In this politically regressive era in the United States and beyond, it is especially vital that LGBTQ+ history be recorded and shared, enabling us to find context, empowerment and guidance in the narratives of our queer and trans forebearers. Recognizing that necessity is composer, sound designer, writer and audio producer Hugh Sheehan, whose exquisitely crafted five-episode podcast, Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7, won a raft of awards in 2025 including at the British Podcast Awards and the Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards. Created, presented and produced by Sheehan as part of the BBC Sounds Audio Lab scheme, the rigorously researched, riveting and poignant docu-series explores a landmark legal case in late 1990s Britain that changed the lives of seven gay and bisexual men and traces how the case played a significant role in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.
Criminally Queer recalls how these seven working class men from Northern England had consensual group sex and were subsequently arrested and charged with the archaic crimes of gross indecency and buggery under the Sexual Offences Act 1967. The case has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent British LGBTQ+ history and the the series exposes the prejudicial actions of both the Crown Prosecution Service and Greater Manchester Police at the time.
Throughout the series, Sheehan chronicles the events that led to the men’s arrest, their interrogation, trial, sentencing, and the aftermath of their ordeal, weaving a rich tapestry that uncovers systemic and state homophobia. Criminally Queer features interviews with contributors including former Home Secretary Jack Straw, Booker Prize-winning author Douglas Stuart, activist Peter Tatchell, queer historian Justin Bengry, lawyers who represented the Bolton Seven, and members of Bolton’s LGBTQ+ community who offer insight into the historical criminalisation of queerness in Britain. Sheehan also reflects on his personal journey of queer acceptance and how his sense of self intersects with some of the major themes he investigates in the series.
With the acclaimed podcast now available internationally, Hugh Sheehan speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his dedication to telling this story with nuance and detail, how he decided who to include as contributors, what the podcast medium allowed as a storytelling form, his approach to the sound design and music, and the significance and legacy of the case. He also discusses his tender 2023 singer-songwriter album, Shapes That Are Different, and his admiration for the late writer Edmund White.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: how did you become interested in queer history?
Hugh Sheehan: “I was late into understanding that I was queer and coming out. I was 25. So late by whatever metric that we’re often told is normal. Before that, growing up in a really homophobic place, I had always rejected it and strained so far from it. It was a two or three year process, as I gradually came to understand that I was queer and that it was intrinsic to my selfhood. Initially, it was queer literature that gave me access to the histories of queer people and queerness, be they stories or imaginings or reimaginings. That was one of the forums that really opened my eyes and opened the door to understanding my own queerness.”
“Once I had come out and accepted and embraced my queerness, then came a real hunger to explore what that meant to me and what I had inherited in being queer. I finally began to explore this vast history and culture I’d inherited which I’d shut out for 24-odd years for not wanting other people to be able to recognize it in me. There was a desire to understand how my own life had been impacted by past struggles and injustices.”
“Queerness is intertwined with so many things, like joy and beauty and community, but it’s also intertwined with struggle. I’ve always been interested in the struggles of marginalized people and injustices at the hands of the state or society at large. I’m 33 now, and from my late 20s onwards I became really enamored by understanding the history and the mechanics and the infrastructure of queerness.”
I remember the Bolton Seven story from the time, but I was shocked to see how little recent coverage or reexamination of the case there has been. Searching online, it’s just your podcast and then a few contemporary news stories that come up.
“It’s amazing isn’t it? I was like, surely there’s got to be more out there. This feels like a big enough story that someone must have done a long-form, deep dive into it, but they hadn’t. Most of the contemporary articles that you do come across are in regional outlets like The Bolton Evening News or publications which are semi-tabloid.”
How did you come across the story of the Bolton Seven and what was your initial reaction to it?
“I found out about it in the 90s archives of the direct action LGBTQ+ rights organization OutRage! They had drawn attention to the case of the Bolton Seven at the time, as had other organizations like Stonewall. When I came across the story, I had exactly the same thought as you about so little being written about it. Which is mad given that it is so recent and so seismic in terms of the shift that it caused, but also the harm that it caused. The story latched onto me and I tried to get work about it off the ground in some way or other for about three years. I lived in Finland for 10 years, so trying to get funding for a story about Bolton in Finland had its challenges, but it sat with me enough to persevere. I knew that there was something there that I had to pursue.”
