Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  Like much of Symonds, this suggestion may seem a little hypothetical and old-fashioned. The law, however, was not necessarily sympathetic. In 1898 the Vagrancy Law Amendment Act was passed; it was intended to prosecute men ‘who in any public place persistently solicit or importune for immoral purposes’. The actual nature of the offence was not named. A smile, a nod, a wink or a whistle might be the occasion for prosecution.

  A correspondent of Havelock Ellis, whose testimony is printed in Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928), noted that ‘with regard to the general inability of inverts to whistle, their fondness for green, their feminine calligraphy, skill at female occupations etc., these all seem to be but indications of the one principle. To go still further and include trivial things, few inverts even smoke in the same manner and with the same enjoyment as a man; they have seldom the male facility at games, cannot throw at a mark with precision or even spit!’ They were supposed to have longer fingers. It was also said that queer men wore patent leather shoes, and that they preferred to wear their overcoats over their shoulders. At a later date the ‘look’ had turned to suede shoes, Liberty ties and camel-hair coats. The 1890s was the decade when queerness became an object of scientific as well as medical awareness. It had always been a matter of absorbing interest since the days of antiquity but in the work of Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and others it became a psychological as well as a physiological condition.

  Men were not necessarily the centre of unusual sexual attention. Lord Alfred Douglas, the inciter and abettor of Oscar Wilde, wrote a letter to the Review of Reviews in order to point out that ‘perhaps you are not aware that “lesbianism” exists to any extent in London, but I can assure you that it does, and though of course I cannot mention names, I could point out to you half a dozen women in society or among actresses who would be considered as “dangerous” to young girls as Oscar Wilde will I suppose henceforth be considered to boys’. The letter was not published.

  In fact women were as much the object of scientific or psychological enquiry as men. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds worked together on a volume entitled Sexual Inversion (1897) in which they stated that ‘it is usually considered as no offence at all in women. Another reason is that it is less easy to detect in women, we are accustomed to much greater familiarity in intimacy between women than between men, and we are less apt to suspect the existence of an abnormal passion. A woman may feel a high degree of sexual attraction for another woman, without realizing that her affection is sexual …’

  Ellis was a little more open in the first volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex where he stated that ‘passionate friendships among girls, from the most innocent to the most elaborate excursions in the direction of Lesbos, are extremely common in theatres, both among actresses and, even more, among chorus and ballet girls. Here the pell-mell of the dressing rooms, the wait of perhaps two hours between the performances, during which all the girls are cooped up, in a state of inaction and excitement, in a few crowded dressing-rooms afford every opportunity for the growth of this particular kind of sentiment.’

  At a slightly later date, in 1901, Ellis went further. ‘A Catholic confessor, a friend tells me, informed him that for one man who acknowledges homosexual practices, there are three women.’ He even diverged into physical detail. ‘Homosexual passion in women finds more or less complete expression in kissing, sleeping together and close embrace, as in what is sometimes called “lying spoons”.’ Sigmund Freud believed that bisexuality ‘comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men’; unlike men they had two sexual organs, the vagina or female organ and the clitoris ‘which is analogous to the male organ’.

  A foreign noblewoman, known only as Countess V—, who had lived in London for some years, killed herself in 1901. Another self-professed expert on queer living, Xavier Mayne, described her case in The Intersexes (1910): ‘she was also robust to virility, though not amazonian or coarse. She had been allowed in childhood an almost boyish liberty of tastes, amusements, dress and so on. She was a hunter of large game and an expert boxer and fencer …’

  Catherine Coome in the same period earned her living first as a painter and decorator on P&O steamers before becoming a highly respected decorator in the West End. She had then ‘married’ the female servant in the family of Lady Campbell at Hampton Court. At her subsequent trial for fraud it was reported that ‘the prisoner looked thoroughly masculine, and the voice and manner were so man-like that there was no wonder in her identity being unguessed’. The ‘wife’ of Catherine Coome ‘had never suspected’ that her spouse was not a man.

