Category: Writing

You might have thought that in the decade of free love, peace and eternal cosmic happiness, there would have been a place for a greater understanding and tolerance of our sexuality. Everything else was getting the treatment: politically we swung to the liberal left,  womens’ rights were discussed and in some cases even acted upon, the recognition of widespread institutionalised racism and the need to change these prevailing attitudes, the recognition of the need to understand and treat mental illness with sympathy and care, the need to make society an easier place for disabled people to live in. Ok, true: that was still very much to come. But for a young lad growing up gay in rural England?  Were there any crumbs of comfort at all? Anything to make him think he wasn’t a freak, misfit or weirdo, as the kids all told him, at the slightest sign of effeminacy?

Well, you’ll be expecting me to say ‘no- there was nothing’. And that, it’s true, is the simple answer. In fact there was actually, but you had to look very carefully and know where and how to find it. I could probably have gone to my local library, at least by the end of the sixties and found a few books on sexuality, with a clinical analysis of homosexuality. I could have found biographies of my future heroes and role models, where there was a least a hint of their sexuality within the text or maybe more likely the subtext. Hell, even reading ‘Swallows and Amazons’ was pretty radical then. Funny (or maybe not) that all the most popular books then were about groups of kids getting on and having lots of adventures. I went through the Enid Blyton books in a flash one year: ‘Five do Smugglers Rock yet again’; they even had tomboy ‘George’ with her dog Timmy, an archetypically queer, transgender character if ever there was one (George not Timmy, though who knows?). Whilst Enid Blyton certainly used stereotypical tropes in abundance and was clearly racist too, she got some things right and hit the sweet spot for me at least for a few years. Whilst the adults are there in her stories, they never get in the way of a good  adventure. Her books were rightly spoofed by the Comic Strip in the mid 1980s but in a relatively loving way. Recently her own sexuality has become a talking point as well.

But for library books covering anything more radically outre? Well, you had to borrow them first, get that library stamp and past your parents. By the end of the decade I was only 12, and just about recognising that Robert Hoffman as Robinson Crusoe on TV was pretty good to look at, and that Captain Scarlett from Thunderbirds was strangely quite a handsome puppet, and well, that Blue Boy from the High Chaparral was very cute too. And yes: let’s go there, wouldn’t it be really quite fun to dance with Rolfe, the sexy telegraph boy, in The Sound of Music singing ’16 going on 17′ (yes, not cool, he becomes a fully fledged and facist Nazi later, I know, I know..it was just a passing thought).

I still have no complete idea quite why ‘The Sound of Music’ in particular carries a huge cache of significance for me and so many other gay men and lesbians of a certain age (not all by any means: it’s a bit of a ‘marmite’ film). Starring Christopher Plummer, who recently passed away aged 90 (and always professed to hating the film) and Julie Andrews, for literally decades, as a gay man, it was impossible to admit to liking it without being mercilessly mocked and so I kept that secret hidden but I never forget it: always, secretly, loved it. It is just about the first film I can remember seeing; when I was just eight, in August 1965, my family went to see it at Bournemouth Odeon whilst on holiday and I can still remember the thrill (yes, really, thrill) of seeing it on that huge screen in glorious, glorious technicolor. Its commercial success at the time was huge: released in March 1965 it was on the same level as say ‘Star Wars’ a few decades later. By November 1966 it had become the highest grossing film of all-time.

