Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  The young man, however, does not speak in terza rima. ‘In a cul-de-sac at the end of that passage you would have found full service, with bright railings round it. And in a street on the right, just below Marylebone Lane and going towards Portman Square – in that street is a public yard provided with one of those zinc or iron enclosures painted a grateful green … You see, places of that kind which have no attendants afford excellent rendezvous to people who wish to meet out of doors and yet escape the eye of the Busy.’ The young man mentions crooks and bookies as possible beneficiaries of his advice, but his real audience is clear. ‘When, for instance, I have been at a loss in Dalston, in Streatham, in Clerkenwell, in Bermondsey, knowledge acquired on previous journeys has always been a blessing.’ He takes all London as his province. ‘In the section between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road, places may be found at the bottom of Argyll Street.’ Chancery Lane might seem to be a wilderness except for ‘the little turning opposite Bream’s Buildings’. One of the most fruitful neighbourhoods is that part of south London by the bridges, and in particular Borough High Street. Vegetable markets are always popular, as is St Paul’s, Covent Garden.

  His route became a pilgrimage for those who could avoid the policeman or the ruffian, but for others not so fortunate it became a broadway to perdition. If you were arrested, taken up and taken away, your family, your employment, your prospects were gone in an instant. One man wrote to a Member of Parliament at a time of debate on the question that ‘it is all right for people to condemn us so much but they have no idea of the life of fear and dread we live all the time, in case our friends find out or we are caught. I know I did, and I know the hell I lived in when the police came to me, and I’m still living in hell now!’ There was also of course the ever-present danger of blackmail. Those who could afford it preferred exile; others made do with the silence of fear and trembling. Two men, found guilty of sex in a taxi, flung themselves into the icy Thames to find their quietus.

  18

  Howl

  When the lights went out, during the Second World War, a strange mood compounded of fear, hysteria and excitement affected the people of London. Everything was turned upside down, including once more the role and status of the sexes. Any particular sexual orientation was of lesser interest in a world where you might be killed or injured at any moment. Those who have watched the domestic films of the forties may recall that the voices of the women carry more weight than those of the men – whether it be on the factory floor, in the bomb shelter or in the kitchen.

  A genuine confraternity existed in the streets and public spaces of London, and it was not unusual to find soldiers and seamen frequenting public houses, particularly those in the East End, which would remain open all night for whatever purposes were deemed necessary. The added vein of darkness during the blackouts increased the sexual tensions of a world where everything seemed permissible. As Quentin Crisp put it, ‘never in the history of sex was so much offered by so many to so few’. It is often quoted as ‘to so many by so few’. It can be taken either way without distortion. In any case it did not last long after the lights were lifted.

  As a form of official retribution, pehaps, the immediate postwar years were dominated by fear and suspicion. Nightclubs as furtive as their clientele, public houses that somehow survived by bribery of the police, ‘cottaging’ in always dangerous situations, clandestine street encounters were the order of the night. The campaign by the upholders of the law against queers was in fact intensified in the fifties. Ever more sensational and salacious cases were publicised by the ever-devouring press. Those affairs have now been forgotten but at the time they were the subject of front-page headlines. It is not too much to confirm that the police, and the newspapers, were then the objects of terror among gay people. Letters and photograph albums were burned in case of incriminatory suspicions. Men who were visited by the police often fled their immediate neighbourhood. Suicide may have occurred in numbers larger than reported.

  Eight policemen, in groups of two, monitored the public lavatories in a well-worn circuit from Victoria Station to Bloomsbury Way. The level of arrests increased exponentially, as did the incidence of blackmail. Some men were given immunity from persecution if they testified against others. All of them were, according to one prosecuting barrister, ‘perverts, men of the lowest character’. Other expressions of disgust were common. It would not be too much to say that an incipient police state was beginning to emerge, assisted by the various home secretaries, directors of public prosecution and assorted judges and magistrates.

  Numerous well-publicised cases sustained prurient attention among the readers of newspapers. A group of young guardsmen were caught ‘riding around in a harness’ for the benefit of their customers at a flat in Curzon Street, Mayfair. The activities of the customers in the Fitzroy Tavern also became the subject of a court case. A student of this history might be forgiven for thinking that she or he has read it all before. It is part of the London story.

  In the fifties the deities of family, home and marriage were all the more venerated after the destruction of the previous decade; they were also the triune figures of the new welfare state. Half of eligible men were married in 1921, three-quarters of them in 1951. The public state was closing ranks, and there emerged once more what was known as ‘the threat of homosexuality’.

  It was in the context of quiet and not so quiet persecution that the Wolfenden Committee was established in 1954 to inquire into the legal status of homosexual acts. The committee comprised the great and the good, but they were neither conventionally ‘liberal’ nor unprudish in their social attitudes. For the sake of the ladies present at the proceedings, homosexuals were known as Huntleys and prostitutes as Palmers after a well-known firm of biscuit makers.

