 Mr. Lovett, tell us who you are and what is your connection with the Spanner case? Well, my name is John Lovett and I'm a solicitor, which in the United States we called an attorney. And I came to London in, oh, many years ago when I was 33 and discovered leather and little more than that. But then, as a lawyer, I learned about this famous case called the Spanner case. And I was reading all the reviews of it. I thought, well, I'd quite like to find out a bit more about that. And I saw in the gay press that there was a club called SM Gays who was going to give a talk on the Spanner case. So I went along. And prior to that, I had no idea what say the masochism was. Wow. Yeah. So that is how I came to come into the Spanner case in about the early 1990s. The case then had actually happened. The court case had happened. They had been convicted. They had been sentenced. They had been to the Court of Appeal. They had appealed. Their appeal had been reduced. But a campaign was then being launched called the Countdown on Spanner campaign to try and get some resources available, some money available, so that they could appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. So that is how I first came into the Spanner case in the early 1990s, assisting with that campaign to try and raise money for the appeal of Strasbourg. Tell me more about that appeal. How did that transpire? How did it transpire? Well, I think it transpired because the whole world was horrified by what had happened. And a lot of the money came not from this country, but from all over the world and principally, I have to say, from the United States. And in 2006, the Chicago Hellfire Club decided to have a fundraiser at Inferno for the Spanner case as it was then called. And as I was then a trustee of the Spanner Trust, I went along and assisted with the fundraising. How did you come to be one of the trustees? Ah, well, as I am both a lawyer and into SM, one of the trustees who was a client of mine said, John, you must come and be one of the trustees because you're a lawyer and you know the criminal law and you're into SM so you understand all about it. So I was invited in about 2004, I think it was, to become a trustee. What did that entail? Ah, well, the trust was already established and had been established as a trust because the American donors said they're not going to give money to just some group of individuals they don't know anything about. They wanted to establish just a legal trust. Ah, in fact, I've forgotten about that. That's how I came to be involved because they wanted a trustee drawn up and as one of the trustees was a client of mine, he said, John, will you draw up a trustee for us? I of course said yes, I'm happy to do that. I will do it free of charge. So I drew up the trustee, set up the span of trust in the first place. I remember now. Oh, I see, I see. Now, tell us a little bit more about your life as a lawyer and how you've been able to combine that with your work on this. Ah, well, I started off in London when I came here at the age of 30 as a commercial property lawyer who worked in a big commercial property firm and was very successful professionally, made a lot of money, but it was incredibly boring. And I was paying tax at 55%. And a locum solicitor who came to work for the firm was gay. He said, I'm thinking of starting my own practice as a gay solicitor. Would you like to join me? I said, really? What we said about a firm as a gay firm as a solicitor? He said, yes, the law society just said that solicitors can advertise. So we can advertise as gay solicitors. I said, can we really? He said, well, I think so. Anyway, before we set the firm up, we wrote off to the law society. And we said, now that lawyers can advertise, can we advertise as gay solicitors? And they said, oh, we've never been asked that one before. We'll have to have a meeting to find out. And they had a meeting and they came back some days later when we badgered them for an answer. They said, well, we've had a meeting and we can't find anything in the rules which says you can't. So I said, well, therefore we can. Well, yes, therefore you can. So in 1899, we were the first firm to advertise in the gay press as gay solicitors. And that brought in lots and lots of clients because men were then being sent to prison for cottaging on a regular basis. And they all pleaded guilty and went to jail. We said, no, don't plead guilty. Plead not guilty. Go and fight it. And we would always go for trial by jury. And 50% or 52% actually of the ones who took trial by jury, the jury acquitted. My God. Yes. But please explain cottaging very quickly for the audience. Cottaging? Oh, that's when two gay men go into a public laboratory. And OIC, because Americans might know what cottaging is. The audience in the States probably. Right. I believe we call that tea room. Tea room, do you? OIC. Yes. And usually what happened in this country was because the police have to get a number of convictions before they can get promotion. I see. If they're coming up to the deadline when they've got to have a few more convictions, they go off to the local gents, stand there waving their dick out at somebody who comes in unsuspecting and just touches it. You're arrested. I'm a police officer. Yeah. Yeah. And they've set them up. You said 52% of these were eventually acquitted? Yes. We went to trial by jury. 52% resulted in acquittals. Wow. So that was how I first became a lawyer in 1989. Tell me more about the Spanner case logistics. It's very involved. It's multi-layered. Oh. Please explain that. I went along to SM Gaze where they gave a talk about it. And SM Gaze used to do a course of six lectures called Introduction to the Hard Scene, I think. And they said, would you do a lecture on SM and the law? And that would be the last lecture. I said, OK. So I then had to go and research one and write one, which I did. And I researched the history of the Spanner case and how it came about. And it is a tragic, tragic tale of catastrophe after catastrophe. Yes. And it goes back a long way. And in fact, ironically, it goes back to right here where we are in Soho. Because in the 1960s and in