  A similar situation emerged in London in 1912 when two young women shared an interest in Christian social work among the poor. It was one of those causes that late-Victorian and Edwardian women took up with enthusiasm. They began to live as man and wife. The ‘husband’ earned a living as a plumber’s mate, and became renowned for his skill at ‘fisticuffs’ in the mission halls and elsewhere. He was at last discovered by his partner’s brother in circumstances that are not entirely clear. This story had for once a happy ending. The law was mild with the two women and ‘as they remained devoted to each other, arrangements were made for them to live together’. Another young woman was continually arrested for wearing male clothes. When asked what would break the habit, she replied ‘if I could go to sea’, no doubt on the principle that all the nice girls love a sailor.

  Some did not need to hide. In 1912 Madame Strindberg opened a basement club in Heddon Street, just off Regent Street, and therefore in the centre of gay London to which couples of both sexes flocked. It was called the Cave of the Golden Calf, which seemed to promise almost biblical licentiousness. It had been decorated by Wyndham Lewis, Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein, and so might just pass muster as an artistic establishment; but it is doubtful if anyone was fooled.

  It could not have been further, socially and artistically, from the painted boys of a rendezvous along the Edgware Road identified by one urban wanderer, Thomas Burke, who stated that ‘you may know these places by the strong odour of scent when you enter them, and the absence of women. The sweet boys stand at the counter … under the wandering eyes of middle aged grey faced men.’ It was not an alluring prospect. Some queers were past caring. The Marquess of Anglesey, heavily perfumed and beringed, walked his pink-ribboned poodle through the streets of Mayfair. It was an egregious example of title, and wealth, triumphing over the force of public opinion. The birch, brought back in 1911 for homosexual offences, was reserved for those who were considered to be of lower-middle-class origin or worse.

  A measure of the dismay that queerness still aroused in the upper-middle class is revealed in E. M. Forster’s Maurice when the eponymous hero is told by another young man, ‘I love you.’ ‘Maurice was scandalized, horrified … “Oh rot! … Durham, you’re an Englishman. I’m another. Don’t talk nonsense … it’s the only subject absolutely beyond the limit …”’ Durham admits that ‘most men would have reported me to the Dean or the Police’. A brief conversation from the novel may be admitted as further evidence of repression.

  ‘I say, in your rounds here, do you come across unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort?’

  ‘No, that’s in the asylum work, thank God.’

  Fact was no less menacing than fiction. In 1912 an actor, Alan Horton, was imprisoned for two weeks simply for walking into a urinal ‘with a wiggle’. In Compton Mackenzie’s novel of the following year, Sinister Street, a young man is approached by what might be called an aesthete. ‘Won’t you smoke? These Chian cigarettes in their diaphanous paper of mildest mauve would suit your oddly remote, your curiously shy glance …’

  Xavier Mayne pasted into his notebook a newspaper clipping concerning a servant who had been arrested on the Euston Road: ‘He wore an irreproachably fitting black walking costume of the newest fashion, made to order, a grey feather boa, and a coquettish hat of fine net … He resented the arrest, in great indignation, declaring to the officer, �
�you wretch! I am a lady!” As the officer did not regard this statement, the complainant gave him a violent blow in the face and a fierce battle began at once, in which the “lady” bit the officer’s finger. Only with the assistance of three other policemen could he be overpowered and brought, struggling, biting, scratching and spitting, to the police station.’

  The First World War was, for most queers of either sex, a welcome opportunity. Women in uniform were no longer considered as ‘mannish’ but as patriots; close-cropped hair and working boots were becoming indispensable in difficult work. And why not roll your own cigarettes? All the men did. The dockyards, factories and arsenals were soon filled with women workers, while public transport came to depend on their efforts. One million women, or more, became recruits in what had once been a masculine world and the sexual balance in every respect began to change. Natural homoerotic tendencies, once repressed in the line of domestic duty, were released. Women became ‘mates’, in ways that had not previously been possible. Naomi, known as ‘Micky’, ran a munitions factory in Willesden. Lillian Barker was superintendent of Woolwich Arsenal while living with her girlfriend.

