Pride and Prejudice: The History of LGBTQ People in British Newspaper Cartoons

To crib from Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being caricatured is not being caricatured. For decades, and indeed centuries, British democracy has been accompanied by a lively press free (within certain legal safeguards) from censorship. This has enabled people to say what they thought at the time, however offensive that my seem to twenty-first century sensibilities; not only say, but also draw, since the art of the modern political cartoon can be traced back to the bawdy print culture of the age of the Enlightenment when nothing was entirely sacred. High moral seriousness then and now, whether coming from religious traditionalists or political radicals, could bore many readers, whereas comedy enabled difficult topics to gain a popular audience.

One thing the digital age does not allow for is full appreciation of the artist’s material craft, which used to involve not just pen and paper but also, in the eighteenth century, large metal plates. More recent cartoonists’ work was normally drawn to a much larger scale than it was eventually printed. This means that the shelves of the British Cartoon Archive have to be particularly sturdy and capacious. It has been my privilege, courtesy of an award from the Beaverbrook fund, to work with these materials this summer and contribute to an exhibition of cartoon humour in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My focus was on presenting cartoons that depicted LGBTQ people. In that context it is surely not the case that the only thing worse than being stereotyped is not being stereotyped! What a detailed trawl through those archives brought to light was how contested and controversial legal reforms relating to gender and sexuality have always been. The exhibition included around thirty images chosen from several hundred as being exemplary of their time. It should be said that some of the other cartoons were so gratuitous and unpleasant that they were best left in their boxes. What follows, therefore, is intended as a productive encounter with prejudice and progress.

Postwar Discretion

We start with an anonymous and undated postcard of the bawdy seaside type that was very popular in the mid-twentieth century. Two ‘old maids’ sit on the beach where ball sports are in progress. The first says, ‘I know, let’s go gay’. The second replies, ‘Let’s pinch someone’s balls’.[1] The red face of a man passing by testifies to the smutty innuendo. The joke only works if you know both the old meaning of gay, ‘happy and carefree’, and the new meaning, ‘homosexual’, that supplanted it with the advent of Lesbian and Gay Liberation in the 1970s. Gay had been in subcultural use with the second meaning in previous decades but it took quite some time before the original English title of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) (1882) could raise a titter.

One problem that liberation activists faced was not so much disinterest as a studied refusal to engage with issues that were widely seen as difficult and unpleasant. In 1533 the Buggery Act had made anal sex between men a hanging offence in England and Wales and the last executions had taken place in London in 1835. From 1885 a maximum of two years imprisonment with hard labour was imposed on men such as Oscar Wilde who, in 1895, was found guilty of ‘gross indecency’. In 1957 the Wolfenden Report recommended decriminalisation of sex between consenting adult men in private but it was to be ten more years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised sex between men over the age of 21 (although it only applied in England and Wales and excluded the armed forces). Finally, in 1972, the first official gay pride rally took place in London.

With women doing jobs formerly reserved for men in the factories, World War II brought a ‘queer new world’ of gender confusion in which service men were depicted as the Brylcreemed beauties that the in-laws needed to impress.[2] The pressures of the World Wars disrupted traditional roles for men and women, but public attitudes to people we would now call LGBTQ issues continued to swerve between wry amusement and moral panic. The Wolfenden Committee linked together (female) prostitution and (male) homosexuality as twin social problems concerning sex outside marriage. Rab Butler, the Conservative Home Secretary, endorsed the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations on female prostitution but not those on homosexuality. He was duly depicted enthusiastically cranking the handle of a seaside ‘what the Butler saw’ machine showing women sex-workers while another on ‘homosexuality’ stands idle beneath a sign reading ‘do not touch’ (fig 1).[3] 

Fig 1. No caption (‘Vicky’ [Victor Weisz], New Statesman, 6 December 1958). British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, VY1326. Copyright belongs to the current heirs of the estate of Victor Weisz whom I have been unable to trace. Anyone with knowledge of the owners of the estate should contact the author.