the 1970s, the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publication Squad used to come down here and go into the pawn shop selling pawn, confiscate all the pawn, and prosecute the people selling the pawn. And what the police then did was went and sold it again elsewhere. So the squad was totally corrupt. And so Robert Mark, who was then the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, realized that this was going to come out as a scandal. The entire squad was totally corrupt. And what can I do about it? They thought, I could sack them all. And then appoint other officers. Well, they'll just become corrupt as quickly as that. Because police officers were not very well paid in those days. It's according to their pension. So he thought, what are we going to do? I've got a bright idea. I will appoint fundamentalist Christian police officers to run the Obscene Publication Squad. OK. And it worked. It worked because, of course, they went in, confiscated all the pawn, and destroyed it because of their Christian beliefs and arrested the people selling it. And the pawn industry down here was closed down. Uh-huh. Now, we had Mrs. Thatcher as prime minister with an economy going down the hill. Yes. And her remedy for that was unemployment and cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts to government expenditure. And everything she cut, one thing she wanted to cut out was the Obscene Publication Squad, because they had nothing to do. So that was the background of it. The scene now shifts to North Wales up in the far part of the country. When a man is driving along on his motor car and he's stopped by the police on a routine check, the police can stop you and say, is this your vehicle, sir? Can I check that the lights work and the brakes work? Can I look through the vehicle, sir? He said, yes, you can look through the vehicle. Now, although they're allowed to check the lights and the brakes, they're not allowed to look through the vehicle. But he gave them permission. And they found some videos. They said, what are these? Oh, they're videos. Well, can we take these and have a look at them? And he said, yes, well, it means they should have said no. They had no legal right to take them, but they took them. And they saw videos of gay men having sex. Straight video, non-SM videos. And they went back to his house. And they said, have you got any more videos that we can look at? He said, oh, yeah, come in, naive man. And they looked and said, well, can we take all these videos and go look at these? And he said, yes. So they took the videos away. And the videos they saw showed SM scenes. And they thought that they had found snuff movies. They thought people were getting killed. So they immediately launched a murder investigation. And they telephoned the Metropolitan Police because any serious murders or serious crimes, the Metropolitan Police, which is the biggest police force under, gets involved. And there was the head of the fire squad. Nothing to do. And he got this call from North Wales. Why don't you come and help us investigate snuff movies? Ah, he thought, my job saved. Not if he went in his helicopter. And they had a murder investigation, which lasted some time. I don't know how long. And eventually they realized that nobody had been killed at all. So the murder investigation was dropped and just became a general investigation of what was going on. But they wanted this man to identify the people in the videos, which he did. And he also took away his address book. So they contacted everybody in his address book. And they all got visits. And eventually 14 police forces in this country, out of about 40. That's about a third of the police forces in this country, carried on this investigation over years, about seven years I think it was, cost him about four million pounds. And at the end of it, they came to the conclusion that the only crimes that had been committed were gross indecency. That is, socking cocks and things. But they couldn't prosecute anybody for that because there's a timeline of prosecutions of six months. So there was absolutely no crime whatsoever that they could prosecute any of these men for in English law at that time. How do we justify all this expense? How do we justify all these years and years and years? Well, can we not prosecute them for assault, they said. They've been all been assaulting one another. Oh no, you can't prosecute them for assault. They consented, that's a defence. If you consent as a defence in law to a charge of assault, if you engaged a boxing match or anything similar to that, you can consent to it. Well, let's take his lawyers and see what they say. And out of the hundreds of men that they had arrested and questioned, they selected 16 or 17 to prosecute. Yes. One, who was Alan Oversby, they prosecuted separately. He was convicted of, I think putting a Prince Albert into somebody's dick. Either with or without an anesthetic. The other 16, they prosecuted together on charges of assault. Ah, but they all said, but they all consented. And the judge argued in the case that yes, you can consent to assault if there's a good reason. For example, if it's cosmetic surgery. Yes. Or if it's a piercing and it's done for all mental purposes or if it's a boxing match or it's a rugby match. But if there's no good reason, you can't consent. And I find that the satisfaction of sexual libido, to use his expression, is not a good reason. Therefore, I'm going to direct the jury to convict. And each of them had their own barrister. And all their barristers advised them to do was to plead guilty. And then you'll get a much lesser sentence, probably just a fine and be let off. So they all pleaded guilty. They didn't even put you to the jury. Oh. Who may very well have acquitted. They all pleaded guilty. But to their horror, instead of getting just a fine of a few hundred pounds, they got sentences of four and a half years and downwards. So they appealed to the Court of Appeal. And the Court of Appeal reduced those sentences I think to three years. The four and a half came in at a three. And the others proportionately. But they were all, the convictions were