Transcript: Dr Luciano Rila – The UK’s First Gaysoc
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Hello and welcome to The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th and 19th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London, the first institution in England to admit students without imposing a religious test. Bentham is widely credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces. He put it simply in his advice: create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant to the ethical problems of the 21st century. Today’s episode delves into the history of the UK’s first ever university-affiliated Gaysoc, right here at UCL. I’m joined today by Dr Luciano Rila, whose curiosity about the Gaysoc led him deep into the archives here at UCL.
LUCIANO RILA:
Right, I’m Dr Luciano Rila. I’m a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics. I joined UCL 14 years ago and have been interested in widening participation. So I’ve organized, like, events for girls in mathematics. So I always had that interest in diversifying mathematics. And with that, I started working with equality and diversity and joined the, what was called LESG, the LGBTQ+ Equality Steering Group. So I always had that interest. And then someone from the Steering Group, Professor Bob Mills, he had a project called Queer Tapestry, which looked at former students, LGBTQ+ students, and what they’re doing now. And he produced posters. There was an exhibition, and one of the posters was of this student called Jamie Gardiner. And he founded the first Gaysoc at UCL in 1972 and he was a PhD student in the Maths Department. I was like, wow, this is great. This fascinating. I want to know more about that. So I went back to the department, and I was like, oh, do we have, like, archives? Said, we have a filing cabinet in the head of Department’s Office, I can open it for you. Sure. So I went through, you know, all the records that we had, and I found nothing about Jamie. I don’t think it went back as far as the 70s. So I didn’t know what to do. So I went on Twitter and put out like, please help me. I want to figure find out how I find, like, archives at UCL. And then Georgina Brewis said, oh, go to UCL special collections. They might have something there. So I did that, put on a request and said, you know, do you have anything to do with the founding of the first Gaysoc? It’s around March 1972 so they gave me a few boxes. So I went down there, it was in a basement. I don’t know. I think they’ve changed sites, I don’t know now, and I have these boxes, so I went through all the documents that they had. It was called the Homophile Society.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Oh right, so the official name was the Homophile Society?
LUCIANO RILA:
The official, yeah, but then they put Gaysoc in brackets.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Okay, right, yeah. So when you say it was the first, was that the first at UCL, or the first anywhere?
LUCIANO RILA:
Well, we believe, I’m no historian, as I said, but I believe it was the first Gaysoc associated with a student union in the UK.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
In the UK, right.
LUCIANO RILA:
Yeah, there were other, like, gay groups that were led by students, like the Gay Liberation Front at LSE, you know, was led by students, but it wasn’t part of the student union, and that was founded in 1970—so earlier, and might have informed the Gaysoc at UCL but, yeah, associated with the student union, I believe was the first one in the UK. So that was March. So obviously, September, October 1972, there was Freshers Week, and that was the first time that people heard about the Gaysoc, and there was a program for the week, and what was going to happen, like gay disco and free booze and all sorts of things. So I found all these things, but also that’s when the story takes a dark turn, because Freshers Week was also the time when the academics learned about the Gaysoc. My understanding is that at that time, at the start of the academic year, all academics got a list of all the student societies, and they were encouraged to support some of them. So they get that list with all the student societies listed, and one of them is the Gaysoc.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
I suppose the point is, is that the academics can then say to their tutees, look, there are these societies which you might like to join.
LUCIANO RILA:
“Go to the Gaysoc, it’s really fun, there’s free booze” right? I would do that! Um…but that’s not exactly what happened.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
No? Okay.
LUCIANO RILA:
So, there was a backlash from academics, and they wrote letters. So the academics start writing letters to the Provost, expressing…not even reservations, like outright, I would say, disgust, at the fact that there was something called the Gaysoc. “Have we come to that?” and “that”, like underlined, you know… Okay, I won’t say what I want to say…
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
No, I mean that – I mean, just to read it, it finishes by saying, “Had it to meet requirements agreed by the PB and CC?” CC will be College Council. So yeah, this is typical mindset, isn’t it? Has it met the, has it gone through the right procedures? But then it goes on to say, “Who degree decreed that it is in the general interest that the college should be identified with sexual predilections in this way?” So the general interest is a phrase that Bentham used all the time. Either the general interest or universal interest. And he would say, of course it’s in the general interest that we have sexual freedom, whereas right, this person is suggesting that somehow this is not in the general interest. And then there’s no reason given for the objection, apart from outraged…
LUCIANO RILA:
Apart from, “I don’t like it”.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah. And were there many of these?
LUCIANO RILA:
Oh, there were many of these.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Really?
LUCIANO RILA:
Oh yeah. And the next one is “a parade of their aberration.” So, this is another one: “I’m very disturbed to see that Gaysoc is on the list of college societies”.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And “though homosexual activity is no longer a crime, the activity is supposed to be in private” – implication, it should still be a crime.
