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My name's Matt Cooke and we're here at Birkbeck College, University of London in the history department. I'm a historian of gender and sexuality, and most recently I've been working on histories of AIDS using the mass observation archive. Well, I guess that, I mean, there's a number of contexts.

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I mean, the most obvious one is the arrival of AIDS in this country with the first case, the first known case, in 1981 of a guy called Terrence Higgins, who died in St Thomas's Hospital in London in 1981. And what happened after that actually was a

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bit of a slow burn, so there was, there was a fairly rapid community response from the gay community in particular, but it wasn't picked up by government until much later until, in fact, there'd been a test developed, the virus identified in 1985, and thereafter a growing

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awareness and a growth in fear amongst many people in the UK, especially as high profile people started to die, and rather belatedly the government or certain aspects of the government decided they really needed to act. And so Norman Fowler, who was the health secretary at the

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time, pushed through a campaign backed by around £20 million for health education, this was launched in the autumn of 1986. It was a leafleting campaign so leaflets delivered to every household in the country. There was some opposition to this from within the cabinet. Mrs. Thatcher thought it

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would be much better if there were posters in public toilets and STI clinics and doctors' surgeries rather than this campaign which sent leaflets into everybody's household but Fowler stood his ground partly because he saw the significance of what was happening and the potential for the epidemic

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really to spread so that that campaign was called Don't Die of Ignorance and it was backed up by a big TV campaign as well, which we all remember from tombstones and really quite an apocalyptic set of images, really quite fearful, in fact, compared to what other

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countries, other European countries were putting out. In the start of 1987 there was also an AIDS week on TV between both Channel Four and BBC one and two, where there was programming about the epidemic, about the way it was affecting people's lives and about prevention and

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risk and so on. So that was the kind of the dimensions, the main dimensions of the campaign. And quite interestingly and really informed by community pressure, it took a pretty nonjudgmental line. So this wasn't a moralizing campaign. But it was met with a good deal of

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moralizing and a good deal of fearmongering, especially from the popular press and from self appointed moral guardians in the government and beyond. So there's a good deal of Sir Rhodes Boysen, for example, said that AIDS was gay men being gay with anti-children, anti-family and anti-life because

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of AIDS. There was a lot of people using AIDS as a kind of leverage for homophobia. And indeed, what we see in the context of the mass observation directive is a growth in homophobia. So across if we look at the British Social Attitudes Survey by 1987

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I think somewhere around 75% of people disapproved of homosexuality and this was a rise from around 62% at the start of the decade. And this was rather mobilized and reflected in the popular press, especially where there was a rise in kind of homophobic reporting. So by the

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time the mass observation directive was sent out in May 1987 there was quite a feverish atmosphere. On the one hand there'd been this public health campaign which had tried to give information and facts as far as we knew them. And at the same time, there was

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a kind of homophobic, a growing homophobic backlash in the press, and among certain aspects of government as well. I mean, the homophobic backlash was interesting in the context of the 1986- 87 because on the one hand it was clearly related to the AIDS crisis and the way that was

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being talked about in the press and beyond. But it was also about a wider shift in the visibility of homosexuality in the UK So if we think about the 1970s as a decade in which gay liberation, feminism, counterculture flourished by the 1980s what you had was a

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number of labour councils, in particular local labour councils beginning to implement inequalities agenda, saying that actually local government and by association, national government should be taking equalities seriously, which meant potentially some public money. It meant increased visibility, it meant public debate, and so there was a

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sense in which a kind of grudging tolerance of homosexuality and gays and lesbians in the 1970s was shifting in the 1980s to gays and lesbians actually claiming public space and saying that we demand representation, you know, we're taxpayers too we want some public money in relation

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to our, to the groups and support networks that we're developing. And more to the point, once AIDS hits, of course there was a cost to the public purse. And so this all fed into, on the one hand, the drive for equalities and rights and activism and,

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on the other hand, it fed into the homophobia that that was prevalent in the mid to late eighties of people saying, well OK, these people can do what they like, but I don't want it to cost me anything, I don't want this to be a cost

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to the taxpayer. And this really comes out in some of the mass observer responses who are angry about the cost of AIDS to the health service. There's one more aspect to this which is interesting, which is because, well partly because of the community activism and action