upheld. So that's the background leading up to the actual case, which as I say, is a very sad and sorry tale. I can't help but wonder why this gentleman, you mentioned, opened up all these videos for people to see. I'm a bit dismayed by that. Why did he do this? I don't know. But of course, one of the points I used to get across when I was lecturing was to give all the little boys there to know their rights so they would never make the same mistake themselves. Because these men were never being evicted if they hadn't provided evidence in the video form and if they hadn't admitted it out of their own mouths and signed statements. Incredible. Incredible and tragic. And tragic because of course, they all had their lives ruined. Take us the next step with this. Where did the case go? Oh, well after the Court of Appeal, it went to the House of Lords, which is our equivalent of the Supreme Court. Yes. In fact, about five or six years ago, the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court. We now have a Supreme Court as well. And in the Supreme Court, there were five judges who heard it and two of them voted that all the acquittals should all be acquitted and three of them did not. So by the smallest of majorities, they lost in the House of Lords. And the next step of course was to go to the European Court of Human Rights, which they did. And I'm afraid the European Court also dismissed their appeal on the basis that the enforcement of morals was a matter which each nation could decide for itself. And it wasn't a matter of the European Court. That would probably go differently today. I think that the attitudes have changed. How do you mean that? Please explain that a little bit. Oh, the European Court of Human Rights was set up after the Second World War with sort of eight principles. And the judges have kept on expanding those principles as they've gone on. One of the principles was you have a right to a private life. They've now expanded that saying you have a right to be gay. It's a bit like the American Supreme Court which keeps expanding the law and reinterpreting it. How do you feel the Spanner case impacted any decisions made in that department? Which department? As the court has expanded the rights and has changed its view. It is still the law. So if the police wanted to prosecute you, they could prosecute you. What the Spanner trust was then tasked with doing after the appeal would fail was to try and get the law changed which of course is what we've been trying to do for the years ever since and haven't succeeded, at least not in this country. We much succeed in Japan, but not in this country. But do you feel that a modern judge if it were to be brought forward today do you feel that it would be viewed as a violation as it was years ago? Oh no, I don't think it would at all and in fact there have been subsequent cases that have gone to the Court of Appeal. They've all been involving heterosexual couples where the judges have ruled that consent was a valid defence. Do you feel Spanner is what has brought that about? Well, those cases wouldn't have gone and been prosecuted to those straight ones if it hadn't been for the Spanner case and the prosecution clearly were trying it on and the interesting thing was they went to the Court of Appeal and when they lost they didn't take it on to the Supreme Court because they didn't want to risk upsetting the Spanner case which it could have done. How do you mean? What does that mean? We have two levels of appeal in this country we have the initial court then we have the Court of Appeal and then we have the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court overrules all the other courts below and the Spanner decision now is at the Supreme Court level you see. So when the prosecution got an acquittal on a straight case in the Court of Appeal they didn't go on to the Supreme Court because they didn't want to risk overturning the Spanner decision if that makes sense. It does but why not? Why not? The government don't want to change the Spanner law they want to keep it because it wins votes for them but we haven't succeeded in changing it there's no votes in it we've been and talked to the civil servants we convinced them that it should be changed and they said well you convinced us but we're not going to convince the ministers there's no votes in it there are more votes keeping the law as it is than there are in changing it. Do you feel it would ever be changed? Well it's very interesting you should say that because I've been thinking about that I don't think the last few days because up until last week Theresa May was one of the most right-wing ministers we've ever had but Boris Johnson he was talking on day one about LGBT rights I think he is amenable to have it changed so once he settles down a bit I think we might well have another go How will you do that? By waiting until a bill country for parliament in which we could put an amendment we've done that before we've quite succeeded in getting the amendment through for example a criminal justice bill we tacked something on to that to say that consent should be a defence to a charge of assault even if it involves say a domestic sex in other words it would overrule the Spanish decision Do you really think that that is something that you may see in the next while? It sounds like a very very big hurdle to be honest and frank and candid but that doesn't mean you don't try True Now the Spanner trust is what would bring forward whatever It would sort of finance it it would have to get some sort of person to nominate themselves to put themselves forward to bring it in their name Now you have lectured about the Spanner case What have you confronted with that? What has that done for you? That was to various people who were engaging in SM so that they were aware of what the law was so they didn't make videos that could incriminate them if they got caught and so that if the police did come knocking on the door they knew of their rights and that they could deny access unless they had a warrant that's the main, basically education is the reason why I used to give the lectures Now you mentioned the word