  The laws of demand and supply catered for the influx of soldiers into the city. New gay clubs, bars and pubs were established – the Empire, the Trocadero, the Wellington and the Griffin among them. Lyons’ Corner House in Coventry Street became known as the Lillypond. In the face of death and destruction, an instinct for self-expression, or liberation, became visible.

  It was said that some soldiers unbuttoned their flies on the way to disembarkation. The ‘blackout’ was like a transformation scene in a pantomime. The familiar world went into hiding. Certain theatres, including the Prince of Wales, were known for their policy of ‘anything goes’. Robert Hutton wrote that ‘when dusk fell a feeling of restlessness and excitement crept over me’. Some bars bowed to demand by catering for two different types of clientele. Heterosexual couples would rub shoulders, if nothing else, with young men who wore lipstick and mascara. The Long Bar at the Trocadero and the Circle Bar at the Palladium were nominal rivals but they shared their clients in happy bonhomie; there was the Tea Kettle in Wardour Street and the Chalice Bar sometimes known as the Poisoned Chalice. A basement club in Endell Street, the Caravan, was advertised as ‘London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous’. But the Criterion, in Piccadilly, probably merited that status; sailors entering down the wide staircase were greeted with applause. So many were summoned and all were chosen. The Running Horse, known as ‘The Mare’, was one of the most celebrated of evening rendezvous. It might have been believed by visitors that the streets of London were paved with men rather than with gold. Some old regulars, such as the Rockingham, the ‘A&B’, the Spartan, and the Festival, survived into the sixties and even into the seventies.

  Many clubs for women were known and named. The Cave of Harmony, the Orange Tree and the Hambone were believed to harbour women with short-cropped hair, women with monocles and women with little green cigars.

  It was rumoured during the First World War that the Germans had compiled a black book of prominent English queers, of both sexes, who might be blackmailed after a German victory. Noel Pemberton Billing, a former pilot and editor of the Imperialist, wrote an article in which he claimed that the Berlin Black Book contained the names of 47,000 ‘highly placed British perverts’ who were trained to undermine the male youth of the country. In a further publication, Vigilante, he claimed in an article entitled ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ that an actress named Maud Allan was a lesbian co-conspirator. Allan sued but lost her case. The jury seemed to regard Pemberton Billing in the light of a national hero.

  It might be considered that lesbianism was as threatening as the enemy and even tantamount to treason. In a debate on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill in 1921, one MP, Frederick Macquisten, proposed a clause rendering any act of gross indecency between women a criminal offence. He affirmed that ‘there is in modern social life an undercurrent of dreadful degradation, unchecked and uninterfered with’. Only that night, he added, he had commiserated with a friend ‘who told him how his home had been ruined by the wiles of one abandoned female who had pursued his wife’. A judge, Sir Ernest Wild, mentioned that not a week passed ‘but some unfortunate girl does not confess to him that she owes the breakdown of her nerves to the fact that she had been tampered with by a member of her own sex’. From the evidence of these eminent men it would appear that lesbianism had reached epidemic proportions after the close of the First World War. It is clear that many women – some of whom had done the jobs of men and some of whom had escaped from domestic service in the home, and had worked in factories, on farms and even the docks – felt horribly ‘put back in the box’ when the men came home from the Front.

  A book of lesbian love provoked outrage in 1928. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall purported to be the story of an altogether mannish female, Stephen Gordon, who eventually finds solace with a female companion. The text by no stretch of the imagination could be described as pornographic, or even mildly titillating, but the chief magistrate at Bow Court nevertheless deemed it to be an ‘obscene libel’. The Director of Public Prosecutions upheld that judgement when he delared that ‘a large amount of curiosity has been excited among women and I am afraid in many cases curiosity may lead to imagination and indulgence in practices’. There was a great deal of fuss over one remark in particular: ‘she kissed her full on the lips, like a lover’. Radclyffe Hall explained at the time that ‘I wrote the book from a deep sense of duty. I am proud indeed to have taken up my pen in defence of those who are utterly defenceless.’ A reviewer in the Sunday Express felt obliged to disagree. ‘I would rather put a phial of prussic acid in the hands of a healthy girl or boy than the book in question.’ The book was withdrawn. Hall herself was of distinctively masculine appearance, complete with pipe and monocle; as a person, rather than as a writer, she was accepted as the embodiment of the thoroughly English eccentric.

