Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  John Sparshott, aged nineteen, was strung up in August 1835 and, according to one newspaper account, the old custom of passing the hands of the dead man over the necks of two or three women was still in use ‘as a supposed cure for glandular enlargements’. Three months later John Smith and John Pratt were suspended outside Newgate prison for the same offence. They had the distinction, if such it was, of being the last men sentenced to death for buggery in England. They were poor men, both of them married, who had been found in a derelict boarding house on the south bank of the Thames. The magistrate, Henry Wedgwood, stated that ‘the detection of these degraded creatures was owing entirely to their poverty; they were unable to pay for privacy, and the room was so poor that what was going on inside was easily visible from without’. It was a miserable location, and a miserable end, with all the sorrow of London somewhere within it. Queer men under sentence of death were in every sense pariahs; when Captain Nichols was hanged in 1833 no member of his family approached him or appealed for a lighter sentence. He went to his death unmourned. The death penalty for buggery was abolished in 1861, when the punishment was replaced by that of penal servitude for life. Sexual assaults of other kinds warranted a sentence of three months to two years.

  In 1829 a carpenter, James Allen, was killed in an industrial accident. He had earned his living in the trade for twenty-one years, and seemed to be happily married. At the coroner’s inquest, however, it was discovered to general surprise that Allen was in fact female.

  Four years later the body of Lavinia or Eliza Edwards, then unwanted and unclaimed, was taken up from the streets and dispatched to Guy’s Hospital for dissection. It was there discovered to be that of a young male and, according to the subsequent report, ‘the state of the rectum left no doubt of the abominable practices to which this individual had been addicted’. Eliza had been a performer in female roles who had toured the country, and was known by erstwhile friends as a ‘very lady-like woman’. After her theatrical career had come to an end, she had taken to the streets. The delicate situation of posing as a member of the other sex was well understood in this period, as a verse from ‘The Rummy Cove’s Delight’ of 1833 illustrates.

  Ye wives when you marry of course you expect

  That your husband with something in front will be decked;

  And should he be gifted with what’s rather small,

  It’s better than if he had nothing at all.

  But the story I tell you is true, on my life,

  It’s found out a woman has married a wife

  Who was strong, who was hearty, was stout and was tall

  But to please her poor spouse she had – Nothing at all.

  The Sinks of London, published two years later, tried variations on the same theme. It purports to be a journalist’s account of a cheap lodging house in Seven Dials which, of the poor addresses in London, was close to being the poorest and the most abandoned. This was the neighbourhood where many people lost hope. One ‘creature’ lodging there was between four and five feet in height with one leg longer than the other. He wore a ‘flash’ coat and a female shawl, and so his appearance was perplexing. He looked like ‘a masculine woman and sounded like a man’; he ‘swaggered around the room, his hat half pulled over his brows, and slouched a little on one side; assuming that scowling look of a bully, and at times the flashy air of a gallant’. Her sex, however, was well known to her neighbours.

  Another queer fellow appeared before the magistrates of Hatton Garden. The magistrate, Mr Bennett, asked for the name.

  PRISONER (speaking in a rough manner): It is Mary Chapman.

  MR BENNETT: I never saw a figure more like a man, and the voice is manly.

  WITNESS: I have known her at least ten years and she always appears in a dress similar to the one she now wears, namely, a hat, smock-frock, trousers or knee breeches …

  MR BENNETT: She may be a disorderly and disreputable character, which, in fact, her dressing as a man clearly shows, but I know of no law to punish her for wearing male attire … I advise you to be careful. If I could punish you, I would.

  The tradition of the Jacobean ‘roaring girl’ was in fact very much alive. Mary Newall, known as ‘The Artful Girl of Pimlico’, was in ‘the habit of stealing out to low theatres alone, hiring cabs to go in, and smoking cigars with the cabmen’.

  16

  Omi-palone

  In 1855 a thoroughly modern guidebook was published for the demi-monde of England with particular reference to the lower depths of what was called ‘little Lunnon’; The Yokel’s Preceptor: or, More Sprees in London! was ‘every swankey’s book’ and ‘the greenhorn’s guide’ of ‘flymy kens and flash cribs’, the terminology of which was to be deciphered in ‘a Joskin’s vocabulary’ ‘of the various slang words now in constant use’. Among them were of course ‘margery’, ‘poof’, ‘backgammon’ and other words of queer derivation. It was important for the yokels to find a ‘way to know the beasts’. It might even be described as a guide to queer London without drawing undue attention to the fact.