What were some of the things that caught your attention as you started to learn more about the case?
“Initially, it was how recent it was and then it was discovering the charges that were leveled against the men, which were buggery and gross indecency. I didn’t know the intricate histories of those so-called offenses, but I did know that they were offenses at some time. When I tell people about the subject matter of this podcast—whether they’re queer or not—they often think that they’ve misheard the date of when it happened.”
“Another thing that drew me in was the ages of the men. Five of them, at the time of the activities that led to the convictions, were between the age of 17 and 22. When I read that, I remember thinking, Jesus, trying to understand that you’re queer at that age at the best of times is really difficult, never mind being criminalized for it, never mind being used as a figurehead for a movement, and never mind your name and details being splashed across the front pages of the tabloids. I had an empathy and a sympathy, especially for the young men, thinking that I was their age at some stage and was nowhere near being close to comfortable in or even experimenting with desire. Never mind if I had done that, dealing with this ensuing case being brought upon me.”
“The fact that it was seven men from Bolton also caught my attention. Regional working class stories aren’t told enough in England. Bolton’s such a wicked place, as is the North of England generally. I’m from Birmingham in the Midlands, but the North of England is so rich and vibrant and the people are so idiosyncratic. That was another thing that made me want to find out more about them and what had happened.”
“My background is in music and theatre and I was initially thinking about seven male voices in terms of choral music, which I’ve written a lot of. I knew there was something there but I hadn’t got it off the ground as a performance project and had gradually been moving into the journalistic side of audio when I was lucky enough to get this podcast commission. Once we’d started the research process, I got hold of the transcripts of the court documents and the police interviews and that’s when it really blew open for me. I knew that we had got this really important story to tell.”
What did the podcast medium open up for you as a storytelling form?
“I’m fascinated by the form of podcasts and how they are parallels to the devices that marginalized people have used to disseminate information. Marginalized people from minority groups form community by their stories, which is absolutely how I’ve felt that I’ve become part of the queer community. You’re often not afforded the same channels or platforms that people who aren’t from a marginalized group are and so much of queer lore and queer history is transmitted and amplified through storytelling by the people.”
“I love the notion that podcasting is essentially gossiping. It’s a very reductive way to think about it, but at it’s most basic, it’s one person, or several people, yapping in front of a microphone. It’s also very democratic in that it’s almost free to make and to disseminate. There can be huge amounts of time and effort that go into the research of something, but it’s very democratic from the point of making to the point of consumption. That strikes me as important.”
“In terms of the medium itself, for these sorts of stories which weave together history, personal accounts, expert opinion, and dramatization, you can’t really do that in any other medium in such a rich and high fidelity way. A lot of us listen to podcasts every day and we develop parasocial relationships with the people on them. Whether we are at the gym or we’re cooking, these people who we listen to are in our ears and we come to know them and the stories that they’re telling. The ways that they’re weaving these narratives together is such a human and direct way of telling a story. To be able to weave together all these quite disparate threads with archive, music and sound design is such a powerful way to tell a story.”
You mentioned the music and the sound design, which you created along with hosting and producing the podcast, what was your approach to using those elements in the series?
“I have played and written music since I was small and studied composition at university. I was doing a lot of stuff with computers and sound design and sound installations. I’m as comfortable with an instrument in my hand as I am speaking English. That’s my natural way of processing the world, which sounds grandiose, but it feels less profound to me. You press a key on a piano and you get this instant sound. There are so many ways of doing that. When I started thinking about this project, I knew that music was going to be a major way that I was going to process the grief as well as the determination of these men. When it was commissioned as an audio podcast series, it was really important to me that I could use music and sound, not to engineer emotion, but to add colour and texture to a story that deserved it.”
How did you go about deciding who you wanted to speak to in terms of those involved in the case directly as well as those who contextualize it?