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in the 1970s, the gay and lesbian community were actually particularly well prepared in the sense that there was already structures like gay switchboard and so on, which could be mobilized in response to the epidemic. And so, really, after the first deaths emerged, there was quite a

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a quick, um, bottom up response from the gay community in terms of support on help lines and so on. And what was really interesting about that is it also drove the government response ultimately. So in other national context, Sweden, Cuba, and elsewhere, there was quite a

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punitive response to HIV and AIDS in terms of, for example, segregating people who had an AIDS diagnosis. In here, in the UK, partly because of that early mobilisation by the gay community and because Fowler, I think, was listening to that and listening also to historians who

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he took advice from in relation to previous epidemics, he drove a campaign that was volunteeristic. In other words, it relied on people coming forward to test rather than compulsory testing and it refuted the idea that you should segregate people that were HIV positive. So in other

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words, it tried to draw people into the system, rather than insisting that they came into the system. And the argument is that actually that was incredibly productive in terms of people coming forward, rather than being alienated and hiding away effectively, which could have had really devastating

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effects in terms of the spread of the virus. The reason this is significant in terms of the mass observation responses, um, is because there was debate about how we should respond. And there were models of response that were much more punitive and in fact there were people

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in our political system who were saying there should be camps, people should be separated out and so on. But we chose another line, which was the volunteeristic one which said we want to treat people with respect and we want people to come forward to test and

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to seek treatment because historians, amongst others, had argument, argued that this is the best way to tackle an epidemic, to bring people in rather than alienating them. And that's significant to the mass observation responses because you can see mass observers engaging in that debate. So some people

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saying, you know, why are these people still in our midst and other people saying, you know, no we need to, we're a society, we need to treat people within our society with respect and so on. So you can see this wider debate playing out in the mass

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observation responses. So the directive that went out in May 1987 in its usual chatty tone asked people about specifically for their responses to the government's AIDS campaign. It asked if people had attended any meetings, public meetings about AIDS or HIV, and it asked people, the panel,

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to describe the responses of people they knew, and in particular it asked about jokes or anecdotes that people were sharing. And this was sent out to the panel of I think at that point around 1300 people and around 650 I think responded to the AIDS directive or

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just under, which was about normal for this for this point in mass observation. So there wasn't a significantly significantly less or more members of the panel responding to that directive. One of the, I've never used mass observation or the mass observation responses before, and so I

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guess I went in somewhat naively and I thought, I'm going to go in, look at these responses, which amounted to about 1500 largely hand written pages of material, and I thought, I'm going to categorise them. Who's the reactionary? Who are the liberals? What's the proportion of

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each? And in fact, what I encountered was something much more complicated and, as a result, much more interesting. So what you see is, for example, people with really reactionary views but expressing sympathy for their gay neighbor or their gay nephew, for example. You also have people

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that were much more libertarian, were much more permissive, who were also now not speaking to gay relatives or gay friends. And so you what you get is a kind of map of human complexity in the way, I suppose, political attitudes don't necessarily always square with personal

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feeling. And I think that was one of the big takeaways for me from this research into mass observation, it becomes a kind of window into the complexity of thought and feeling, at this particular historical moment. It was shocking in a way, and upsetting sometimes to be

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reading a directive and to find that, you know, somebody might be expressing what I might consider quite sympathetic views towards people with HIV and AIDS and towards the gay community, much less so generally speaking towards drug users. And then, halfway through the testimony, they share a

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joke they'd heard about people with AIDS, not as a sign of their reactionary neighbors, but as something funny to share or some casual, offhand, homophobic comment that their husband had made. And so you can see how people were negotiating both, multiple pulses. They may have been

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surrounded by people that were deeply homophobic and have some, some resistance to that. And yet at the same time that homophobia was also part of their their daily interactions and daily discourse, and they were sharing jokes along with the others. So one of the really interesting

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things I thought about the responses, and although they were incredibly diverse in many ways, there was one thing that they shared and that was about the ways in which they talked about gay men in particular. So sexuality isn't actually mentioned in the directive, but almost all

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of the responses mentioned gay men because they were one of the key groups that had been highlighted in the campaign and in press discussion of HIV and AIDS. It's hardly surprising that gay men are mentioned quite a bit in these in these responses. But whether people

