Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  Other public refuges concealed shadowy practices. Dr Barnardo, who entitled one of his reports on poor children Rescue the Perishing, was accused of ‘stripping children of their proper clothing, cutting their clothes, and dressing them in rags, for the purpose of getting up fictitious and deceptive photographs’. This brand of poverty porn was manufactured deliberately on the understanding that underdressed or half-naked children might evoke an erotic as well as a charitable response.

  The general fears and suspicions about London, by those inclined to fear and suspicion, were amply confirmed by the publication in 1881 of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. It was about one city, of course, and this city was by no means situated on level ground. It was subtitled ‘The Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism’, the ‘Mary-Ann’ or queer in question being a young prostitute by the name of Jack Saul. Jack Saul was a real person, as were other characters in the book, including Stella and Fanny, aka Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. There are some real locations such as hotels and restaurants. But The Sins of the Cities of the Plain is almost entirely fiction or, rather, pornographic fiction. It was clearly written by someone, or more than one, who knew the queer culture of nineteenth-century London very well indeed. The narrator alluded to a tobacconist’s shop next door to the Albany Barracks in Regent’s Park where willing guardsmen might be found, and revealed that there were six other brothels in London ‘where only soldiers are received and where gentlemen can sleep with them’.

  One of the authors of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain has been suggested to be Simeon Solomon, an artist whose social and cultural career came to an end after he had been found having sex with an old man in a public lavatory; he was fined the very large sum of one hundred pounds. Eventually he was admitted to St Giles’s Workhouse. It may be that the book was in part his revenge against the polite hypocrisies of society. ‘Jack Saul’, for example, reveals that ‘the extent to which pederasty is carried on in London between gentlemen and young fellows is little dreamed of by the outside public’. Small fragments of reported conversation also have the ring of authenticity. ‘I see you are evidently a fast young chap … ready for a lark with a free gentleman at any time … Did you ever see such a fine tosser [cock] in your life …’ It has the unmistakable flavour of the period, as does the standard overture of both male and female prostitutes to a likely client. ‘Are you good-natured, sir?’

  This is the context for one of the most badly conceived interventions into sexual practices that was ever perpetrated by Parliament. In 1885 the Criminal Law Amendment Act was being debated in the Commons when one Liberal MP, Henry Labouchere, proposed an amendment to the effect that ‘any male person who, in public, or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years with or without hard labour’.

  It was a judgement more harsh than any previously imposed. There was no attempt to prove sexual penetration or emission as a mark of crime. There was no distinction between private and public acts. There was no attempt to define what was meant by ‘gross indecency’. The studied vagueness and ambiguity of the amendment rendered it a charter for any blackmailer or ill-disposed person to level a charge against another man without any need for positive evidence or even for a witness. Mutual masturbation, for example, was rendered illegal and subject to a jail term. It says something about the nature of English justice that the amendment remained on the statute book until 1967. It has been said in defence of Labouchere that he introduced the clause as a ‘wrecking amendment’ to force re-examination of the entire bill; but all it managed to wreck were the lives of queer men.

  One subsequent real-life court dialogue of 1889 might have come straight from The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.

  ‘Where did you meet this person?’

  ‘In Piccadilly, between Albany courtyard and Sackville Street. He laughed at me and I winked at him. He turned sharp into Sackville Street … the Duke, as we called him, came near me and asked me where I was going. I said “home”, and he said, “what sort is your place?” “Very comfortable” I replied. He said, “is it very quiet there?” I said yes, it was, and we took a hansom cab there. We got out by the Middlesex Hospital, and I took the gentleman to 19 Cleveland Street, letting him in with my latchkey.’

  The witness was none other than Jack Saul, the young male prostitute whose haphazard memories had been taken up by the author or authors of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. He was as real as any costermonger. The ‘gentleman’ in question was Lord Euston, and he had become embroiled in what was soon known as the ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’.

  It had begun with the unexpected affluence of some telegraph boys from the General Post Office. Telegraph boys were popular in certain circles and one man, accused of sodomy in 1877, stated that ‘the crime for which I am sentenced has been very prevalent amongst the Telegraph lads … many have been found out and dismissed in consequence’. The ‘lads’ were a regular turn. They arrived on the doorstep with the telegraph message. They were quick, lively and, as cockneys, knew all the ways of London. They dealt with ready money from their clients wishing for the urgent news. They were smart in the bottom-hugging uniforms.

  Some verses of the period were entitled Love in Earnest (1892). ‘Earnest’ was a slang word for queer, as, perhaps, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

  Smart-looking boys are in my line;

  The lad that gives my boots a shine,

  The lad that works the lift below,

  The lad that’s lettered G.P.O.

  The G.P.O. lads were perfect for the man who wanted a boy without having to hunt the streets for him. These ‘modern Mercuries’ could also be male whores.

