Against the Law

by Peter Wildeblood; Max Lerner

  There was only a limited choice: I could become either a cook and butcher, a meteorologist, or a pigeon keeper in the Signals. Although physics had always been my worst subject at school, I decided to be a meteorologist, since this would give me opportunities to see some of the wilder parts of Northern Rhodesia, where there was a chain of airfields linking South Africa to the Middle East. I spent the next three years in this way, usually living in a thatched mud hut in some inaccessible place. I acquired a handsome moustache, a pet cheetah and a monkey named Sinatra, a quantity of leopard skins and the title of Shinganga wa Mfula, Wizard of the Rain, which was bestowed on me by a local witch-doctor.

  No magic powers, however, were needed in order to forecast the Rhodesian weather, which consisted of blazing sunshine for nine months in the year and pouring rain for the remaining three. I spent most of my time loafing about with an ancient 12-bore shotgun, or making pencil sketches of the natives. Sometimes I wondered what I would do after the war was ended. The masters at school had always prophesied that I would become a writer, but so far I had written nothing but halting little poems and a few plays based on such colourful incidents as the destruction of Pompeii and the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, with a tendency towards melodrama and blank verse.

  Northern Rhodesia was not a place in which to make plans for the future. It was quite impossible, surrounded by glittering rocks and twisted thorn-trees, the coughing of leopards and the honking of hornbills, to visualise crowded London and the necessity of earning one’s living. And then, suddenly, the war was over. Because I held a scholarship to a university, I was eligible for an immediate release, and by November, 1945, I was back at Oxford—one of a crowd of ex-servicemen trying to accustom themselves to the idea of being back at school.

  During the war years I had had a number of experiences with women, but none with men. I still hoped that one day I should meet a girl whom I could love and eventually marry, but my relationships in Rhodesia were physical and brief; there always seemed to be something lacking. I was already beginning to think of myself as a homosexual, but it was as yet only an emotional bias, with no physical expression.

  It is often claimed that the greatest danger to the community from homosexuals comes from their tendency to make ‘converts’, continually drawing into their circle young men who, if they were left alone, would grow up perfectly normal. It is further said that 90 per cent of homosexual cases known to psychiatrists start with seduction. From my own experience, I would say that neither of these statements is true.

  I have already said that many boys at my school indulged in homosexual practices without, apparently, growing up into homosexuals. I believe that such experiences would only have a permanent effect if the tendencies were already present in the boy, as they were in my case. It does not seem reasonable to allege—as is so often done when a schoolmaster appears in the dock—that a child can be permanently diverted into homosexuality by a single experience of this kind.

  There were several homosexual masters at both my schools, as I later discovered, but they are the last people whom I would blame for my condition. They never made any attempt to seduce me. The damage was not done by them, but by the ‘normal’ masters—or those with violently suppressed homosexual desires—who either did not understand what was the matter with me, or else recognised it only too clearly as something which existed, also, in themselves. Later on, I discovered that such people were the worst enemies of the homosexual. A normally-adjusted man is surprisingly tolerant; the scorn and the denunciations nearly always come from a man with more or less suppressed homosexual desires of his own. This phenomenon is known to psychologists as ‘projection’; when a man is ashamed of something in his own nature, he relieves himself of his guilt by strenuously denouncing it in other people. Mr. Gordon Westwood, in his well-documented and enlightened study Society and the Homosexual (Gollancz, 1952) says:

  ‘A tendency towards alcoholism may be replaced by a fanatical attitude towards temperance; the desire to excel at games and the awareness of some physical disability may be closely allied in origin; a talkative and bombastic disposition may hide a gnawing feeling of inferiority in the unconscious; and an aggressive, vitriolic attitude to homosexuality may be a defence against these tendencies.

  ‘Due to early influences beyond their control, hundreds of thousands of men have marked homosexual tendencies in their make-up. The violence of their denunciation represents a desperate repudiation of their own homosexual tendencies. It is impossible for these people to approach the problem of homosexuality with any kind of emotional detachment. Many of these people are as badly in need of psychological treatment as the homosexuals they so violently condemn.’

  Towards the end of my schooldays and during the first few months of my service in the RAF, I had met a number of people connected in various ways with the theatre and other arts, some of whom were frankly homosexual. The fact was openly discussed, and it must have been obvious to them that although I already had a bias in that direction, I was entirely inexperienced; but, instead of taking advantage of my inexperience, as some people might think they would be tempted to do, they left me severely alone. The ability of men of this kind to behave in a way which, in any other context, would be described as ‘moral’, is by no means unusual, but it is often forgotten in the heat of discussion.

  At Oxford I met a great many people. This was, in fact, the main purpose of going back to the university, as I saw it. I added another scholarship to the one which I already held, but after this there seemed little point in acquiring further academic honours. I did as little work as possible, but I made hundreds of friends. The undergraduate population at that time was of an unusual kind, consisting in about equal proportions of young men who had come straight from school and others who had served in the forces, many of whom had wives and families. We did not pay much attention to the regulations; the ex-servicemen did not take kindly to the ban on public houses and ignored the midnight curfew, returning to their colleges in the early hours of the morning by scaling walls and squeezing through gaps in railings. As one of them said, we had all been either bored to death or frightened to death during the war, and we did not propose to waste any more time. There were parties every night; theatre parties, bump-supper parties, sherry parties and week-end parties in London. Even the lady don responsible for my studies produced a bottle of Pernod with which to enliven our discussions on mediaeval lyrics.

