Capital in the closet

“London has always been famous for its many and beautiful parks”, announced a 1966 guidebook to the capital; “just what those parks are famous for is not necessarily limited to the flowerbeds and landscaping.” Outlining some of the popular haunts of gay men, from cinemas to Turkish baths to the public lavatories or “cottages” that served as assignation spots, the book was ahead of its time: homosexuality between consenting males in private was only decriminalized the following year.

A tone of camp drollery, hardening at times into defiance, characterizes many of the entries in Some Men in London, a captivating two-volume anthology, edited by Peter Parker, that chronicles the lives and experiences of gay men in the city between 1945 and 1967. Darker moods intercede at various points – whether of vitriol or fear or despair. The first volume begins with E. M. Forster’s grim prediction, in 1960, that the recommendations made by the Wolfenden Committee in 1957 (which had included partial decriminalization) would never be accepted: “What the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it”.

Parker’s anthology is the story, on one level, of the slow dismantling of that prejudice. A reader’s report for the British Board of Film Censors on Victim (1961), in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married gay lawyer drawn into a blackmail ring, is representative of a grudging shift in attitude: “I for one don’t care a fig what homosexuals do in private. But in 90% of such men there is a curious recklessness in the choice of their companions and often their public behaviour”. The anonymous author went on to lament the case of “Oscar Wilde and his disgusting little chums”. Wilde’s downfall – his obdurate refusal to be cowed – had cast a long shadow, one that persists even to this day.

The two volumes are not merely a record of queer experiences, then, but of society’s coming to terms with something that had been – until recent times – unnameable and unspeakable. Concentrating on the “comparatively brief but crucial period” spanning the end of the Second World War and the passing of the Sexual Offences Act, Parker draws on the testimonies of homosexual men (largely in the form of letters or diary entries), along with a multitude of other documents: newspaper articles, debates in parliament, court transcripts, government memos, novels, plays and the priggish reports on those plays that were issued – until 1968 – by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. (A typical judgement is that of the reader’s report for Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer in 1958: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indication that the dead man was a homosexual”.)

Parker has focused on the experiences of men for the simple reason that – by an anomaly of history – female homosexuality was never criminalized in Britain, although, as he readily acknowledges, lesbians were victims of the same everyday prejudice. In consequence, the two books track the emergence of a specifically male gay identity in these years, presaging the emancipation of the 1970s and after. The sources proceed chronologically, weaving between public and private testimonials as much as between different walks of society. Parker has not conspicuously shaped or weighted the material: there is no historicizing agenda at work. Notorious scandals or causes célèbres come into momentary focus – the Montagu affair, or rumours of Lord Boothby consorting with the Krays at gay parties (“a tissue of atrocious lies”, according to Boothby in 1964, although they proved largely true) – but Parker avoids allowing any given event to dominate. Each book has an essentially democratic composition, in contrast to the arcs and emphases of a more conventional history.

The tone of the collection is ever-changing: light comedy (intentional or otherwise) sits in close proximity to the tragedy of a suicide or a reputation-shattering arrest, or simply a private outrush of loneliness. On occasion, contradictory moods seem to operate in parallel. In April 1958, John Gielgud wrote to a friend about his live-in manservant, Bernie, having been beaten up by burglars. His palpable shock subsides into something closer to a quip: “I’m only grateful they didn’t ransack the house and all my bibelots, or kill B. with the broken glass they were brandishing”. Excerpts from the diaries of the Conservative politician Chips Channon – a self-confessed Edwardian who liked to sample the delights of high bohemia – alternate, throughout the 1950s, with those of a civil servant called George Lucas, a comparatively anonymous habitué of Marble Arch pubs where willing servicemen might be found. In contrast to Channon’s patrician hedonism, Lucas was given to moments of hypocritical moralism – on one occasion ticking off a pair of soldiers with whom he had gone drinking when they admitted to being gay prostitutes.

Certain patterns of thought or prejudice imprint themselves as the chronology unfolds. There was a long-standing supposition that homosexual men were a security risk – a notion fuelled by the exposure of Guy Burgess as a spy in 1951, as well as the 1962 case of John Vassall, an Admiralty clerk found to have been passing secrets to the Soviet Union. A familiar – unfailingly rabid – voice is that of the tabloid reporter claiming to represent mass opinion. In the summer of 1952, the Sunday Pictorial journalist Douglas Warth published a three-part exposé, “Evil Men”, which channelled the widespread idea that homosexuality was a contagion originating in high society: “This decadent vice, which to a large extent has spread downwards from the over- civilised and public school classes, provides a lucrative market for perverts of all sorts”. More than a decade later, the News of the World painted a picture of nighttime “rituals” on Wimbledon Common: “300 men are visiting the place and occasionally mass orgies involving 20 or more develop during which weird chanting takes place”. Even in a relatively enlightened piece from the Evening Standard in July 1964, the journalist Anne Sharpley observed that “It is generally supposed that many young men are ‘turned’ homosexual in order to get on in the theatre”.

