It may seem almost remarkable, given the extent of the amount of homosexuality and its related cultural milieu, that we can now document as having existed in the first part of the twentieth century, that for all intents and purposes it was still very much an ‘underground’ sub culture by the start of the second half of the twentieth century.
After the war ended, with the advent of what became universally known as ‘demob’ (de-mobilisation, although to some extent National Service continued until the early 1960’s), things changed and society quite quickly ‘reset itself’ back to many of its old norms. Family and support for ‘normalative family structures’ became a keystone in both the Labour & Conservative government’s planning strategies. A lot of development in the period was financed through the USA’s Marshall plan, huge amounts of financial capital were injected into the national economy in order to get western European nations back on their feet again after the privations of war.
The Conservative government was back in power by 1951, under the increasingly ageing Winston Churchill, after six, post war, relatively developmental years of Labour policies, in particular, importantly, the creation of the Welfare State under Lord Beveridge.
The new government led to a more conformist attitude generally: the Conservatives were politically against the Welfare state as a whole but realised it remained a popular and had been a successful project with the electorate, so they kept most of the benefits that had been on offer. However, in other social areas they became quite rigidly conformist again. The Conservatives 1950 election manifesto had promised in a section entitled ‘Britain of The Future’:
We shall make Britain once again a place in which hard work, thrift, honesty and neighbourliness are honoured and win their true reward in wide freedom underneath the law. Reverence for Christian ethics, self-respect, pride in skill and responsibility, love of home and family, devotion to our country and the British Empire and Commonwealth, are the pillars upon which we base our faith.
and also promised in relation to a section entitled ‘Foreign Policy’ that:
‘Above all we seek to work in fraternal association with the United States to help by all means all countries, in Europe, Asia or elsewhere, to resist the aggression of Communism by open attack or secret penetration’ (my bold italics),
– so very much throwing in ‘our lot’ with support to the USA, in its foreign policy decisions. In the USA it was an era when there was a great deal of paranoia about Russian activity, with the initiation of what became known as the Cold War from around 1947 although the first direct action related to it only really begun in 1950 with the onset of the Korean War, which lasted until 1953.
When the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbour to the south, many American officials feared this was the first step in a Communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that non-intervention was not an option, The tensions fuelled fears of widespread communist subversion within the USA.
Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator for Wisconsin, started a witchhunt internally in America, against many well known people active in social, educational & cultural areas deemed to have left wing, progressive or radical ideologies. However, this also begun to encompass rooting out other ‘undesirable’ traits in people, such as evidence of or indeed any support for homosexuality, which was also perceived to increase a person’s risk for blackmail in relation to spying or other clandestine activity. Elements of this activity triggered similar -although undercover-campaigns in Britain in the period after 1952.
As far as sexuality went then in the UK, homosexual acts were still considered by law to be criminal offences and the Conservative government became more rigorous in its perusal of those who were deemed to be having such relationships. The number of convictions related to sexuality rose rapidly in the immediate post-war period, as the Home Office pursued prosecution more rigorously. At that time too, homosexuality was also the subject of sensationalist reporting in the popular press, and there were a number of high profile cases
Although by late in 1954 McCarthy was discredited in the USA, Sir John Nott-Bower, the commissioner of Scotland Yard begun to weed out known or suspected homosexuals from the British Government. During the early 1950’s as many as 1,000 men were locked into Britain’s prisons every year amidst a widespread police clampdown on homosexual offences. Undercover officers acting as ‘agent provocateurs’ would pose as gay men soliciting in public places.
A map produced by the police force in London in 1953, highlights the places where arrests had been made (mainly in public toilets) but inside a red circle drawn around the eastern part of Hyde Park it notes that seventy nine arrests had been made in Hyde Park alone, relating to homosexual offences in just that one year.
The prevailing mood, as in America for a period, was one of barely concealed paranoia. In 1953 John Gielgud the actor-director, was arrested on the 20th October in Chelsea for cruising men in a public lavatory, and was subsequently fined. He did not acknowledge publicly that he was gay but the episode affected his health and he suffered a nervous breakdown months later.
The nature and portrayal of homosexual desire in this period became heavily coded, as for instance this cover of a classic physique magazine shows. Tommorrow’s Man was produced in the USA in the fifties but was shipped or sent to other parts of mainly Europe. Pictures inside were of models in posing pouches but there was no nudity and certainly no ‘sexual desire’ on display. Inside a list of addresses of model studios shows where further pictures of the models could be obtained. Usually a studio catalogue would be sent first and men could choose more explicit images which would be sent discretely through the post in a plain brown envelope. Other erotic literature was not generally widely available though.
