The English writer Rupert Croft-Cooke was onto something when he observed in 1963 that “we are one of the world’s most homosexual races.” My own sense is not that the British are more prone to homosexuality than other peoples but rather that gay men have long been vastly over-represented among Britain’s elite. From the world of letters (Oscar Wilde, Nöel Coward, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster) to the theater (John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi) and pop music (Elton John, Freddie Mercury, George Michael), they have contributed far more than what their relatively tiny numbers would suggest.
The question is: Why? The homoerotic subculture of single-sex boarding schools, a frequently cited reason, fails to account for the prevalence of a human quality more nature than nurture. Maybe it’s just something in the Thames. Whatever the cause, Some Men in London, Peter Parker’s kaleidoscopic, two-volume anthology of postwar British gay life, reinforces the impression that the U.K. is exceptionally gay.
Parker, a biographer of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, has scoured Albion for diaries, letters, police reports, newspaper articles, novels, textbooks, films, and plays to assemble a scintillating collage documenting the lives of those whom the since-shuttered News of the World once derided as “that misguided collection of misfits known as The Queers.”
My own sense is not that the British are more prone to homosexuality than other peoples but rather that gay men have long been vastly over-represented among Britain’s elite.
He begins his epic account immediately after the end of World War II, a transformative event in the evolution of gay identity, with the mass mobilization of young men in close quarters providing ample opportunity for sexual discovery and experimentation. Parker’s first selection, an entry from the diary of a physique photographer named John S. Barrington, relates the narrator’s joyous visit to Piccadilly Circus on V-E Day, where he was “kissing every soldier, sailor, and airman I could meet.”
Such open expressions of same-sex desire would be short-lived, however, as Britain reverted to what Isherwood called “the heterosexual dictatorship.” While the authorities had long ago stopped imposing the death penalty for “the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast,” the prohibition was still rigorously enforced.
The onset of the Cold War, and the attendant fear that homosexuals in sensitive government positions were vulnerable to blackmail, exacerbated an already nerve-racking existence for gay men. (Parker deals exclusively with male homosexuality as Britain never proscribed lesbianism. The reason, as one apocryphal story goes, was because Queen Victoria could not comprehend that such a thing even existed.)
London’s theater world was said to be so riddled with “pansies” that some newspapers dubbed homosexuality “the West End vice.” Conservative M.P. Beverly Baxter, who moonlighted as a theater critic for the Evening Standard, declared that “we shall never have the long overdue Renaissance of great dramatic writing until [homosexuals] are destroyed or at any rate diluted.”
While many gays flocked to careers in the theater, they were legally prohibited from depicting men like themselves onstage. The Orwellian “Examiner of Plays,” an office created in 1737, had unlimited power to censor theatrical productions, and homosexuality was a chief target. A report on Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer read, “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism, but the [Examiner of Plays] will find more objectionable the indication that the dead was a homosexual.”
With the few pubs friendly to homosexuals operating under the constant threat of police raids, many men availed themselves of London’s parks and lavatories for sexual release, a practice dubbed “cottaging” after the Victorian term for a public commode. In 1954 a London police officer reported that in Mayfair there existed “three urinals that are quite famous throughout the world.” (The ritual of cottaging is depicted with balletic élan in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears, based on John Lahr’s biography of playwright Joe Orton.)
London’s theater world was said to be so riddled with “pansies” that some newspapers dubbed homosexuality “the West End vice.”
Gielgud, Conservative minister Ian Harvey, and Beatles manager Brian Epstein (who alongside Andrew Loog Oldham, of the Rolling Stones, and Kit Lambert, of the Who, formed the triumvirate of gay impresarios behind Britain’s top rock bands) were some of the many, many men arrested for the crime of “persistently importuning for an immoral purpose.” Told of Harvey’s arrest, Winston Churchill is said to have replied, “On the coldest night of the year? Makes you proud to be British.” (The notoriously promiscuous left-wing Labour M.P. Tom Driberg was, on the other hand, “the sort of man who gives sodomy a bad name.”)
The desirability of men in uniform is a theme that runs throughout these volumes. In 1954, after the government formed the Wolfenden Committee to study the law prohibiting homosexuality, the chief metropolitan magistrate of London submitted a memo analyzing the problem. The noticeable decrease in the “old unholy traffic between soldiers of the Guards and Household Cavalry and perverts in the Royal Parks,” he wrote, was due not so much to “education and a higher moral sense” but rather “abolition of the old tight overalls.... Battle dress or khaki serge lacks the aphrodisiac appeal of the old walking out dress.” Descriptions like these underscore my one small quibble with this otherwise magnificent anthology: the lack of pictures.
Parker is an inspired magpie with superb editorial judgement. No document in these combined 800 pages bores or feels superfluous. Often, only a few sentences from a newspaper article, diary entry, or letter convey something of great magnitude. In 1959, a 16-year-old boy was charged with committing sexual offenses against two girls. “Previously he had been found guilty of offenses which suggested a homosexual nature,” a psychologist told the court. “These latest offenses are at least evidence of a step in the right direction.”