It was also an exceptionally long film, coming in at just six minutes under three hours, pretty good for an eight year old to sit through but it was never boring. This length necessitated an interlude half way through, for ice cream, more popcorn and fizzy drinks, though a comfort break in the film was quite common in those days for the longer films. In retrospect, and after some thought, I think what made it special for me, was that it was the very first time I realised it was possible to ‘escape’ into a fantasy world: one far removed from reality. I still remember now, over half a century later, that I came out of the cinema in a daze, back into the real world. And that real world suddenly felt strange, somehow forced, unnatural. That was the first time, I recognised that it was possible to so completely be able to escape into cinematic fantasy for a few hours, to immerse yourself in a different world, where the sun shone, people danced and sang on the street and there was always a guaranteed happy ending. A realisation that we can live out our life or a part of it at least, in a fantasy world that we have created, if we so wish too. Except that in the ‘Sound of Music’, its takeaway, as they climb up over the mountains, to escape Austria for (eventually) the USA, says that an escape to a new happier life is really possible if you try. And best of all, at the end, it’s even a true story (yes, a slightly sanitised, sugar sweet, Hollywood version but nevertheless..) it’s not a lie. Fantasies can become realities. Part of me decided there and then, that I wanted to create these fantasies too. I still feel that it seems somewhat harsh that Maria Von Trapp (the original Maria) had no credit of any sort in the film at all though. Credit where credits due!

Climb every Mountain, sings Maria, the beautiful ex nun turned children’s governess,

Search high and low
 Follow every highway
 Every path you know

Climb every mountain
 Ford every stream
 Follow every rainbow
 ‘Till you find your dream

It seemed to promise that there was a way out of one reality to another, where nobody knew you and you could start a new fresh life. And there’s that glorious rainbow, with it’s promised pot of gold. This was a fantasy, my fantasy, that I suppose took over from Father Xmas, the Tooth Fairy and all those other tales that your parents spin to you, in your early years. And then you discover in your eight year old world, that they were all a lie: a horrible, horrible lie! How could they be so cruel? How can you ever trust them again?! So there is this double edged sword: what makes my parents fantasies presented to the young me unforgivable and yet my fantasies acceptable? Perhaps it’s something to do with consent or the lack of it. Perhaps others didn’t feel as upset at their deception as I did. Did you? Was the ‘Sound of Music’ special in fact to me because it was the very first time I ‘took control’ of my fantasies?

Like any fantasy you have, at such an early age, it’s hard to pinpoint now, half a century later, precisely why ‘The Sound of Music’ carried such strength and emotion for so many of us. I know I wasn’t the only one. In 2019 ‘Queer Lion’ website called Julie Andrews the ‘last remaining true gay icon’. 

When you deconstruct it of course, you realise that all the key queer elements are there. It’s a sad lonely world, without a real mother until Julie comes along and a strict uncaring father, (classic homosexual trope), which is ultimately transformed by the power of song: fears of a thunderstorm are vanquished (My Favourite Things), everyone has a part to play in song (Do -Re-Mi), it’s completely natural to meet and sing together, (the Song Festival) and dance with your boyfriend (Sixteen going on Seventeen), then escape, with high drama but a song in your heart, for more adventures and a new life over the hills.. (Climb every Mountain..). Arguably, you could probably pin my later love of walking, weather, cinema and musicals, romantic love and big adventures on the ‘Sound of Music’. Something in my eight year old brain connected with my hope that I’d find ‘my place in the world’ like that too and the ‘big bad Nazis’ would be vanquished forever. I wonder if my parents would have taken me to see it, if they had known?! I do like to think so- but on reflection I am not quite so sure.

In fact I was so convinced of the merits of ‘The Sound Of Music’ that I put ‘My Favourite Things’ into my degree film, ‘From Linda to the Lizard’, when I went on later to study Film, Video & TV production at West Surrey College in Farnham, Surrey. This was undoubtedly a mistake! Do not necessarily assume your critics will try and understand you, just assume they will value your work on their own level. It almost cost me my degree. To be fair, it also really wasn’t a great film but that’s another story

Julie Andrews, one of the last living true gay icons

As I grew up in the early sixties, we moved away from leafy but fast expanding Cowplain and to a new home in Torpoint, which nestles just inside Cornwall, on the western shore of the Tamar River, opposite Plymouth, on the banks of St John’s Lake and here my father took up a deputy headmasters post in a local school. I think I made friends relatively easily there, I still remember Tony, who lived opposite us and others, where we would climb up the large, eighty foot, fir trees on the foreshore and explore the heath land by the old Millpond. I had the somewhat strange experience of being taught by my father for the last year of my primary school. He was a good teacher actually and always managed to really involve his pupils, with an imaginative blend of storytelling, model making and ways of engaging their curiosity. It still pains me to write this but oh, if only he could have been quite such a good father!