In the same year (1953) Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood (a journalist) were arrested and charged with having committed specific acts of “indecency” with two RAF airmen Edward McNally and John Reynolds; they were also accused of conspiring with Edward Montagu (the 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu) to commit these offences. The Director of Public Prosecutions gave his assurance that the witnesses Reynolds and McNally would not be prosecuted in any circumstances, but Pitt-Rivers, Montagu and Wildeblood were tried and imprisoned at Winchester in 1954. Also in 1955 homosexuality was officially prohibited by British army regulations, with more trials occurring for those discovered to be or accused of being, homosexual.
However, things were not all going in one direction. There were plenty of people who vehemently opposed the discrimination and criminalisation of homosexuals. More to the point perhaps there were people in positions of power who were homosexual and opposed these developments because they feared they would be or were personally affected by them. The Sunday Times published an influential article entitled “Law and Hypocrisy” on 28 March 1954, that dealt with the Montagu trial and its outcome. Soon after, on the 10 April, under the editorialship of Kinsley Martin the New Statesman printed an article called “The Police and the Montagu Case” highlighting the abuses of police powers which the case portrayed.
Throughout their lives Gerald Brenan and Ralph Partridge kept up a long correspondence with each other, with selected letters of theirs being published in an anthology edited by Xan Fielding in 1986 (Dashing for the post). They are interesting because as well as covering the Bloomsbury set period in the 20’s and 30’s with candid discussion of its participants, they also discuss many of the political events ongoing in the period as they lived their lives, from a fairly liberal perspective. On the whole Ralph tended to be more left wing in his outlook than Gerald was; in fact he was involved in writing for the ‘New Statesman’ magazine for some decades, until his relatively early death from a heart attack in November 1960, aged 66. However, the letters give an insight into the frank, honest opinions and feelings of two men moving in the intellectual (mainly) literary circles in the post war period.
In March 1954 (just before the Sunday Times article above was published) Ralph tells Gerald that he has been asked to write a book on ‘Homosexuality’, which he says ‘is all the rage’. However, he says that he wonders if he dare and is worried that his methods were unsuited to ‘such an egg shell subject’. He opines that he would want to do ‘his usual covert propaganda’ but didn’t know how to effectively ‘disarm the ranks of prejudice’. How would ones friends feel, he asks Gerald in the letter, ‘when one drags out into the open all their mother fixations’.
Gerald, in his reply on the 20th March 1954 is more circumspect. He hopes Ralph will write the book he says, but that if he wants to write it he:
‘will have to resign himself to a certain amount of hypocrisy. Homosexuality in England can’t be defended in England or classed as an unavoidable abnormality , it must be blamed, like adultery’. Toleration of it, he goes on, ‘must be defended as the lesser evil, unless you want to write (only for) the converted’. ‘One thing that has always struck me’,he says, ‘is that even the most reactionary and conservative people invite to their houses people they know to be homosexuals and only cut them (ie: disown them) when ‘they get into the papers’. Over theft, blackmail etc they act differently’, which he says ‘implies an exceptional amount of hypocrisy’ and ‘seems to show that they would be glad to see the act against homosexual relations dropped, provided that a proper amount of moral thunder and manly disgust were used at the same time to salve their guilty feelings’.
Ralph responds to Gerald on the 2nd April 1954 by saying that ‘homosexuality had been obsessing him recently’. He had in fact sat through the Montagu trial mentioned above for eight days (for the New Statesman magazine) and felt:
‘it was a barbarity. Three perfectly responsible young men (Montagu, Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers) hounded to gaol for a little sexual indulgence , the grim apparatus of the law crushing them in its jaws as cruelly and meaninglessly as heretics in other spheres used to suffer’. The villains, he notes, ‘were the police, determined to taste blood and enjoying every minute of it’.
On the 5th April 1954 Gerald replied. He too was horrified by the Montagu case he says and had written a letter about it to the NS (New Statesman) which he copies to Ralph. It would not have been published however, as in the interim the three men had decided to appeal and any related comments published publically might have been taken as sub judice. However, he advises Ralph,
‘write the book but be circumspect. Your book must influence opinion and so you must not defend the practice’.
On the 29th April 1954 Ralph responded. He had ‘liked Gerald’s letter very much’ and notes:
‘that yesterday the Home Secretary (David Maxwell-Fyfe) had announced an enquiry into homosexuality, solicitation and prostitution’. With what object he wonders, ‘to relax or to stiffen the law? I don’t like the man and expect him to pack the enquiry with stooges’.
