Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis

Abstract

This is a history of male homosexuality in London between the end of the first world war and the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957. It excludes lesbianism for the good reason that it was not illegal. The illegality of male homosexuality was of overwhelming significance in the lives of active homosexual men; it shaped their experience in ways the law did not do for lesbians. This is also a book about the city. Houlbrook accepts the view that modern homosexuality is an urban phenomenon: it not only takes place within the city, it is ‘shaped and sustained by the physical and cultural forms of modern urban life just as they in turn shape that life’. The geography of London is thus central to the narrative. Houlbrook draws upon an array of sources—literary, biographical, autobiographical, the press and, most tellingly, the records of the London courts and the Metropolitan Police. These records include seized material—often private correspondence—which is both evocative and yet shocking since its seizure represents often ruined lives. Houlbrook's scope is wide. What was the map of queer London? How was London's ‘homosex’ policed? Where did it take place? There is here a whole microhistory of urinals, pubs, parks, clubs, alleys, cinemas, Turkish baths, the secret as well as the commercial world of male homosexuality. There is the great diversity of gay life: the extravagant ‘queans’ and ‘Dilly boys’ of the West End who led risky and often humiliating existences; soldiers and sailors; working-class men who saw nothing abnormal in having both boy and girl friends; the respectable and discreet who were able to pursue a comparative private sexuality. Houlbrook is very good on differing queer social networks as he is on the relationship between sex and where people lived—or where they could afford to live. For many men there was a tension between the excitement of public sex and a desire to find a place where the police and the neighbours were not a constant threat. Several clear arguments emerge from this account. Public homosexuality was policed as heavily as we would expect, but Houlbrook suggests the pressure to do this came not from the very top, as is usually thought, but from the Met itself. Much of the judiciary was utterly unbalanced in its hostility to homosexuality but that was not universal: there were some judges, like L. Atherley Jones (a former Liberal MP and son of Ernest Jones the chartist, it is worth noting), who were sympathetic and the despair of the Met. The geography of queer London shrank throughout the period. In the 1920s it was surprisingly wide, with foci scattered all over the place. By the 1950s many of these (public lavatories included) had disappeared and queer London increasingly meant Soho and the West End, and private rather than public sexuality. An increasingly narrow definition of ‘normality’—the view that if you were predominantly hetero you were exclusively hetero, and that if you were queer you were the same as heterosexual men except in sexual preference—became dominant. This had a clear class dimension. It did much to banish the queans and the Dilly Boys (who were primarily working-class in origin) from the scene and made it increasingly unacceptable for working-class men to have both homosexual and heterosexual relationships, as many once did. It also permitted the respectable and ‘private’ homosexuals to ‘capture’ the evidence given to the Wolfenden Committee. The result, Houlbrook argues, was a ‘moment of political “liberation”, which excluded and stigmatised vibrant forms of queer urban culture’. The old ‘demotic public queer culture’ was marginalised. This is a fair argument. That much of the extravagance of gay life disappeared is true. But whether a privatised ‘normality’ was alone responsible for that is debatable. As Houlbrook points out, queer politics was changing. Even if still incomplete, the long process of ‘liberation’, which began in 1957 and accelerated in the last ten years, has changed not only the legal context of homosexual life, but also its cultural context. The police no longer scrape a gay man's face—as apparently they did—with blotting paper to see whether he is wearing make-up. Although the geographical metaphor can take over—there is too much ‘mapping’ and there are too many ‘sites’—Queer London is an important book where cultural and political analysis fruitfully intersects.

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