Forgotten gay scandals that changed politics

Popular histories of gay rights tend to start at Stonewall in 1969. In several countries, though, the law moved earlier, and it moved because of something uglier: a trial, an arrest, a raid, a death. “Scandal” here means a public event that exposed how a state treated gay men and that politicians then had to answer. Six cases from four continents follow. Some produced reform, one produced a worse law, and one produced nothing at all, which turns out to be informative.

Year	Place	Case	What followed	What stays contested
1906–09	Germany	Eulenburg affair	Monarchy shaken; public debate about homosexuality, mostly hostile	Most trial records were destroyed
1954	UK	Montagu trial	Public outrage; Wildeblood testified to the Wolfenden Committee	Whether the trial caused the committee
1964	US	Walter Jenkins arrest	Resignation; no measurable effect on the vote	What Johnson knew, and when
1966	South Africa	Forest Town raid	Organized law reform; a harsher clause anyway	Who the movement represented
1967	Canada	Klippert case	Decriminalization in 1969	The reform did not free Klippert for two more years
1980	Hong Kong	MacLennan affair	Public inquiry; decriminalization in 1991	How MacLennan died, and why

Germany, 1906–09: the Kaiser’s friends

In 1906 the journalist Maximilian Harden began publishing thinly disguised attacks in his weekly Die Zukunft. The targets were Prince Philipp of Eulenburg and General Kuno von Moltke, both close to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Harden used nicknames, among them “the Harpist” for Eulenburg and “Sweetie” for Moltke. His motive, according to the same account, was political rather than moral. The result was a run of five civil trials and courts-martial lasting into 1909.

The publisher of Norman Domeier’s study describes the affair as dominating European headlines until 1909 and as the first modern scandal in which homosexuality was openly discussed. The historian Isabel Hull, quoted there, rates it as comparable to the Dreyfus affair. The same blurb calls it “too often forgotten,” which is fair. Most readers know Dreyfus and have never heard of Eulenburg.

Care is needed with what the record can bear. Transcripts of Eulenburg’s trials were destroyed by German authorities in 1932, and correspondence between Moltke and Eulenburg was burned in 1907. Historians rely heavily on press coverage, and Domeier’s study draws on roughly 5,000 newspaper articles. The affair also did not help gay Germans. The public discussion it set off was, by that account, mostly negative.

Britain, 1954: the Montagu trial

By 1954 more than 1,000 men a year were being imprisoned in Britain for homosexual acts. That year the youngest peer in the House of Lords, Edward Montagu of Beaulieu, stood trial with his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and the Daily Mail diplomatic correspondent Peter Wildeblood. Two RAF men were given immunity to testify. The eight-day trial at Winchester Assizes ended with sentences of 12 months for Montagu and 18 for the other two. Wildeblood admitted in court that he was gay.

The usual summary says the trial led to the Wolfenden Committee and then to the Sexual Offences Act 1967. The record is messier. The National Archives notes that Churchill’s government began debating reform in February 1954, before the trial opened in March, and that another decade of campaigning followed the 1957 report. A Staffordshire University paper on Wildeblood warns that the trial is often miscredited with causing the committee.

What Wildeblood did is better documented. He was the only openly gay witness to testify to the committee, and the historian Dominic Janes places his importance in his 1955 book Against the Law more than in the conviction itself. The public reaction mattered too. By one account, the verdict outraged many ordinary people who had begun to dislike the witch-hunt atmosphere.

United States, 1964: the scandal that did not work

On 7 October 1964, a month before the presidential election, police arrested Walter Jenkins, Lyndon Johnson’s longest-serving aide, in a Washington YMCA restroom. The story reached the press on 14 October, and the White House tried unsuccessfully to persuade newspapers not to run it. Jenkins resigned the same day. The FBI later reported an earlier arrest at the same location in 1959, according to documents from the LBJ Library covered by the Washington Blade.

