Timeline of LGBT history in the United Kingdom
Following the war, moral attitudes to prostitution and homosexuality rapidly changed. The Anglican Public Morality Council declared that the police were once again 'conducting a campaign against this deplorable (homosexual sex) offences'. In London, gay men in Piccadilly and Leicester Square were targeted and anyone caught charged with being "concerned together in committing an act of gross indecency" 20th century. 1950s. Throughout the cold war atmosphere of the 1950s, when witch hunts later called the Lavender Scare were ruining the lives of many gay men and lesbian women in the United States , the parallel political atmosphere in Britain was virulently anti-homosexual. The then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, had promised "a new drive against male vice" that would "rid England of this plague." As many as 1,000 men were locked up in Britain's prisons every year amid a widespread police clampdown on homosexual offences. Undercover officers acting as ""agents provocateurs"" would pose as gay men soliciting in public places. The prevailing mood was one of barely concealed paranoia.