  I met a man with whom I had been at school. He had been a naval officer, with some staff appointment in Ceylon. He said that most of the officers at the station had been ‘gay’ and looked at me as though this was some password to which he expected me to reply. I had not heard the expression before, but apparently it was an American euphemism for homosexual. He was, of course, gay himself, and took it for granted that I was, too. I was surprised and rather impressed. He did not look in the least like the popular idea of a homosexual, being well-built, masculine and neatly dressed. This was something new to me. Although I was perfectly prepared to admit that love could exist between men, I had always been slightly repelled by the obvious homosexuals whom I had met because of their vanity, their affected manner, and their ceaseless chatter. These, it now appeared, formed only a small part of the homosexual world, although the most noticeable one—the exposed ninth, so to speak, of a very large iceberg.

  The number of homosexuals in England and Wales has never been satisfactorily estimated. Some statisticians have given a figure of 150,000; others, of over a million. If the Kinsey report, based on inquiries in America, is accepted as a rough indication, the figure for England and Wales can be estimated at 650,000. This refers only to men who are exclusively homosexual; Kinsey found that in the USA more than a third of the entire male population had some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age.

  It is, of course, perfectly obvious that only a very small proportion of this 650,000 is noticeably odd. It is equally evident that homosexuality is not, as some pro
pagandists would have us believe, a kind of fashionable vice restricted to decadent intellectuals and degenerate clergymen. This idea is extremely useful to those who wish to influence public opinion against homosexuality, and it succeeds because the British people, on the whole, despise intellectuals and distrust the clergy. But it does not happen to be correct. In a recent survey of 321 court cases involving homosexuality, it was found that the accused men fell into the following categories:

  Shop and clerical workers

  16%

  Artisan (factory workers)

  15%

  Transport and Post Office

  11%

  Unskilled labourers

  10%

  Hotel and domestic servants

  7%

  Students, trainees, schoolboys

  6%

  Schoolmasters

  4%

  Agricultural workers

  4%

  Clergymen

  2%

  Mentally deficient

  2%

  Independent means

  2%

  Unclassified

  11%

  Homosexuals are a minority, and are persecuted as such. They do not, however, form a cohesive or organised group, as other minorities do. For the most part they are isolated, not only from the rest of the community, but from each other. The fear under which they live creates no freemasonry among them; the problem of homosexuality is not the problem of a group, but of hundreds of thousands of individuals—each of whom, according to the laws of Britain, is a criminal.

  If all the homosexuals in this country were to be rounded up and imprisoned, they would fill the existing gaols thirty times over.

  But in 1946 I was not concerned with statistics; I merely wanted to lead my own life. I knew, of course, that homosexual conduct was illegal; but so were many other things which everyone did at that time, like trading in clothing coupons and buying eggs on the black market. Furthermore, it hardly seemed likely that the existing laws, antique and savage as they might be, would ever be used against men who were living, according to their lights, in a moral and discreet manner. I know that the word ‘moral’ may sound out of place in this context, but it seemed to me then—and it still does—that there are different degrees of morality (or immorality, if you like) in relationships between men, just as there are in relationships between men and women. At one time adultery and fornication were crimes, as homosexuality is today. The essence of a crime, presumably, is the fact that some harm is done to someone. But who does the most harm? The adulterer, stealing a man’s wife, breaking up a home and perhaps affecting the whole course of her children’s lives? The man who seduces a girl and abandons her with an illegitimate child? Or two men who prefer to live together?

  Earlier generations may have tried to ignore such questions. During the first years of peace, after a war fought, according to our rulers, for four indispensable freedoms, they were widely discussed by all kinds of people, men and women, normal as well as homosexual. It was even being responsibly suggested, for the first time, that the laws of Britain should be brought into line with those of other countries, where sexual conduct in private between consenting adult males was not considered a crime. But most of us were not interested in law reform and hardly gave a thought to the possibility of prosecution. We always supposed—and the cases reported in the newspapers appeared to bear this out—that if we behaved ourselves in public, the police would leave us alone.

  I say ‘us’, because by this time I had become accustomed to thinking of myself as a homosexual. It was partly a social attitude. I had always been irritated and distressed by the rigidity of the English class system, even though I had derived every possible benefit from it myself. Thanks to my scholarships, I had received a ‘good education’ and would therefore presumably be in a position to walk with kings if ever the opportunity arose, but it seemed more difficult to retain the common touch. I instinctively rebelled against a system by which a man, whatever his personal qualities might be, was indelibly labelled ‘Top Drawer’, ‘Middle Drawer’, or ‘Bottom Drawer’, merely by the manner in which he spoke. Having served for four years in the ranks of the RAF, I had met many working men and was proud to call them my friends. Now that the war for freedom was over, I was no longer supposed to speak to them, because they were not ‘my class’. The social rules seemed to me as ridiculous as those imitation traditions which I had had to learn at school.

