Poem caused public outcry and led to blasphemy prosecution
» JAMES Kirkup (1918-2009) was born in South Shields County Durham. A conscientious objector in the Second World War, he worked as a farm labourer. His first volume of poetry appeared in 1946. He became a teacher and struck up a friendship with JR Ackerley, a fellow gay writer and editor of The Listener, who commissioned reviews from him as well as publishing some of Kirkup’s increasingly risqué verse.
One poem, about gay men’s recreational pursuits in public toilets, called ‘The Convenience’, was published despite Ackerley’s typist’s refusal to co-operate.
Flamboyant, outspoken, witty and sociable, Kirkup’s many other literary friends included fellow poets Roy Campbell and Stephen Spender and novelist Muriel Spark.
In 1950, he became the first resident poet in the UK at Leeds University. In 1952 he moved to Gloucestershire with his male partner and for a few years was head of the English department and poet-in-residence at Bath Academy of Art at Newton Park.
He later recalled: “I was beginning to feel the police must be after me. Was this sheer paranoia, so widespread among gays in the Fifties? If so, was it justified paranoia? Was there something wrong with me? Was my behaviour bad, or simply not natural?…
“I knew if I stayed in England any longer they would get me. There were bobbies on the beat in Chippenham and Bath, and in Corsham itself there was a plain clothes officer living in the main street just a few doors away from where my parents and I were living in Weaver’s Cottages, Flemish Buildings. I could not trust some of my colleagues at Bath Academy of Art.”
On May 29-30, 1954 Kirkup joined members of University of Bristol Speleological Society on two caving trips exploring the Stoke Lane Stocker cave on the Mendips, and wrote a long poem based on his experiences underground he called ‘The Descent into the Cave, being an account of an underground journey in the Mendip Hills of Somerset’, which was dedicated to the members of the group.
The poem was broadcast on radio on the Third Programme on September 26, 1954 and published in 1957. Kirkup also read a selection of his poems, which were broadcast from the BBC studios in Bristol in July 1958.
After the break-up of his relationship, Kirkup left England in 1956 and lived in Sweden, Spain and later Japan, where he stayed for over 30 years, although he visited the UK regularly after being made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and became playwright-in-residence at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff.
Kirkup’s poem, ‘The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name’, appeared in the June 1976 issue of Gay News. It features graphic imagery of a Roman centurion having sex with the body of Christ, and claims that Jesus had sex with his disciples, guards and even Pontius Pilate, and it caused a public outcry.
This led to the famous private prosecution for blasphemy instigated by antipermissiveness campaigner Mary Whitehouse. The trial opened at the Old Bailey in July 1977.
The first Gay Pride Festival in Bristol held that summer was organised as a fundraiser for defence at the trial.
Kirkup was mortified and admitted the poem was “not aesthetically a successful work”, and he stayed away from England during the trial at which authors Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble were witnesses for the defence, which was led by barrister and novelist John Mortimer.
On July 11, 1977 the magazine and its editor Denis Lemon were found guilty in what was the last successful blasphemy trial in the UK. The magazine was fined £1,000 and Denis Lemon was fined £500 and received a ninemonth suspended sentence, which was overturned on appeal.
In 2008, the blasphemy law was abolished.
Kirkup died, aged 91, in May 2009 in Andorra, where he had been living for some years with his Japanese partner, Tamaki Makoto. Mary Whitehouse was awarded a CBE in 1980 and died in 2001, aged 91.
In 2017, it emerged that her prosecution barrister during the Gay News trial, John Smyth, had performed sadistic beatings on schoolboys and young men, and was ‘doorstepped’ in Bristol by Channel 4 presenter, Cathy Newman. Smyth died the following year, aged 77.