Against the Law
PETER WILDEBLOOD
Preface by Matthew Parris
Weidenfeld & Nicolson LONDON
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER
First published in Great Britain in 1955 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This edition first published in 1999 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
© 1955 Peter Wildeblood
Preface to the 1959 American Edition
This is a book that leaves a scar on the memory. It took courage for Peter Wildeblood to set down so nakedly, for posterity to read, not only the fact of being a homosexual, but also the whole painful story of his involvement with Eddie McNally, his arrest and trial, his prison ordeal.
To be sure, it was on the court record and in the newspapers for a spell. But where another man might have hoped that time would erase the memory and traces of it, the author has chosen to keep them alive—partly to confront people with the ugly visage of what the law, the police, and the prisons are doing in the name of morality; partly also, one guesses, to confront himself and come to terms with himself.
The problem of the homosexuals in our society is one of the seemingly insoluble problems of our time. To deal with it we have need of an imaginative effort of insight, and a large measure of compassion. From the homosexual, in turn, it demands self-knowledge and a kind of stoicism in the face of the hostility of others and his own tangled plight. With the example of the author’s stoic honesty before him, what reader can fail to be stirred to compassion, or to get at least the glimmer of a new insight?
For the American reader there are some differences to be noted between the treatment of homosexuals in Great Britain and in the United States. The sharpest difference is in the role of the police. In America the surveillance of sexual behavior is left to the local authorities: it is not the concern of any Home Office or of a national police administration like Scotland Yard. Neither the Home Office nor the police come off well in this book: they are shown to be capable of harassing tactics, of driving ruthlessly to get a conviction, even of doctoring some of the evidence. As for the prison administration, the vivid documentation of its blunders and stupidities would make the book notable if there were nothing else in it. Nor is it surprising that Home Office, courts, police, prisons, should all be drawn into the web of evil. Once you start with the proposition that men are to be punished for behavior in private that harms no one, all the rest follows: the spying, the search without warrants, the ingenuity about means and the blindness about ends. The infection spreads and becomes gangrenous. Even in the American case, the local police “vice-squads” have at times not hesitated to provoke the very conduct for which they then arrest their victim.
Nor can we Americans be proud of the influence of our own hysterias upon the wave of arrests of which the Lord Montagu case was part. Wildeblood is a good newspaperman, and there is an authentic ring in his narrative when he tells how a high Home Office official came back from talks with American security officers, who had impressed on him the need for rounding up homosexuals, on the theory that their presence infected the defense forces and made officials in “sensitive” government posts more vulnerable to blackmail and therefore prey for the Russians. It was the kind of tortured reasoning which found itself at home in a nation haunted by the “tortured problem,” and still bedeviled by the baleful legend of Oscar Wilde.
The American experience was in some ways even zanier than that of the British. There was a period when the “State Department scandals” dominated the Washington scene, and when able officials all through the federal government were hounded out of jobs and careers under the guise of a campaign against Communism. As it happens my own interest as a student of homosexual behavior, and of national attitudes toward it, first began in earnest when I went to Washington to track down the truth of the crusade by Senators McCarthy and Wherry, and studied the operations of the Vice Squad of the District of Columbia police. It is a curious fact that the ordeal of Peter Wildeblood should stand at the end of a circuitous train of events stretching from Oscar Wilde’s blunder in pushing a libel suit, and taking a wide detour through the American security syndrome in the McCarthy era, and the episodes involving the atomic spies, until it reached two young men in London in their private, if also shabby and unhappy, relationship. History sometimes has a crazy logic and wild indirection of its own, and those who seek rationality in it will be frustrated.
As the author points out the British and the Americans stand almost alone, in the modern world, in their archaic legal prohibitions in the area of homosexuality and their fitful spells of intensity in carrying them out. They manage these things much better, for example, in Norway, Sweden, France, and the Netherlands. It is clear, of course, that the British and American laws on sexual offenses come from much the same sources in legal and religious history, and the barbarity of the statutes is also similar, although in America their absurdity has mostly meant their non-enforcement.
In at least one respect the British case is worse than the American: the British, as C. H. Rolph has pointed out, know terribly little in a factual way about the extent of the problem. To be sure, the police records show a dramatic tenfold increase in “reported offenses” in the quarter-century between 1931 and 1955. But this may not prove much more than greater police zeal and greater public awareness of the problem. The British have never had a Kinsey statistical study, as the Americans have—a study which, whatever its inadequacies, offered massive evidence that homosexuality is not a matter of the wilfulness of a few, to be broken by the police and the courts, but a widespread phenomenon which in its origin and its life-history is related to the emotional structure of the family and to other deeply rooted elements of contemporary life. What the British do have, to complicate the problem, is the “public school” tradition which the author movingly describes, which takes a boy away from his family at an early age, and brings him up in an all-male society, where brutality is all too frequent.