Indeed, just a month after the Montagu trial the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe whom, as Ralph had noted, had a reputation as being conservative and generally ‘very anti’ (homosexual), agreed to appoint a committee to examine and report on the law covering homosexual offences headed by Lord Wolfenden, (as mentioned earlier, which, when it was finally published would become known as simply the ‘Wolfenden report’), and is, more or less, the point where I happened to come into the world, in July 1957.
Why did he decide to do this at that particular time? Well, it is likely that there was pressure placed on him in order to be seen to do something and is also quite likely that he thought the report would be generally condemnatory of such practices but that at least the government could say it had looked into and investigated such practices, to its critics. However, what he perhaps did not realise at the time, (and it has been a mistake made over and over again, by those who think they can rely on bastions of the law ‘to do the right thing’) is that Lord Wolfenden’s son, Jeremy was gay. Sadly, his life was not an especially happy one. Jeremy was the correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Mexico, but also a spy and an alcoholic and eventually he ended his life by committing suicide in 1965 (although rumours, with perhaps more than a grain of truth, of him being killed off, persist).
However, of the Wolfenden headed committee of sixteen people, eventually only one disagreed with its findings, (although two had resigned from it in 1956). They took evidence from just three men in the end. The historian Patrick Higgins, who wrote the book Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London: Fourth Estate) in 1996 has described a number of flaws with the report, particularly in
‘its failure to understand or appreciate (except in the most negative terms) the importance of the homosexual subculture’.
And so the report is not really something that we can look back upon with pride or take any great delight in; it was flawed in many respects but -luckily- eventually helped inform a parliamentary decision in favour of abolishing the law that made homosexual acts between consenting men illegal in private, and that is an important distinction here, as it was felt not something the State should concern itself with, impinging on personal freedoms and also being extremely difficult realistically to police, unless one of the participants confessed or complained about the fact to the law. However, in the event, as it was only an advisory report, when it was presented to the Cabinet the majority decision was, anyway, to oppose any proposal to implement Wolfenden’s recommendations. The decriminalisation of male homosexuality, would, in fact, have to wait until the more permissive circumstances of the late 1960’s. However, the blue touch paper, as it were, had been lit and there was now continued pressure by the more left leaning, progressive liberal papers of the period to pursue the issue.
As it was, it eventually came, after much more discussion, a decade later, though with important caveats: it was still illegal in public, for anyone under 21 and only applied in England and Wales. Scotland would need till wait until 1980, Northern Ireland until 1982, a full 25 years after the initial Wolfenden Report.
To return to Gerald and Ralph’s correspondence though, briefly, we can see that, even in private, both men but especially Gerald were reluctant to be too bold in their relatively positive outlook and opinions on the subject. And these two men were some of the most liberal correspondents of the pre and post war period. It is difficult now for us to imagine the anxiety that frank discussion of the subject caused individuals and society more widely in this period. In the end Ralph did not write the book, as he felt he would not be able to say what he wanted and would be seen as a hypocrite by those that knew him and also that he began to be more concerned with the health problems that would eventually cause his death, just a few years later.
In retrospect, it is now clear that there were many ordinary gay men and lesbian women in the period who were living together. I hope though from the body of work that I have presented, it is clear that by this period the first half of the twentieth century had seen a huge amount of creative work from a great number of people who defined more or less as ‘homosexual’.
I have confined myself to using examples of those who could have been potential role models for me, as I grew up. I could also have mentioned though a great number of female role models that lesbians could have been inspired by also, indeed the subject has now been reasonably well covered by literature such as Lesbian Nation by Jill Johnston (1973) and The Price of Salt (Carol) by Patricia Highsmith, considered the first lesbian themed novel with a happy ending (and published in 1952).
The shocking reality though, is that nearly all these people were not being celebrated by young homosexual men at the time because virtually nothing on any educational syllabus of the period made any mention of their personal lives in relation to the inspiration behind the great work of these celebrated men. Life was lived from a heterosexual perspective with the importance of the classic nuclear family and familiar structures uppermost. Everything I had been taught up to the time I was around 21 was preparing me to be a heterosexual man with 2.2 children (the average at that time).
Indeed, for the next few years, homosexuality would consider to be seen as a clinical illness and something that needed to be and could be treated in a variety of ways, in what was usually known as ‘aversion therapy’. Mostly I have mentioned artists and writers up to this point, as potential role models. Actually this was not where I saw my life developing at this time. I was more interested in the sciences growing up. But one man who could have been a role model has had a lot of attention recently and was not an artist but a mathematician principally. I refer, of course, to Alan Turing.
