In the late 1980s British police ran a large investigation into consensual sadomasochism among gay men. The operation was called Operation Spanner. The Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad led it from 1987 to 1990. Officers questioned about a hundred gay and bisexual men and named 43 in the report. The Director of Public Prosecutions charged 16 of them with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, unlawful wounding, and related offences, for private consensual acts between 1978 and 1987. Nobody had complained. Nobody needed a doctor. The videos were homemade. The law still treated the bruises as crimes. In R v Brown the House of Lords ruled that consent is not a defence to actual bodily harm.
The climate, and the Dirty Squad
Public feeling about homosexuality had hardened. The 1987 British Social Attitudes Survey found that three-quarters of respondents called same-sex activity always or mostly wrong. That same year the government’s HIV/AIDS campaign, Don’t Die of Ignorance, tied gay and bisexual men to the pandemic. In the 1987 election Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives campaigned against the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools. Party posters accused Labour of backing books such as Young, Gay and Proud. At conference she attacked the claim that children were being taught they had an inalienable right to be gay. In 1988, Section 28 of the Local Government Act barred local authorities from intentionally promoting homosexuality. Peter Bruinvels said the measure would help outlaw homosexuality. Sex between men had been partly decriminalized in 1967, but gross indecency was still an easy charge. In 1989 police recorded more than 2,000 such offences, the highest number since decriminalization. About 30 percent of sexual-offence convictions that year were for consensual gay sex.
The Obscene Publications Squad enforced the Obscene Publications Act 1959, seizing material likely to deprave and corrupt. The unit already had a corruption record. Detective Superintendent William Moody was said to take about £25,000 a year in bribes. Thirteen officers went to prison. The nickname was the Dirty Squad. After the scandal, postings were shortened. In the 1980s the rebuilt squad worked with Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association and joined the video-nasty campaign, seizing films such as Evil Dead II and a large amount of gay pornography. The Lesbian and Gay Policing Association said the work damaged police relations with LGBT people.
KL7
In October 1987 Greater Manchester Police obtained a videotape later coded KL7, showing consensual sadomasochism between men. Searches followed in Bolton, Shrewsbury, and elsewhere. With no evidence that anyone had died, officers still claimed someone might have been killed during filming. More tapes showed whipping, spanking, and wax play. The inquiry spread across sixteen forces. The Met’s Obscene Publications Squad took the lead and the operation got the name Spanner. Gay magazines reported the raids. A man told Him that police had talked about snuff in interview. Greater Manchester Police denied that, then wrongly linked the case to a 1985 Leeds murder. Snuff became the police story. It was not proved. The men said they had met through magazine ads and that everything on screen was consensual. The tapes were a play party with a camera.
By early 1988 investigators still did not know who was on KL7. On 29 March 1988 a Hampshire officer recognized the man with a distinctive joint deformity on his left index finger in a Panorama episode. The programme showed a same-sex blessing by a Church of England vicar. The finger was visible in close-up. The man was not the vicar. Police interviewed him on 7 April, searched his home, and he named another participant. By 1989 they had hundreds of tapes and statements. They seized more than 400 cassettes, many of them commercial or not pornographic at all. The investigation cost about £2.5 million. They found no non-consensual acts and no lasting injuries. In September 1989 sixteen men were charged with more than 100 offences, including the rare count of aiding and abetting assaults against themselves. Two were charged over a photograph of a child. One faced a bestiality count. Those were extra charges stacked on the file, not the SM consent case. In 1991 the Met replaced Detective Superintendent Leslie Bennett after he misused the Police National Computer.