Nor was superstitious bigotry the preserve of the press. In a House of Lords debate in 1965, the Earl of Kilmuir warned against “the proselytisation which goes out from sodomitic societies and buggery clubs, which everybody knows exist”. Two days later Noël Coward wrote in his diary that Kilmuir, who was brother-in-law to the actor Rex Harrison, had made an “ass” of himself.

Coward’s is one of several notable voices that ring out intermittently. (These also include Channon, the painter Keith Vaughan and the writer James Pope-Hennessy – all represented by their diaries.) Different sources reflect Coward’s public and private selves. He was thanked by Gielgud for a letter of support following the actor’s arrest in 1953 on charges of importuning in a Chelsea mews (“you shame me by your wonderful sympathy”), but confessed in his diary: “I am torn between bitter rage at his self-indulgent idiocy and desperate pity for what he must be suffering … Poor wretched John, so kind and humble and sensitive and what a bloody bloody fool.” Another recurring character is Forster, who in old age becomes a sort of Greek chorus, rueful and wry. In August 1965, he wrote in his “Locked Diary”: “I should like to record – and why not here – that during nearly 70 years I have been in interested in lustful thoughts, writing, and sometimes actions, and do not believe they have done me or anyone else harm.”

At other times, we glimpse lives from a tantalizing remove, through third-hand accounts such as the report of a female impersonator prosecuted in 1964 for running a “vice house” in St John’s Wood. The defendant was clearly transgender rather than a mere drag act; the defence counsel was reported as claiming that “his distress was difficult to describe because he was in a man’s prison … he was only one stage removed from being a woman”.

Besides the introductions to each volume, Parker’s authorial presence is felt only in the short bridging statements between excerpts. These are typically factual and concise – like the best kind of museum label – though he occasionally indulges in a sardonic aside, noting for instance that “It is a nice irony that Sir John Wolfenden, who would chair the government inquiry into the laws relating to homosexuality, should have a son, Jeremy, who was himself queer”. When it comes to literary material his interest seems to be firmly in what reveals or evokes, rather than anything more aesthetic or high-minded. If some of the entries have a hackneyed feel, it only adds to the richness of the overall array: a sense of all life being here. Among the stranger – most striking – inclusions are excerpts from long-forgotten novels that deal with gay love or longing in working-class adolescents. C. H. B. Kitchin’s Ten Pollitt Place (1957) depicts a fifteen-year-old disabled boy, Hugo Muller, who develops a crush on the local dustman. In one episode, at a tea party, the dustman, Bert, lifts the boy up to a window for a better view: “Letting himself rest limply against Bert’s broad, strong chest, he was filled with a rapture, such as Ganymede, nestling in the divine eagle’s warm down, must have felt on the skyward journey”.

One curiosity of the books’ timeframe is that the word “queer” – which, as Parker notes, is nowadays the preferred term for sexual difference of all shades – was at once a prevalent and ambiguously loaded term in these years, signalling recognition as well as opprobrium. It is apt, then, that the two volumes are a testament to both change and continuity – the gradual relaxation of attitudes and redrawing of boundaries, ranged against the perpetuation of tragic or desultory fates. In a diary entry of December 1966 the photographer Cecil Beaton reflected that “it was only comparatively late in life that I would go into a room full of people without a feeling of guilt”, while remarking also on “what damage, what tragedy has been brought on by this lack of sympathy to a very delicate and difficult subject”.

Indeed, Parker’s anthology isn’t simply a period piece, for all its arcane or nostalgia-inducing details. It projects backwards and forwards in time. It is impossible to ignore the fact that most of the events occurred in living memory, a mere two generations ago. And while Forster’s pessimism in 1960 was to prove unfounded – he lived to see the change in the law – the currents of prejudice that move through both books never feel so alien as to be dismissible. When the Sexual Offences bill was eventually passed in July 1967, the Labour MP Peter Mahon declared: “It is by no means unnatural to have absolute revulsion against a bill of this type” – adding that he opposed it “lock, stock and barrel, root and branch, hook, line and sinker, warts and all”. Even the sympathetic Lord Arran counselled that “no amount of legislation will prevent homosexuals from being the subject of dislike and derision”.

Some Men in London has the democratic, unpolemical quality of a social realist novel. In its sheer range of viewpoints and incidents it shares something with the roving perspective and multitudinous voices of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). It is a testament to Peter Parker’s skill as a compiler – his ear for the peculiar and the archetypal alike – that gay life in these years, far from being a niche or rarefied thing, comes to feel like its own epicentre, the beating heart of the city. At times it feels more urgent and vibrant by far than life in the present. In the words of a contributor to Michael Scofield’s 1960 sociological study, A Minority: “When I walk through Notting Hill Gate I feel I’m at a gigantic homosexual party”.

James Cahill’s second novel, The Violet Hour, will be published in February

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