Was winston churchill gay
Mary & George: homosexual relationships in the time of King James I were forbidden – but not uncommon
The Sky TV series Mary & George tells the story of the Countess of Buckingham, Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore), who moulded her son George (Nicholas Galitzine) to seduce King James I. She believed that, as the king’s lover, her son could become wealthy and wield power and influence.
No one identified as a “homosexual” in King James’s time (1566-1625). The word was only coined in the Victorian period and sexuality was not used to construct identities as it is today.
There was also a more fluid concept of gender. Male and female bodies were seen as fundamentally the same, with sexual differences determined by the way bodily humours (fluids) flowed through them.
A man who desired sex with other men was seen as having an imbalance in his humours – and was blamed for failing to control it.
Sexual acts between men were forbidden by the church, citing passages from the the Bible. Corinthians 6:9 classed the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” among the “unrighteous” who would not inherit the kingdom of God.
The puritan theologian William Perkins,
Winston Churchill
Career
A descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, he was born at Blenheim Palace. As a young cavalry officer he took part in a cavalry charge. As a war correspondent he escaped from a prisoner of war camp in the Boer War. He entered parliament as a Conservative in 1900 but switched to the Liberal Party in 1904. During the First World War he served as First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1924 he re-joined the Conservative Party and became Chancellor of the Exchequer, but from 1929 he was out of office and became estranged from the Conservative leadership. On the outbreak of war in 1939 he was brought into the Government in his ancient job at the Admiralty. When Chamberlain resigned in 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister, in which role he was an inspiring head. Defeated in the 1945 election, he was Prime Minister again from 1951 to 1955. He wrote many books, and received the Nobel Prize for literature.
LGBT-related aspects
In 1895 he was accused of having committed "acts of gross immorality of the O
Historian discounts claim that Churchill and other British PM's were gay
Winston Churchill could not include been a more faithful husband — and he never showed the slightest romantic or sexual interest in other men. Yet in a controversial recent book, which the Mail serialised on Saturday and yesterday, the respected biographer Michael Bloch has presented Churchill as a ‘closet queen’ — one of a long series of 20th-century politicians who, he says, ran enormous risks to keep their homosexual inclinations secret from the public.
These men, says Bloch, ‘were past masters when it came to keeping secrets and taking calculated risks. They were also actors on life’s stage, with a powerful sense of showmanship and a flair for intrigue and subterfuge’.
Even by the standards of the most revisionist histories, Bloch’s novel makes frankly astonishing reading. Among his other closet queens are at least four prime ministers — not merely Churchill, but the late Victorian Liberal Lord Rosebery, the Edwardian Tory Arthur Balfour and the late Edward Heath, the keen yachtsman who took Britain into Europe — as well as a host of ministers, backbenchers and political hangers-on.
In some cases,
Prime Minister Winston Churchill bluntly replied that the Tory party were not going to accept responsibility for making the law more lenient towards gay men.
On the 24th February 1954 the Cabinet discussed the issues of prostitution and homosexuality, then inextricably linked as ‘sexual offences’ in the eyes of the legislators.
Gay sex between consenting adults, even in private, was a criminal offence, and many hundreds of gay men were being caught and convicted of sodomy and gross indecency every year.
The high-profile journalist Peter Wildeblood had been arrested for queer offences the previous month, but he did not stand trial until March.
The scandal surrounding his arrest and that of Baron Montagu of Beaulieu led to public discussion of homosexuality.
At Cabinet the Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe seemed mystified at the spike in convictions for lgbtq+ offences:
“While crime generally has doubled, these offences have risen four and a half times.
“Some thi