Esmé Langley

 

Esmé Langley's book, "Why Should I Be Dismayed?" published under the pseudonym of Ann Bruce

Picture from WikiCommons.

Esmé Langley was the co-founder of the Minorities Research Group and Arena Three, two early organisations that advocated the interests of lesbians in the United Kingdom. Her work helped raise the profile of lesbians and lesbian rights, particularly amongst other women, at a time when such issues were rarely discussed in society.

Born in Yorkshire in 1919, Esmé served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the Second World War, working on War Office cyphers. She was skilled enough to apply to join Bletchley Park to work on the Enigma cipher, although her military unit refused to release her for the work. She got pregnant at the end of the war whilst an unmarried woman, quite taboo at the time, but she managed to find a job to support herself and her child. She turned to writing, using her skills gained during the war, and published an autobiography Why Should I Be Dismayed? in 1958.

Esmé experienced prejudice both as a single mother who never married, and as a woman who had a relationship with an African man. This inspired her to fight for the rights of other marginalised people in society. In 1963, she founded the Minorities Research Group alongside three other women which aimed to research “the homosexual condition, especially as it concerns women” and to spread information about this “to those genuinely in the quest of enlightenment”. The group aimed to be an educational source but also a way for lesbians to meet, talk, and socialise. Esmé was made the sole proprietor of the group to avoid legal cases of statutory conspiracy for the type of content they were producing.

The group advertised themselves in national newspapers, although initially many refused to publish these adverts thinking they were offensive. In 1964, the Sunday Times ran an article on the group and accepted one of their adverts, and after that news of the group spread into other prominent newspapers like The Guardian and the News of the World.

This publicity provided a boom in membership and raised the profile of the organisation. The same year, Esmé appeared on Welsh television and not long afterwards a documentary was made for This Week which was broadcast in January 1965. Featuring several members of the Minorities Research Group, it was the first national British television programme about lesbians.

With the rising popularity of the Minorities Research Group, in 1964 Esmé and another woman, Diana Chapman, decided to create an associated monthly publication called Arena Three which was published by the Minorities Research Group. Britain’s first lesbian and bisexual women’s publication, it ran for nearly 10 years and was distributed via mail order to subscribers as it was not available in shops. The publication was entirely funded by Esmé alongside some money from advertising and subscribers, and featured writings by lesbian and bisexual women. However, much of the content was produced by the same small group of women and over time it came under accusations of being too middle class.

After the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 which partially legalised male same-sex relationships, a number of political organisations sprung up which focused on equal rights for a variety of people in the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and this started to supersede the objectives of the Minorities Research Group. The final issue of Arena Three was published in March 1972, and the Minorities Research Group dissolved around the same time. Some group members went on to work in other associated organisations, particularly the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and the Gay Liberation Front.

Esmé moved to Malawi where she worked for a time in the office of the President, but she soon returned home to England. She died in August 1991 at St Albans City Hospital aged 71. Her work had done much to connect lesbians with each other and educate and inform a variety of groups in society. Her organisations were pioneering and fed into later liberation movements of the 1970s and 80s.