Leo Abse; UK politician helped liberalize laws on homosexuality
LONDON - Leo Abse, a colorful Welsh politician who took a leading role in liberalizing laws on homosexuality and divorce, died Tuesday in London, his law firm announced.
He was 91.
Noted for his dandyish apparel, Mr. Abse also won attention with books that attempted to apply psychoanalysis to Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton.
Exhibiting a knack for a long, catchy title, Mr. Abse wrote about Thatcher in "Margaret, daughter of Beatrice," in 1989; "Wotan, My Enemy: Can Britain Live With the Germans in the European Union?" in 1995; and "The Man Behind the Smile: Tony Blair and the Politics of Perversion" in 1997.
"Leo was courageous, highly principled, very funny, and totally unique," former Labor leader Neil Kinnock and his wife, Glenys, said in a statement.
"We are glad that he had such a long and fulfilling life in which he gained so much social progress by being an outstanding freethinking socialist."
Mr. Abse was a Labor Party member of Parliament from 1958 to 1987.
He sponsored legislation in 1967 that decriminalized private sexual acts between adult men in England and Wales.
Peter Tatchell, a veteran gay-rights activist in Britain, said that while homosexuals felt "huge relief" following passage of the measure, the law still maintained some restrictions on gay sex - such as a higher age of consent than faced by heterosexuals.
"It was not the liberation that many of us had wanted and expected," Tatchell said in a statement.
Mr. Abse also was active in passing the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act of 1984, which updated divorce laws, and the Children's Act of 1975, which streamlined laws on adoption and fostering.
"I had two great advantages: I was born a Jew in Wales in the benign climate of Welsh nonconformity; we believed we had a covenant with God and God would look after us," Mr. Abse said in an interview this year with Intelligent Life magazine.
"Being in a minority within a minority, I had the benefit of being an outsider without feeling inferior. And I never went to university, which meant I wasn't groomed to conform."
Marjorie, his wife of 40 years, died in 1996. Four years later, Mr. Abse married Ania Czeputkowska, a former shipyard worker from Gdansk, Poland, who was 51 years younger.
He leaves his wife, a son, a daughter, and his brother, the poet Dannie Abse. 