 Today I'm speaking with Dr. Matt Lodder and Dr. Lodder would you please introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about the work you do. Sure, hi. So I'm a senior lecturer in Art History and American Studies at the University of Essex, just a few miles outside of London. I work on the history of tattooing is what my research is about, but I came to work on that through growing up basically in the tattoo piercing and body mod scenes. As part of my broader work on the history of tattooing, I've been working a lot on the life and times and work of Mr. Sebastian, Alan Oversby, the first important queer tattooer in Britain, the pioneer of body piercing in this country and one of the men caught up in the span of prosecution. And as an offshoot of that work, I have begun to think with some colleagues in other disciplines, particularly law and chronology, about really kind of what the cultural and historical contexts of Operation Spain are versus Brown and its kind of legacies and tendrils into British cultural history and cultural life might be. So I think we've run some workshops, I've given some public lectures, we're just beginning to work again on some more kind of sustained work to think about the case, not just in the context of legal scholarship, what it might mean for the law, but what it means for history and what it means for contemporary cultural life in Britain basically. Let's take a step over to Alan Oglesby, Mr. Sebastian, you've mentioned him and that he is someone I have not explored much regarding all of this research I've been doing on Spanner and preparing for the interviews that are coming up with this. Tell us a little bit about him, I'd like to know a little more about him. He's an amazing character and I feel slightly saddened that I never got to meet him, he sort of died I guess shortly after I became aware of him. So he was born in the 1930s in the north of England, worked very briefly in Guiana in the Caribbean and spoke of seeing farmhands on the sugar plantation he was working on with nipple piercings. He thought hey that sounds good, get me some of that and he asked them overrun one evening to pierce his nipples, this must have been in the 50s. So he came back to Britain with nipple rings, he trained as an art teacher but soon found himself more drawn to London and the queer communities, particularly the tattooing world. So he moved down to London and found himself kind of this nexus of the burgeoning body piercing scene in Britain. So he had made good connections with Jim Ward and Doug Malloy at Gauntlet in San Francisco, pre-Gauntlet days and really started to communicate with them and learn from them about techniques, to share ideas with them. And basically became the first kind of professional body piercing studio I guess we might call it today in the UK, so this is in the late 1970s. It's really interesting, there's a great interview with him in one of the PFI queues where he talks about essentially wanting to kind of become better as a body piercer or to become a body piercer really. Because he'd seen piercing being undertaken at the kind of orgies and BDSM parties and other parties that he was at, but these piercings were being done quite unsafely, quite unsanitary, quite poorly and thought hey I want to do this better basically. And so he parlayed that particular kind of niche sexual interest in body piercing into an industry and essentially was by the early 90s, around the same time as the Spanner as the Brown case was going through the courts, became a pretty prominent figure for the kind of fashionistas of London. So he got caught up in the Spanner prosecutions, he ended up with a suspended sentence, he didn't serve any prison time, but his case was an interesting and complex one for the prosecution because basically what he was convicted of was piercing his boyfriend's dick, he did a Prince Albert I think. And the law said wait a minute, okay we're going to kind of push this line that there's no consent in the law and British law for GBH, who is probably harmed, but we allow ear piercing. So how are we going to kind of nail this guy that we want to convict for piercing and so then they kind of invent this kind of sort of strange legal logic about piercing that can't be done for sexual purposes, they sort of carve out this sort of weird bit of case law. And so he ends up being convicted in an unreported case, which means it wasn't a published case, but the case was later cited after the Spanner convictions happened, his case was cited in the review of the Law Commission in 1995 after the initial round ruling. To go, this is a difficult problem, how are we going to kind of deal with the fact that we've said that genital piercing or sexual genital piercing is illegal but ear piercing is not illegal, how are we going to square this, we need to think about this legally. And unfortunately he didn't really live much longer to kind of see the legal changes that happened through. But I think it's kind of deeply interesting and deeply problematic and deeply kind of sad to me that he was convicted for doing in private what he then became quite well known and quite prominent for doing in public. And