“The executive producer on the series, Anishka Sharma, is incredible and was so trusting in what I wanted to do with it and went above and beyond in guiding me. At the start of the process, she told me to draw up a list of all the contributors who I wanted to speak to regarding the cultural and sociological angles and all the people who were attached to the case. In terms of the cultural people, pretty much everyone said yes, which I wasn’t expecting. Everybody was so wholeheartedly on board, which was really heartwarming.”
“In terms of people connected to the case, that was when it became more tricky. When it came to the men involved, one of them is now dead unfortunately and one of them is in prison, which is another thing that we have to explore in the series. Out of the remaining five younger men who are part of the Bolton Seven, we could only track down one of them. We were in touch with him but for various reasons that interview didn’t go ahead.”
“As a storyteller, I was posed with the question of how to tell these men’s stories if they weren’t telling them themselves. That posed a quandary in itself. Then the next step was the lawyers and the prosecutors involved and the activists in the case, as well as members of the local community who were there at the time, who drank in the pub and the pub landlord. On that side of things, it was about getting as wide a network of people that were connected to the case as possible, speaking to them and finding who could speak to it most clearly in a way that sounds good on audio. Some people can tell a story and some people aren’t as equipped with those skills. So it was a case of trying to piece the puzzle together. Anishka has produced such a wonderful array of documentaries and stories and she really helped me to assemble this cast of people.”
With sex being such an integral part of this story, did you know early on that you would need to be explicit when talking about it and to not feel censored in any way in order to do it justice?
“Absolutely, that was a really big thing for me. So much of what this case was about was the sex. So much disgust and disdain towards gay men in the 80s and the 90s in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic was a disdain for sex and it being seen as immoral and dirty. That’s what the prosecution’s case relied on. Of course, the interiority of the humanity of these men is so important because these cases have very real consequences, but at the crux of the evidence it’s the sex that they’re having. The way that it was picked apart in court was so grotesque and so dehumanizing that I was like, if we can’t cover that in detail then we don’t do this story. I was that hard-line about it, because that’s what people still shy away from in terms of non-heteronormative sex. ‘It’s disgusting, it’s dirty. I don’t want to see it.’ Well, that’s the thing that I want to inspect and I guess it stems from my own experiences of shame surrounding sex.”
“This wasn’t a series that I was going to do without being very comfortable in myself and in my own queerness. It’s diaristic in parts and it was cathartic in a way, being able to really exercise that notion of this being something that I was not shying away from and that I wanted to discuss in absolute hi-fi detail. That also spurred me on to consider the sociocultural connotations of the criminalization of gay men and what that meant for class, race, and all of these factors that would have impacted these men’s lives and the lives of so many other men like them.”
I really enjoyed the cruising section and the way you brought in the socioeconomic aspects of it, which is rarely talked about.
“When it came to cruising, I was like, they’re not going to let me talk about it in this much detail on the BBC! But the pragmatism with which it was met was so wonderful. Anishka agreed that it was something that we absolutely had to explore. That discussion stems from one of the reasons that these men could be criminalized for the sex that they were having, because it technically wasn’t in private. It was actually in the privacy of one of their own homes—which he either owned or rented—it was a private residence, but there were more than two people present. In the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967 it stipulated that sex could only happen between two men. That law would then be used to stipulate against men who were having sex in bedsits or other semi-private spaces. So we blow that up and think about what that law actually means for different parts of society. The Bolton Seven were seven working class men from from Bolton who probably would not have had access to private spaces, like many men like them, because they lived in multi-generational households; or they lived in homes where it absolutely was not safe to come out; or they lived in communities where there was one gay bar and if you went there you were very much putting yourself on show.”
“Although we often think of those laws as quite detached from people’s real lives, they have a very real effect. I spoke to Jack Parlett, who is a brilliant scholar and writer about queer history and queer culture, and he talks really eloquently about why cruising has been and remains a necessity for gay men who have a human right to seek out intimacy. Everybody should have the right to seek out sex if they want to without fear of admonishment or reprisal or danger, which is not the case for so many queer and trans+ people and so that’s spawned this culture which is multiplicitous and rich and happens in different places, at different times and in different ways. Douglas Stewart, whose books are incredible excavations of what it means to grow up queer and working class, offers really heartbreaking but interesting personal accounts of him seeking out sexual encounters when he was a young man. He examines how the middle class controlled his sexual congresses because they have the space and the money for concealment or privacy, which the working classes often don’t.”
