Development of the gay counter culture
At the same time, as a still spartan network of gay clubs were developing, the effects of the radicalised liberation movement of gay men & lesbians (and to some lesser extent then, bisexual & transgendered people) was also blossoming. This movement was fuelled more by radical literary & political thought emerging from the effects of a less censorious network, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and other radical thought from the counter cultures of the 60s, feminism, marxism & socialism in particular. It held more radical views about the way forward for minority groups: the demand for free speech, equal right, equality, even the official sanction of same sex partnerships- a notion that seemed frankly unthinkable early in this period, even to the most forward thinking activist.
Progress was not going to be made dancing in windowless clubs behind closed doors but on the outside: the way forward was to be seen and accepted publically, we needed to be on the streets, arm in arm, not down on the disco floor, off our faces. In retrospect, there was undoubtedly a somewhat puritanical aspect to this, a backlash perhaps to the drug fuelled excesses of the late 60’s and early 70’s but it seemed likely to most involved, that such rights would have to be fought for, long and hard. For those old enough to remember, the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexuality had not come easily but had been an extremely long process since the initial Wolfenden report of 1957. For myself, as a young out gay man in London, in my early twenties, I hardly realised then the battles that had already been fought, on my behalf, to enable me to benefit from the ability to socialise, meet, live and love other gay men. When a battle is won, history will record the outcome but seldom has much time for those who put in the groundwork to make it happen.
Nevertheless, I understood enough at least to know that for those of us involved in these debates, there were some difficult choices to be made. How could we enjoy ourselves as gay men, lesbians, without selling out our principles? Be seen to be remaining committed to the cause? It’s certainly the kind of discussion I had with people like Mark Ashton, a highly politicised co-worker later on with me, on London’s Gay Switchboard and many other close friends at regular intervals in the early 80’s.
One of the first things I did when coming out in London in the late 1970’s, after listening to no nonsense counsellor Anna Raeburn on London’s Capital Radio, (Capital jingles and intros 1970s..) was to find myself some literature to read, to educate myself a little better about this strange new world I was about to enter. However, it is also indicative that one of the first books I bought, in 1977, in an effort to educate myself about ‘my kind’ was from the Gay News mail order service and was called ‘Male Homosexuals‘, (Amazon link) published in 1974, a rather academic tome written about homosexuals and their habits.
Although it was not actively negative, it was notably written in the frame of it being deviant behaviour. Nevertheless, I read it from cover to cover, fascinated by its context, trying to place myself in the structural narrative and relate to its mysteries. Apart from books of poems, for example those by CF Cavafy, the Greek poet, it was hard to find anything especially positive about gay men then. Even this was subtitled “Their problems and adaptations”, a title which seemed to scream out don’t get your hopes up buster. None of this was new, I soon came to realise. Despite there being some visibility of ‘queer behaviour’ in the 16th century onwards, at least in the largest cities (for example there were networks of male prostitution in cities like Paris and London), homosexual activity was outlawed in England by the enchantingly named Buggery Act of 1533. As a result, across much of the United Kingdom (and indeed Europe) in the 17th to 19th centuries, the legal punishment for ‘sodomy’ was death, making it dangerous to publish or distribute anything with overtly homosexual themes. In fact up until the mid 1950’s British authors could be prosecuted for writing openly about homosexuality. The earliest book that focuses specifically on a homosexual love affair in probably the german novel A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion published in 1805 by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha Altenburg. Set in ancient Greece, it features several couples—including a homosexual one—falling in love, overcoming obstacles and living ‘happily ever after’. The Romantic movement, which was becoming popular early in the 19th century, allowed men to “express deep affection for each other”, and the motif of ancient Greece as “a utopia of male-male love” was an acceptable vehicle to reflect this, but some of the Duke’s contemporaries were said to have felt that the male characters “stepped over the bounds of manly affection into unseemly eroticism.” Henry Blake Fuller’s 1898 play, At St. Judas’s, and the 1919 novel, Bertram Cope’s Year are also noted as being amongst the earliest published American works in literature, on the theme of homosexual relationships.
Although a few contemporary bookshops were starting to stock some similar and later novels based on lived gay experience, there was not much available in London in the early to late 1970’s. What became known as ‘alternative bookshops‘ like Housmans in London’s Caledonian Road however had already started stocking a range of ‘alternative books’ (and also given a home above the premises to a fledgling organisation called London Gay Switchboard, offering support & advice over the phone to gay men and lesbians).
However, I was lucky enough to benefit from the opening in 1979 of a bookshop that has now become pretty much world famous, called ‘Gays The Word‘ at 77, Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1. It was the first bookshop in the UK to dedicate itself to stocking a wide range of literature, both books and magazines, of relevance to lesbians, gay and bisexual men. I recall in particular an amazing Canadian publication, that I would likely never have seen otherwise called ´The Body Politic´. I first picked up a copy in Gays The Word. It had a great contemporary feel to it I recall, at the time. It felt fresh and forward thinking, somehow more progressive than our own ´Gay News´ here in the UK. Oddly enough, after all this time, I remember it also smelt different, possibly to do with the different papers and inks, they used in Canada, but I don’t know. It is a smell that still gives me hope! These went some way towards answering the questions that we had about how we might construct a progressive lesbian or gay identity for ourselves, within our communities, that melded other aspects of the progressive libertarian polemic of the time. They inspired me in different ways to think about how I might want to construct my own future, given there seemed to be no clearly defined way forward in the late seventies.