  The case against The Well of Loneliness did more to fashion the identity of the female queer than any other trial or scandal of the period; in certain respects it proclaimed the birth of the lesbian in the twentieth century, complete with shingled hair, tailored suits, stiff collars and flannelled shirts together with low-heeled patent leather shoes. It was the annunciation of what was called at the time ‘the third sex’ or, more flippantly, ‘the Boyette’. ‘She had never been quite like the other children,’ Stephen Gordon recalls, ‘she had always been lonely and discontented.’ That was the central text of The Well of Loneliness which convinced its readers. I have always been lonely. I will always stand outside the world. I know it. For many queers, male or female, life was a vale of tears.

  It is arguable that in the first half of the twentieth century, however, gays of both sexes were subject to a level of prejudice and intolerance not seen before in Western history; entrapment, imprisonment and sudden police raids became familiar characteristics of London life. All this was to change in the last decades of the century, but nobody knew that at the time. Until the sixties and early seventies it was the same grey and furtive atmosphere of surveillance and arrests. In 1939 a reporter from the People noted of the bars for either sex ‘that they flourish by the score in dingy side-streets, alley-ways, cellars and basements between Oxford Street and Charing Cross … The surroundings are always the same – they keep the lights low to hide the dirty walls … and a handful of semi-drunks going through the motions of dancing on a tiny patch of linoleum.’ One was arrested for wearing ‘rouge and had a powder puff in his pocket’. A principal target had become now the ubiquitous ‘bedsits’, close enough to the city centres, where passion flourished in small anonymous rooms. ‘Well, I don’t mind the beastly raid,’ one of the victims is alleged to have said, ‘but I would like to know if you can let me have one of your nice boys to come home with me. I am really good.’ This may have been one of those ‘gay’ repartees which made queernesss less serious and less threatening.

  But
the public lavatories were still at the top of the list for furtive encounters. They were sometimes known as ‘tin chapels’, as if sacred rituals were conducted within. One client might be informally chosen as ‘watch-out’ for the visiting stranger or policeman. The urinals around the back of Jermyn Street were well known to the acting profession, and the public lavatory at Waterloo Station was positively cornucopian. The toilet at Hill Place was a magnet for ‘toffs’ or anyone in evening dress.

  One contemporary recorded that ‘these small unobtrusive urinals were in many areas, the most important places for homosexuals of all and every kind. Always open, usually unattended, and consisting of a small number of stalls, over the sides of which it was quite easy to spy and get a sight of one’s neighbour’s cock, they were ideally built for the gratification of the voyeur’s sexual itch.’ The activity or practice was known as ‘cottaging’, no doubt named after the plain single-storey toilets that in part resembled the simplest cottages in Arcadia. Their narrow and malodorous compartments were full of drawings and caricatures of a phallic nature, together with pornographic graffiti and requests for carnal meetings at a certain time and on a certain date. It is not clear how many of these were taken up. But the walls were a life class for sex.

  A pseudonymous account of the urinary situation, For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to all Londoners and London Visitors, Overheard at the Thélème Club and Taken Down Verbatim, was published in 1937. It was supposed to have been written by the succinctly named Paul Pry but was in fact the work of Thomas Burke whom the reader last encountered in the purlieus of the Edgware Road. Under the guise of a sanitary expert, ‘Paul Pry’ investigates the most prominent lavatories of London in the company of a chirpy young man who takes on the guiding role of Dante’s Virgil in the ‘Inferno’.