I find that one of the most interesting and kind of complicated issues in the whole, at least my angle on this whole case, that somehow what he was doing behind closed doors was completely kind of illegal to the point of criminality. But when he was doing it for paying customers it was this brand new trend and this nexus that happens literally in like 92, 93, 94, the body piercing changes very quickly from underground queer practice to mainstream cultural practice, he's right in the middle of that. And the very fact that the exact practices that he'd learned to do during the orgies that were on the spanner tapes or probably became this mainstream thing. It's really funny, in that PFIQ interview it's amazing, so he says like, he said I never wanted a belly button piercing, he had quite a big stretch belly button piercing. He said I never wanted a belly button piercing but I had to kind of learn how to do it because loads of guys on the scene were doing it and they were doing it badly and I wanted to learn how to do it better. So perhaps literally the things that he was doing on those tapes that so horrified the Met Police in 1988, just five or six years later, he was being interviewed by Guardian journalists. And that moment at Britain at the end of the 80s and what happens and the fallout and the fact that we haven't really resolved those issues is exactly what I'm interested in. Why didn't he live long enough to see this? So he died of HOV, HOV AIDS, yeah unfortunately. I can't remember how old he was when he died, it must have been in his early 50s when he died. His partner survives, he left behind a really beautiful archive of work, of photographs, of drawings. And a real interesting legacy outside of the kind of spanner stuff, a real interesting legacy in the tattoo community in Britain actually because he was one of the first tattooers in this country to have an art school education because he trained as an art teacher, he'd been to art school. And because his client base was primarily at least to begin with in the 80s at gay men, he wasn't really a threat to other tattooists so they weren't really threatened by him. He actually was getting tattooed by a lot of other tattooers himself so he made quite good connections in the scene. And even though he was a slight sort of anomaly culturally, he was quite well tolerated and quite well liked actually by other tattooers in the country. And in fact it's really really interesting that now some of the kind of grand figure if you will of British tattooing speak very very fondly about having known him and having met him and having even been tattooed by him in some cases. My gosh. Yeah. Okay. And he was a beautiful guy, worth also checking out, so he also had a beautiful voice, right? He had this incredibly honeyed voice, like very kind of silken and clipped and beautiful. And he ended up doing a voiceover because he tattooed Genesis Pete Orridge from Throbbing Gristle. In fact, Genesis is in, he's in Sebastian's interview in Modern Primitives, the Vail and Juno book that came out in 1989. And Genesis Pete Orridge and Paul Orridge were interviewed in that book too. They talk about being tattooed by Mrs. Sebastian. And after he tattooed them, he ended up working with Throbbing Gristle and doing voiceovers with Swelkick TV, one of their offshoots. And he did the voiceover for one of their tracks. It's him kind of reading this beautiful prayer about sexuality and about queerness. And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to listen to him talk because he had an incredible, incredible voice. Oh, okay. Interestingly, I approached you some time ago after seeing a video you had on YouTube. Yeah. When I was doing some of the initial prep for these interviews, what were you doing? What was this lecture? What was I doing? So I have been writing for a long time, long overdue, sorry my publishers, a long overdue book on the history of tattooing and in there there's a chapter on Mr. Sebastian. But it's largely about his tattoo work. And of course I have to mention the context of Harvey Brown, but there's much more I wanted to say about that, that I couldn't fit into the chapter in the book. So I'm really lucky at the University of Essex where I work. We have a centre of research on human rights. And they said to me, have you got anything in your work that touches on human rights concerns? And I said, yeah, I'd love to talk about human rights in the context of Harvey Brown, particularly where Mr. Sebastian fits into that. And at the time we put together a group of colleagues, a woman called Alex Dimmock who is now a goldsmith, who's a chronologist, who wrote about female masochism and the law for her PhD, and a scholar called Dominic Johnson who works on performance art histories. So we're going to put together this project because we thought there was going to be some value in thinking about the case, not just as a piece of legal history or a piece of legal theory, which is how it's often thought, but as a really interesting cultural moment. Because we realised, I think, that there are these overlaps with performance art, there are these overlaps with tattoo and body mod history, but