Which Cornflowers alumnus was involved in the legislation that marked “the start of a long campaign to secure legal equality for homosexuals”?

Richard Crossman (1907-1974) was a Member of Parliament, intellectual force within the Labour party, Minister, and famed diarist.

Michael Bloch, in his introduction to “Closet Queens” writes: “thanks to two of [the 1964 Labour government’s] more enlightened members, the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and the Leader of the House of Commons Richard Crossman, both of whom had enjoyed homosexual adventures in their youth, time was allowed for a Sexual Offences Bill … which passed into law in July 1967. That marked just the start of a long campaign to secure legal equality for homosexuals…” Bloch also emphasises Crossman’s support for the Wolfenden recommendations in parliamentary votes.

Crossman, who after Winchester went up to New College, is said by Bloch to have “enjoyed homosexual experiences” while at Oxford. A handsome young man (as you can see in the photograph), he was a friend of W.H. Auden (with whom he “frolicked” at Oxford), and “in an early diary describes an Easter holiday with another young poet ‘who kept me in a little whitewashed room for a fortnight as his mouth was against mine and we were completely together’.”

In the Spectator of October 1990, Ben Pimlott writes a splendidly titled review (“Teenage hero mutant Wykehamist”) of Anthony Howard’s biography of Crossman. He describes Crossman as “a Renaissance man in an age of specialists … a maverick and a dilettante … Crossman was a genetic Wykehamist (his family claimed to be founder’s kin), and he remained throughout his life an instantly recognisable member of the breed…” Pimlott also finds it “interesting to discover that as an undergraduate Crossman was predominantly homosexual. Howard makes light of this aspect, suggesting that it was almost de rigueur among cultured Oxonians at that time, especially in the circle which included W.H. Auden. Yet a bisexual temperament … may have contributed to his social irreverence, as well as to the incestuous clubbability and high emotions which characterised Crossman’s enjoyment of the almost all—male Westminster world.”

Although he “went on to become resolutely heterosexual”, his record in the House suggests a continuing sympathy for what would now be termed the LGBT community.