I used to get confused sometimes and call him ‘Dad’ at school and ‘Sir’ at home. And then there were things that hurt much more than they should ever have and stayed with me for a lifetime. Like when the school was gathered in the hall for assembly every morning.. I was with my classmates half way back and my father had called for quiet. It seems that my father thought I had gone on talking (but I always and still do dispute this). ‘You’ my father said .. ‘yes you my son’. I still can hear him uttering those words from a full fifty five years ago. ‘Come out to the front, face the wall and stay like that for the rest of assembly’. Of course, I had wanted the ground to swallow me up. In retrospect, it’s quite possible my father was actually doing me a favour: so people couldn’t say he was favouring me as his son in the classroom. It is still worrying to me now though, that I held that against him for a very long time, whereas he might very well have forgotten about it the very next day. How often I wondered, do we unintentionally do things to others that scar them for life, without having any real idea of what we’ve done?

By the time I was seven, in 1964, the country had a Labour party in power, with Harold Wilson its PM. We tend to look back now and remember the period as one of rapid change and a preoccupation with the sciences, arts, culture and all things progressive. Wilson had delivered a memorable speech at the party conference in Scarborough, where he boldly stated that if the country was to prosper, a ‘new Britain’ would need to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of ‘scientific revolution’.

Aspirationally, people were able to create a 2.2 person family unit (the average number of children that couples had then) that thrived, with a better healthcare system, cleaner, functional and more modern housing and jobs with reasonable security and paid holidays. However, in actual fact, in retrospect, the period was not quite as rosy as history remembers it. There was, to a greater or lesser extent, a preoccupation with national economic decline. Both the Conservative party in the years leading up to 1964 and the Labour party in the years afterwards, attempted to develop fiscal policies that would enable Britain to be more competitive on the world stage.

In fact though, a lot of time was actually spent dealing with problems caused by the balance of payments and volatility of the pound. The expectation that Wilson’s government had created, of continually rising living standards and welfare, came to be seen as a shackle, as the public became disillusioned that such changes were not more rapid and more widely felt. Scientific & Technological opportunities for progress were also missed, despite Wilson’s bold promises. There were large swings in the public’s feelings about different political parties and their various solutions: ‘panaceas’ succeeding one another in quick succession. So, actually, it didn’t feel like an especially aspirational period to have lived through, though in retrospect we can see that things were, in fact, slowly getting better.

Certainly, in terms of liberal or progressive social attitudes, things did slowly improve. In 1967, with the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, many people reshaped their attitudes, as a result of the government’s stance and of liberal media opinion more widely and through the next decade and a half, acceptance of homosexuality, in fact of sexuality in all its forms, slowly increased. It’s important to reiterate though, that there was still a lot of negative opinion about; indeed many were of the opinion that what people did behind closed doors was one thing but that it should never be flaunted outside, openly, in public. There was also a segregation of opinion in the country, where London, in general, was much more tolerant of homosexuality that other parts of the country. Most ‘ordinary’ working people then did not personally know another person who was openly homosexual. For most people, attitudes were to change because popular culture represented homosexuals in a more tolerant way, it was popular film, television and popular music that reshaped attitudes most obviously. Television ownership rose rapidly in the UK in the late fifties. In the year I was conceived, 1956, just 37% of households had a TV, by 1960, when we got ours, it was 68% and by 1970, 92%. 

