LONDON – Britain will posthumously pardon thousands of gay and bisexual men who were convicted of sexual offenses that were decriminalized decades ago, the government announced Thursday. In addition, the process for people who are still alive and want to clear their name will be streamlined.

The decision comes nearly three years after Queen Elizabeth formally pardoned Alan Turing, the British mathematician regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer, who was convicted on charges of homosexuality in 1952. He committed suicide in 1954.

The government apologized in 2009 for its treatment of Turing, who made a major contribution to Britain in World War II by cracking Germany's Enigma coding machine, and the head of Britain's signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, apologized in April for past discrimination against gays.

Consensual sex between men over age 21 was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967, in Scotland in 1980 and in Northern Ireland in 1982. The age of consent for homosexual sex was reduced to 16, the same as the age of consent for heterosexual sex, in 2001.

Under a proposal that some have called the Turing Law, deceased people convicted of sexual acts that are no longer criminalized will receive an automatic pardon.

Among them could be Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright who was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895 after being accused of sodomy, although the complexity of his case makes it difficult to know for sure. He was tried not once but twice, and only after he withdrew a criminal libel lawsuit against his accuser.

The Ministry of Justice said, however, that no deceased individuals would be singled out by name.

Under the plan announced Thursday, they will receive an automatic pardon, without additional review by the government. Some 15,000 of 65,000 men who were convicted under such laws are still alive, according to John Sharkey, a member of the House of Lords who put forward the Turing Law.

"It is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of any crime today," Sam Gyimah, the parliamentary undersecretary of state for prisons and probation, said in a statement.

John Nicolson, a Scottish member of Parliament, has put forward a bill, which Parliament is scheduled to debate on Friday, that would offer an automatic blanket pardon to living Britons convicted under offenses like gross indecency that were used to target gay and bisexual men.

Gyimah said the Conservative-led government did not support the legislation because it "could lead, in some cases," to pardons for people whose convictions included offenses that are still crimes, like sex with a minor and nonconsensual sexual activity.

Paul Twocock, director of campaigns, policy and research at Stonewall, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, said it disagreed with the government's interpretation of Nicolson's bill.

Matt Houlbrook, a professor of cultural history at University of Birmingham and the author of "Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957," said he was worried that the posthumous pardons contributed to oversimplification of both history and the identities of men like Turing.

"The metaphor of the closet fails to capture the nature of queer life before 1967: interwar London was home to a vibrant urban culture that was perhaps more visible than at any time before the 1970s," he wrote in a blog post, when the debate over Turing's pardon was underway.

He also noted that gay identity meant something very different decades ago. "The most remarkable thing about queer urban culture is that it was, to a large extent, composed of and created by men who never thought themselves queer," he said.

In an interview, Houlbrook said he thought the government's announcement had "symbolic and practical importance" for those who are still alive, but still found it insufficient.