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were being incredibly negative about gay men, whether they were being incredibly sympathetic or liberal, what these responses do is they reinforce and reflect a binary of gay and straight. So it kind of reinforces this separation of sexuality, which had begun to emerge much more fully in

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the seventies. And I'd say that AIDS and the responses to the AIDS crisis reinforced that division of sexualities. And we get this, we see this through other testimonies and other sources as well, where we see gay men and lesbians feeling much more embattled in the eighties

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and so separating out from the rest of the community who they saw as reacting against them, which wasn't necessarily absolutely the case. But that was the feeling that people held. So we're getting this kind of them and us idea emerging through the eighties much more fully

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and reflected then in these mass observation testimonies. Whether or not people were sympathetic to the gay community. Just to give you one example of a woman, a middle class woman, who has two gay neighbors. And she talks about them being respectable, keeping themselves to themselves and,

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in a sense, respecting those neighbors. But what she also does in her response is show a kind of fascination with them and a fascination with their difference if you like. And she observes other people's responses to them, her Children laughing at them, workmen and people that

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go to visit the house being derisory as they left and so on. And so there's something quite interesting about this woman who is ostensibly, you know, accommodating, respectful of sexual difference and yet at the same time is clearly fascinated by it and in the process kind

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of suggests a kind of acute awareness of that difference, if you see what I mean. Another different identity in a different way of life. So in that sense, I suppose, reinforcing a kind of them and us dichotomy. What's interesting I think about the directives, the responses

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to the directives as a whole, is that they are very largely from heterosexual or as many of them say normal people. And I found I think there was only two gay, um, people, people in the mass observer panel at this time, one of whom writes very movingly in

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a separate letter actually, not in response to this directive, but writes to mass, mass observation about his experience of losing a close friend to AIDS related illness. And the homophobia he experienced, so he talks about kissing his boyfriend on the cheek goodbye at Heathrow Airport and

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somebody walking past and calling him a filthy AIDS queer. And the way in which, in the run up to his friend's death, nobody felt able to say what the friend was actually dying of for fear of being shunned by office mates and workmates and so on.

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Um and so we get that single response from, in a sense, the other side of the binary. We get a fuller picture of of how gay men were feeling about that particular context in the national lesbian and gay survey, which was set up by that mass

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observer to monitor and survey opinion amongst gays and lesbians in the 1980s. And it ran, I think, until the early nineties and it ran on similar lines and trying to garner, I suppose, the experiences of ordinary gays and lesbians. And so it's quite interesting to read

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the mass observation, mass observer responses alongside the national lesbian and gay survey responses, and you see a different communities of feeling if you like, because we're talking about one group of people who are talking about them, the kind of diseased others that come across in many

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of the responses. And then you get the people who were responding to the national lesbian and gay survey talking about the feeling of being embattled and judged and people being fearful of them and themselves being fearful of the virus and what it might portend for them

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personally. I suppose one of the interesting things is the way in which we, we tend to, it's quite rare I suppose to have this level of insight into what people think about gay men and lesbians, so historians have tend to, tended to read attitudes off surveys, opinion

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polls or off the popular press, off what pundits are saying. It's quite rare, actually, to have a you know, 600 old straight people talking about what they think about gay men. And it's quite, you know, it's, it's really quite interesting because you see a kind of

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quite a nuanced set of attitudes that this type of homosexual is acceptable, the one that's respectable, coupled, you know, homemaking, is not intruding into public life, and then the disreputable homosexual, the gays who are campaigning, who are ill, who are a drain on our resources, and

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you can see in, in quite a number of responses this split in attitudes towards homosexuality, which harks back to the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act, where, um, sex between two men was decriminalised, but only under certain conditions. You know, two men having sex together in private and with the

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idea of privacy newly newly defined to a hotel room, for example, was no longer deemed a private space. And if you think about that context of the late 1960s, private space was hard to come by. Most people didn't have access to private space, as they do

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now, even have their own bedroom necessarily. And so, for many people, as Joe Orton the playwright said, the act was an irrelevance. Joe Orton's studio apartment in Islington wasn't deemed private space, so any sex he had in that room wasn't, was beyond the law in a sense, let

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alone the sex he was having elsewhere. And I think this idea of the respectable and the disreputable clings on in people's attitudes. And we can see it in the mass observation responses, the way in which there's a kind of grudging tolerance of those that keep themselves

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quiet and a judgment of those that are stepping into the public limelight, if you like. So one of the interesting things we can trace through these responses to the AIDS directive is the ongoing debate about sexual revolution and permissiveness, because that debate very much wasn't over.