Sometimes popular culture in the sixties showed us youngsters some confusing norms though. In particular as a family we would watch ‘The Morecambe and Wise’ show, especially looking forward to the lavish Christmas production, reserved as a national treat on Christmas Day evening itself: 28 million people watched their 1977 ‘Christmas Special’. Ernie Wise’s real name was Ernest Wiseman in fact, so I always felt some kind of affinity to him in a way. Eric was the comedian, the joker, Ernie played his ‘straight’ man, often the butt of Eric’s jokes. The pair by this time were already well established, having honed their craft in the popular music halls of the forties and fifties but were able to re-invent themselves for a wider TV audience, something others found difficult to adapt to. It required ‘cleaning up’ the act to some extent for a family audience but one thing they always still did was share a bed together, when a sketch demanded it, Eric often smoking a pipe in such sketches.

In some respects they mirrored the role of countless other double acts that had gone before them, such as Laurel and Hardy. It was never mentioned though or suggested as strange in any way, (they in fact reminisced that they had often shared a bed when on tour around the UK in their early careers, simply to save money). They often played around with this particular trope though, recognising that the nervousness this would provoke in their audience would result in increased (nervous) laughter at more or less any gag. The way to get round it was to ensure that absolutely nothing was said about their behaviour and the audience after a while realised this, so felt comfortable with it, whilst still retaining an unease. Laurel and Hardy had exploited much the same ‘unease’ forty decades previously. It is also the way female impersonators  got away with so much: think Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in the 1962 film ‘Some like it Hot’. where they both impersonate females to further  the plot. People could accept these ‘gender bending’ roles up to a point as long as an invisible line was not crossed from humour to desire. In fact Curtis and Lemmon took this trope and pushed it almost to its breaking point in the film, with Monroe in the role as the ‘straight man’. But it was always in comedy that you could get away with the most risque material, as radio programmes in the 50’s like ITMA (It’s That Man Again), Round the Horne, and in the sixties the Carry On films, TWTWTW (That Was The Week That Was) and later the Monty Python team, all used with great success. These all allowed for more subversive aspects of sexuality, social culture and politics to be aired in a relatively safe and non threatening way in this period, those ‘in the know’ would understand them and for others the ideas would simply ‘go over their heads’. This understanding was an important entrypoint into acceptance of ‘otherness’, in our world as kids in the sixties and seventies and more widely in society in general, which we have more or less lost now in popular culture as it’s no longer felt needed or necessary.        

Increasingly too, in the late fifties , there was the development of a specific ‘youth culture’ with its own music,l fashion and tastes. Whilst I was not particularly aware of ‘The Beatles’ whilst very small, in the early sixties they quickly became one of the most widely popular bands of all time, with much of that popularity engendered by newspapers, newsreels (in the cinemas), music magazines and television. The time they spent in Hamburg, Germany, is widely credited with turning them from ‘just another teenage band ‘in Liverpool into a tight rock ‘n’ roll combo. They played their first night at the Indra Club there on August 17th 1960. By early 1963, they were huge, with their first number one hit  ‘From Me to You’ in the UK in May 1963 and in the USA with ‘I want to hold your hand’ in February 1964.

What was less well known at the time however, was that the catalyst for such success had been managed from early in 1961 by a gay man from Liverpool, Brian Epstein (1934-1967). Seeing them play at the Cavern Club in Liverpool’s Mathew Street one lunchtime, prompted him to take them ‘under his wing’ and propel them to success, despite his own lack of any other artists management at the time. Retrospectively, as ever, it is quite simple now to examine exactly how his management propelled them to success, rather less so to understand how they were aware of his sexuality: not especially phased by it but accepting that it needed to be kept a secret. This was one question that never came up in the myriad of interviews they did, that were published across the world, in the early to mid sixties. His homosexuality was not publicly known until some years after his death, of a drug overdose on the 27th August 1967, although it had been an ‘open secret’ among his friends and business associates.

Early on, Brian Epstein had made two bold, visionary statements about the future. The first went on to become legendary, when he asserted that: “The Beatles are going to be bigger than Elvis!”. He was right. His second statement has been forgotten but it was in fact bolder, when after dashing lovestruck fans’ hopes by revealing that the Beatles had girlfriends and would one day be married, he added: “And someday, I might be married too!”. Of course, no one took any notice then, it’s only now the significance of what he was suggesting is clear.