“I had thought about all these elements before making the series, but in the process of making it and speaking to these wonderful people, it became a much bigger thing. I knew that reflecting on how these laws impact people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds more than other groups absolutely had to one of the main pieces of the series.”
What has stayed with you as you reflect back on creating this project?
“It’s the perseverance and dissent in the face of decree that those men themselves, and so many others like them, embodied. Queer literature and the exploration of queer history have been so important for me in understanding and embracing my journey into queerness. In the process of researching and making the project and since releasing it, so many men of that generation have got in touch and shared that they had similar experiences. It’s been so moving and inspiring. I say at the end of the series that my generation, and those who come after me, we truly stand on the shoulders of giants in terms of what those men went through. The rights that I have and the ways that I can access sex and intimacy and community now are absolutely tied to what those men went through. I’m so adamant that we must never forget those histories and never take those men’s experiences for granted.”
I was really pleased to discover your 2023 album Shapes That Are Different, which feels like it’s in conversation with this podcast in some ways. There is archive speech interwoven with your gorgeous songs. There’s also a song called “James” on there, but that wasn’t the only reason I liked the album!
“That’s so nice to hear that you’ve engaged with it and enjoyed it. James is my middle name, so that song is semi-autobiographical. I had never been a singer-songwriter before, but my family is from Ireland and I had grown up playing traditional Irish music, it’s always been a big part of my life. I played and studied classical music throughout university and I got into the contemporary world of minimalism. That’s what I was making a living off doing. I was in the contemporary music ecosystem and doing a lot of theatre work. During lockdown, I was back at my mum’s house and found her beautiful old nylon string guitar that she’d got as a teenager but never really got into it playing. I passed the time learning how to play it and loved that it afforded me a new way of making music which was quite novel.”
“I was also doing a lot of reading at that time and got the urge to put some songs together exploring past feelings. I’ve played music my whole life and that had been my creative outlet, but I’d never written words in a creative way before. It felt so exposing and revealing. Like you say, it was a precursor to what I did with the podcast. It gave me the confidence to believe in the words that I was writing as well as music. Over a couple of years, I put the album together and recorded it with lots of friends in lots of different places like Finland, Ireland and Scotland.”
“The album is an excavation a lot of stuff that I was figuring out like shame and desire and queer selfhood and what those things meant to me. I had just broken up with my first boyfriend and was thinking about that and what that meant. I was thinking about how I hadn’t come out until I’d met him and how that had changed my life but now that relationship wasn’t there anymore. It was a really wonderful vehicle for me to process a lot of the things. I never thought I’d be putting out a singer-songwriter album. I gigged it a little bit, but that’s not really what I do. It was a really enjoyable project though. I’m a big believer that if you’re a creative person and you’ve got this one idea that you want to do—even if it doesn’t adhere to the boundaries of your practice—just go for it and see what happens.”
What’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“Edmund White. I read his brilliant memoir earlier this year, The Loves of My Life, about his sex life. It’s the last book that he wrote before he died and it’s so funny, profound, and revealing. He wrote about sex so beautifully, but he also wrote about the queer experience in such a rich and honest way. I love so many of his novels.”
How about a queer podcast recommendation – is there anything you’ve listened to that you want to let people know about?
“Rather than a specific podcast, I’ll shout out a wonderful UK production company called Aunt Nell. It’s run by a brilliant duo, Tash and Adam, and they make beautiful podcasts about queer people and queer stories. One of them is called The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain, which looks at the log books from 1974 of the UK’s national LGBTQ+ helpline Switchboard. They also made Queer Roots and Routes about queer immigrants and asylum seekers.”
By James Kleinmann
In the UK, listen to Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7 via BBC Sounds. Outside of the UK, listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music. Follow Hugh Sheehan on Instagram @hughsheehan and visit his official website.
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