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So if we think about the kind of the sixties and seventies as a period of a kind of loosening of moral stricture and the rise of youth culture and so on, in the eighties, even in the early eighties, there was the beginnings of a, or a push

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back against that. The idea that we needed to pull our moral socks up as a nation and by the mid eighties, there was, you know, some demonization, for example, of single mothers alongside the beginnings of a growing demonization of gay men and lesbians. Um, and ongoing

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debate about kind of taboos around divorce and illegitimacy and so on. And so those debates haven't gone away. And what was interesting about the AIDS crisis, particularly from 85-86 was that it was very explicitly connected to this debate about sexual revolution and permissiveness, and the idea

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that we needed to go back to a pre-19, a fantasized pre-1960s moment when when people were having, weren't having promiscuous sex. And this comes along, across very strongly in about 15 or 20% of the mass observer responses, you know, AIDS was the result, they argued, of sexual

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revolution and what had happened in the late sixties and seventies. And it was an experiment that had gone badly wrong and we now needed to turn the clock back. Um, those, those mass observers tended also to have very limited sympathy for gays and drug addicts with,

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with HIV and AIDS, they deserved it, one mass observer said. They're a selfish lot, they want, they want, they want, in capital letters in her in her testimony, you know. They want hospices. They want treatment. They want sympathy. They want support. So the idea that this

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was a selfish group who had sowed their wild oats, done what they wanted, and now they wanted society to look after them. The people that tended to get sympathy from this proportion of the mass observers were the innocent victims. So the hemophiliacs and the babies who

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were born, being born with with HIV, who deserved treatment as opposed to those other, those others who didn't. So I suppose there was, they were fair, that group was fairly straightforward to categorize. And, as I say, for about 15 to 20% of the responses fell into

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that category in response to ideas of sexual permissiveness and sexual revolution. The others were more complex. There was probably another grouping, well there was another group in a second group who largely echoed that first group. You know, they certainly had some questions about was this a

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judgement from God, you know, had the sexual revolution gone too far? But they were often marrying that with some equivocation. So maybe they knew somebody who was gay and had some affection for them. Or maybe their children had different attitudes. It was quite marked that those

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mass observers with children were often slightly more conflicted in the way they were thinking about some of these issues. So generation really mattered. Um, there was a third group who, of probably about 30% of these responses, who were very specifically and I think probably quite careful, carefully,

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nonjudgmental. And so we're very much about saying we need all the information, we need to act responsibly, we need to take care of members of our society, we need to make sure children are safe, but where you can almost feel it in their writing, really careful

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to avoid the kind of judgments that we saw in those other two groupings. So I guess the first two groups I identified, you could say, are very worried about the effects of the sexual revolution and permissiveness and feel that AIDS is the consequence of that. This kind

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of loosening of moral standards, moral relativism had led to this crisis. A third group of people doesn't explicitly take that tack and that's probably roughly around 30% of respondents and they, in a sense, talk about the need to be responsible citizens reading the information, making sure that

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Children were informed and expressing by and large some sympathy for anybody who is afflicted, who had the virus and who was suffering from an AIDS diagnosis. And then there's a final fourth group, which is pretty small, but which is quite interesting in a way. Where, where which takes

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a lot more, and those mass observers take a more explicitly, I suppose, left wing or feminist and feminist standpoint, and are talking about the politics of AIDS in those terms and thinking about sexual not, not about grudging tolerance for homosexuals, but about the acceptance of difference. Um, so

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it's a different tenor and also thinking about the politics of health, I suppose, and this idea that was being wheeled about, about who deserved healthcare, and this group of mass observers, relatively small, saying, Well, this is a ridiculous debate. We live in a society, and if we

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live in a society, we make sure people have adequate healthcare, you know, whatever their health conditions and however those health conditions have have come about, otherwise we'd stop providing health care for people who smoked, for example. And so you can see a kind of shades of

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opinion about permissiveness, morality and sexual revolution playing out in these mass observer responses. And, as I said, you get I suppose the groups I've identified as one and four at either end and then in the middle you've got, you can see people kind of trying to

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navigate that debate. And in some ways trying to come to a position in relation to the crisis and how they should respond to it. Just to give an example of the group that I guess were fairly pragmatic in the face of the AIDS, the AIDS campaign.