Sadly, he was not to live to see homosexuality decriminalised. There have been many rumours, counter rumours, salacious stories and much gossip in the intervening years about whether any of the Beatles were ever involved with him, the ‘pass’ he made at Pete Best, in his car (Best was the sacked Beatle) and the story of John Lennon’s time away with him in Barcelona, Spain is the stuff of legend now, and depicted in a 1991 film ‘The Hours and Times’ which generally received critical acclaim. Also legendary, is the suggestion that Lennon’s song ‘Baby You’ve got to Hide your Love away’ (on the ‘Help’ soundtrack) was written about, or for Epstein. Whatever the truth, which is of lesser importance now (though maybe not interest), the reality is that none of this was ‘open’, it was all clandestine and although such sexuality was accepted in certain arty circles (as it always had been to an extent) it didn’t filter through, down into the popular culture of the time; I wasn’t aware that the Beatles had had a gay manager until about 1990.

As it was of course, it all ended in tragedy (as, we were then led to believe, homosexuals lives always tend to) when Epstein died of a drug overdose, just a month before homosexuality was decriminalised in England & Wales. His abuse of stimulants and barbiturates led to addiction and death, at just thirty two. All four Beatles were devastated by the news, especially John, who was probably the closest to him. It’s often thought that Epstein’s death marked the beginning of the end of their career, Lennon certainly ‘thought they were fucked’ after he died. And in 2006, his ex wife Cynthia Lennon said: “I think Brian’s one of the forgotten people. It’s almost as if he’s been written out of the [Beatles] story. I don’t think they’d have got anywhere without Brian.”

Of course, the case of the Beatles and Epstein is just one story, in what essentially is a vast network of musical culture and more widely artistic and literary culture in this period, where gay men & lesbians had a huge influence in shaping its portrayal and its related creative output. Mostly, it was as undercover as Brian Epstein’s life had been with the Beatles and his other artistes. The other thing about the period, which certainly didn’t help, was that the newspapers, more especially the ‘red tops’, often made a huge negative issue out of rumours -or indeed truths- about peoples’ sexuality and it was felt then (sadly, quite rightly) that such publicity could end people’s careers.

ON to Sex, love and Life 1.8 Into the Swinging Sixties: surrounded by pervasive conformity, part 2

 BACK to Sex, Love, Life: an index

And so, I began to understand how the half century in particular, before my birth, was full of relevance potentially to my own life, my concerns, my modus operandi as a gay man, both in terms of the people who had shaped it and the contemporary history that had shaped them. There was a great deal that had happened in that period, that it would have been very useful to have been taught (to some extent) at all ages but certainly as a teenager, as I grew up and progressed to the then legal age of maturity at twenty-one. Yet I knew practically nothing that I felt was positive about ‘my condition’, desires, life and loves up to that age. Nothing that I was taught about or read or discussed with others had really given me any references, stepping stones if you will, as to how to go about living my life in the contemporary world in the early to mid seventies, in central London. It was hardly surprising in retrospect then, that there were struggles to come, negativity, feelings of doubt and low self esteem in this period. I had no idea how to progress beyond the feeling that I try and live my life on a day to day basis and see what transpired. As Neil Tennant (yet again..) wrote in 1984 (though they cut a demo then, it wasn’t released until 1987):

When I look back upon my life
 it’s always with a sense of shame
 I’ve always been the one to blame
 For everything I long to do
 no matter when or where or who
 has one thing in common too 
 It’s a sin

 Everything I’ve ever done
 Everything I ever do
 Every place I’ve ever been
 Everywhere I’m going to
 It’s a sin

Whilst this theme has recently been used quite effectively by Russell T Davies in his story of gay life, love and tragedy in the early eighties (Channel 4 TV), and was a song from ‘Actually‘, (the name of the Pet Shop Boys album that it was released on) Neil Tennant has since said that ‘it was a throwaway lyric and not meant too seriously’ but -as ever, with much of their work, for some decades at the end of the 20th century – the song caught the zeitgeist of the times when it was released and went to number one in the UK charts. It certain affected me immediately, and with Derek Jarman directing the accompanying video, depicting the seven deadly sins, I’ve always regarded it as a inspirational, slightly camp masterpiece. And it’s one of those timeless pieces that always sounds ‘fresh’ with each new listen.

