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ON 27 MAY 1938 A DR. R. D. REID WROTE to the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, requesting clear guidance on the issue of homosexuality. Reid was a former school headmaster who had lost his position in a homosexual scandal the previous year. Following his prosecution and conviction, he "received letters of sympathy from inverts all over the country" and through these contacts found his way into what he called the "homosexual underworld."1 He told Lang that it was there, "in an atmosphere of bitter hostility to authority, both religious and civil, these unfortunate people obtain the understanding of fellowship which is otherwise denied them." Reid considered himself a loyal member of the Church of England but found the church's complete silence on homosexuality deplorable. He pleaded with Lang to end the church's "policy of almost criminal silence."2
Lang replied to Reid on 9 June. He wrote: "I am indeed only too painfully familiar with the problem with which you are concerned as I have constantly to deal with clergy, some of them otherwise of high character, who have given way to the instincts about which you write."3 Despite his sympathy with and knowledge of the problem, Lang concluded that he was not prepared to change the church's "policy of concealment."4 Nonetheless, Reid continued to campaign for church reform over the next twenty years. In 1953 he wrote to the new archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. Fisher replied in almost the same words as Lang: "This is hardly the moment at which to put in a plea for a better law or for public sympathy"5 As Fisher was writing those words, however, the Church of England Moral Welfare Council was starting to formulate a new church policy on homosexuality. In 1954 it published The Problem of Homosexuality: An Interim Report, which recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality. This report formed the basis of the church's submission to the British government's Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, known as the Wolfenden Committee, which met between 1954 and 1957. Significantly, it prefigured all of the committee's recommendations, including the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. Almost overnight, the Church of England seems to have ended its policy of silence and come out in support of...