The young gay men jailed for consensual sex in a private home. Using a law from 1533. In 1998.

OUTCAST WORLD

• Podcast Home
• Download Episode

Thursday, 11 June 2026 - 39 minutes

In 1998, eight months into Tony Blair's government, seven gay and bisexual working-class men from Bolton were convicted at Crown Court of buggery and gross indecency for having consensual sex together in a private home. No victim. No complaint. Some went to prison. All were placed on the sex offenders register. The laws used against them dated back to 1895, and in one case to 1533. Greater Manchester Police, the same force that prosecuted Alan Turing, pursued this case with a fervour no other police force in the country was matching at the time. Almost nobody knows this happened. Hugh Sheehan is the writer and audio producer behind Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7, the five-part BBC Sounds documentary series that spent years in the making and is referenced in Russell T Davies' Channel 4 drama Tip Toe, starring Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner in Manchester's Gay Village. Davies made Tip Toe because, in his words, the fight is back on. He's right. And the Bolton Seven are a significant part of why. In this episode of Outcast World, Graeme and Hugh cover the full story: the centuries-old laws that remained quietly on the books after partial decriminalisation in 1967, the two-man rule that made consensual group sex a criminal act regardless of what straight people were doing, the class dimension that meant working-class men from Bolton had no legal defences that a wealthier man in a privately owned home might have had, and the Chief Constable whose fundamentalist homophobia had shaped Greater Manchester Police for over a decade before the Bolton Seven were ever arrested. Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7 is available on BBC Sounds, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe to this podcast

• Apple Podcasts
• Apple Podcasts
• RSS Feed