  The ‘beasts’ could be seen at the southern and eastern ends of Regent Street, in Fleet Street, the Strand and among the purlieus of Charing Cross. Nowhere was safe. The Burlington Arcade had become a nest of male whores, where you could find ‘a bit of brown’ or some ‘back-door work’. The Alhambra Theatre was similarly to be avoided. The London Pavilion and the bar of the St James’s Hotel were ‘so’, in the word of the time, as was a skating rink in Knightsbridge. Two public houses, the Crown on Charing Cross Road and the Windsor Castle on the Strand, were eminent. It is perhaps significant that the queer quarters of London had finally reached the West End, leaving most of the City behind, emphasising that sexual culture followed or accompanied consumer culture. That was where the money, and the customers, and the bright lights, were all to be found. The old signs, however, still seemed to be in use. ‘When they see what they imagine to be a chance, they place their fingers in a peculiar manner underneath the tails of their coats, and wag them about – the method of giving the office.’

  This may have something to do with the contemporary rise of the great metropolis of which queers were an integral part. The pertinent characteristics of a large city such as London – the railway termini (even the trains themselves), the public baths, the arcades, the parks, the museums and art galleries, the gymnasia, the restaurants, the new theatres, the public lavatories and above all the restless streets – formed the perfect environment for same-sex pursuits.

  In 1854 a transvestite ball at the Druids’ Hall in Turnagain Lane was raided. One of its participants, a man of sixty, was arrested; he was ‘dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age’. ‘Drag’ entered the vocabulary in the 1860s, and has never left it since. When George Paddon was arrested on the Hackney Road in the summer of 1863, the constable testified that his abnormally large crinoline was the only clue. Paddon was also wearing a silk dress with an ‘over dress’ as well as a lady’s French coat trimmed with black lace. But the policeman stated that ‘he should never have taken her for a man but for the crinoline’, a response that elicited from the members of the court ‘uncontrollable laughter’.

  In April 1864 one prurient diarist, Arthur Munby, came upon an advertisement for a ball at a pleasure garden in Camberwell. The tickets were selling at a shilling each, a relatively expensive sum, and Munby set out to investigate the clientele. He realised that ‘not a few of the youths were elaborately disguised as women of various kinds; some so well that only their voices showed they were not girls – and pretty girls. This is a new thing to me, and is simply disgusting.’

  If many Londoners were unaware of male cross-dressing except as an act in the penny gaffs or pantomimes, the unexpected appearance of two young men in the dock at Bow Street magistrates’ court came as a revelation. One wore a cherry-pink evening dress trimmed with lace, while the other was dressed in dark green satin with a shawl of the same material. Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, oth
erwise known as Stella and Fanny, were accused of ‘conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence’. They had been arrested, while wearing the same female clothes, at the Strand Theatre in the spring of 1870. In a contemporary pamphlet to celebrate the occasion of the trial it was revealed that at the theatre ‘the ladies leaned over their box, twirled their handkerchiefs, and lasciviously ogled the male occupants of the stalls’.

  It soon transpired at the Bow Street hearings that the two young men were well known for their transvestite escapades in the West End. They had been thrown out of the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square for exhibitionism and making ‘chirruping’ sounds to attract male attention. The manager testified that ‘they were looking in front of the box, handing cigarettes backwards and forwards to each other, and lighting them by gaslight’. They were frequent visitors to the Burlington Arcade, where the beadle knew them well; he was addressed by them as ‘you sweet little dear’. They had been seen, en travesti, at the Casino in Holborn, at fancy-dress balls at Haxell’s Hotel and the Royal Exeter Hotel, and, curiously enough, at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. It seemed that any crowd of males would draw them out. They made a habit of parading down Regent Street, the Quadrant and the Haymarket. They had been seen to wink and pout at gentlemen while Stella used to turn her head ‘in a sly manner’. They were, in truth, importuning, like any other prostitute, male or female.