LUCIANO RILA:
Yeah, you know, as a gay man, I also find it interesting to see how at that time, and it’s not just the professors that wrote those horrible letters, but I think it was something of that time and that conflation of sexual identity and sexual act. So I think we now have a different understanding of that these are two separate things. You know, I’m a gay man, even if I am celibate, I’m still a gay man. It has it’s not about any sexual act. This is separate, in a way. But that was the conflation that they had, you know. So being gay meant sodomy in particular, sodomy, and that’s why it was “distasteful”.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, yeah. And then it says, “homosexuality is an unfortunate aberration biologically and very different from the norm in nature and human society”.
LUCIANO RILA:
Right.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And “I don’t understand”, it goes on to say, “why people should be allowed to make a parade of their aberration”. I mean, Bentham would be, would be both not surprised and appalled, because these are precisely the arguments that he had to, he argued against. You know, that it’s unnatural. And Bentham said, well, you know, you can take Greek and Roman times, and what looked natural was men having sex with younger men. Bentham’s view was that, you know, when you talk about nature, all it means is, if anything, it means anything, it means what’s done more often rather than less often. And there is no, let’s say, normative dimension to it. So that’s really, you know, Bentham would be appalled. And this is from a professor or…?
LUCIANO RILA:
Oh they’re all professors, oh yeah. I mean there’s more, that’s the second one.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Okay.
LUCIANO RILA:
There’s this, “corruption of youth”.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Sorry, I’m getting annoyed on Bentham’s behalf.
LUCIANO RILA:
Yeah, that’s like…so again, the thing about in private: “Sex, and I include homosex”—which I love: homosex. That’s like, that’s the new term— “seems to be, to me, a matter for consenting adults in private.” Emphasis on “in private”.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, he says, “corruption of youth, it’s mostly happened already in the schools”.
LUCIANO RILA:
Look at us now. There’s one more, I think this is the last one that I found. So again…
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Ah, “very distasteful”.
LUCIANO RILA:
Yeah, “these folk”.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, so it says, “This Gaysoc, to which we are invited to subscribe, is very distasteful”. Bentham had a thing about the notion of taste, and he thought it was an aristocratic word which was used to make certain people feel superior and certain other people inferior. So if you were a person of taste, you were morally or intellectually superior to the people who had no taste, and that meant, you know, the aristocrats and the wealthy, as opposed to the to the poor. And so Bentham hated this, this notion of taste, because he said, you know, all that counts is whether you get pleasure from something or not, and if people would not engage in an activity if they didn’t think it was pleasurable, insofar as you know it was consensual activity. And to say that such a such an activity was distasteful was merely to show your own prejudices. And so if you condemn homosexuality as it was, as distasteful. It was merely to say, well, you don’t I, you know, I don’t like it. But why is that a reason for stopping other people who do like it from engaging in it? The, I mean, the – it’s fascinating that these arguments in 1972, all these points in 1972, are the same prejudices that Bentham was opposing 150 years earlier. Fascinating.
LUCIANO RILA:
So, what happened was, I assume that the President of the Student Union had to get involved with that probably was, you know, contacted and, you know, what is this? What’s happening? How did you approve that? Or whatever? So, he wrote to the college secretary: “I’m a little surprised to hear that members of the college have been expressing disquiet at the inclusion of the Gaysoc as an affiliated society of the Union”. So he reminds them that the college had “a great tradition of adopting a certain nonconformist approach”. This letter is perfect. Yeah. So you know that talks about the income, because obviously the professors would mention the money and the financial support that I think academics, I don’t know if they had, they, they, they supported financially as well the student societies then? I don’t know. But obviously it got money from college budgets?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, yeah.
LUCIANO RILA:
So, “I would have hoped, however, that college would take its traditional liberal stance on this issue and would not adopt a moralist attitude with regard to any individual society.” So, and the society went ahead, so, I assumed that this letter was successful and did exactly what they wanted it to do. So, reminding the powers that be of the traditions of Bentham, right?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the only thing is, you know, Bentham would say taking a view of sexual liberty, that is a moral view. Another, the quote there is “moralistic”. In other words, from Bentham’s point of view, it’s not sitting on the fence to allow people, consenting people to engage in sexual activity. That is the right thing to do, but it’s looks here, like the president of the Student Union, is much more in touch with the with the Benthamic approach to life, than with certain of our professors from the time. I mean, when, when Bentham looked at objections to homosexuality, he had two lists. One was what he called principled objections, and ones were what he called unprincipled ones. And the principal ones were, you know, there might be some, some reasons. For instance, lessening population. If men were having sex with each other, they weren’t reproducing babies. And he dismissed all those. And the unprincipled objections were precisely the objections that those professors were, were making about it being distasteful, about, you know, being I don’t like it, being outraged by it. So it’s, in a sense, rather sad to see that the prejudices continued. Yeah, the, you know what Bentham thought, there might possibly be some, some sense in, let’s say, the anti-population argument, those arguments had gone, and it was just down to prejudice. That was all that was left.