The scandal’s political effect was close to nil. Polls showed most Americans knew about it by the end of October, yet it had no measurable influence on voting. News of Khrushchev’s ouster, a British election and a Chinese nuclear test pushed it aside within days. A History News Network analysis of the White House tapes notes that Johnson’s polling lead approached 30 points just before the arrest, and it leaves open whether a closer race would have gone differently. Whether Johnson knew of the arrest before it became public is also unresolved. The same analysis says no written or audio evidence shows he did.

The case belongs on this list because of what it ended. A gay scandal in the capital, weeks before an election, no longer decided the outcome. The historian Timothy Stewart-Winter adds a human cost: Johnson concealed any later contact with a friend of 25 years, and Lady Bird Johnson’s public statement centered on Jenkins’s wife and children.

South Africa, 1966: the Forest Town raid

In January 1966 police raided a private party in a Johannesburg suburb. About 350 white gay men were there. Few were caught in any act, and the charges that followed were minor: nine men for “masquerading as women,” one for indecent assault on a minor, and the hosts for selling liquor.

The consequences were larger than the raid. Historian Jacobus Du Pisani describes how it set off a proposal to criminalize male and female homosexuality, which in turn produced the Homosexual Law Reform Fund. That body is regarded as the start of organized gay rights activism in South Africa. A parliamentary inquiry also set off a 1968 letters debate in the Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger, and Du Pisani argues the taboo on discussing the subject in Afrikaner society lifted for the first time.

The outcome was mixed. The raid led to the 1969 Immorality Amendment Act and its “three men at a party” clause, which criminalized any sexual act between men with a third person present. The Constitutional Court struck it down in 1998. The fund also spoke for white, middle-class men on one narrow issue, and Du Pisani is plain that it did not see itself as a broad gay rights organization.

Canada, 1967: Everett Klippert

Everett Klippert was a mechanic’s helper in the Northwest Territories. Police questioned him about arson in 1965, and he was soon a suspect in something else: his own sex life. After conviction for gross indecency he was declared a “dangerous sexual offender” and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. His sister Leah retained a lawyer, and the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal 3-2 on 7 November 1967.

The decision caused outrage. On 21 December 1967, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced an omnibus bill and said there was “no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” The line had been coined earlier by the Globe and Mail columnist Martin O’Malley, as CBC notes. The bill passed in 1969, and Parks Canada now credits the case with showing legal discrimination against gay men to a broad Canadian audience.

The reform did not help Klippert. He stayed in prison until July 1971, and a government pardon was announced years later. Parks Canada designated the case a national historic event in 2025.

Hong Kong, 1980: the MacLennan affair

John MacLennan was a 29-year-old Scottish police inspector. In January 1980 he was found dead of gunshot wounds, shortly before colleagues were due to arrest him on a sex offence. The ensuing inquiry cost HK$16 million, the most expensive in Hong Kong’s history. It heard claims that he had been hounded into suicide because of his sexuality, and the suicide verdict still left many unconvinced.

The historian Nigel Collett argues in A Death in Hong Kong, which won the 2017 Hong Kong History Book Prize, that senior expatriate officers pursued gay men and pedophiles as if the two were one. Hong Kong decriminalized homosexuality in 1991, 24 years after Britain. Until then a gay man could face a maximum life sentence.

This is the least settled case here. Multiple books dispute what happened, and the Collett account that links the case to reform rests on contested material. The reform was real, though, and so was the damage: Collett describes a gay community that went underground for years.

Why they matter

Reform followed embarrassment more often than enlightenment. In Canada, the gap between the outrage and the bill was six weeks. In Britain it was a decade, and in Hong Kong eleven years. In South Africa the reaction ran the wrong way for thirty years.

Three further points stand out. Individuals did much of the work: Wildeblood writing from prison, Leah Klippert hiring a lawyer. Exposure was a political weapon for as long as it worked, and Jenkins shows the point at which it stopped. And scandals can harden law as easily as soften it, which Eulenburg’s Germany and apartheid South Africa both demonstrate.

Most of these cases are remembered chiefly by historians, with the Wolfenden Report the best known. The people in them were real, and several never saw the change their cases helped bring.