Trans people meanwhile found themselves the subject of lurid exposés. In 1961 the glamour model April Ashley was outed as a trans woman in the Sunday People. It was jocularly suggested that it would take nothing less than such a ‘sex change’ to bring about a political marriage between the Labour and Liberal parties.[4] Progressive views post the 1967 Act, including those positive toward lesbian and gay liberation, were mocked as deriving from a trendy leftist elite. There was, for example, a panic that sexual ‘perversion’ was being promoted by trendy BBC schools broadcasters. Whatever next, asked a Daily Express cartoon: a Professorship in Homosexuality?[5] Overall, however, the topic of LGTBQ lives was largely absent from the cartoon archive; partly because it was not thought to be very important and partly because it was seen as an inappropriate subject for levity. Both of these things were soon to change.

Queer Visibility and the AIDS Crisis

The majority of the British print media was conservative, but the decline in social deference since the 1960s gave a boost to reporting, commentary, and satire that might once have been condemned as vulgar and salacious. This meant that previously tabooed subjects such as homosexuality were available for open derision. Nevertheless, in 1981 sex between men was decriminalised in Scotland, followed a year later by similar legislation applying to Northern Ireland as a result of a case brought in the European Court of Human Rights. Nationalists took note of this continental affront to traditional British bigotry. Newspapers that supported Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s blend of free-market capitalism and social conservatism mocked the influence of ‘poofters’ (offensive slang for queers) on so-called ‘loony left’ Labour local councils and their espousal of ‘lesbian strength and gay pride’.[6] Labour leader Neil Kinnock was projected as being at the mercy of pressure groups that were depicted using racist and phobic stereotypes (fig 2).[7] 

Fig 2. ‘I don’t know what effect my troops will have’ (Michael Cummings, Sunday Express, 8 February 1987). British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, 37952. Cummings/Sunday Express/Mirrorpix.

Right-wing papers championed Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1987) which made it illegal for such bodies and their employees including teachers to ‘intentionally promote homosexuality’. The night before the legislation came into effect, lesbian campaigners abseiled into Parliament—and caricatured as stereotypically masculine—were cartooned invading BBC1’s Six O’Clock News.[8] This stereotype was repeated in many cartoons of the period including one in the Daily Star that saw a conventionally sexy nymphette being asked if she was sure she was a ‘militant feminist lesbian against the [nuclear] bomb’.[9]

The counterpart of this was the use of effeminate stereotypes to depict gay men. This built on long-standing popular conflation between sexual and gender non-conformity resulting in such wilting stereotypes as the ‘cissy’ and the ‘pansy’. Thus the gender panic produced by revelations that the violent and ultra-masculine gangster Reggie Kray was queer was eased by cartoons such as that of Stanely Frankin in The Sun showing the prison guards painting the bars of his cell lilac.[10] The pop star Boy George was bringing genderqueer performance into the mainstream at a time when rumours began to circulate that Princess Diana had many gay friends.[11] Meanwhile more or less jocular rumours were circulating that key institutions of the Establishment including the Church of England and the intelligence services were nests of perversion despite official prohibitions against openly lesbian and gay people.[12]

The AIDS crisis stoked popular fears but also pushback from a new wave of queer activists. Chris Smith came out in 1984 as the first openly gay male MP at a time when AIDS was being inaccurately labelled a ‘gay plague’. The Sun newspaper’s cartoonist Stanley Franklin suggested Smith should have stayed in the closet by cruelly depicted him as sitting isolated on the opposition benches in the House of Commons, and so evoking fears that all gay men had the virus.[13] There was, however, some discernible push-back against such extreme representatives of social prejudice as James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, who became the epitome of homophobic policing when he declared at a seminar on AIDS that gay men were ‘swirling around in the cesspool [storage tank for sewage] of their own making’. Noel Ford showed a policeman apologising for throwing slops over gay men leaving a nightclub and thereby suggesting that the filth was of Anderton’s own making.[14] As a result of all this, LGBTQ issues came into the mainstream of political debate and for the first time became a popular topic for cartoons which were all too often racist and sexist as well as homo- and transphobic.