  And so it had proved in the spring of 1884 when a young telegraph boy, Thomas Swinscow, was found to be carrying eighteen shillings of the coin of the realm. He was of course suspected of theft but when questioned he replied after some hesitation that he had received the shillings from a Mr Hammond and that ‘I got the money from going to bed with gentlemen at his house’ in Cleveland Street. Cleveland Street, a nondescript throughfare close to Tottenham Court Road, could have been made for surreptitious sex. Other telegraph boys were associated with the same address, and in the process they named several important clients including Lord Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset who managed the stables of the Prince of Wales. Prince Eddy, the name familiarly given to the son of the Prince of Wales, was also subject to whispers and rumours.

  It had to come out in the end. A journalist from the radical North London Press named names. Lord Somerset, Lord Euston and others had attended a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, where there seem to have been more telegraph boys than in the General Post Office. Some of the evidence, from the notorious Jack Saul in particular, was interesting.

  ‘And were you hunted by the police?’

  ‘No. They have never interfered. They have always been kind to me.’

  ‘Do you mean that they have deliberately shut their eyes to your infamous practices?’

  ‘They have had to shut their eyes to more than me.’

  Saul, despite declaring that he was a ‘professional Maryanne’, admitted that he earned his living in part by house-cleaning for female prostitutes. There was a solidarity in the suffering sisterhood.

  In the face of vague or inconsistent testimony from the prosecution witnesses, the case against the Cleveland Street queers fell to pieces. Somerset had been spirited out of the country, while Prince Eddy began a tour of India. A determined opponent of the English legal system might find here some evidence of conspiracy, but even at this late date nothing can be definitively proved. The suspicion lingers, however, that the more eminent the defendant, the easier it was to slip the bounds
of justice. As one young telegraph boy put it, ‘I think it very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk about free.’ This, however, is the condition of queer London.

  17

  Damned and done for

  Oscar Wilde was subjected to three trials, one for libel in which he was the instigator and two for gross indecency in which he was the accused. He foolishly miscalculated by pursuing the Marquess of Queensberry for accusing him of ‘posing as a somdomite’; it was not wise to appeal to the English legal system in the guise of a victim. Wilde’s ill-advised libel action gave an additional legitimacy to the whole process of pursuing and punishing queers.

  Wilde knew that Queensberry had what in the language of card players and gamblers is called a trump card. Queensberry’s eldest son, Viscount Drumlanrig, was suspected of having a queer affair with Lord Rosebery who became prime minister in 1894. Drumlanrig had been his private secretary. Drumlanrig had committed suicide seven months after his employer became premier, but Queensberry is supposed to have had in his possession a compromising letter between the two men. It would have provoked a political sensation and it is possible that Queensberry threatened to make public Rosebery’s predilections if the administration did not pursue Wilde to the uttermost. Since Wilde had taken up with one of Queensberry’s other sons, Lord Alfred Douglas, here would have been poetic as well as legal justice. In the libel trial, after a more than usually intimate cross-examination of Wilde, Queensberry was acquitted.

  The second trial also did not proceed as planned. Queensberry and his detectives had trawled the streets of London for likely young catches, willing to accuse Wilde of sodomy and other unnatural practices, but the jury was not entirely convinced. At this second trial Wilde was asked to define ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. He responded in his most golden tones, invoking Plato and Shakespeare, Michelangelo and David. ‘It is the deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect … It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of expression … The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’ It remains one of the most impassioned defences of queerness since Plato’s Symposium, and may have helped to save him momentarily from ruin. The jury could not reach a verdict. Wilde left the Old Bailey and fled for refuge to his mother and brother in Oakley Street. ‘Willie, give me shelter,’ he is supposed to have called out to his brother, ‘or I shall die in the streets.’

  The jury at the third trial, which followed soon after, had not the advantage of hearing Wilde’s eloquent apologia, and had no doubt about the writer’s guilt on eight out of nine counts of indecency. His crimes were compounded by his evident delight in boys of a lower class. Shakespeare and Michelangelo counted less than the physical proofs of the buggery of young men. As a result of these trials, certain facts of queer life became known to the general public, from the stains on the bed sheets of respectable hotels to the private rooms of restaurants where men and boys might exchange kisses or more.

  One of Wilde’s acquaintances, Alfred Taylor, had chambers that might have come out of a French novel. ‘The windows of his rooms,’ his landlady remarked at the second trial, ‘were covered with stained art muslin and dark curtains and lace curtains. They were furnished sumptuously, and were lighted by different coloured lamps and candles … The windows were never opened and the daylight was never admitted.’ If it were necessary to venture outside, the restaurants of choice were the Café Royal, Kettners, the Florence, the St James’s and Solferino’s. These were the temples, or at least the anterooms, of queer London.