Some will say of course, that no one of that age, has any real idea how to live their lives: we are all a mass of contradictory thoughts, ideas and emotions at that early period in our lives. We experiment with things, pick up some ideas as being useful and cast others aside. But in the main we look at others who are slightly older & wiser than we are and try to understand what they are doing right, use them as mentors, if you like. An older brother, older friends: look at how these people are living their lives. Seldom do we listen to our parents or older guides at this time, for their thoughts, opinions, values all too often seem outdated, outmoded, and of no relevance whatsoever.

I think this feeling of ‘ones older and betters being outdated’ was something especially relevant in this period: the early second half of the twentieth century, here in western Europe, and Britain in particular, where fashion tastes, music, culture were all being shaped very rapidly indeed. So, in some ways, we were all in this melting pot together. Even the very shape of heterogenerative normality was changing quickly. And in retrospect, perhaps this was my saviour. People had stopped looking very far ahead at that time, as you simply did not know what the future was going to present to you. Each previous decade nowadays we tend to have wrapped up for us and re-presented in popular culture in different ways. The swinging sixties, the glam seventies, the kitsch eighties. Then, with CND at its peak the future was seen as potentially being quite dystopian. In the gay community in particular too, we had to contend with AIDS & HIV and again this stopped us looking very far beyond the immediate horizon; this time it wasn’t just a case of the unknown, we simply didn’t know if there would even be a future for us…which sounds rather dramatic but it was true.           

It is also quite simple now, in hindsight, for us all to be able to see how we weaved our way through the paths available to us then; to gauge how much we were influenced by various styles, themes, political and social movements. In doing so, we often see how relatively rigidly in fact, we still tended to follow one of the prevailing paths open to us, in terms of our social class and structure. However, to some extent those structures were also being shaken up by the increasingly important body politic of the sixties and seventies; things were becoming less rigidly defined and our options as young people were becoming greater.

Without realising it at the time, as I left my schooldays behind me for good (or so I thought), I was going to be thrown into one of the largest and most diverse social & cultural melting pots (and spots) in Europe. And perhaps that was the saving grace for me, as I would have struggled I think, to feel happy elsewhere at that time.

But I am rushing ahead of myself (as I would often tend to do in the next few decades). It is still 1957, the conservative politician Harold Macmillan is Prime Minister, I have been born in St Mary’s hospital in Portsmouth and settled as a bawling baby (and my, did I bawl, my mother used to tell me) in Cowplain, the fast expanding overspill village nearby, which has recently become full of new prefabs, built to provide cheap new housing outside of the heavily bombed Portsmouth, the scars of which were still very visible just a decade later. Not for us though: after a few years in a tiny flat above a shop, my father is able to afford a mortgage and buy a brand new bungalow ‘Ingledon’ (shades of little England..but I discovered only after both had passed away a few years ago, it was the name of the holiday cottage in North Devon where he proposed to my mother Jean) in a leafy street in the expanding village, as he is teaching crafts, woodworking and sports at the secondary school in Portsmouth, in the poor suburb of Milton; the playground is still an old bomb crater; my mother is still working as a teacher, part time.   

There were a few bright notes at least, on the creative front during 1957. Openly (ish) gay (ish) composer Leonard (Lenny) Bernstein & lyricist Stephen Sondheim were to finally complete a new musical  (which Bernstein had started in 1949), which opened on Broadway on September 26th, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but set in the New York Bronx. They had called it ‘West Side Story’. Though it received a mixed critical reception, (the later film released in 1961 was to be what made it ultimately, so successful) they had written a new song for the show ‘Somewhere’,  

Someday,
 Somewhere,
 We’ll find a new way of living
 We’ll find a way of forgiving
 Somewhere,

There’s a place for us..