Human Rights Reform and Same-Sex Marriage

Princess Diana, portrayed in the papers as the darling of the progressive chattering classes, died in a car crash in 1997 just as the Labour Party returned to power for the first time since 1979 and was about to launch a range of progressive initiatives.[15] In 1998 the Human Rights Act incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic UK law and the following year discrimination against trans people by employers was banned by the Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations. In 2000 the ban on lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in the armed forces was lifted after a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. The British military had traditionally been seen as the epitome of masculinity and so cartoonists were able to mock the new political correctness while also more gently ribbing the blimpishness of traditionalists. The prospect of openly gay men in the army was held up to ridicule by depicting them as camply flamboyant.[16] Trans inclusion was offensively projected as bizarre by a number of cartoonists, but it was suggested by Griffin in The Sun that masculine lesbians would be the only women to join the Special Air Services, confounding the sexist expectations of the squaddies toward the imminent arrival of ‘hot babes’ (fig 3).[17] In 2001 the age of consent for gay and bisexual men finally aligned at 16 with that for heterosexuals. This led to right-wing panic about children being turned queer and, as depicted in the Mail on Sunday, the appearance of special wardens to allow gay children to cross the road.[18] Still, in 2003 Section 28 was repealed and in 2004 trans people were enabled to change their legal gender.

Fig 3. No caption (Charles Griffin, The Sun, 10 October 2006). British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, 74522. © Charles Griffin.

The Civil Partnership Act (2004) allowed same-sex civil unions but debates about the ‘sacredness’ of marriage held up further legislative change. In 2010 the Conservatives were only able to secure a majority in Parliament by signing an agreement with the centrist Liberal Democrats. This resulted in the marginalisation of the political right-wing and, in 2013, same-sex marriage was duly legalised in England and Wales, followed shortly after by Scotland. Opposition centred not only on legal issues, but also on matters of personal faith, morality, and attitudes to nature and, as a result, the Church of England was prohibited from performing these ceremonies. Right-wing papers had long insinuated that gay men were incapable of marital faithfulness whilst their progressive opponents such as The Guardian parodied Anglican opposition as being rooted in misogynist bigotry—‘what’s worse than a male priest in a dress? A woman as a priest!’.[19]

The debate on whether same-sex desire was ‘against nature’ was informed by ‘revelations’ (that were no surprise to pioneering biologists) that many animals formed same-sex couples, including penguins, who were duly and stereotypically depicted in 1970s gay ‘clone’ style with leather caps and bushy moustaches.[20] The alleged foreignness of LGBTQ cultures, originating supposedly from fin-de-siècle Paris, Weimar Germany, and 1970s San Francisco and then transplanted onto British soil, was also debated. In HG Wells’s classic sci-fi novel War of the Worlds (1898), Britain was menaced by an alien invasion. Because Europe was seen by some as imposing its human rights agenda on the UK, the conservative hard right aligned Euroscepticism with opposition to same-sex marriage to wage a new ‘War of the Tories’ for control of the Party.[21] The Village People were an American pop group that presented themselves using 1970s gay stereotypes. It was the relatively centrist Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, visually parodied as one of the ‘Westminster Village People’, who succeeded in pushed through same-sex marriage without the support of the majority of his own party’s MPs.[22] One of the very rare woman cartoonists to be published in the mainstream British press, Grizelda Grizlingham, meanwhile insinuated that Cameron had also been attempting to distract people’s attention from ‘our dire financial situation’.[23]