there are also things where it kept bubbling up. And the more we looked, the more we thought, wait a minute, there's something really unresolved in following the House of Lords ruling in 1997. The British government never dealt with this and the kind of rank unfairness and they just sort of left it alone. But by sort of 2010, it was bubbling up again. It had started to be used as the basis, for example, of pornography regulations in the UK. It was mentioned by Theresa May which was then Home Secretary in relation to FGM and cosmetic vaginoplasty. And we just sort of thought that there was going to be some utility in talking about Spanner as a historical moment rather than just as a legal problem. But in the last year or so, it's become a much more urgent issue again. And so I'm certainly hoping to do a lot more work on it in the coming three or four years. So hopefully this culture and historical legacies of Spanner, particularly in Britain, although the tendrils are a bit wider than that, particularly in the British context, is going to be the focus for the next few years. You mentioned that the case has become hot again. And why is that? What's going on? Well, so there's been no real legal interest or certainly kind of prosecutorial interest in doing anything with that case law since the 90s. So there was a case called R versus Wilson in which the Spanner logic, as I call it, this idea that you can't consent to GBH, that came up in a case called R versus Wilson in the early 2000s, which was to do with a heterosexual couple, a man who branded his wife consensually. It was part of a master-slave relationship and the judge in that case, the police and the Crown Prosecution Services pushed that through. The judge in that case said, we have no interest in getting involved in what happens behind closed doors with married couples, right? So in this case, for about 10 years, it seemed like the interest in prosecuting people for what they did behind closed doors had evaporated. So since then, not much has happened. No one's been convicted under that logic for a very long time. But this year, in February this year, in 2019, a guy called Brendan McCarthy, who's a body modification practitioner from Wolverhampton, was convicted and sent to jail for 40 months for consensual body mod practices. So he got convicted of doing a tongue split, which is fairly conventional I think, and then he did two harder procedures, a nipple removal and an ear removal. Convict you consensually, no complainant, no victim in any kind of moral or ethical sense. But every stage, essentially there was a whistleblower in the case. And at every stage in his prosecution, the judges went, well, the law says this, you know, the European Court of Human Rights are very clear, that you have no defence to this charge, you have to plead guilty. So he ended up pleading guilty, and he's currently in prison right now behind bars. And then, you know, the specter of the case is starting to kind of bubble under again. So it was just mentioned just this week by Harriet Harman, former Labour minister, who's working on the New Domestic Violence Bill, as a kind of model for the kind of legal thinking that they want to kind of embed in the Domestic Violence Bill to prevent, again, the discussion's always about straight couples in the discourse, which is interesting and complicated. But to prevent, in her words in this article for the Independent last week, men using rough sex as a defence for harming their partners. And so sparring the Spanish logic is live again in a way that it hasn't been for a very, very long time. And I think not enough people are aware of just how pernicious and how deeply embedded, both legally and culturally, the kind of thinking and the kind of legal logic is that led to those prosecutions. Why has this started coming up again? This is not new information. Why has it sort of come around in the circle again? Well, that's the kind of, you know, impossible question in a way. I think, yeah, we're seeing globally a conservative turn, right? Sure. And I think this is why I think it's interesting to think about sparring historical context, because it arose, you know, out of a particular moment in time, height of the AIDS crisis in the middle of a kind of queer panic, in the middle of a satanic panic, which it was linked into. It was also a result of an interesting set of concerns in British cultural life around videos and video nasties about the kind of what videos could do to kids, right? And all of that kind of conservative logic, which we thought we kind of got over in the 90s, in the 2000s, in the early years of the millennium, are sort of being back in again, you know? Like conservative social forces are resurgent. Homophobia is on the rise. Cultural kind of panic, particularly about non-normative forms of sexuality, particularly about kind of queerness, which breaks some kind of normative standards is increasingly kind of very, very live. Concerns about, you know, about child abuse, rightly or wrongly, are very hot in the UK right now. Concerns about, I mean, basically all the things that people, that the Met Police were worried about and responding to in the late 