The BBC becomes less and less literate
with basic spelling mistakes/errors on its website,
and ignorance of history in its programmes.
Recently, on a history programme I heard a presenter
express horror that a queer man was sentenced to 14 months'
imprisonment in Buchenwald in 1943 "for being gay".
(The German law specified soliciting, not just being a Warme Brüder.)
Queer men were likewise sent to prison in 1940s Britain|
and Ireland and the Channel Isles, Gibraltar
and throughout the British Empire,
for inviting (or appearing to invite) others to 'physical intimacy'.
Some. like Alan Turing, killed themselves.
Why do BBC presenters not know this ?
2 comments:
I 'solicited' and allowed myself to be solicited for sex
(though not to penetrate or be penetrated anally)
when it was still a crime in the nasty British Isles.
Fortunately, I was not apprehended nor imprisoned for it –
metely for shoplifting groceries in the 1970s.
It is not just the BBC, or commercial television, that are amnesiacs with regard to when 'being gay' was illegal and vigorously prosecuted. It was only during lockdown, in 2020, that I read the penguin paperback 'Against The Law' by journalist Peter Wildeblood. There I understood his courage in standing up to the law. He served time in prison and survived it. He was different to Wilde and Casement who both directly died due to British justice. Whilst incarcerated Wildeblood taught some prisoners how to read. His book surely appalled Tory Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, who made 'being gay' whilst being an ordinary citizen far more difficult then it had been in the years before Fyfe was Home Secretary.
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