Brexit and the Culture Wars

Attitudes toward LGBTQ people are much more favourable in the United Kingdom today than they were in the twentieth century. At the same time there have been concerted moves to roll back reforms that have been labelled ‘politically correct’ or ‘woke’, particularly in relation to trans issues. Attempts to reform attitudes and practices in the police and military, such as alleged ‘gender neutral police caps’, have aroused traditionalist wrath.[24] Interference in parental rights and preferences has been another flash point as illustrated in Michael Heath’s drawing in the Daily Mail of a woman of colour lecturing a group of unwilling white school children on gender and sexuality.[25] The popular image of trans people has changed considerably from the twentieth-century fixation on glamourous ‘sex-changers’. Panic has since spread about ‘ordinary’ children identifying as trans while trans women, it is now implied, are unsexy because their figures allegedly lack feminine curves.[26] The repeal of the Human Rights Act and withdrawal of Britain from the European Court of Human Rights remain central to projects aimed at reversing the progressive LGBTQ agenda. It is for this reason that when it was briefly suggested that Jacob Rees-Mogg, the arch Euro-sceptic, might become leader of the Conservative Party, his supporters were depicted in a pastiche of ‘The Creation of Adam’ (c.1508-12) by the queer renaissance artist Michaelangelo, as opponents of sexual liberation in all its forms.[27]

Traditional prejudice that associates LGBTQ lives, loves, and cultures with foreign interference and state socialism is alive and well in Britain today. Amid all the contemporary furore over immigration it is sobering to view ‘Mac’s’ cartoon, published a quarter of a century ago in the Daily Mail, that shows a bearded Middle-Eastern man boasting that ‘I love it here, mother: One lorry ride and I’ve been given political asylum, a sex change—and guess what?—I’m pregnant’ (and thus able to claim child benefit at tax payers’ expense) (fig 4).[28] At the time of writing,

the [UK] Supreme Court has ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex […] Specifically, they ruled that the definition of sex as used in the Equality Act 2010 is ‘binary’ and decided by biology—a person who was not born as a biological female cannot obtain the legal protections the Act affords to women by changing their gender with a Gender Recognition Certificate.[29] 

Fig 4. ‘I love it here, mother’ (‘Mac’ [Stan McMurtry], Daily Mail, 11 July 2000). British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, 54752. © Daily Mail.

This abrupt rollback of a trans-positive legal framework has emboldened those who dream of more radical neo-conservative moves. Pride flags are regularly torn down and painted over by vandals both on the streets and in cartoons, such as in a recent edition of The Spectator illustrating ‘End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough’.[30] The article is written by a gay man who is against various aspects of present-day LGBTQ politics including contemporary pride parades, but the accompanying cartoon showing a man whitewashing a giant pride flag strongly evokes, for me a least, a generalised silencing. After all, we are in a moment when the words ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ are being eliminated from public monuments and websites across the United States.[31] We may deplore the bigotry on show in many of these drawings, but it would have been even worse had there been no political contestation and, as a result, no queer visibility in the story of British newspaper cartoons. Above all, it is heartening to finish with the thought that some of the artists produced work that parodied both conservatives and radicals in ways which contributed to political debate and, at times, were genuinely funny.

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Dominic Janes

Dominic Janes is Professor of Modern History at Keele University and a Professorial Fellow at the University for the Creative Arts. He has written several books on queer history and the visual arts in Britain including Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900 (University of Chicago Press 2016) and Freak to Chic: ‘Gay’ Men in and out of Fashion after Oscar Wilde (Bloomsbury 2021). He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of LGBTQ History and writing a study of queer loves and lives at Oxbridge before World War Two.

The British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent includes material from the nineteenth century to the present day. The work of more than three hundred artists is represented and artwork is held for over 200,000 cartoons. One of the collections on loan to the Archive is that of the Beaverbrook Foundation, which consists of over 8,000 twentieth-century British political cartoons. The Foundation was established by the first Lord Beaverbrook in 1954 and has provided grants to over 870 charitable organisations. In 2025 a grant from the Foundation enabled the Archive to host two visiting scholars to work on an exhibition on ‘Humour in the Long Twentieth Century’. This was divided into two sections: the first on British responses to fascism and the second on images of LGBTQ people in British newspaper cartoons. Thanks go to the Beaverbrook Foundation, the staff of the British Cartoon Archive and the team of student interns who made this research possible.

