Sadomasochism and the State
Operation Spanner
The text below is a short extract from the book proposal I’m currently writing. I am fortunate enough to have recently signed with literary agent Imogen Morrell at Greene & Heaton, and together we are creating a proposal for a book about the history of perversion. I spent the first part of this year working on a sample chapter about Operation Spanner, a police investigation into gay sadomasochism in the late 1980s spurred by the period’s moral panic around British values.
After you read this extract, I would encourage you to watch Lasting Marks, a short documentary film directed by Charlie Lyne about Operation Spanner featuring interview footage with Roland Jaggard, one of the men prosecuted.
In November 1987 in the quiet town of Welwyn Garden City, Roland Jaggard was in bed with his boyfriend. Roland was sleeping later than usual, with plans to spend the day resting after a weekend away in the West Country. He had worked as an aerospace engineer designing missile systems for nearly a decade and, now in good standing with his company, he felt at ease taking time off to enjoy the house he owned with his boyfriend and making home movies with his prize possession - a new VHS camera. He was living a life he had pain-stakingly built for himself, working his way up from a poor, rural upbringing to achieve middle class security in a commuter town.
It was barely 7 o’clock when Roland and his partner were awoken by someone banging on the door. It was a loud, angry banging that kept going as Roland’s boyfriend scrambled to get up and groggily walk down the stairs and into the hallway. Roland, still half-asleep, waited in bed to hear what the commotion was all about. He had never been good with emergencies - he had a chronic fear of authority figures and hated being involved in pressured, urgent situations with all eyes on him. It felt surreal when a police officer strode into his bedroom and ordered him to get dressed because they had a search warrant. They suspected that Roland had killed someone.
Roland and his partner were taken into the living room and questioned while eight policemen turned their house upside down searching for evidence. The police, hailing from the notorious Obscene Publications Unit, told him that they were there in connection with obscene materials, including what they believed to be a snuff film - a pornographic video showing a murder. The police brought down a collection of board games Roland played with his elderly mother and asked if he used them to lure children to his house to torture them.
As the questioning continued, Roland understood why the police were there - he had not murdered anyone, but he had, as part of sadomasochistic (“S&M”) sex he had with friends and strangers, recorded violent gay fetish content that had been circulated amongst a small group of lovers over the past decade. He had heard of S&M raids happening to acquaintances as part of the government’s crackdown on the gay leather scene, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the police would come knocking on his door.
After two hours, the police took all of his VHS tapes and left Roland and his partner sitting in their living room. Slowly, they got dressed, went to their car, and drove into the countryside to sit and talk and try to understand how their lives were about to change. They did not know that over three hundred other people were also being questioned in an investigation the police had named Operation Spanner, and that soon Roland would be facing prison for his involvement in consensual gay sadomasochism alongside fifteen other men labelled as ringleaders. They did not know that Roland’s face would appear across the UK’s press labelled as a predator and pervert, and they did not know that Roland would appeal their sentencing all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. They were just two men sitting quietly with each other, knowing that their lives were about to fall apart.
Roland would state in a later interview that he had been naive to think the police would not come knocking at his door about the tapes. Perhaps he is right, but each of us carries a hope that the big bad thing we are afraid will not happen to us and that we will be left to live our lives, and in most cases we are lucky enough to get by. In Roland’s case, however, Operation Spanner began amidst heightened focus by the government and press on the spectre of S&M and a fear that youths were being corrupted - not only by kinky sex, but by the gay rights movement that was growing in the UK throughout the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher had been leader of the right-wing Conservative Party since 1975, and Prime Minister since 1979, ushering in over a decade of increasing privatisation of state-owned companies and attacks on trade unions - as well as an increased focus on the idea of British values and the sanctity of the heterosexual family.
Public fear about S&M corrupting the traditional family was potent as the 80s wore on. An anonymous letter-writer printed in The Daily Mail in 1985, four years before the raid on Roland’s house, wrote that “Sado-masochism should never be legalised. The unthinkable is now becoming commonplace and we are accepting as the norm more of the attitudes of a vocal minority, while the rest of us are pilloried for trying to keep our ordinary values.” The perceived opposition between “ordinary values” and gay or kinky sex would have been known to Roland as a long-time member of the group Campaign for Homosexual Equality - it would have also been on his mind when he participated in and recorded acts of fetishised violence as part of a loose group of men who would meet up on occasional weekends.
The men had met each other through advertisements in gay porn magazines such as Sir, Gay Galaxy and Corporal Contacts, whose offices were also raided as part of Operation Spanner. They were largely middle class and closeted, with professions including antique restorer, computer operator, United Nations lawyer, and in Roland’s case, a missile design engineer. They were the kind of people who would be referred to as law-abiding citizens - professional and seemingly adherent with so-called ordinary values. It was only when the Obscene Publications Unit, also known as “The Dirty Squad” both for their focus and their reputation for corruption, launched an inquiry into adverts in gay magazines that the men’s involvement in violent sadomasochistic sex was made public.
It is difficult to pin down the exact content of the tapes the Obscene Publications Unit used to prosecute the men - depending on whether you read testimony from the men themselves, court documents, or salacious newspaper headlines, the content ranges from light spanking to bestiality. An article in The Independent during the trials details “activities which involved cutting each other’s genitals with surgical scalpels, sandpapering scrotums and pushing fish hooks into penises” while the House of Lords ruling on the case, during which the Lords themselves did not actually watch the tapes, describes fish hooks inserted through penises, hot wax inserted into urethras, and the men using scalpels to draw blood.