80s seem to have kind of bubbled back up again, culturally. And what the kind of causal relationship is there, I don't know, like what way that causal arrow runs, I'm not sure, but it just seems like, you know, the logic of Brown and the ruling in Brown was so liberal and so shocking and so horrifying that it was unthinkable for so long, but I think that the attitudes are rashing back a little bit. And I hear this a little bit, actually, from my colleagues who teach about Harvey Brown and the law, because this is really the first thing that law students in Britain learn about consent and the law. You were mentioning this, yes. It's absolutely because day one, we're going to talk about this. And in fact, for some people that studied law but didn't go on to be lawyers, it's the only thing they remember about their legal education, because it's taught very pruriently, it's taught very kind of shockingly, obviously it's taught at 18-year-olds, right, like first-year undergraduate students. So they deal with it often with a kind of mix of, I mean, the way in which the, if you read the ruling, the way in which the judges presented it was very prurient, very voyeuristic, very shocking. And talking to colleagues who have been teaching this stuff for a long time, for a long time students were kind of horrified by the ruling about how unfair it was and how previously shocking it was. But I hear anecdotally, and there's more work to be done on this, but anecdotally, more and more, my colleagues who teach law are finding not the majority but some students in their classrooms going, yeah, no, I think that was the right decision. So I think the resurgence of cultural conservatism is a big part of it, right, and really important why we have to think about this case and why we have to think about the context of it, because it felt like for a long time this very niche concern and actually it is much, much bigger than I think anyone really understands. How do you see this playing out as more conservatism tends to present itself? Well, that's a good question. I mean, you know, what was interesting, I mentioned already that in 1995 after the initial case the Law Commission did this review on consent and the criminal law, because they sort of realised this was fucked up, all right, they realised there was something wrong here, it felt wrong to them, and they were like, we've got to look at this because clearly, because the offensive against the person act is a Victorian law, I think it's 1865, something along those lines. So it's a 150-odd year old law, right, and it clearly hasn't got space in it to think about these kind of moral conceptions of rights and consent and all that stuff. So even in 1995, the Law Commission were like, we've got to deal with this because this is like, how do we demarcate a clear line between what we want to prosecute and what we don't want to prosecute? And essentially they punted on it, right, like they just, I mean, a new government came in in 1997 and they just were like, we're just not going to deal with that, and it remained undelted with. But I think in a way, some of that anxiety has faded away, and as I said, I think now there are certain forces, even in the kind of well-meaning left actually, and it's one of the domestic violence bill advocates, who want, well, yeah, who don't share the same qualms that even their antecedents in the early 90s did, and they find it a kind of useful bit of, because it's so ambiguous and because it's so loose, it is a useful piece of legal logic to base, you can use it to frame a case against everything that you might find objectionable in this sphere. How? How can you do that? Well, so for example, so when Theresa May was Home Secretary, she was asked before a select committee on FGM, right, and was asked, well, do these statutes apply to vaginoplasty, right? Adult women consensually choosing to get their vaginas kind of medically altered, and she said, yeah, the spanalogic absolutely applies to that probably, and it would take someone to try and prosecute it, but by the letter of thought, this probably stands. And you can see that that then is a useful tool if you're a, I mean, this is, again, with the derisive violence case, if you're a feminist campaigner and you are against women being kind of forced culturally by patriarchy to alter their bodies, this feels like a kind of use, that the understanding of consent, or the lack of consent that's baked into that law, fits a certain kind of left liberal model of how consent works weirdly. And it's slightly kind of awkward to get your head around that, that somehow left liberals are finding this a piece of useful case law. But like, but here we are. I mean, the same string of pornography, right? So when the British, that film, the support of film classification were given the task of regulating pornography, particularly online and what was going to be legal and not legal in the UK, and then settled on what looks like, what is explicitly actually a piece of sort of spanner inspired rhetoric to determine what's legal and not legal under the extreme pornography statutes. So things that leave lasting marks and break the skin are, and also which