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So there was a woman in Wales, for example, who said she read the information very carefully. She made sure her children had read it. There was another older woman who made sure she watched the TV, the programs on TV. She made sure that her children, who were

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going off to college were aware of the risk. She was worried that they had a kind of sense of invincibility, of youth and so on. So there's this group of mass observers who in a sense were you might say, taking the risks seriously, reading up, getting

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the knowledge and trying to persuade their children to behave sensibly. Most, most of the mass observers, almost all of the mass observers, said, well, I'm not a risk, you know, one woman says oh my husband's philandering days are over, so I no longer, I no longer feel

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that he or I are at risk from the virus. But I worry for my children. So there's a way in which mass observers are trying to, many of the mass observers are trying to digest the information and decide what to do with it for themselves and also for

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for their children and grandchildren. One of the very interesting things that comes up is the amount of people that talk about religion and faith, and in very different ways. So I suppose you could, what I termed the harder line mass observers talk about Christian judge, about

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the judgment of people with AIDS. And about the um, and used that as a kind of way of voicing their intolerance to homosexuality. You know, this was something that is forbidden under God's law. And one mass observer, for example, was very critical of his, his vicar,

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who was pleading tolerance at the pulpit, he said, well, this wasn't appropriate. while are we pleading you know, why don't, why isn't he talking about people with cancer? You know, why is he talking about people with AIDS, you know, who don't deserve and don't have a place in

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the Christian community in that sense. At the other end of the scale, you have people using Christianity as an argument for sympathy and empathy, saying, you know, we need to show Christian tolerance and we need to show sympathy for those that are ill and dying. And

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so Church, the Church and Christianity and Faith weaves through a lot of these responses to an extent I hadn't quite expected. And it weaves through, also in practical ways. So there's more than a handful of people who talk about their reticence in taking communion because of

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the shared cup and what they were going to do about that. They didn't want to share a cup lest they, that the virus was transmitted to them. And this is at a point two years after the identification of the virus and a very clear sense of what the

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risks were. So there was a kind of hangover, I suppose, of people's fears, even though we knew by that point that there was no way that the virus could be transmitted by the Communion Cup. There's still a size, a reasonable number of people who were fearful of

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catching the virus in that context. So we could say that very broadly speaking, it's the older mass observers who tend to be the most judgmental of those who have caught the virus and have AIDS diagnoses. And I say that very generally. There's also some clear examples

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of older men and women who are deeply sympathetic and worried about it. But by and large those people that were born in the sixties and after tend to be more sympathetic and tend to be a bit more nuanced in their responses, partly because they talk about their

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own sexual lives and the fact that they may themselves have had multiple partners or part, sexual partners before they married or whatever. And so we can talk about generation in that respect, that there's a, there is a shading of opinion that we can see going from

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older mass observers to younger. There's another aspect to that as well, which I think that again very loosely speaking, it's very difficult to generalize when we're talking about mass, mass observation, but it's very interesting reading the accounts of those older mass observers with children and grandchildren

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because there's a different engagement with AIDS as an issue. So whereas older mass observers that either don't have children or don't mention them tend to be fairly clear cut, those with children and grandchildren are either, either report the opinions and views of those children and grandchildren,

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and say that they agree or disagree with them. But more than that, they have I suppose a personal investment and a personal set of worries and concerns for those children and what they're doing. You know what, what are they going to be getting up to, away at University?

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Are they at risk? How can I talk to my, how can I talk to them about these issues and so on? So there's a kind of different set of dynamics. It's not so much them and us as a them and us and my children. And so

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there's a kind of, a different configuration or dance of concerns and you see that in reverse, too. So a number of mass observers talk about their older parents or older relatives who they see as old fashioned and reactionary in their views and some tension around those

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issues. So whereas maybe before the AIDS crisis that could be somewhat brushed under the carpet, in the context of national crisis, these issues emerge more fully and we can see families really trying to negotiate them together. And so there's one older woman who says, you know

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well my daughter and son in law really don't agree with us on this, and they have a number of gay friends and have been appalled at the way other friends have fallen away, and they visit them regularly and so on. And talk about, talks about it almost

