Queer London

"What Matt Houlbrook’s book is so good at showing is while there was certainly prejudice against ‘nancy boys’, as they were called, and very flamboyant, very exhibitionist homosexuals, generally homosexual behaviour was much more tolerated than you would imagine. It was after World War II that you really got a crackdown on homosexuality. If you look back at the diaries of Virginia Woolf there was obviously a great deal of homosexuality and bisexuality, including Virginia Woolf herself. Even in working-class communities, homosexuality was much more accepted than one would have believed. One tends to have a Whig interpretation of history, that people have got more tolerant as time goes on, but it’s not necessarily true. You have had great changes in society, but homosexuality was much more tolerated in the thirties than we realise and I think Houlbrook has done a great service in ripping that period apart. Homosexuality wasn’t confined to the avant-garde, to the artists and the writers who were sexually adventurous, but it went right through robust working-class communities. You would have your male mates, your same-sex mates, and there would be sex. Then you would move on and marry a nice girl and settle down with a family, and then you weren’t homosexual any more. You were a heterosexual with a family. It’s always the classic thing about public schools that boys have homosexual relationships because there is nothing else available. Yes, I think it’s to do with that. You married late because you had to save up for a bottom drawer – even if you couldn’t afford a home, you had to pay out for your sheets and your towels. That was the social convention. I think it was also partly to do with the view of women. There were far more separate spheres. As a man you went out with your mates. You went to the pub, the football or the music hall. Women fulfilled a different function and relations with women were much more about courting. You would probably just sit at home or might go out to a dance hall. So there were both these reasons. But the important thing was the lack of essentialism. Apart from, as I said, the nancy boys and rent boys and real exhibitionists soliciting around Leicester Square, who were regarded as something very different."

"I picked this one, first of all, because it takes us away from America to Britain. It stands as an example of an approach to history that focuses on a very specific place or town. George Chauncey has written on ‘ Gay New York ‘, a city that has a whole literature built around it. Recently, there’s also been a book out on ‘Queer Budapest,’ by Anita Kurimay. I’ve chosen this book on London, which looks at the time, since the end of the First World War, into the 1950s. Matt Houlbrook finishes in 1957, the moment when the Wolfenden Report was published, when discussions about legal reform begin in the UK, which ultimately lead to the reform of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, and the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality. But here we are talking about the period prior to that, when sex between men especially was criminalised, and also prosecuted. And it’s interesting, because this one takes the city and looks in great detail at the different geographies and spaces within London and thus affords a very specific and a very productive lens into queer history. So it talks about the police and prosecutions and how the police organised, surveyed and controlled space. But it also talks about how different groups of people used spaces in order to have sexual encounters and find some form of sociability among ‘queer’ men. “He comes up with a panorama of different social groups of same-sex desiring men” He talks about sex in public spaces, parks, bathhouses, and about an emerging commercial culture of gayness in the 1920s and ’30s, which affords more and more opportunities for people who could afford to access those spaces, like the bathhouses, but also cafes, and other places like that. And, of course, ultimately, also, domestic spaces and hotel rooms. In very revealing detail he follows and traces the whole range of public and private sexual interactions. He not only looks at how the police tried to control those spaces—how the police sent plain-clothes officers to entrap gay men, men looking for sex with other men in urinals and in parks—but also how same-sex desiring men forged new spaces for themselves. He looks not only at those with money, but also at working class culture, hustler cultures. Houlbrook talks about things like the Lady Malcolm Servants Ball in the 1930s. Where he also shows that it was definitely not just Oscar Wilde -like aristocrats and definitely not just upper-middle class men who searched for spaces for same sex sociability and intimacy, but also working class people, hustlers. He talks about the Dilly boys who would spend their time in Piccadilly Circus in the West End. So he comes up with a panorama of different social groups of same-sex desiring men. This is where the book is particularly strong, because there is the question why ‘queer’ is in the title, which is a half-anachronistic term for the period from the 1920s into the 1950s. But what it does not do is to claim that there was a unified culture. It’s very precise about kind of hierarchies involved in those sexual encounters and those forms of sociability. It pays really close attention to the role of class and, for me, that’s the most instructive takeaway message from the book. British culture was very class-based in that period. And that is kind of reflected in the queer culture of the time as well. So there was an exploitative relationship between middle class homosexuals and working class or lower class hustlers. There is an ongoing discussion about respectable masculinity performed by some of the men involved in those scenes, and more vulnerable groups who were gender transgressive and performed femininity. Rank and file soldiers come in as a special social group as well that is often in need of making additional money. Questions of ethnicity play a role. There’s a chapter on Britishness and how Britishness is redefined in very heteronormative terms in the 1950s, and how that then has a very specific effect on all the different groups involved in the constellations and scenes Houlbrook describes here. That also then leads to his conclusion, moving into discussions about the partial decriminalisation, where he talks about the successful attempt to establish something like a respectable middle-class homosexual, performing traditional masculinity, who needs to be protected from all those foreign, non-white, lower class hustlers and blackmailers, who threaten to undermine his class-based respectability. And that’s the way in which the book also explains why partial decriminalisation in 1967 in the UK came about in the way it did. It was in a very—and historically, I think, problematic—class-based fashion and in a fashion that also emphasised an exclusive notion of Britishness, and British masculinity. Maybe not only in Britain, but there it was very obvious. There were beginnings, I would say. There was a lot of what Houlbrook describes as ‘forcing space’ for one’s own community. So there was this kind of cultural activism. But there were discussions as well about law enforcement and how that might change. But I think that only came together as a forceful lobby in the 1950s. That had a lot to do with the trial against Peter Wildeblood and others. And this idea of the respectable masculine, middle class homosexual. Anything that happened before that was only emergent at best, but never reached the organized lobbying power that was behind the drive to decriminalize homosexuality later on."