suffocate and all those kind of things are explicitly illegal in British pornography law. So again, if you're the kind of feminist campaigner who finds pornography objectionable per se, the shape of consent in the legal logic of spanner, which is that there are some things which are so harmful that consent does not apply, that's very useful, right? Because if you think pornography is a harm, many people who are, you know, who are pornographers or advocates for pornography will say that everyone involved is consenting. The shape of the argument that spanner gives, the brown logic gives you, which is that consent is no defence to certain kinds of harm, is very, very useful for certain kinds of ostensibly, you know, leftist campaigning or feminist campaigning. I find that really problematic, obviously, but it's super interesting because it tells us a lot about cultural attitudes and the limits of consent and harm. How profoundly have you seen that change from the time of the late 80s until now? That's a good question. So I think, you know, so in the immediate aftermath of spanner, even before the prosecution, there was a big upswell among certain communities in Britain, but there was a huge amount of support for the spanner men amongst mainstream gay life in Britain. Many mainstream gay campaigners in Britain felt that the spanner men were quite problematic, that there was a time of trying to campaign for gay marriage and for equality and kind of this sort of quite conservative politics of homosexual acceptance. The spanner case was just not the kind of queer that they wanted to deal with, so they literally got pushed under the bus. I think because of the work of Cat Noir Spanner, the work of the spanner trust, because of the work of people like yourself, actually, you know, campaigners in the US who were supporting the case, I think for a brief moment around the term millennium, that battle was sort of won for a bit, right, that queerness was an acceptable and understandable part of mainstream gay life. But I think as time's gone on, and you saw this even recently, you know, even this year's Pride in London, big kind of campaigns online about, like, hey, get the leathermen out, and we don't want to see that Pride isn't about sex, it's family-friendly event, whatever that might mean. So, again, I think it's this interesting kind of cultural conservative term that is, you know, that is, I mean, there's a cliche to say, you know, we must learn from history or we're doomed to repeat it. But in some senses, I think that's what's happening. We never dealt with, the law never dealt with, culturally, we never dealt with why the hell the spanner prostitution's happened, like the institutionalised homophobia, the absolute kind of queer panic, the absolute kind of fear of the unknown, the complete kind of lunacy of the net police at the time. We never dealt with that, culturally or constitutionally, and so it persists, you know. Interesting you bring that up because there's a bit here in this book by Bill Thompson. Bringing up, dealing with the cultural issues of this and also perhaps the time in which it happened, there's a phrase here that says, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion than that Lord Templeman found the spanner defendants guilty, either because he was completely ignorant of the nature of SM sex, which would make him unfit to judge in such a case, or because he was deliberately manipulating the evidence to justify a personal preference, which would also render him unfit to judge the case. What have you to say to that? The Met Police Vice Squad who led the prosecution under a guy called Michael Haynes were absolutely dead set on getting these guys on something. They were like, this must be illegal. There must be some law against this, right? They were convinced, for example, as if this was in the middle of a substance panic, they were convinced that they'd found evidence of... Michael Haynes says that he thought initially that the spanner tapes that they seized were snuff movies, right? He thought they were literal snuff movies. This is the kind of paranoia in the British police in the 80s. So essentially it was a vindictive prosecution, I think, I want to argue that, and they spent a lot of energy and a lot of manpower and a lot of paperwork done on getting these guys on something, right? The prosecution doesn't come from a rational place, because there's no sensible harm, and in fact the whole logic of the prosecution is that there's no harm of a particular kind. I mean the ECHR judgement in 1997 broadens that a little bit, but the Met Police understand there's no harm, but they hate this, they disgusted by it and disgusted as a real big part of how this is prosecuted and litigated. And they're going to get on summon. And I think by the time... By the time it gets to temperament in a way, the train is on the rails already, right? There's no way off of this, because the prosecution working for the Met realises that there is no explicit defence of consent in GBH or against GBH and therefore they get this on rails sort of legally quite quickly. What I think is really interesting about that, as I said, is what is