00:32:55.260 - 00:33:09.940

with some pride about what, what the daughter and son in law are doing in terms of the AIDS crisis. And yet they themselves position themselves rather differently and say, well, we don't agree with with their point of view. So there's this kind of tension between pride

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that the, that their daughter has kind of stuck by the gay community. Whilst at the same time voicing some some some homophobia in relation to those, to those men that her daughter's friendly with. So there's some really interesting complexities around that. There's also a reluctance. You know one, one older

00:33:28.840 - 00:33:41.620

woman says, you know, I really wanted to talk to my daughter about monogamy. You know, my, the daughter had said, oh mum it's alright, I use a condom. And she said, the woman writes, well I really wanted to say, you know, what about monogamy, and what about

00:33:41.620 - 00:33:56.840

celibacy until you get married? But she said, I felt I couldn't say that. So there's an interesting kind of power dynamic, you know that this, she said whereas my mother would have insisted that I just was monogamous and didn't have multiple partners, this woman, in a

00:33:56.840 - 00:34:12.820

different cultural context, felt she couldn't give that advice to her daughter. And kept quiet on that, you know, so there's some interest, you can see I think, one of the fascinating things about these responses is they show ideas and cultures in flux and the way in which

00:34:12.820 - 00:34:31.210

you know an older generation, this woman's parents might have felt able to police her boyfriends. You know, this woman, now in the 1980s, felt she doesn't have that right or power over her children. So there's something very interesting about about these direct, the responses to these

00:34:31.210 - 00:35:00.420

directives, signalling a culture in shift, a society in flux if you like. So there's a, there was a geography of the AIDS crisis in the sense that, um, London and Brighton, Edinburgh, you know, had a large number of the cases and that was well publicized. So, you

00:35:00.420 - 00:35:24.690

know, the popular press had already in the mid eighties, pinpointed Brighton as the AIDS hot spot for example. And similarly, there had been significant press coverage of, of rates of HIV transmission and AIDS diagnoses in London. And so in people's minds, um, this is quite interesting, because

00:35:24.700 - 00:35:42.330

if you lived elsewhere, there could be a kind of false security. You know, I'm not in, I'm not, I don't live in or near these these hot spots, and by the same token, there could be a fear of going to them. So one woman, I think

00:35:42.330 - 00:35:58.160

from Kent, talked about a visit, a day trip to London, and she says, you know, I felt I was entering the hazardous zone. And another talked about the experience of visiting London and going on the Underground, and somebody on the underground had sneezed. And she wrote

00:35:58.160 - 00:36:20.650

in her testimony, you know, I couldn't help thinking that this person who sneezed might be an AIDS character, carrier. And so there's around, London became this kind of totem of risk for some mass observers, and a place of fear in that respect. But for others, it represented

00:36:20.650 - 00:36:43.800

a space of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. So somebody writing from East Anglia talked about what he felt were the attitudes of people locally in, in East Anglia, as opposed to the more liberal and to him acceptable attitudes of people living in the capital. And that comes across

00:36:43.800 - 00:37:07.380

in a number of testimonies. So the them and us idea of gay straight also plays out geographically, the kind of them and us, the cosmopolitan Londoners versus the, the more traditional people living elsewhere in the country, which again is a kind of face, false, false binary.

00:37:07.470 - 00:37:29.730

But you can see those attitudes reflected in some of these testimonies. And yet for others, the sense of risk is pervasive. So and in some ways, the fear of the virus is more acute away from these so called hot spots where perhaps people hadn't experienced or

00:37:29.730 - 00:37:48.510

didn't have a circle of friends that included gay men or that included people that were HIV positive. And so there's a, there was a greater paranoia. And so you get people, there was, ah, a woman in the south of England, one of the southern counties who doesn't,

00:37:48.510 - 00:38:04.930

no longer shopped in charity shops for fear that the clothes she was buying might, might communicate the virus. There were people elsewhere in the country who took, a number of people, actually, who took their own scissors to the hairdresser's, lest the virus be communicated in that

00:38:04.930 - 00:38:27.140

way. And I've talked already about the fear of the Communion Cup. So what you garner is this sense of day to day paranoia about every day interaction and a casual, the casual communication of this virus, which we knew by 1987 couldn't be transmitted in these work, in