  It has become customary to canonise, or at least to beatify, Wilde. He claimed later that his decisions were the only proper ones since ‘To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.’ With this defiance he earned his place with the very highest of those who have defended themselves in the dock. But it did not seem so at the time. He was for a while a byword for sexual infamy. On the night of his conviction it was said that six hundred English gentlemen crossed the Channel, and well into the twentieth century any apparent homosexual was greeted with catcalls of ‘Oscar! Oscar!’ He had always denied conventional reality but now he and others were impaled upon it. He had once explained that an interpretation was more suggestive than a fact but now he was destroyed by the interpretations of others. The Echo rejoiced that he was ‘damned and done for’.

  Wilde returned to the Old Bailey for sentencing, and the judge consigned him to the full Labouchere punishment of two years with hard labour. ‘My God, my God,’ he called out. ‘And I? May I say nothing, my lord?’ The judge waved him away, and he was carried in a closed van to Newgate, from which he was removed along a via dolorosa to Holloway and then to Pentonville.

  The publicity granted to Wilde’s trial and to the Cleveland Street affair concentrated public attention on London as the nursery of vice. The front pages of Reynold’s News had successive headlines, ‘OTHER SERIOUS CHARGES’ and ‘OTHER CASES – HORRIBLE CONDITION OF LONDON’. The members of the press were on the watch, further aroused by the mass-circulation newspapers that specialised in scandal and sensation. Five court cases repeated the Wildean experience of an older man seducing a younger boy. A chemist’s assistant, John Goodchild, for example, was convicted for luring a Jewish match-seller into ‘acts of gross indecency’. Walter Woolverton, a well-known and highly repectable member of the YMCA, was arrested for committing gross indecency in a boat-race crowd. Was nowhere safe? A public urinal off Oxford Street also came to the attention of journalists.

  Some urinals had a worldwide reputation. ‘Clarkson’s Cottage’ was known for its proximity to Willie Clarkson’s theatrical costume shop and it was purchased after the Second World War by a rich American who erected it, in memory of happy days, within the grounds of his New York estate. The toilets in Down Street underground station, off Piccadilly, were deservedly popular. It was reported that ‘urinals have a certain odour … a staleness [which] … excites [queer men] as if they were so many dogs on heat’. Another favourite was a three-stall urinal down a flight of steps beside the Yorkshire Stingo on the Marylebone Road. The toilet beside the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith was ‘chock a block from dusk to dawn’. Some preferred of course the relative warmth of the theatres themselves, especially in the rear areas labelled ‘standing room only’. One theatregoer standing at the back of the Islington Music Hall noted that ‘someone undone my flies and started pulling me out … while they were doing it someone pushed themselves up against me expecting me to do it to them’. ‘It was no uncommon sight,’ a contemporary remarked, ‘to see literally hundreds of young men … walking about, talking in high-pitched voices, recognizing one another.’

  In A Problem in Modern Ethics (1896) John Addington Symonds, who has already wandered into this study, suggested that in London ‘inverted sexuality runs riot’, and he named various ‘rioters’ including men to be found ‘in drawing-rooms, law-courts, banks, universities, mess-rooms on the bench, the throne, the chair of the professor, under the blouse of the workman, the cassock of the priest, the epaulettes of the officer, the smock-frock of the ploughman, the wig of the barrister, the mantle of the peer, the costume of the actor, the tights of the athlete, the gown of the academician’. It is a colourful list, but what was ‘the throne’ doing there?

  In the following year George Ives, part of the queer world of the period, founded the Order of the Chaeronea, a secret society of men who favoured ‘the Hellenistic ideal’, which presumably included love between men and boys. It represented a ‘common cause’ of mutual duty and self-sacrifice, although these virtues were not outstanding in 1897. The order was supposed to represent an idealised community along the lines of the Sacred Band of Thebes, lovers who fought together in battle, unfortunately massacred by Philip II of Macedon at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. This did not provide an apt prec
edent, perhaps, and the Order of the Chaeronea hardly got beyond the realm of good intentions. The class of Greek translation at Cambridge in 1910, according to E. M. Forster’s Maurice (not published until after the author’s death), was cautioned that it was necessary to ‘omit a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks’.

  Ives’s small band of brothers, which included Edward Carpenter, celebrated same-sex love as part of a masculine ideal of egalitarian partnership that somehow transcended class-based behaviour. They were full of good intentions but seemed ultimately preposterous in their excursions to the gymnasia, the public swimming baths and the nude bathing sections of the Serpentine. ‘Early in the morning,’ Symonds wrote, ‘I used to rise from a sleepless bed, walk across the park, and feed my eyes on the naked men and boys bathing in the Serpentine.’ Even though he was perhaps inspired by the highest possible motives, others might have seen him as a seedy voyeur. He also proposed the notion that certain areas of the public parks should be reserved for queer men and be known as ‘spoonitoria’, from the word for cuddling from behind.