the anxiety that this immediately causes, because there's no way that I can think of, the lawyers I've spoken to about this can think of, demarcating the things we do want to separate and the things we don't want to separate. There's no way in law to adequately kind of carve a neat enough, sharp enough line. So for example, in the Law Commission review, they realised that under this logic, if we were going to say there's no defence to GBH, then professional sport was going to be a problem. Boxing was going to be a problem. Ear piercing, tattooing, lots of what they call rough force play that goes on at Britain's public schools was going to be prosecutable. So what we have to do is go, oh, we're going to fudge it, but we can't explicitly say harm is illegal. We have to sort of say, well, we're going to leave it up to the, you know, up to the kind of whims of the prosecution. And so this is why it's been, was a powerful tool in the context of the initial convictions, because really, they had no out, because there was no logical way in the way that the law was framed, in the way the thinking was framed to make a case that you fall on either side of the line, because really that was always going to go up to the judges. And the judges, basically, were working in a particular kind of mindset and picked a set of, well, I wouldn't do that to myself, so therefore, right? But they could understand maybe why someone would get an ear piercing or why someone would play the eating wall game. And that's what it came down to. It came down to kind of like, why the hell would you do this to yourself? I don't understand it. To me, I can't imagine why anyone wants to do this, therefore it should be illegal. And there's nothing textual about that in the legislation. It's all in the way that the argument is framed in the course of the prosecutary logic, you know? Do you think if the Spanner case came forward today that it would be differently decided? Do you know what? So if you'd have asked me that when I gave that HRC talk, I may have even said that, I think if you'd have asked me that then, I would have said there's no way that would be prosecuted now. Today, I think that's different. Because as I said, this year, it's been used in anger for the first time. Interesting. I would hope. Again, I think it's interesting, right? Because if you took the exact same facts of the Spanner case, so gay men, one of whom was marginally under the age of consent at the time, not by modern standards, but was at the time, one of whom or more than one of whom was in particular kind of positions of state sensitivity. One of the Spanners was a nuclear missile engineer. I reckon you might find a jury in modern Britain to convict again with straight people, with heterosexual participants. Maybe not. As I said, when this came, when this was used in 10 years ago, 12 years ago in Einar versus Wilson, the judge didn't convict. I don't know. The optimist in me would say, maybe we're better than that now. But the pessimist says maybe not. This remains a huge hulking on a resolved issue. One of the interesting things that's happened recently in the Met, unrelated slightly, but there was a serial killer who preyed on young gay men, called Stephen Port. He would basically find this was a few years ago, found guys on Grindr, brought them back to his house, drugged them, killed them, and then dumped them. In fact, the police never connected them. Even though two of the men, I shouldn't laugh, it's horrific, two of the men were found in the same place, in the same churchyard, by the same dog walker. Imagine walking your dog and finding a dead body bad enough. One of those in your lifetime is bad enough. It's nice in the same place. The police refused to connect those. Basically, that revealed, I want to argue at least, the institutionalized homophobia that was present in the 1980s, is at some sense is still present in the Met Police today. These young gay men having risky sex, sorry they're dead, but we're not going to investigate it anymore. It took the families of the last victim to really kind of go, wait a minute, don't you think these cases might be connected to finally take this guy to justice? Clearly, some of those attitudes, I'm sure the Met Police was in 1988, but those attitudes to gay men, to queerness in general, to transgressive body practices more broadly absolutely persist in the police and in British cultural life for sure. Again, there was meant to be a review again of the effects against the person acts because of this 19th century law, not in the context of obviously, but in general it's an old law that doesn't really cope well with the vicissitudes of modern policing. And again, that's just not gone anywhere because we've had Brexit and we've had, you know, the parliamentary times busy with other things. So this remains a completely live, unresolved issue and I think probably will continue to be so. So when Mac was convicted, Brendan McCarthy, I wrote a mitigation statement for him to the court, not that he did any good unfortunately, but I said in there, you know, what sense does it make to send that guy to prison for 40 months for doing things which dozens, let's