00:38:27.140 - 00:38:46.120

these ways. And yet this enduring suspicion amongst many mass observers that we weren't being told the whole truth about the epidemic and what it could portend. There's a very moving, there's a very moving testimony from a older woman who had a gay friend, I think neighbor,

00:38:46.700 - 00:39:03.030

who used to visit her on a daily basis and would get her shopping and bring her shopping in and so on, and after the AIDS crisis hits when he rang on the doorbell, she would hide. So there's this rather desperate sense of this woman cutting off

00:39:04.200 - 00:39:20.290

the support she had from this man because of the fear of what he might transmit to her. And presumably we don't know what that man felt about about this. Presumably, he knew she was, she was cutting him off and hiding from him, so there must have

00:39:20.290 - 00:39:35.120

been a sense of loss and grief on his part as well. And you can see in these ways the kind of day to day impact of the AIDS crisis and the impact of fear, because the virus wasn't an actual threat to this woman or an actual

00:39:35.120 - 00:39:52.940

threat to these people visiting the hairdressers. But their fear of the virus was shaping their everyday lives and interactions. I mean, I should also say that it's easy to highlight these kind of, I suppose what we'd say now a remarkable or surprising or, um, almost funny

00:39:52.940 - 00:40:07.460

in some cases, fears that people had. It's worth saying two things. I think one is that's not the majority of mass observers. We're talking about a handful, a relatively small number who are changing their behavior in these ways. And the other thing, I think it's worth,

00:40:07.800 - 00:40:28.190

it's easy, I think, with the condescension of history to kind of judge this behavior. But I think fear is real and ah, and it plays out for people in different ways. So it's, in a sense, it was biomedically unjustifiable but the fear that people felt was real,

00:40:28.210 - 00:40:47.620

you know, and we, there's testimonies from other people who have gay friends and say, well, one woman you can see in her testimony she's really battling with this, she says well, you know, I still kiss my friend on the cheek Goodbye when, when, when I, when we part.

00:40:47.620 - 00:41:05.580

And when I greet him and I figure you know it's worth, it's worth the risk for the offense I might cause if I didn't. And so you can see that AIDS and HIV is becoming a kind of filter through which people are thinking about daily interactions,

00:41:05.580 - 00:41:26.940

interactions with friends, interactions with hairdressers, charity shops, at Church. You can see how it's kind of feeding into the way people are operating and the way in which they're thinking about gay men in particular in new ways and thinking about their friendships in new ways. So I think

00:41:26.950 - 00:41:45.130

one of the most, one of the things that struck me most about this collection of testimonies and I really wasn't anticipating, was the wave of emotion that you see weaving through this material and which I felt as a researcher. So I've never cried in the archive

00:41:45.140 - 00:42:06.210

before in the way I cried over these testimonies and over the parallel testimonies in the, delivered to the national lesbian and gay survey. Um, the fear that some people are experiencing at this time is palpable. And there's various examples about the ways in which that fear

00:42:06.560 - 00:42:28.490

is shaping people's everyday lives, is shaping the way they're worrying about their children and grandchildren. And in the other set of testimonies from gay men in the national lesbian and gay survey, we see both of fear of homophobia and homophobic attack. But we also see really

00:42:28.490 - 00:42:44.800

acute fears about the virus and contracting it and the effects that it might be having. So fear is very palpable, and then also anger. So amongst many of the mass observers, a sizable minority of the mass observers, there's real anger with those that they see as being

00:42:44.800 - 00:43:04.490

sexually permissive. Real anger towards gays. Real anger amongst the handful of mass observers about left wing local councils, the so called loony left local councils who they saw promoting homosexuality. And that's the sort of anger that fuels what happened in the following year in 1988 which was

00:43:04.490 - 00:43:31.390

the passing of Clause 28 into law, which forbade local authorities from I'm quoting promoting homosexuality as a, as a legitimate or pretended family. So prevented, in my view, proper sex education and prevented libraries stocking certain books and so on. So you can see some of this anger that's

00:43:31.390 - 00:43:56.160

beginning to fuel that debate, which has legislative consequences the following year. As with all mass observation responses, there's a gender division, and there were many more women than men on the panel and women tended to respond more. And in this case there were 449 responses from women.