  Its report, published in 1957, recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. It was followed in 1958 by the establishment of the Homosexual Law Reform Society to support ‘those suffering from intolerance, persecution and social injustice’. This was complemented by such studies as Michael Schofield’s A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain, published in 1960, in which the author suggested that ‘the homosexual must be studied in the wide context of the whole community’.

  But the Wolfenden recommendations were not passed into law as the Sexual Offences Act until 1967; the new Act followed the Labouchere Amendment of 1885, and so for more than eighty years the Victorian edict had remained in force. The paradoxical result was that, by the time the new Act had passed, many queer people had lost interest in the technical provisions of the law. Such provisions already seemed irrelevant and even farcical. The reports and observations of the Wolfenden Committee may have brought much needed light and air to a pursuit that had been shrouded in darkness and mystery. Yet it made very little difference to queers themselves. The lifting of certain regulations seemed to have no effect upon magistrates and policemen who simply redoubled their efforts. Criminal convictions rose in the years following the acceptance of the recommendations of 1957.

  It has been suggested that in the 1960s London became in many respects a sexually liberated space. It did not seem like that at the time. In the early part of the decade – before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 – it was still cloistered and claustrophobic, a city where queerness was discussed in low voices and where police activity was still eminently visible. In September 1960 E. M. Forster wrote in an epilogue to his novel of 1914, Maurice, that ‘we had not realised that what the public truly loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it’. He turned out to be spectacularly wrong. But the furtive nature of the time may have contributed to his nervousness. Few came out yelling and screaming in support of a more liberal attitude to homosexuals in England, although Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ of 1955 helped the process in the United States. Someone, somewhere, may have been ‘swinging’ in Queer City but the genera
l mood among homosexuals was still one of discretion and subdued gaiety. The playwright Joe Orton was the Rimbaud of what he called ‘pissoirs’; in his diary of 1967, there are references to ‘the trade’ and to a variety of ‘queens’. Sex seems to have been readily available, but treated in a haphazard and rather pointless manner. The lacklustre atmosphere may well be a testament to the real rather than the mythic conditions of London in the sixties.

  Places of assignation were as well frequented as ever, but the new arrivals in London had some diffficulty in finding them. A little club in High Street Kensington, a little pub in Hampstead were slim pickings. Soho and Earls Court raised the temperature, but London was lukewarm and always vulnerable to the attentions of what was known as ‘Lillie Law’.

  ‘Lillie Law’ knew all the old haunts. The White Bear, beneath the ‘circus’ of Piccadilly, was one of the survivors. The Criterion, close by and happily above ground, attracted its regular clientele by ten in the evening. In case of customer fatigue, the Standard and Ward’s Irish Bar were in the immediate neighbourhood. To the north of Oxford Street stood the Bricklayers Arms, the Fitzroy Tavern, the Wheatsheaf and the Marquess of Granby. Le Gigolo, in the King’s Road, was the favourite of those who liked to wilt in a crush of men. The Kandy Lounge and the Pink Elephant and the A&B were all in Soho, while the public houses there were joined by coffee bars, among them the Haymarket Coffee House and the Matelot in Panton Street. The geographical dispersal of coffee bars in Soho was the harbinger for the gay occupation of that neighbourhood in later decades. The map of London could in fact be marked by myriad scarlet stars as signs of occupation, but the venues remained for the most part unknown to name and fame except by those who frequented them.

  One of the most famous venues in the city in the 1960s was like some remnant of an earlier age; the Biograph, known colloquially as the Bio-Grope, was close to Victoria Station and must have been one of the few cinemas where no one came to see the film. Instead it was filled with the creaking of old seats as one or another customer moved from one row to the next in search of more obvious fun.

  Among women, according to queer memoirs of the period, the process of meeting a partner was often hesitant and diffident … somebody knew somebody who knew somebody. The entrance to a new world was not always easy. Women seem to have avoided the promiscuity that males practised in toilet and street. There were one or two nightclubs that catered for queer women, such as the Fiesta in Notting Hill Gate, but some novices or adventurers were nonplussed by a rigid sexual coding which had developed and which divided girls into ‘butch’ or ‘femme’. You had to pass as one or other, complete with Brylcreemed hair for the former and handbags for the latter, or you were deemed to possess no sexual identity at all. The butch wore shirt and tie; the femme wore skirt and blouse. For some women this was as depressing as the sexual stereotyping of the heterosexual world, but it was perhaps an inevitable aspect of this age of transition.

  The most famous of all venues for queer women was a club on the corner of Bramerton Street and the King’s Road. Like many semi-mythical phenomena, the true origins of Gateways are still in doubt. Throughout the 1940s and 50s it had a mixed clientele, male and female, comprising mainly those who did not quite fit the starched atmosphere of the period. It came into its own as a gay haunt for women in the 1960s, and did not close until 1985. Once again, however, sheltering behind an anonymous green door, it bore the marks of secrecy and isolation. Gay women had not yet emerged in the office or in the shop; they were at ease only behind closed doors.