not overstate this, but dozens of people in Britain have been doing for 20 years. Why is he the full guy? And I think the same applied in the initial prosecution to Spano, right? Yes. You know, they would just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, basically. They got caught in the sights of a malicious prosecution at a particular moment in time and you know, the manifest unfairness of it is what animates me, I think, more than anything else. Earlier you said that you're going to do further research, is it more study on this, more academic pursuit and that you used the Freedom of Information Act to access the actual tapes from this. Is that correct? I tried. I tried. So Michael Haynes, who was the head of the Met Police by squad at the time and who led the Spano prosecution, there's a chapter in his book where he talks about Operation Spano and he says in there that his officers for some time watched the tapes and they made a time coded list of all the offenses that they saw committed. So with that little piece of evidence, the day that the files became available under Freedom of Information law in the UK I put an Freedom of Information request to the Met Police and I said hi I'm academic I'm working on this as an academic project I would like access to all the files that you have particularly this itemised list but any other case files that you have available acquired during Operation Spano and in the prosecution of our vices to Brown and the House of Lords appeal and that was literally on the 1st of January so the very day that it became available and some weeks later I got a phone call from the head of the Met Police Freedom of Information Unit who rang me up and said Dr Lotto normally these requests are dealt with by quite low level assistants in the department but when we saw your request it was passed straight to me do you know what you've asked for and I was like yeah absolutely I know what you've asked for that's why I asked for it and the sort of the guy sort of sucked his teeth I don't know it's going to be tricky why tricky well you know the stuff is still too hot to handle and eventually it went through a period of the deliberation and back and forward in which he revealed to me quite how extensive the files were I'm right in saying that he said they seized over 200 tapes they only prosecuted on one the actual prosecution of the 15 Spannermen that went to trial in RV Brown was on one tape I think but they had over 200 tapes loads and loads of files but they said we can't give you access to these because amongst other reasons health and safety right so under UK Free Information Law when you FOIA request things it becomes public knowledge and they basically thought if it was made public it would encourage people to copy copy what they had read or something I mean stupid and horrific and dumb but we really got stonewalled on that but one of the reasons why I haven't pursued the project as much as I'd like to is because we couldn't get access to those files because I think they'd be a really important resource there are potentially other ways in which I might as an academic have to get privileged access to that material I'd like to try that with a PhD student how amenable the Met Police will be to that I don't know it remains to be seen I'm going to try because I think it's important but you know we have found I won't reveal on this tape we have found some other ways to get some some of the other material that we couldn't get access to so we're going to be moving forward me and my new PhD student there's much more work to be done I mean I think also the kind of work that you're doing and the work that other people have been doing interviewing Roland for example in trying to kind of keep the stories of this alive is really important and you know I think what you're doing is really amazing and important and going to be a really valuable resource I think for me as an historian and for historians in the future maybe I can ask you a question maybe this isn't the format but maybe I can ask you a question so what is it now why is Spana for you important now in 2019 because I think you know I think people who have been involved in the scene and people who have been involved in this talk knew about it and you know I've been kind of thinking about this my whole adult life really but it seems that in recent years it's not just me and my academic colleagues that noticed that there's something problematic about Spana now so why have you come to this now I don't look at it as problematic I look at it as capturing history while it still can be captured so many of the Spana litigants are deceased Roland has been amiable to speaking with me I am looking at it more as an opportunity to chronicle a bit of history that has been underrepresented and requires preservation so why has it been underrepresented that's kind of what interests me it's a big part of my education I said to you earlier on when I was 14-15 when this was happening starting to get pierced getting interested in piercing I became aware of Mr. Sebastian I think just before he died I became really aware of what was happening I was 17 when the House of Lords ruled in