The Old Bailey
In October 1989 the defendants were sent from the magistrates’ court to the Crown Court. Trial opened on 29 October 1990 before Judge James Rant. The defence was that everyone had consented. Rant cited R v Coney (1882) and R v Donovan (1934) and ruled that consent was not a defence. “People must sometimes be protected from themselves.” The defendants changed their pleas. Convictions followed on 7 November. Before sentence, Detective Superintendent Michael Hames wrote in the Daily Mail that the men were the most horrific porn ring ever before a British court. The National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Acts called the article heavily propagandist. On 19 December Rant sentenced eight men to between one and four and a half years. Prosecutor Michael Worsley QC described brute homosexual activity in sinister circumstances, about as far from human love as could be imagined, while conceding that the evidence was statements and private videos. Rant said the courts had to mark what a civilized society would accept, and that these practices lay on the wrong side of that line.
The Daily Telegraph wrote of a torture vice gang. The Times wrote of the leaders of a vicious and perverted sex gang. Defence counsel kept saying the participants were adults and that none needed treatment. Anna Worrall QC objected to the airing of some defendants’ HIV status and to the use of police dogs on the raids. She warned that those details would feed stigma. Several papers printed them anyway. Rant looked distressed watching the tapes and later said he was not likely to have forgotten that film. As the men left court, photographers knocked one defendant down and kicked him. Dropped conspiracy counts fed a suspicion that the government had wanted a test case on the limits of consent. The dock was filled with gay sadomasochists. The rule that came out could be used against anyone who left a mark on purpose.
Appeals and the street
In February 1992 five men appealed. Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane upheld the convictions. Consent, he said, was immaterial. He accepted that the men had not realized their conduct was illegal, cut the longest sentence to six months, and certified a further appeal to the House of Lords. The Lords rejected the appeal 3–2. Ann Mallalieu QC argued that private acts between consenting adults should not be crimes unless they caused serious harm or involved an unwilling person. Lord Templeman, for the majority, said that pleasure from inflicting pain is an evil thing and that cruelty is uncivilised. Three defendants went to the European Court of Human Rights. The court upheld British law 9–0 as necessary in a democratic society for the protection of health. Laskey, Jaggard and Brown v. United Kingdom put the same stamp on it as a human-rights judgment.
Civil-rights groups called the trial an invasion of privacy and a misuse of state power. Keir Starmer, then a human-rights barrister, said judges had imposed their morality on others and were too unrepresentative to do so fairly. The Pink Paper called it a homophobic show trial. In February 1991 about 5,000 people marched in London against the convictions and against Clause 25 of the Criminal Justice Bill. Two months later, thousands joined the Liberation ’91 march in Manchester, demanding the repeal of anti-gay laws.
The law stayed; the scene did not
Countdown on Spanner fought the appeal ruling, published the newsletter Spanner People, and demonstrated for Hames’s resignation. In 1992 more than 700 people joined the first SM Pride march in London. In 1994 the Law Commission proposed that sexual activity between consenting adults should be legal unless it caused serious injury. The proposal was not adopted. The Spanner Trust was set up in 1995 to support the defendants and push reform. In 1996 Countdown on Spanner took Large Nonprofit Organization of the Year at the Pantheon of Leather Awards. No major statutory rewrite followed in the mid-1990s. The scene had already changed. The Sexual Freedom Coalition sat in the same ecology: people had just watched the state treat a safeword as irrelevant. The short documentary Lasting Marks later retold the case for The Guardian.
Actual bodily harm is not a high bar in English law. Bruises, welts, and cuts can meet it. These men were not convicted because someone died or because anyone went to hospital. They were convicted because the injuries were wanted, and the Lords said wanted injuries still count. Boxing and surgery stay inside the lawful-activity exception. A private SM session does not. The extreme-pornography offence of 2007–08 and the 2014 audiovisual rules are not identical to R v Brown, but they drink from the same well: the state, not the participants, decides how much pain may be given for pleasure, and who may look at the pictures. A London fetish club can still fill a dance floor. A party that looks like the KL7 tape is still, on the books, a room of potential complainants who may also be co-defendants, including people charged with assaulting themselves. The facts are not in dispute: sixteen forces, £2.5 million, more than four hundred tapes, a finger on Panorama, a defendant kicked by photographers, five thousand people in the street, and a report that was not adopted. Consent was not in dispute as a fact. It was ruled out as a defence.
