ABSTRACT
A significant portion of the initial public response was quite favourably disposed to the report’s principal recommendation on homosexual law reform. Section 1 of the Street Offences Act made it criminal ‘for a common prostitute to loiter or solicit in a street or public place for the purpose of prostitution’; and Section 4 increased the maximum penalty for living on the earnings of prostitution to seven years imprisonment. The men and women who had been encouraged by the publication of the report to coalesce politically around the prospect of law reform chose to liken what was happening in and around the criminal courts, especially outside the large urban areas, to ‘provincial pogroms’. Change would again have to be effected through legislation in Westminster, but action in Parliament would be fraught. The response to the Report was taken to ‘show[] that the most ignorant prejudice flourishes in high places’.