Their Own Private Language
For some, homosexuality was more than a mere public nuisance. “I have watched it growing—as it grew in Germany before the war, producing the horrors of Hitlerite corruption, and as it grew in classical Greece to the point where civilization was destroyed,” declared the author of a 1952 series in the Sunday Pictorial entitled “Evil Men.” They have “their own private language” and “recognize each other by the phrases they use,” a not entirely inaccurate accusation in light of Polari, a jargon spoken among dockworkers and some gay men in 19th-century London later popularized by the (tacitly homosexual) 1960s BBC comedy duo Julian and Sandy.
Yet Fleet Street could also be quite guileless. A 1950 newspaper report on Britain’s “three most eligible bachelors”—actor Ivor Novello, playwright Terence Rattigan, and dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II Norman Hartnell—seemed oblivious to the cause of their bachelorhood. The young female reporter who interviewed the men (“Novello put down his make-up pencil”; Rattigan “was well groomed” and “faultlessly tailored”) seemed genuinely mystified as to how they had yet to find the right girl.
Life under the heterosexual dictatorship wasn’t entirely bleak, and Parker richly illustrates the unintended benefits that can accrue to members of an oppressed minority. A 1960 appendix on “The Homosexual Vernacular,” listing “tatty”(tasteless), “trick cyclist” (psychiatrist), and “minny” (effeminate homosexual) exemplifies the joyful subversiveness of gay British humor.
Sir John Gielgud, Conservative minister Ian Harvey, and Beatles manager Brian Epstein were some of the many, many men arrested for the crime of “persistently importuning for an immoral purpose.”
For some men, a sense of excitement and intrigue adhered to leading a precarious double life. Viewing the welcoming parade for the King of Norway in 1951, the Tory M.P. (and candid diarist) Henry “Chips” Channon spotted Queen Elizabeth on horseback: “Beyond her immediately in the cavalcades of Life Guards was Corporal Douglas Furr, my private friend. For a brief second I saw them both. What a juxtaposition! The Queen saw me and smiled; he did neither.”
This being a book largely about the British elite, seemingly no character is more than one degree away from any other. The cliquishness of the upper classes was heightened by the furtive nature of the secret these men shared. As Jack Hewit, one of the many private friends of Communist spy Guy Burgess, observed, “It was like the five concentric circles in the Olympic emblem. One person in one circle knew one in another and that’s how people met.” This clubbiness contributed to a perception that homosexuality was an affliction of the idle rich, “a decadent vice which to a large extent has spread downwards from the over-civilized and public school classes,” according to one newspaper.
In reality, homosexuality transcended Britain’s class barriers, as it transcends all barriers. While many of the individuals featured in Parker’s anthology were to the manor born, this is simply a reflection of the fact that it was such men who had the time and education to write the diaries, novels, and correspondence that comprise the book.
If anything, the gay world was more democratic than the straight one. According to a witness interviewed by the Wolfenden Committee, homosexuals “do not pay very much attention to social status or where they come from or where they are going to; and I think that is one of the reasons why society is rather alarmed about them, that they do not adhere to the ordinary social prejudices and distinctions.... I have known an eminent novelist who lived in a great state of devotion with a London policeman.” The novelist in question, Parker writes, was Forster, whose posthumously published Maurice depicts the romance between a stockbroker and a gamekeeper.
No document in these combined 800 pages bores or feels superfluous.
Just as “the West End vice” could be found within the highest strata of society, so did it reach the lowest. The gangster Ronnie Kray was bisexual, and extremely cagey about it, once killing a man for calling him a “fat poof.” A 1962 government report about gay men at least nodded toward the population’s diversity, even if its categories —“The Demoralized Married Man,” “The Sugar Daddies,” “The Ship’s Queer,” “The Psychopath”—were somewhat unscientific.
As the years progressed, glimmers of hope appeared. In 1953, four months after receiving a knighthood at the young Queen’s coronation honors, Gielgud was arrested in a Chelsea public toilet. (“This imbecile behavior of John’s has let us all down with a crash,” Coward wrote in his diary.) Yet at his first public performance following the arrest, Gielgud was greeted, much to his surprise, with a standing ovation. Four years later, the Wolfenden Committee produced its report recommending that private, consensual sex between males over 21 be legalized.
In 1961, Victim, in which the closeted matinee idol Dirk Bogarde played a married barrister blackmailed over a gay affair, became the first British film to depict homosexuality explicitly (a year before Advise & Consent achieved the same distinction in the United States). Two years later, as the British capital was beginning to earn its reputation as “the swinging city,” a newspaper declared that “from being the despised and rejected, not to say abhorred, on God’s earth, the queer is rapidly assuming the role of Hero of the sixties.”
Parker ends his saga in 1967, when both Houses of Parliament decriminalized homosexuality—36 years before the United States Supreme Court. The Conservative peer who sponsored the bill had simultaneously put forward a measure protecting badgers. Asked why the former had passed while the latter had not, he replied, “There are not many badgers in the House of Lords.”
James Kirchick is a Writer at Large for AIR MAIL, a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times, and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
