Author: Andrew Copson

From A J Ayer and Bertrand Russell leading the charge for decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s, to the founding of the Gay Humanist Group in 1979, humanists have been marching, campaigning, and fighting for LGBT+ rights for well over a century.

To celebrate Pride Month, we’re spotlighting five iconic LGBT+ humanists.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

‘For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place.’

(Orlando, Virginia Woolf)

Virginia Woolf’s modernism can be understood as fundamentally a humanist project, one deeply shaped by her challenge to conventional ideas about gender, sexuality, and personal freedom. She rejected the static, patriarchal, and divinely ordained models of Edwardian society, choosing instead to explore the complexity of human consciousness and desire.

In 1912, aged 30, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf, and the pair continued to cultivate the tight-knit circle known as the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury was an LGBT-inclusive network of friends and lovers that celebrated sexual equality and freedom, feeling that every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose. In 1922, she met and began a relationship with the writer Vita Sackville-West, an intimate and romantic partnership that inspired what is perhaps the most magnificent love letter in English literature: Orlando (1928). Orlando shifts effortlessly across centuries and genders, a striking creative destabilisation of the rigid sexual categories of the 1920s.

James Baldwin (1924–1987)

‘Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?’

(Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin)

For James Baldwin, the struggle against racism could never be separated from the struggle against oppression based on sexuality. Through both his writing and activism, he challenged America to confront prejudice in all its forms, helping to raise public awareness of the connections between racial and sexual injustice.

This commitment was most boldly expressed in Giovanni’s Room (1956), Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love between two men in post-war Paris. The book was a risky and courageous departure from what his publisher had expected after the success of Go Tell It on the Mountain. American publishing house Knopf initially rejected the manuscript, warning that its supposed ‘perversion’ would harm Baldwin’s career. Undeterred, Baldwin pressed ahead, publishing a novel that explored love, sexuality, self-knowledge, and acceptance with extraordinary honesty and humanity.

Set among the queer bohemian circles of 1950s Paris, Giovanni’s Room portrays characters searching for meaning, belonging, and personal freedom across boundaries of language, culture, and class. Through its deeply compassionate depiction of love, heartbreak, and suffering, the novel reflects Baldwin’s profoundly humanist concern with individual autonomy and the universal quest to understand oneself. Today, it is recognised not only as one of Baldwin’s greatest achievements but also as a foundational text of LGBT+ literature, helping to pave the way for the gay civil rights movement that followed.

E M Forster (1879–1970)

‘Only connect’

(Howards End, E M Forster)

The great novelist E M Forster spent his life navigating the boundary between public conformity and private truth. For Forster, a Vice President of Humanists UK in the 1950s, the value of our lives lay in our relationships with others and the need for tolerance, sympathy, and love. It is in Howards End that we find his immortal phrase: ‘Only connect’.

Forster’s humanist conviction that love and intimacy are positive goods – wholly independent of religious validation – culminated in his novel Maurice. Written in 1913 but intentionally withheld from publication until after his death in 1970, Maurice was a revolutionary act: a story of homosexual love that did not end in suicide, madness, or ruin, but in joyful, enduring partnership. 

During the First World War, Forster joined the Red Cross, working in Alexandria as a searcher tracing missing soldiers when he met and began a relationship with Muhammad al-Adl. In 1930, after Muhammad’s death from tuberculosis, he met Bob Buckingham, a policeman, with whom he maintained a relationship until his death. In 1932, he wrote: ‘I have been happy, and would like to remind others that their turns can come too. It is the only message worth giving’. It was during this decade that Forster became a visible presence in campaigns for civic freedom and social reform.

Alan Turing (1912–1954)

‘I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future:

‘Turing believes machines think

‘Turing lies with men

‘Therefore machines do not think.’

(Letter Turing wrote in 1952 to his friend and fellow mathematician, Norman Routledge)

Alan Turing was a visionary thinker and one of the greatest humanists, mathematicians, and codebreakers of all time. He was also a private man who, though never seeking to conceal his sexuality, was subjected to the cruelty of state bigotry when prosecuted for gross indecency in 1952. Forced to choose between prison and chemical castration, he accepted the latter – a barbaric act by the state. Yet through it all, he had simply sought the freedom to live unjudged, and to pursue the work which mattered to him: to play his part in the innovations of the ‘human community’. As Andrew Hodges wrote in the closing pages of his biography, ‘with so few messages from the unseen mind to work on, his inner code remains unbroken’, but his legacy – for humanists, for scientists, and for the LGBT+ community – remains undeniable.

Today, Turing is a celebrated icon of the queer community. His work cracking the Enigma code and laying the foundation for computer science is recognised globally, and he currently features on the Bank of England £50 note.

Maureen Duffy (1933–2026)

‘I’m just taking up my whole personality and walking quietly out into the world with it. We’ll see what happens.’

In the modern era of activism, we should honour the monumental legacy of the late poet, novelist, and playwright Maureen Duffy. As one of the first public figures to fight for lesbian visibility in this country, Maureen’s courage and openness about her sexuality transformed gay and lesbian acceptance in the UK, breaking down barriers and prejudice, and giving other women like her the confidence to do the same. In 1962 she published her first novel, That’s How It Was, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in post-World War II England.

Her second novel, The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous lesbian Gateways club in London, was a feminist work that explored the lives of a group of women in 1960s London. It was considered the first ‘openly’ lesbian novel in English, and was banned in Ireland, the Vatican, and South Africa. Expressing the need for visibility for the LGBT+ community in The Microcosm, Maureen said:

‘We’re part of society, part of the world whether we or society like it or not, and we have to learn to live in the world and the world has to live with us.’

Today, that struggle continues. Whether campaigning for a full ban on the abusive practice of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ or resisting the rise of resurgent religious nationalisms that target LGBT people globally, the template remains the same.

The individual triumphs and tragedies of these historical icons have been fundamental to the organised humanist campaigns that have followed. 

For nearly half a century, LGBT+ Humanists has blazed a trail arguing for LGBT liberation and has played a key role in achieving milestones such as the decriminalisation of gay sex, ending Section 28, and the equalisation of the age of consent. 

Humanists UK celebrants were conducting same-sex humanist weddings decades before the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Humanists UK was later a prominent campaigner for legal same-sex marriages in Britain, working closely with the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group on the passing of the Same Sex Marriage Act 2013.

The Gay Humanist Group also campaigned for legal same-sex marriages since its inception in the late 1970s. In 2001, the group campaigned heavily for gay couples to take part in the London Partnership Register – the policy which later inspired the Civil Partnerships Act and eventually the Same Sex Marriage Act.

Today, that struggle continues. Whether campaigning for a full ban on the abusive practice of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ or resisting the rise of resurgent religious nationalisms that target LGBT people globally, the template remains the same.