The demonising of homosexuals in postwar Britain

Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and, even at this short distance, impossible completely to understand, the culture of male homosexuals in London was only partially legalised in 1967. Before that has to be interpreted through material which is intrinsically unsatisfactory.

A comparison might be drawn to the textual means historians have of understanding another proscribed culture, the early Christians in Rome. What we have are comments by outside observers, such as Tacitus or Celsus, who obviously didn’t understand, and whose views were driven by hostility. There were times when members of the secretive circle were too strident to be ignored and had to be punished. We have records of martyrs, and the investigations and persecutions of Nero and Domitian. Did these reveal typical members of the cult? It seems unlikely. And we have quantities of writing about the culture from years later which might divulge anything or nothing.

Peter Parker has assembled a fascinating amount of written material about the existence of homosexual men from 1945 until 1967, when Harold Wilson’s government, under the guidance of Roy Jenkins, legalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21. The publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957, recommending legalisation, is a key moment at the centre of the narrative. Parker has austerely but usefully ruled out any material printed after 1967 on the grounds that hindsight affects accuracy. He excludes even Quentin Crisp’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, published in 1968.

The use of pretty policemen to entrap homosexuals was always denied, but seems indisputable

What we have are fascinatingly partial accounts, some of which are valuable because they are often hilariously wide of the mark. What many politicians, journalists, psychologists and psychiatrists believed about homosexuals now seems so ludicrous as to be worth including for entertainment value alone. Investigative journalism produced some implausible scenarios. A News of the World reporter took a trip to Wimbledon Common one night in 1963. (‘Owls hooted and small animals rustled in the undergrowth.’) Unable to resist the temptation to gild the lily, he assured readers that ‘occasionally mass orgies involving 20 or more develop, during which weird chanting takes place’.

Speculation runs riot. A member of parliament says that ‘the ability and the willingness to enter into homosexual acts is a means of promotion’ at work. A psychiatrist postulates to a journalist that a cure might be found in ‘the delicately balanced endocrine glands’, and that despite recent developments, research is ‘still in the groping stage of trial and error’. There is much priceless naivety at work here. I strongly recommend a 1950 profile in People of three of Britain’s ‘most eligible bachelors’, Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello and Norman Hartnell, and their burning problem – ‘three famous men who can’t find the right girl’.

The Sunday Mirror, however, had no uncertainty about ‘How to Spot a Possible Homo’: ‘They wear hairy sports jackets… they play golf… the over-clean man… the man in the bar WHO DRINKS ALONE.’ The Sunday Pictorial in 1961 uncovered a chief cause of homosexuality. Men ‘become homosexuals eventually because they are afraid to make contact with women. They may try once or twice and be given the brush-off’. The reporter had, however, a cure for it:

After just a few sessions of LSD the actor told me: ‘It is amazing. I have reached the stage now where I can get some excitement from thinking about women.’

Decades of extra-clinical trials have shown that this result is not repeated on a large scale.

Amusing as all this is, it rests on an obvious delusion. Most commentators on the dangers of homosexuality focused on the prevalence of dishonesty and susceptibility to blackmail, particularly after the Vassall case; and on the widespread addiction to secrecy and fondness for underground clubs of dubious legality. They seemed, too, to be unable to tell the difference between prostitutes of either sex and men who merely happened to be homosexuals. It didn’t apparently occur to most people that the root cause of secrecy might be the fact that you could get sent to prison otherwise. The habit of concealment persisted for years after 1967, and opportunities remained for blackmail in those areas where homosexuality remained proscribed – the military (until 2000) and the diplomatic service (until 1991).

Parker includes a good many rather gruelling accounts of prosecutions for sexual activity, mostly in public. These caught a number of celebrated figures including Sir John Gielgud and Wilfrid Brambell (the actor behind Old Steptoe). A large part of the success of police prosecutions was due to their willingness to entrap. The use of pretty policemen was always denied, but seems indisputable. PC Butcher told the Wolfenden Committee:

I had one one day, and I said to the chap at work with me that if he will follow me to such lengths he will follow me to the police station, and he did. I gave him a smile…

Whether the public much cared, despite the irritation of finding a lavatory being used for sexual purposes, is not clear. Gielgud was greeted at his first performance after his arrest with a standing ovation. Clearly, the forces bearing down on the homosexual threat had over-egged their horror. In 1967, two details about the killer of a teenager seemed about equally reprehensible. ‘Two grim facts emerged. He is a homosexual. He is an expert in cutting up bodies.’ The Lord Chamberlain fought a long and lonely battle against licensing plays about homosexuality. Of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, one commentator wrote: ‘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 done an excellent job of unearthing passages from novels, plays and film scripts from the period. The splendid Rodney Ackland Soho drama Absolute Hell and the campaigning movie Victim are now familiar,but others ought to be better known, such as a favourite novel of mine, 10 Pollitt Place by C.H.B. Kitchin. A wonderful range of extracts from outrageous pulp fiction makes this substantial anthology unmissable.

Then as he saw me crying like this his arms were round me, and I cried and sobbed and he said: ‘Never call me missy again, Don.’

This sort of thing must be read with a sceptical eye. The discreet relationships between professional men sharing a house that occasionally appear – an anonymous doctor and banker, or Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten – are not good material for fiction of this sort. Nevertheless, the trash is excellent, and perhaps tells us something about what its readers wanted, rather than what they were.

More reliable are the occasional courageous diary-keepers – Keith Vaughan, the pornographer John S. Barrington and Joe Orton – who at least describe their lives, atypical though they might have been. But most telling of all are the uninhibited recollections of guardsmen, and the screamingly funny small ads in selected publications:

Pleasant young man required weekly in young designer’s flat. Must be willing to do anything from floor scrubbing to bed-making. Friendly atmosphere.

Parker says that he was refused permission to quote from some well-known material of the period. There are various telling extracts from fiction by observant heterosexual writers, including a splendid account of a ‘queer wedding’ from Frank Norman’s Stand On Me, surely a classic in need of revival. There is, however, no Keith from Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings; nor the predatory Frankie feeding on the cultured Patrick in Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness; nor the very sad failed seduction scene in Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League. If these estates and others turned Parker down, it was an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Most moving are the stories of unnecessarily destroyed lives – the suicide of a man who, accustomed to the fear of authority, had kept his lover away from medical help and watched him die of appendicitis. Careers were ruined. Major Fitzroy Fyers, who had been equerry to the Duke of Connaught and was described as ‘one of the bravest men ever known’, resigned his post as serjeant-at-arms after smiling at a police constable at South Kensington underground. E.M. Forster, at 85, saw the whole thing clearly: ‘How annoyed I am with society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousnesses that might have been avoided.’ After 1967, the situation was irreversible. But the issue didn’t end there; and a third volume – perhaps pursuing the negotiations between militancy, injustice and mild boredom to the 1980s – might be equally rewarding.

Of course it is so recent that memory and experience can enter in surprising ways. Mine came with a two-part Daily Mirror investigation entitled ‘Will My Son Be a Homosexual?’ by Quentin Crewe. ‘Every one of them will be unhappy… Theirs is an existence which one would not wish on one’s worst enemy,’ he wrote. Screamingly funny, of course, but one which has an interesting personal application. The piece appeared in April 1965. I don’t suppose my parents were readers of the Daily Mirror but, as it happens, I was six weeks old at the time. Also, as it happens, it didn’t work out so badly. This is an anthology with an immense amount to tell us about its period, scrupulously sieved, and just as much about our lives now.

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