LUCIANO RILA:
Well, and now we talk about overpopulation.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And that, that was one of the points that Bentham actually said, because in 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus produced the essay on population, which said that there’s a tendency to population to outgrow food supply, and so you then end up with famine, war, as people compete for resources. And so then the population is brought back down to a level where it can subsist. And of course, Bentham says, rather, tongue in cheek. Well, if you get men having sex with each other, they’re not going to create babies. And so this will solve your population problem.
LUCIANO RILA:
We’re here to save the planet.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yes. We’ll be right back after the break.
VOICE OVER:
[The Greatest Good’s first documentary is out on YouTube now. Learn more about Bentham and discover the hidden history of the Vere Street coterie from leading academics at UCL. Click the link in our podcast description or search YouTube for ‘The Greatest Good: Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’.]
LUCIANO RILA:
So, Jamie’s story doesn’t stop here, doesn’t stop at UCL. So going back to the gay rights that you called me out about—
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
No, no, I didn’t want to call you out. No I was just thinking out from a Bentham point of view, he didn’t, he wouldn’t have, you know, from a Bentham point of view, he would have talked about gay welfare, rather than rights. In a sense, if you’re giving people liberty to practice freedom, you don’t give them… It’s not a claim based on human rights. For Bentham, it’s a claim based on happiness.
LUCIANO RILA:
Right. So, you know, we’re talking about this localised movement at UCL to found the first Gaysoc, but that came from, you know, a wider picture of gay students, at trying to create that space where you could have Gaysocs, where the National Union of Students would support gay students. And so in the winter of ’72, there was the Winter Conference and Jamie was part of that, that group of students, so he went to Margate, where the Winter Conference was in 1972, and they submitted a motion urging the NUS to support gay students. But it didn’t work out. They had support, but the motion was never prioritised; it was never voteed. But then, actually, Jamie wrote an article for Pi Magazine at the time, called ‘A Gay Weekend in Margate’, which probably, at the time, was quite something, the title, right? But then in the Easter of ’73, the motion was passed, and it was huge because it was the first national non-LGBT organisation in the UK to adopt a position in support of gay rights. And obviously, it wasn’t Jamie’s doing, but it was a collective and he was part of it. You know, he went to those conferences, and he was, you know, a core member of that group that was were pushing that. So that was in April ‘73 and by November, ‘73 active Gaysocs at universities increased from 19 to 70 in just a few months. So, you know, was a huge thing, and really, you know, changed the landscape of higher education for queer students.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
But that, I mean, that’s incredible. In a sense, from 1972 this was the first one, to virtually every university in the country by just over a year later.
LUCIANO RILA:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
So it sounds like a suppressed demand, let’s say, putting it in economic terms.
LUCIANO RILA:
Sure, but if you think that six years earlier, it was a crime. So it takes a few years, you know, to for people to then have the courage to be out. And so it was there. It was brewing for a long time. So when he finally got that kind of support, you know, when you think, Oh, we can do this, you know, we have the support of the Student Union, you know, so let’s do it.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
I mean, this is really interesting. I mean, I wonder whether other universities have the same outraged letters from professors.
LUCIANO RILA:
I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s funny because I asked Jamie if he remembers any backlash, anything that came from the maths department. I mean, he was a student there. They must have known something about… someone must have known that he was involved with that. And he said, no, I don’t remember.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And so what happened? What happened to Jamie afterwards?
LUCIANO RILA:
So he is a lawyer.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Oh right.
LUCIANO RILA:
He lives in Australia, so he went back to Australia. He did not complete his PhD.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Why was that?
LUCIANO RILA:
I’m not sure. I think he got too involved with that and went to Australia to become a lawyer. He’s a human rights lawyer, and so he, you know, he had a career as a lawyer and a LGBTQ+ activist and, you know, advise the government on policies…
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And what did he say about his experience of UCL?
LUCIANO RILA:
Oh, he loved it, he had a great time. Yeah, you know, it must have been a time of great liberation for gay people. You know, when it had just been at least partially legalised, and you had that freedom to be out where when you didn’t have for a long time. I can only talk for myself how his story really inspires me as you know, and that someone from my department, you know, that perception that the maths department would wouldn’t contribute to that, which has some reasoning behind, you know, but so it’s good for me, because I do feel like I’m… not anymore, but I did feel initially that I was the only person in my discipline, trying to move things forward, which was which was not true, of course, but I didn’t know enough people then. It did feel like I was the only one. Then I realized that I wasn’t. But those people are not very visible, so you know, and they’re very isolated. And I think more and more we create in this community, and it’s becoming more visible, but to have, you know, Jamie in the 70s, when things were very different, can you imagine, with all those professors around, to be like, you know, an out member of staff? I would not expect that anyone was out then, you know, certainly not in sciences and maths.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and tune in for next week’s episode.