  Social change, prompted by the unknown laws of life, is inevitable. The Gay Liberation Front (or GLF, as it came to be known) marked what seemed to many to be the first assertion of gay identity without apology or equivocation. The meetings were as likely to be made up of hippies as white-collar workers, of students as well as teachers. It represented, therefore, the single most vocal sexual opposition to what soon became known (at least among many queers) as ‘straight’ culture. Straight culture was the culture of the suits, of the politicians, of the businessmen, of the journalists, of the police, of the judiciary and of the ‘authorities’ – that is, anyone who, according to their opponents, thought they knew better than you did. They were the members of the ‘establishment’.

  The GLF was established or, rather, came together in Highbury Fields, in November 1970, largely as a reaction against a dubious arrest in a public urinal. It was borne out of rage, and defiance, against harassment. In the month before some students had agreed to attend weekly meetings at the London School of Economics, partly in response to the ‘Stonewall’ riots of New York in the summer of 1969. In the manifesto of the GLF the demand for equality was accompanied by a rejection of discrimination. In the summer of 1972 the first Gay Pride march was held. Its colourful supporters walked from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park; in various incarnations it has continued ever since. Gay News was first published in that summer, testifying to the broader sense of community and self-assertion in those who were even then learning to be called and to call themselves ‘gay’. Coincidentally or not – it is said that in London there is no such thing as coincidence – Spare Rib, the first radical feminist magazine of its type, was established at the same time. More than one bookshop catering for gay readers opened in London.

  Like many altruistic endeavours the Gay Liberation Front came to pieces in the end, shipwrecked by internal dissension and recrimination. It was divided largely between the different aspirations of men and women, between those who supported active and radical protests and those who did not, between the socialists or the New Left and various anti-authoritarian or counter-cultural movements. Some preferred flower power while others campaigned for street power. The GLF could not contain its contradictions. But its legacy remained in the number of subgroups such as the Gay Black Group and the Gay Teenage Group, as well as in the less tangible but equally significant new mood of resolution and independence among queer men.

  Not all queer men were enthusiastic about the sudden exit from the closet; some thought it in bad taste, while others were simply alienated by the pack mentality which solidarity sometimes espoused. It was all too grim and self-righteous for many of the less committed. For others, however, the burgeoning of GLF meetings, gatherings and parades offered the opportunity for picking up sexual partners outside the claustrophobic atmosphere of clubs and pubs. Yet many others still, perhaps the majority, lacked the self-confidence openly to proclaim themselves in the face of a hostile or indifferent public. They did not wish to rock the boat.

  Yet ironically it was the movement towards queer liberation that helped to prompt the extraordinary growth in nightclubs in London; these tended to be multi-levelled discotheques in which dazzling light and sound helped to encourage an atmosphere of fevered sexuality. In 1976 Bang! was opened on Monday nights at the Astoria off Tottenham Court Road, and was soon succeeded by others in the vicinity and elsewhere. The thumping beat of disco music and the gyrations of scantily clad customers helped to define a movement of hedonism and consumerism that seemed set to define queer London of the 1980s.

  And then the music stopped.

  By 1982 there were rumours of a new illness. The year before, five young men had succumbed to a rare form of pneumonia in Los Angeles; in the summer of the following year Terrence Higgins died in St Thomas’s Hospital, London, of what seemed to be a related condition. The bad news was at first greeted with disbelief and even denial. It was an American disease. It would pass. A cure would soon be found. All of these bland prognostications faltered as the condition spread wider still and wider. It soon became known as ‘gay men’s cancer’ and then, as its virulence increased, ‘the gay plague’. As information about its nature spread it was known more neutrally as Aids or ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’. Suddenly everyone knew what the ‘immune system’ was and what its ‘deficiency’ meant.

  This new condition seemed to stalk gay men, inducing horror, helplessness and confusion. The varieties o
f symptoms were endlessly discussed in an atmosphere where panic was mingled with ignorance. It became known that some forms of Aids led to blindness, others to skin cancer and still others to pneumonia. The newspapers took delight in publishing photographs of gaunt, emaciated men.

  The earliest sufferers were often stigmatised. They became outcasts, abused or ignored by the general population and treated only with extreme nervousness and caution by the medical profession. Many dentists were suddenly unavailable and most medical procedures were accompanied by precautions that resembled the after-effects of a nuclear explosion. Aids appeared to be a death sentence and, perhaps because many of its victims were very young, there were few means of coping with dying. Aids induced fear, depression and almost constant panic. There was, for many, nothing ahead except darkness.

  When it began to hit friends and acquaintances, the reality became almost too great to bear. The symptoms were feverishness, trembling, shuddering and sweating, failing sight, disabling diarrhoea, or general nervous lassitude. The only palliatives were painkillers, self-administered injections, endless pills of unknown provenance, tubes, injections; the regular visits to the hospitals were of course demeaning enough, but not so bad as the periods in the wards where you might lie beside a bed in which a young man was curled up in preparation for death. Fellow sufferers served only to intensify the misery. It was as if they were neither living nor dead. The feeling of helplessness was increased by the suspicion that the prescribed medicines themselves were responsible for some of the more morbid symptoms. Did the doctors know what they were doing?