came through a really kind of foundational way I thought about this stuff and it's been very, very live in my academic life since I was an undergraduate student really and how I think about the body and how I think about the law and how I think about culture but it seems like it hasn't been this big issue of even subcultural focus until the last five years or so in my opinion I cannot offer you anything more substantive than that I can only speculate that the nature of the case is somewhat shocking and thus socially unacceptable and you have alluded and other people have alluded that a lot of gay people even find it unacceptable because it's an extreme topic I don't see it that way I think it's more than germane and I think it is and looking at it in such a myopic point of view does not give justice to the fact that this deals with human rights, basic personal rights privacy and the sanctity of your home the list goes on and actually where do you draw the line and how do you define the minutia of abuse versus sexual pleasure and I think that that is unfortunately in a conservative society which unfortunately is the foundation of American society is taboo and you're not to talk about that except if you're weird what I think is really another reason I think it's so important to talk about is because actually I think kink communities and particularly kind of the leather community both men and the leather lesbians as well have been at the forefront of talking about consent and harm all of the academic theory for example on this stuff the best, most nuanced, most careful most compassionate, most empathetic work and thinking has come from these communities so it's ironic that the problems that like as I said in the way that it's found that's being mis-deployed now in Britain to deal with FGM domestic violence, pornography ironically the best way to think about this stuff was the people that you convicted in the fucking first place I find that so shocking right, the people who are the most careful and the most thoughtful and the most systematic and the most cautious in most, not in every case but in most cases certainly on a community level about how consent and pleasure and harm function and how they intersect in interesting and complicated ways are the exact communities that are still being demonized and I find that I find that really it's completely kind of topsy-turvy to me you know I agree we convicted the wrong people in 1988 and the space that that law carves out works in entirely the opposite direction in many ways than its advocates wanted to this will take more thinking but something in the last decade made more than just me you and others in the US and loads of people have started thinking about Spanner again and I think that in itself is interesting the very fact that we're having this conversation now in 2019 is interesting in and of itself as a piece of historical thinking in conclusion what advice do you offer me or other researchers about Spanner that you feel would be germane well so here's more broadly as a historian of tattooing my success or my kind of research methodology and the reason I can do the things that I do is because I'm engaged with the communities directly that I'm writing about so I don't treat anything that I'm writing about voyeuristically I'm bored of what I was doing yesterday you're weird and I'm going to write about you which happens a lot with tattoo stuff happens a lot with people who write about queer studies and queer history it's people who are bored doing their day jobs who fancy something a bit sexier and that is not the way ethically, morally or academically to approach anything so I think what's been really interesting particularly not even primarily myself but recently the material culture research that's being done or not just treating as Spanner and Arbus Brown as this abstract problem of legal consent which is how it gets written about thinking about it as a material moment that affected and continues to affect real people's lives not least Rowland but to think about this as a you've got to do the work as I said we have found a colleague of mine found some of the material that nobody's found since 1997 which is going to be absolutely useful for us going forward to think about how to think about the case but that took some work just took someone to go I'm going to go and look for it and that kind of empathy and materiality I think is really important talking to people who are involved getting that on record thinking about this on an empathetic human level from the inside with access and with knowledge and with pre-existing sensibilities to the topics will allow hopefully the work that comes out is once more connected more intricate because most of the work Bill Thompson's book but most of the work on Spanner has been like this is weird it's about this for a bit and that is either an explicit or implicit tone of lots of the work so it's about getting over that and it's about treating it as a serious moment of tragic moment of legal and cultural history Dr. Matt Lauder, thank you very much Thank you I feel like I was talking No, no, no, no, no No, no, no This has been amazing, are you kidding?