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The campaign was based largely on Parliamentary lobbying, and there was a noticeably lower level of mass mobilisation / direct action than had been the case in anti-Section 28 movement, around AIDS provision with ACT-UP, or even in the recent OutRage actions…ġ8 was proposed in legislation – but tory MP Edwina Currie in fact introduced an amendment to change this to 16. But 18 was seen in some quarters as a fall back position, a compromise that could be agreed with more cautious or reactionary MPs. There was general consensus on the ground in gay communities that the male age of consent for sex should be equalised with everyone else, at 16. In the parliamentary debate, many evocative arguments were brought up, such as ‘Putting your penis into another man’s arsehole is a perverse…’ (Nicholas Fairbairn MP, who was, er, cut off, by the Speaker before he could finish his sentence) However, the challenge it faced was a large bloc of MPs, mostly tories but not entirely, who either blatantly would have liked to bring back imprisonment for gay sex entirely, or expressed their prejudice more subtly as ‘concern for the safety of young people’. The campaign for the age of consent to be reduced had been building for several years. But the horrors of AIDS, links of lesbian and gay activists to other movements in the 1980s, had also contributed to a groundswell of mass support for at the very least basic equality under the law. The huge resistance to the imposition of Section 28, coming on the heels of the AIDS crisis and the massive community solidarity dealing HIV had created, had helped create a large and multi-faceted lesbian and gay movement (all the other initials BT etc were pretty much yet to be added…). This came just a few years after the tory government had introduced Section 28, severely restricting local authorities’ right to ‘promote’ homosexuality (ie to keep anything pro-LGBT in libraries, schools, publish or teach anything positive about alternative sexualities or suggest that the straight missionary position wasn’t all there is to sex). The crowds gathered outside were bitterly disappointed that it had not been reduced to 16, and a riot ensued in the precincts of Parliament for the first time for 150 years.
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On February 21st 1994, the House of Commons voted to reduce the gay male age of consent from 21 to 18.