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[1] ‘I know, let’s go gay’, undated postcard. All references to items in the Beaverbrook Foundation collection at the British Cartoon Archive.

[2] Joseph Lee, ‘Smiling through: queer new world’ (Evening News, 3 December 1943).

[3] ‘Vicky’ [Victor Weisz], no caption (New Statesman, 6 December 1958).

[4] Abu Abraham, ‘You simply change your sex’ (Observer, 28 January 1962).

[5] Michael Cummings, ‘Some specialist teachers’ (Daily Express, 31 May 1971).

[6] ‘Mac’ [Stanley McMurtry], ‘Gay studies curriculum’ (Daily Mail, 24 June 1987).

[7] Michael Cummings, ‘I don’t know what effect my troops will have’ (Sunday Express, 8 February 1987).

[8] Charles Griffin, ‘Why I’m giving up newsreading’ (Daily Mirror, 25 May 1988).

[9] Bill Caldwell, ‘Are you sure you are a militant-feminist-lesbian-against-the-bomb?’ (Daily Star, 22 January 1986).

[10] Stanley Franklin, ‘D’you think he’ll like the lilac bars’ (The Sun, 25 February 1986).

[11] Stanley Franklin, ‘I’m a bit worried about [Prince] William lately!’ (The Sun, 17 September 1984).

[12] Bernard Cookson, ‘You’re a deceitful cunning poofter’ (The Sun, 29 April 1987); ‘Zoke’ [Michael Attwell], ‘Ah-men!’ (News of the World, 12 July 1987).

[13] Stanley Franklin, ‘You should have kept quiet’ (The Sun, 26 February 1985).

[14] Noel Ford, ‘The James Anderton cure for AIDS’ (Daily Star, 13 December 1986).

[15] Michael Heath, no caption (Sunday Times 30 August 1998).

[16] Charles Griffin, ‘We do take heterosexuals’ (Daily Express, 6 April 1998).

[17] Dave Gaskill, no caption (The Sun, 2 April 2002); Charles Griffin, no caption (The Sun, 10 October 2006).

[18] Michael Heath, no caption (Mail on Sunday, 28 June 1998).

[19] Bill Caldwell, no caption (The Sun, 1 July 2003); Martin Rowson, ‘In the bowels of Christ…’ (The Guardian, 12 July 2010).

[20] Andy Davey, unpublished (10 November 2011).

[21] Steve Bell, ‘The war of the Tories’ (The Guardian, 21 May 2013).

[22] Peter Brookes, ‘Westminster Village People’ (The Times, 6 February 2013).

[23] Grizelda Grizlingham, ‘Gay marriage’ (The Spectator, 31 May 2013).

[24] Jonathan Pugh, ‘Gender neutral police caps’ (Daily Mail, 11 May 2017).

[25] Michael Heath, ‘Can I be excused this lesson?’ (Daily Mail, 22 February 2015).

[26] Nicholas Newman, ‘I wanted transgender Barbie!’ (Sunday Times, 31 January 2016).

[27] Ben Jennings, ‘Mogg 4 PM’ (I News, 9 September 2017).

[28] ‘Mac’ [Stan McMurtry], ‘I love it here, mother’ (Daily Mail, 11 July 2000).

[29] Ben Hatton, ‘UK’s highest court says legal definition of woman is based on biological sex’ (BBC News,

16 April 2025) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t> accessed 1 September 2025.

[30] Jess Warren, ‘“Trauma” as Pride flags vandalised for the fifth time’ (BBC News, 21 August 2024) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkmzzxpeg2o> accessed 1 September 2025; Harvey Rothman, no caption, illustrating Gareth Roberts, ‘End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough’ (Spectator, 31 May 2025) <https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/end-of-the-rainbow-prides-fall-cant-come-soon-enough> accessed 1 September 2025.

[31] Brajesh Upadhyay, ‘Transgender references removed from Stonewall monument website’ (BBC News, 14 February 2025) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cglywwn29n6o> accessed 1 September 2025.