00:43:56.350 - 00:44:12.700

And just under 100, around 180 from men so you've got a gender division there. And in fact, one of the things that's marked in the responses to the directive is there is a, there is some difference, a gender difference in responses to the question and responses to

00:44:12.700 - 00:44:35.400

the AIDS, the AIDS directive. So there's something very interesting in the older age group. So the, in the over sixties about 45% of the men who were responding specifically blamed homosexuals and were specifically critical of them, whereas only about 15% of women in the older category

00:44:35.500 - 00:44:55.230

were specifically critical of homosexuals. Instead, they tended to be critical of immorality in general, and sexual permissiveness in general. So there's something quite interesting in the way men are much more targeted in who they're blaming. And in the younger age group, there's much more, there's much

00:44:55.230 - 00:45:14.910

more parity between genders. So we see about 20% of men and about 15% of women in a younger age group blaming homosexuality and immorality. So it's much more evened out in the younger age group than in the older age group. What older women who were writing into

00:45:14.910 - 00:45:34.440

mass observer, mass observation in response to this directive, comment on repeatedly is how their husbands are homophobic and, one woman said, you know, oh the men in my circle think homosexuals should be shot or put quietly to sleep. That's not what I think. So you can see

00:45:34.440 - 00:45:52.550

how a lot of the women in, especially in the older age group, are distinguishing their own views from the men in their lives, friends or, or their husbands. And marking a difference between them. That might be the case, or it might be that they share these

00:45:52.550 - 00:46:06.940

views, but they don't quite want to open themselves and so are displacing them onto the people that are saying them or saying those things more explicitly. So there's something very interesting about gender in the older age bracket, which tends to even out in the younger age brackets

00:46:06.940 - 00:46:35.320

of the mass observers. So one of the really fascinating things about mass observe, mass observation, these directives specifically, is how they allow us to key into cultures of feeling at particular times. And to see feeling and emotion as historically specific. So we tend to think of

00:46:35.320 - 00:46:57.380

things like fear and hate and anger as being trans historical, as being the same across time. But what mass observer, mass observation material alerted me to was the different texture of these emotions at specific historical, specific historical moments. So in this moment of acute concern about the

00:46:57.380 - 00:47:17.200

AIDS crisis, we see fear heightened in particular ways amongst the worried well, those people that were very unlikely to contract the virus but had this kind of fear that was shaping their everyday lives. And then in testimonies from gay men in the national lesbian and gay survey,

00:47:17.210 - 00:47:32.490

you see fear again. But you see fear textured in very different ways, more acutely related to their own health and wellbeing and that of their friends. And so you start to see the complexity of emotion in the way I think it's very difficult to see when

00:47:32.490 - 00:47:57.820

you look at, for example, media archives or, or at political pundits, which, of course, mobilize and use emotional language, but not in the way that mass observers are writing about it. And indeed, people that are interviewed in oral history projects are speaking about it. So the

00:47:57.830 - 00:48:13.130

digitalization of mass, mass observation is incredibly helpful in terms of teaching and research. And I say that for a number of reasons, the first is you don't have to go to The Keep in Brighton to look at this material. And it is truly a unique archive.

00:48:13.220 - 00:48:30.990

What the digitization is doing is allowing us to search the material in different ways so you can search by gender, by age, by location, in ways that I was having to do by hand in the archive, in a much more laborious way. So there's there's something

00:48:30.990 - 00:48:51.750

about the searchability of this material now it's online, and there's something also about allowing students and scholars to see this material, to have access to this material, which is truly unique. So there's no other resource quite like it in terms of tapping into everyday and ordinary

00:48:51.980 - 00:49:12.130

life. And so although, of course, the mass observer panel is self selecting, it's largely middle class, it's more women than men and so on, it's the closest thing we have to people commenting about their context, culture and society at the time, at that time. As opposed to,

00:49:12.130 - 00:49:31.790

for example, in oral history reflecting back on the time. So in that sense it's really quite unique, and having digital access to it really means that more and more people can learn from this material and can respond to it. There's something incredibly valuable in looking, at the

00:49:31.790 - 00:49:47.970

one hand, on opinion polls, which have clear yes and no answers to things and then looking at mass observation, and comments on those same issues and seeing how complicated and thoughtful, complicated people are in the way they're thinking about and equivocating over issues, and you get

00:49:47.970 - 00:49:50.080

a much fuller picture of that through mass observation.