  On the day of their arrest they had been followed by police agents in their pursuit of what was called ‘frippery and frivolity’. They had travelled by cab to Oxford Street, for example, where they purchased gloves and then to Portland Place in order to buy jewellery. The law finally pounced at the Strand Theatre.

  The police called in a surgeon to examine the two defendants, but it subsequently appeared that the doctor had been overenthusiastic in his work by initiating a rectal examination which was later denounced as a ‘revolting procedure’. The attorney general commented at the trial that ‘fortunately there is very little learning … upon this subject in this country’. The police and doctors, in other words, did not know what they were doing.

  In defence of Fanny and Stella their barrister claimed that they were simply theatrical, albeit to an extraordinary degree, and that they considered their activities to be a bit of a ‘lark’. They had even appeared, as actresses, in minor theatres and village halls where they had been applauded to the echo. Boulton’s mother testified that her son ‘had dressed up as a girl from the age of six. As a child his favourite role was that of parlour maid, in which he deceived his own relations.’ It was all very English.

  They were not considered to be sodomites or blackmailers, although in truth they may indeed have dabbled in those activities. No one was harmed, and in fact very few people were offended. The London public took their side; they were applauded whenever they left the magistrates’ court and their testimony was greeted with gales of laughter. Despite the strictures of the moralists, it was all just good fun. From the evidence of the press reports, the London crowd was quite accustomed to ‘drag’ on the streets of the city. The city was known in that sense to be free and easy.

  The magistrates’ hearings were followed by a trial at Westminster Hall in the spring of the following year but much of the material about cross-dressing and prostitution was omitted. The earlier reports about large gatherings of queer men at gay parties were also omitted. It seemed that too much had already been said, and none of the legal teams wished to leave the impression that London was a queer Eldorado.

  The confused evidence of the police and others, as well as the botched surgical examination, led to the prosecution being dropped. The jury found the two men not guilty of conspiring to commit a felony, whereupon Stella fainted. He had by now grown a moustache. Clean-shaven men were in this period an object of constant suspicion.

  Some relatively sensational letters had been read out in court. Stella had written to an erstwhile admirer that ‘I am consoling myself in your absence by getting screwed’. Fanny had complained of the weather that ‘it has turned so showery that I can’t get out without a dread of my back hair coming out of curl’. He had also alluded to ‘my campish undertakings’. ‘Camp’ was so new a word that one newspaper interpreted it as ‘crawfish’. Another phrase worth remarking on, ‘we shall come in drag’, marks the first time that the word ‘drag’ was heard in a court of law. Another letter from a witness included the phrase that ‘I care for nothing but trade’. But the meaning here of ‘trade’ was too much for a court of law.

  This was one province of the queer world from which emerged the queer slang known as ‘polari’, a strange amalgam of Romany, Yiddish, lingua franca, cockney rhyming slang, back slang and vagrants’ canting terms that were as ancient as vagrants themselves. A ‘huge cartzo’ was a large penis, ‘lallies’ were legs and a ‘bona ecaf’ was a nice face. ‘Omi’ was a man and ‘omi-palone’ an effeminate man; ‘martinis’ were hands and ‘aunt nells’ were ears. ‘Dona’ or ‘palone’ was a woman; and at a later date ‘sharpy palone’ was a policewoman. It all became, in the language of polari, very ‘camp’. In the twentieth century polari was a familiar and frequently used ‘other’ language as a secret code to disguise the often sexual meanings of various words; thus it was employed in theatres, pantomimes and the merchant navy. It afforded a sense of community and belonging among those who spoke it, and sealed them off from the various impositions of the common language. ‘Naff’ was one of the words that crossed the divide, but ‘national handbag’, the dole, did not. It was, in a sense, the language of the suppressed. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century it was rarely employed.

  It is a short step from the dance floor or the shopping arcade to the workhouse or the dosshouse. Some queer men actively sought out those of a lower class. It afforded them more satisfaction. It was not necessarily a question of power, although that might play a part. The man or boy could turn out to be a brutal blackmailer, in front of whom the most experienced queer might quail. It was essentially a question of money. In a culture dominated more and more by commodities, the body was one of the most delectable.