In one respect, however, the British are ahead of the Americans. Since this book was written, the Wolfenden Committee has issued its report, which deals with homosexual offenses as well as with prostitution. It is notable that the committee recommendations jibe almost exactly with the basic position taken in this book. While agreeing that homosexuals who exploit minors must be punished, as well as those who make a nuisance of themselves in public places, the Report draws a sharp line there. Private homosexual relations between adults, it says, are their own private affair, and the police and courts would do well to keep out and leave them alone.
I might add that this represents what has been for some years the weight of opinion among psychologists, psychiatrists, welfare workers, legal thinkers, churchmen, and other serious students of sex and society on both sides of the ocean. Yet it has not prevailed to bring about a reform of the criminal law on sexual offenses in either nation. Even in Great Britain the Wolfenden Report is still only a Report, and none of the major parties has dared take the risk of pushing it into legislation. Judging by public opinion polls, the popular mood is still against making a formal change, although I agree with Wildeblood that in many concrete cases the people as a whole are more compassionate and understanding than their officials.
Much then still remains to be done in clarifying public understanding of this agonizing problem. My own study of it makes me believe that there is a greater chance for success from psychiatric treatment than Wildeblood seems to believe. In America, at least, there is a cautious but growing confidence among psychiatrists that the situation is not hopeless. But if further progress comes, it will be because of the fierce honesty and the stoic courage in books like this one.
- Max Lerner
New York, July, 1959
Preface to the 1999 edition
This book, wrote Max Lerner in his preface to the first American edition in 1959, ‘leaves a scar in the memory’.
The memory has faded since. To offer a new preface to a book published when I was nine, is unsettling. I only fitfully recognise the England which Against the Law describes. How does one assess this astonishing account? Can those of us who never had to be brave in the way Peter Wildeblood was brave, critically admire without patronising?
Best coolly to note what he did. This was epoch-making. The sensational court case - the Montague case - which led to Wildeblood’s imprisonment for homosexual offences, became the trigger to the Government’s appointment of the Wolfenden Committee to consider the law on homosexuality. Their report led nearly a decade later to the qualified legalisation of private homosexual behaviour - before then utterly illegal. This was the first advance in gay rights in England in our century, and the only advance for another thirty years to follow.
It is still the most significant reform homosexual men have ever gained. By his honesty during the trial this book reports, by the publicity and sympathy attracted, and by the evidence he then gave personally to the Wolfenden Committee, Wildeblood did as much as any witness to influence that advance. The scale of his contribution is not really reflected in Against the Law, written as it was when events were still in flux, but the book - and the sheer fact of its publication - proved to be part of that contribution. Against the Lawis, itself, a leading witness in gay history.
Wildeblood was the only participant to describe himself honestly as a homosexual rather than to simply confess homosexual acts. Amazingly, this makes him one of the first men in history to do so. Why did he do it? The offences (as they then were) for which he was convicted were routine. What was extraordinary was the candour, inside and outside court, of this talented and successful journalist. ‘Very faintly,’ he writes, ‘as though at the end of a tunnel, I could see what I must do. I would make a statement... I would simply tell the truth about myself. I had no illusions about the amount of publicity which would be involved. I would be the first homosexual to tell what it felt like to be an exile in one’s own country. I might destroy myself, but perhaps I could help others.’
Here and throughout the author writes in the crisply accessible style of a practiced popular journalist; but what he is saying is - was - stunning. In some ways this book, which like so much else flowed from that decision, remains teasingly incomplete: for Wildeblood, forever the reporter (no Proustian introspective he) never properly explains why he jumped one way in circumstances when a thousand other defendants would have jumped the other. His sheer nerve is - was - breathtaking; the tragedy which unfolded poignant; his parents’ support touching; but little is made of any of this. The narrative is factual.
We are left wondering what distinguished Peter Wildeblood from perhaps a million of his contemporaries. Did he seek publicity? In a sense, of course, yes. Some of the Wolfenden Committee slightly distrusted the journalist as an attention-seeker making ‘unnecessary’ or ‘uncalled for’ statements about himself; and that was the charge with which the 1950s British Establishment defended itself against his evidence - and this book. It is worth noting too that the shrewd Fleet Street professional in Wildeblood may have guessed that his conventional career would be over, whatever evidence he turned. Certainly by the time he wrote Against the Law he had little to lose.
Except this. With time, privacy and a period of decent obscurity, hurt begins to heal. This is what people pushed into public opprobrium most commonly crave when exposed and vilified. But when most men would have piped down and taken cover, some instinct in Wildeblood pushed him to break cover and speak up. Everyone advised him to let it go. Instead he carried on stirring it up.
At first a victim of events, he made himself their master. The legal indictments he could not avoid. Natural honesty may have compelled him to answer as he did. The sentence and imprisonment were out of his hands. The publicity attaching to the case was beyond his control. But this book was a voluntary act, calculated to cause himself immense pain. Nothing can take away from the heroism in that.