  The homosexual world knows no such boundaries—which is precisely why it is so much hated and feared by many of our political diehards. The real crime of Lord Montagu, for example, in the eyes of some ‘Society’ people, was that he became acquainted—on no matter what basis—with a man who (to quote the prosecuting counsel) was ‘infinitely his social inferior.’

  I do not believe that anyone is ‘infinitely the social inferior’ of anyone else. People are either pleasant or unpleasant, entertaining or tedious, trustworthy or dishonest, and these qualities are in no way related to accidents of birth. There are plenty of boring Earls and brilliant bricklayers and there are also delightful Dukes and deplorable dustmen; one should at least be allowed the freedom to choose one’s friends.

  I shall probably be accused of letting my sexual preferences colour my social views; it will be said that my fondness for working people is due not so much to their excellences of character as to their physical attractiveness. There may be some truth in this, but I can only say that if homosexuality results in a heightened awareness of social injustice, it is—in this way, if in no other—a force for good.

  As it happens, the person of whom I was most fond at this period was a foreign prince, whom I had met during one of my frequent week-ends in London. He was extremely intelligent, considerate and kind, and I would not dream of embarrassing him by giving any clues to his identity. He knew everybody in London, it seemed, both in the homosexual world and out of it, from Cabinet ministers to the proprietress of a Mayfair brothel with whom we used to take afternoon tea. She had navy-blue false eyelashes and I remember her telling us how she had stolen her bedroom carpet, which was almond pink, from the ladies’ toilet at Ciro’s by wrapping it round her and pretending it was an evening cloak.

  For the first time I began to understand how the word ‘gay’ had come to mean what it did. So many people have written about homosexuality in a spirit of self-pity and shame that I feel bound to confess that I thoroughly enjoyed my adventures with the prince. He was a delightful companion, and though we quarrelled frequently it never lasted very long. When I parted from him, finally, it was because I imagined that I had fallen in love with a woman.

  I was 24 and on the point of leaving Oxford, although I still had no idea of what my career should be. My woman friend was five years older, a sweet and sympathetic person who knew many of my ‘gay’ companions and had no illusions about me. Neither of us thought it would matter. We talked of marriage and of having a family. Everything seemed perfect. I passed my Finals at Oxford with Second Class Honours—better than I deserved, considering how little work I had done. And then everything became gloomy and impossible again, as though the sun had withdrawn behind a cloud.

  I had no money, no job and no prospects. My university degree qualified me for nothing except teaching, which did not appeal to me. Ex-servicemen were a drug on the market. I tramped round the BBC, the film studios, and the publishing houses. It was the same everywhere: nobody would give me a job until I had some experience, and the only way of acquiring experience was by getting a job. ‘I shouldn’t bank on a job in television, old man; it’s an overcrowded profession, you know.’ ‘I tell you what— why don’t you go away and write something, then we can have a look at it.’ ‘So many qualified journalists coming back from the war just now, it’s pretty hopeless for a beginner.’ ‘My friend has a friend who used to know Sir Alexander Korda, but I think he’s in New York.’ ‘No, I’m afraid it isn’t the kind of thing we want.’ The Editor regrets ... the Editor regrets.

&nbs
p; I took a job as a waiter in a small residential hotel at £5 a week. I had to get up at dawn to stoke the boilers, help to cook the breakfasts and sweep the dining-room, as well as waiting at table. At night, I wrote. I sold an article to Vogue, one to Printer’s Pie and two to Punch. Then I got the sack for arguing with the proprietress. I went home to my parents and wrote a play about Northern Rhodesia. It was a farce about the groundnuts scheme, called Primrose and the Peanuts. It was performed one Sunday evening at the Playhouse Theatre and later, for two weeks, with a different cast, at the Bedford Theatre in Camden Town, which was then being used for ‘try-outs’ with a view to production in the West End. It received excellent reviews in the Observer, the Evening News and the New Statesman, and Sir Beverley Baxter in the Evening Standard was kind enough to say that the third act was ‘pure Shaw’. They all agreed that it should be transferred to Shaftesbury Avenue, but the theatre managements demurred; they said that the groundnuts scheme was a dated subject which would not ‘draw them in’. I was left with an exercise-book full of Press cuttings and a net profit of £200.

  In the meantime I had joined the Daily Mail as a reporter, starting in the district office at Leeds at a salary of £6 a week. I lodged in a council house at Meanwood and spent most of the time ringing up the local police, ambulance and fire stations to see if there was any ‘news’. Occasionally I stumbled on some item which could be given an unusual twist, but most of the stories fell into clearly-defined categories. There was the one which began: ‘A little grey-haired woman sat last night wondering...’ And: ‘Everybody in Heckmondwyke knows Jock, the lovable shaggy-haired Scottie....’ And: ‘This is the story of a little girl who wanted to be a nun...’ And: ‘Police of four counties were last night searching for...’ All human experience, I discovered, could be reduced to some formula of this sort; and the more closely one stuck to the formula, the higher one’s stock rose at the main office.