  John Addington Symonds, a poet and critic of the latter half of the nineteenth century, was inclined to metropolitan wanderings. On one of his journeys through the city he glimpsed a graffito that seemed to him to be ‘so thoroughly the voice of vice and passion in the proletariat that it pierced the very marrow of my soul’. The graffito in question was, in his words, ‘of phallic meeting, glued together gushing’. The legend beneath it was ‘prick to prick, so sweet’.

  This crudely drawn scene overwhelmed Symonds, eliciting a furious hunger for sensation of a similar kind. He had once before rejected the advances of a soldier with a mixture of fascination and revelation. Now he picked up a guardsman and took him to a brothel. For him it was wonderful to touch, and even to converse with, a member of the lower class. No doubt for the soldier it was simply business as usual.

  Guardsmen appear in many reminiscences of the period, where they are treated as synonymous with male prostitutes. They could be found everywhere in London at a price ranging from four shillings to a sovereign. One middle-aged guardsman admitted that he and his colleagues used to ‘break in’ the raw recruits, but he added that most young men did not need any preparatory training. Elder brothers or older friends had done their duty in advance. He added that ‘although of course we all do it for money, we do it because we really like it, and if gentlemen gave us no money, we should do it all the same’. Those in the upper ranks were not immune from suspicion. It was widely reported that Field Marshal Kitchener and Major General Sir Hector Macdonald were ‘so’.

  The murder of a homosexual artist, Archibald Wakley, dominated the sensational press in the spring of 1906. The young painter was in the habit of inviting soldiers to his studio, where they might of course pose as models, but his artistic career came to an end when his body was found fatally slashed and his skull cracked open. Certain details were left unrecorde
d in the press, including the fact that marks on his thighs had been made by the spurs worn by the Royal Horse Guards. He might have been ridden to death.

  There was a large market for those who were attracted to the poor. The connection between homelessness and same-sex activity was customarily made in the latter half of the nineteenth century; George Orwell would testify at a later date that the tramp had the reputation for being queer. This might in part be explained by the association with vagrancy and the Vagrancy Act, but there is evidence that the solitary wandering life of the tramp encouraged homosocial longings. If homelessness and homosexuality were intimately linked, it was part of an urban history in which tramps openly favoured boys as sexual companions. Another type of family might thus be established. The vagrant havens known collectively as Rowton House, in Whitechapel, King’s Cross, Newington Butts and elsewhere, were also well known for illicit activities. In a world of loneliness and comfortless privation the need for human warmth and human sympathy were every bit as important as food and drink. The ‘refuges’ where the homeless were taken in for the night were reported to be havens for queer sex, and some well-to-do gentlemen disguised themselves as vagrants in order to gain entry.

  John Addington Symonds professed more delicate motives. ‘I have never been able to understand,’ he wrote, ‘why people belonging to different strata of society – if they love each other – could not enter into comradeship.’ Comrade was the just word. It implied masculine fraternity which could also provide the proper motive for an enlarged philanthropic activity.

  Three articles in the Pall Mall Gazette of January1866, were entitled ‘A Night in the Workhouse’ and were set in the casual ward of Lambeth Workhouse. The journalist, Frederick Greenwood, professed himself to have experienced ‘the fate of Sodom’. Here were mingled on single bunk beds ‘great bulking ruffians’, homeless juveniles and ‘dirty scoundrels’ engaged in any and every form of sexual intercourse; Greenwood lay and listened in the dark to ‘infamous’ noises. He described the place as a male brothel designed for the ‘hideous’ pleasures of the poor and the destitute, but added as a grace note the presence of a handsome youth whose cropped hair ‘looked soft and silky; he had large blue eyes set wide apart, and a mouth that would have been faultless but for its great width’. The boy picked his way lightly among the beds asking ‘Who’ll give me part of his doss … who’ll let me turn in with him?’ Greenwood feared ‘how it would be’. This was the fate of London’s victims. The articles caused much outrage and consternation among those who did not know that the lower depths of the city could be quite so dark. Two weeks later reporters from the Daily News visited the same workhouse and discovered ‘youths lay in the arms of men, men were enfolded in each others’ embraces … the air was laden with a pestilential stench’.