warrant How did that apply to the people who actually were rated regarding Spanner? There weren't any warrants and in fact the police wouldn't have been entitled to get any warrants because they hadn't got any suspicion of any crimes being committed Then how were they able to invade these people's homes and take these things? They gave them permission They were naive and ignorant Of all of the litigants is that what you mean? They didn't know any better They did nothing wrong and if you don't think anything wrong why shouldn't you cooperate with the police? Fascinating Fascinating and terrifying at the same time Yes I was reviewing a book here that has some very interesting bits in it and there's one bit I would like to present to you for your thoughts on that The author says that the particulars surrounding Spanner and the laws regarding BDSM has turned Britain into the most sexually policed country in Europe What have you to say to that? Well someone asked me the other day about the most free and liberal country in Europe I think probably the UK would be at the bottom of the pile But I don't think the police at the moment are interested in enforcing the law because they've got other things to do They've got knife crime they've got terrorism But the problem is the law is there it has a chilling effect It's the chilling effect that it has We're all frightened to engage in SM in case something goes wrong So although perhaps we're not policed anymore we're all inhibited we're not free and that's why I go and play in Chicago or Berlin and not in London Fascinating Now do you feel that the particulars that led up to the police raids regarding the Spanner case 30 some years ago were they indicative of the time or was there something perhaps that sparked all of that? No, as I think I said to you it was just indicative of the time The vice-quad wanting something to do Okay, I just wanted to make sure I was correctly understanding that Whereas at the time at the moment the police are not looking for work to do they've got far more work than they can possibly cope with and that is the reason why they're not remotely interested in the moment in enforcing the sex laws and enforcing the Spanner law Besides which I think they know that if it went up to the Court of Appeal or the European Court of Human Rights it would be overturned Yes, yes Do you feel truly that Spanner is the catalyst for that if that were the case Because that's what I am slightly confused about I want to make sure I thoroughly understand that the reason that it wouldn't be viewed in the same vein today is because of what transpired with Spanner Oh, there are two reasons One is that moral attitudes have changed We now have gay marriage Which has come about recently Moral attitudes have changed society has changed and the law has to change in parallel with that So yes, I think if there were another similar prosecution today a jury would have quit if the Crown Prosecution Service decided to prosecute in the first place Do you feel that's the same in the European Court of Appeals not just here in Britain Oh, I think they're far more liberal in Europe than we are here Why do you feel Well, in Western Europe anyway Eastern Europe of course is wholly different I think it's probably worse over there They've got great problems in Poland They do I'm talking about Western Europe But at the time of Spanner it wasn't a 15-0 decision when they took it to the Human Court of Appeals Is that correct? It's the European Court of Human Rights The European Court of Human Rights Do you feel it would be the same today? No, I think it would go the other way So today's Spanner trust is What exactly is it doing and what does it achieve today? Because we call the Carter Government won't change the law because there's no votes in it There's not a lot for it to do at the moment Which in a way is a good thing There's not a lot for it to do It's a good thing So that's a good thing But yet you're still reluctant to engage in that here Even though there's been no prosecution recently Just because there's been no prosecution doesn't mean there can't be one And if somebody goes and complains that I've just been assaulted and that's what usually happens someone's not allowed into a party they go and complain to the police I see What do you think will be the ultimate legacy of Spanner? Probably the most important criminal case of the last half a century That's a very strong statement If you go to the University law departments that's what they will say And all the law students all say that it was wrongly decided by the judges uniformly Fascinating They're coming up Well not to prove of it So someone facing something today what advice would you have for them? Oh don't say anything until you're spoken to a lawyer Okay Fascinating Okay John you've changed your outfit in order to conclude your interview And I find your letters absolutely stunning They carry so much personality so much history I would like very much if you would tell us about the amazing leather that you're wearing and show us a little bit Okay one of the reasons why I became a Spanner trustee was because not only was a lawyer and you've seen me in my lawyer's garb but I'm also I prefer to be in my leathers than in my lawyer garb Wouldn't we all? Yeah and this is a pair of shorts which my ex-boyfriend gave to me These are very very memorable and special Tell us more about the shorts Why are they so special? Oh well he bought them in 1952 in Austria So they have a promenade Yeah Of course of course I'm wearing my jacket which I had from McQueen in Chicago which is the second proudest day of my life It was my fourth degree from the Queen Mother Okay It was a real Queen The second proudest day of my life was when I got my Chicago Hellfire Club Yes please please From a Queen in Chicago Any Queen in particular I can't remember his name now Fantastic Fantastic Thank you for sharing I appreciate it Okay So very very much for teaching me a little bit more about the minutiae and complexities of the Spanner case and for contributing to the overall education of Spanner and why we are here in London to do this My pleasure, thank you