Near-identical articles printed during the trial in right-wing tabloids The Daily Mail and The Sun were more extreme in their summaries of the tapes. Authored by Michael Hames, Detective Superintendent of the Obscene Publications Unit during Operation Spanner, they describe the content of the tapes as “sickening torture sessions, bestiality and group sex”. Hames leans on homophobic stereotypes, casting the men as the “most horrific porn ring ever to appear before a British court” and draws comparisons between the men and paedophiles, stating that “in every case I have investigated, the paedophile turns out to be a hoarder [of pornography].”
Hames, however, is an unreliable narrator. His tabloid articles used the spectre of the predatory homosexual to inspire disgust and fury in its largely Conservative readership and whip up support for the Obscene Publications Unit. There is a murkiness to the tapes - their content shifts and changes depending on the opinion of the person describing them and what they are aiming to accomplish. The tapes were circulated amongst a small group of gay men, and after being seized by the police and used as evidence in the initial trial, they have, presumably, been long since destroyed. Two things are clear: firstly, the tapes did not include a murder as the police initially claimed when raiding Jaggard’s house in the early morning of November 1987, and secondly, the tapes did contain gay sadomasochism, including consensual violence inflicted on men’s genitals for sexual gratification.
The paradox of sadomasochism is that violence can be done with care, and it is this care that turns it into pleasure rather than “sickening torture sessions” that the Spanner group’s sex was characterised as in the press. It can take many forms, including spanking, restraints such as handcuffs or ropes, scratching, biting, using needles or scalpels to inflict minor wounds, hair pulling, or beating someone up, among others. From an outsider’s perspective, it can appear as a horrendous act of abuse - there are certainly instances in my own experience where, had a neighbour glanced through my window, they may have been concerned for my safety and called the police. What underpins this violence and renders it sexually exciting is that all participants are willing, including the supposed victims.
The enjoyment of this abuse can be incomprehensible to those who do not practice sadomasochism. It is often considered a sign that an individual is mentally unwell to the extent that “Sexual masochism disorder” is currently a diagnosis listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (also known as the DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association, a compendium of disorders used by psychiatrists to diagnose their patients. The DSM-5, much like the Obscene Publications Unit, deems arousal from being humiliated or beaten as an abnormality that requires intervention, regardless of whether the sadomasochist wants to be “cured” of their preference or not. In the case of the DSM-5, the suggested intervention is psychiatric, while the Obscene Publication Unit’s intervention was legal. Both, however, base their judgement on an idea of normal sex and abnormal sex, with sadomasochism falling squarely on the side of abnormal sex.
Much of the justification for squaring sadomasochism away as abnormal sex relies on framing it as sex without care - an example of this line of thought is the anonymous Daily Mail letter writer in 1985, who, railing against the normalisation of sadomasochism, wrote that “I believe if you love someone, the thought of dominating or humiliating them is impossible.” Those who have enjoyed consensual sexual violence will know that this is not true, and indeed anyone who has been in a romantic relationship will know that you can love someone and still hurt them.
In my own experience of consensual violence and enjoyable session of sadomasochism involves a great deal of care before, during and after. It is not the absence of care that defines sadomasochist sex, but rather the way great care is taken to hurt someone in a way that brings them pleasure rather than distress. This care can be conversations before sex that establish what each participant wants, what turns them on or turns them off and agreeing to a safe word that, once said, halts the proceedings entirely. These conversations can be vulnerable and intimate, especially if the planned violence involves risk of serious injury. The sex itself is an act of trust that the pre-agreed plan will be stuck to, and that the dominant (that is, the dominating partner inflicting the violence) will listen to the submissive (the partner receiving the violence) in the event the safe word is uttered. If the safe word is ignored, the violence becomes non-consensual. This is the agreement you enter into when practising violence for sexual pleasure - trusting another person to care deeply about your enjoyment and safety.
In the Spanner case, the men involved talked about the care they showed one another during their sadomasochism sessions. Colin Laskey, one of the men prosecuted, explained in an interview with The Independent:
[The police] would look at the video and say, “There you are, [the submissive is] saying “stop, stop”. What they didn't understand is that what the person actually means is “Carry on”. We had code words which were always agreed beforehand as a signal to be used if someone wanted to stop.
The nuances of care within sadomasochistic sex is incomprehensible to those who see it in opposition to the love and care of supposedly “normal” sex, which is often understood as heterosexual and monogamous.
The paradox of the Spanner case is that the police and the courts deemed the consensual sexual violence between the men as unacceptable under the pretense that violence is morally wrong, yet utilised all the tools of state violence in order to punish them - including humiliation, intimidation, withholding information, invasion of privacy, and imprisonment. The care the men showed one another during sadomasochism was not recognised as legitimate because it was not useful to the Obscene Publications Unit or, later, the Thatcher government and its lawmakers, who needed to use the violence of the Spanner case as a scapegoat for a rising moral panic about the gay rights movement. Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the men became emblems of what gay sex represented in British culture: Perverted, strange, and dangerous.
Much of my information about Roland’s experience comes from his testimony in Lasting Marks and an interview he gave with Douglas O’Keefe in 2020. The Bishopsgate Institute in London currently holds indispensable archive material on Operation Spanner, and I’d encourage you to check it out too.
Looking at Porn is written around my full time job. I hope you enjoy it. You can follow my Instagram here and you can email me at robinccraig@gmail.com if you like.
Why the hell call SM sex? I am so annoyed by this habit, so widespread in this subculture. Sex is when I put my penis into people. When I hit them with a cane, that is something else. We usually call it "play" or "scene". It is a sort of a theatre, psychodrama. I do not like putting my penis into people, therefore I am asexual.