Sodom, Gomorrah and the New Jerusalem

Since 1997 the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in the UK have been transformed. This publication looks at what has happened in the last hundred years. It takes as a starting point the work of Edward Carpenter, the gay man whose work as a pioneer of equality was so remarkable, and ends by looking at what remains to be done now that equality - in legal terms at least - is a genuine reality.

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Fascinating history - Rated
In Britain, the Labour Party has changed most of the discriminatory laws that used to apply to gay men and lesbians. This book shows the long and and not always easy history of the issue within the Labour Party - how one of the founders of the Party was an openly gay man, how the party decriminalised homosexuality when it was in power in the 1960s, how its lon period our of power was a time when activities fought to get clear policies of equality accepted by Labour Party conference and succeeded. Then how, afer 1997, it delivered on most of these issues although there remain more to be done. The foreword is by Chris Smith the first MP to come out as gay voluntarily and it contains many fascinating snippets of history. Our rights did not come about by accident or because Tony Blair just felt like doing them. They happened because the party had debated and defined its approach to equality and then followed through.