And quite apart from the contribution he makes here to gay history and consciousness, the description Against the Law offers of mid-twentieth-century British policing, and the judicial culture of the era, will surprise those who were not there. Those who were, will be chastened to have overlooked the nastiness. From his standpoint our country appears as almost a fascist state. ‘I did not believe such things could happen in England,’ Wildeblood writes, ‘until they happened to me.’ How many hundreds and thousands of silent witnesses must there have been, to match just one who spoke?
This chilling tale is republished into a new generation and a different Britain from the country Wildeblood describes. Just how different was betrayed to me by the magisterial original preface, from America, by Max Lerner: a period-piece in itself - completely, shockingly out of date. Straining towards a new age, the liberal rationalist in Lerner praised the author’s courage and his ‘coming to terms with himself’, and he asked for the reader’s compassionate understanding.
But Lerner’s conventionally wise side had the final word. His last paragraph spoke of homosexuality as an ‘agonising problem’. Nevertheless, he concluded, the situation was not hopeless: ‘My own study of it makes me believe there is a greater chance for success from psychiatric treatment than Wildeblood seems to believe.’
Enlightened scholar that he was, Lerner had wholly missed the point. Though Wildeblood offers the sort of respectful nod in the direction of self-loathing which he knew his readership (and publisher) expected - not least as an excuse for the book - he was not seriously interested in a ‘cure’ for a mental ‘disease’. No reader will detect much of a sense of shame, or any longing for release. He was one of the first English writers ever to present and describe homosexuality as a human type; as a sexuality rather than as a failure of sexuality. Between the lines of a tale of giddy descent into public disgrace, the reader will sense a brazen, almost shameless quality in Wildeblood’s prose. A rogue cheerfulness keeps creeping in.
Though it is an indictment, therefore, this book is not a breast-beating appeal, nor a confession, nor a pathology, it is simply a story, one man’s story: remarkable for its picture of a police state in 1950s Britain; remarkable for the author’s self-knowledge in a world which offered him no template; and remarkable for his confidence and courage in publishing. As a fellow-journalist who never faced, and could not have stood, a fraction of the ignominy heaped upon Peter Wildeblood, I salute him.
- Matthew Parris
London, June 1999
Although one of the charges made against me was one of conspiracy, there was, and has been, no conspiracy. The views expressed in this book are entirely and exclusively my own; there has been no consultation with anybody else.
- P.W.
Part One
Sometimes, when a man is dying, he directs that his body shall be given to the doctors, so that the causes of his suffering and death may be investigated, and the knowledge used to help others. I cannot give my body yet; only my heart and my mind, trusting that by this gift I can give some hope and courage to other men like myself, and to the rest of the world some understanding.
I am a homosexual. It is easy for me to make that admission now, because much of my private life has already been made public by the newspapers. I am in the rare, and perhaps privileged, position of having nothing left to hide. My only concern is that some good may come at last out of so much evil, and with that end in view I shall set down what happened to me as faithfully and fairly as I can. I do not pity myself, and I do not ask for pity. If there is bitterness in this book, I hope it will be the bitterness of medicine, not of poison.
The case in which I was involved has become known as the ‘Montagu Case’; because one of the accused men was a peer, it received a great deal of publicity. But in essentials, it was not very different from hundreds
of cases which come before the courts every year. These attract little attention, but each of them implies the downfall, and perhaps the ruin, of a human being. In the last few years there has been much discussion of this question, and many authoritative men and women have given their views about the prevalence, nature, prevention, punishment and cure of homosexuality. There have not, I think, been any among them who could say, as I do now: ‘I am a homosexual.’ For what it is worth, I should like to offer, with all humility, this account of my life, my trial, my imprisonment and return to freedom as a contribution to the study of an urgent and tragic problem which affects many thousands of men.
I am no more proud of my condition than I would be of having a glass eye or a hare-lip. On the other hand, I am no more ashamed of it than I would be of being colour-blind or of writing with my left hand. It is essentially a personal problem, which only becomes a matter of public concern when the law makes it so. For many years I kept it a secret from my family and friends, not so much from choice as from expediency, and I tried privately to resolve my own struggle in a way as consistent as possible with the moral law. During that time I do not believe I ever did any harm to anyone else; if any harm has been done since, I do not think the fault lies with me, but rather with those who dragged out into the merciless light of publicity things which would have been better left in darkness. When the searchlights of the law were turned on to my life, only a part of it was illuminated. I am not proud of what was exposed; most people, if they were honest, would admit that their private lives would not bear such a relentless scrutiny. It will be my task, therefore, to turn on more lights, revealing, in place of the blurred and shadowy figure of the newspaper photographs, a man differing from other men only in one respect.
Against the Law Page 1