It was a song that would go on to grip public hearts, the minds and soul of a new generation, who were ready to throw off the familiar institutions of the fifties as a decade and embrace something new for the sixties; something that was less about traditional family values and more about embracing and accepting the spirit of transformation and diversity.  It was not to happen with any great rapidity however: this was a slow burn.

It was nevertheless a theme that was, by 1958, already resonating through the cultural memes of the period.  In social history, 1958 saw the Homosexual Law Reform Society founded in the United Kingdom, following on from the Wolfenden report the previous year, initiating a public campaign to make homosexuality legal in the UK. In 1959  Alan Horsfall, a labour councillor for Nelson, Lancashire, tabled a motion to his local Labour party to back the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The motion, perhaps unsurprisingly, was rejected, but Horsfall and fellow activist Antony Grey went on to form the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee, which again began to put pressure on authorities for law reform.

Culturally by then, there was also a movement by young playrights and writers to look at issues with a more critically & socially attuned political approach than previously, or perhaps it was more that the public was more attuned to accepting and responding to such material and being affected by it, by that time? 

The‘Angry Young Men‘were various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the late 1950s expressing both scorn and disaffection with the established socio-political order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.

The novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (published as early in the period as 1954) was crystallized in 1956 by the play Look Back in Anger, which became a key, representative work of the movement (and was made into a film in 1959, starring the young Welsh actor, Richard Burton). When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the play’s twenty-six year old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was eventually also extended to all his contemporaries, who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their working-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything seen as too highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier (who, somewhat amusingly, later came to epitomise a particular type of theatrical luvvy) played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the latter part of the decade.

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South, 1959 (Granada) BFI The first gay drama on British TV

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There were also the novelists John Braine (key work Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (his key work generally acknowledged to be Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958), which were also made into critically acclaimed plays & films. In 1959 Independent Television (ITV), at the time the UK’s only national commercial broadcaster, broadcast the UK’s first gay themed TV drama, South, (made by Granada, ‘from the North’, as its jingle used to announce, so you wouldn’t be in any doubt) starring Peter Wyngarde. Wyngarde was in fact in a long-term relationship with the actor Alan Bates, later infamous for the nude wrestling scene, in Ken Russells ‘Women in Love’ released  in 1972), and it was filmed & transmitted as a live performance, as most drama was then and luckily copies still exist. It all seems terribly ‘arch’ today but was strong stuff back in the late fifties. 

In film, albeit mainly in American film, there were also some specific, notable movies that looked at the rise (and the ensuing ‘cult’) of the teenager and teenage angst. In particular Rebel Without A Cause (1955) starring James Dean stands out, co-starring Natalia Wood and Sal Mineo, directed by Nicholas Ray and scored by Leonard Rosenman, (who incidentally was James Dean’s roommate at that time). It had a huge influence on me, when I was considering coming out in the mid 70’s, in terms of relating to Dean’s teenage angst. The studio, Warner Bros released the film on October 27, 1955, less than a month after Dean’s death in a car accident on September 30, 1955.

For gay men, there were always rumours, (correctly, as it happens), about Dean’s sexuality and that he and Sal Mineo had had a relationship ‘of some sort’ whilst filming the picture. Sal Mineo, who was gay however, was only fifteen-sixteen at the time (whilst Dean was a relatively much older, twenty-three) and said later that ‘nothing happened between them, although he did have a crush on Dean’. He noted that, ‘if there had been a reciprocation of feelings, “Jimmy” was well-aware of the differences in age and experience.

There’s a story on ‘You Tube’ from Brian Rhodes, who met Sal Mineo in the Manatabee Bar in Toronto in the early Seventies, (entitled ‘The Night I Hung Out with Sal Mineo in a Gay Bar‘); they ‘clicked’ and he says after some conversation and a few beers he eventually asked him directly if there was some sexual tension between the two of them and Mineo confirmed that yes, the director Nicholas Ray had actually wanted them to play it like that anyway. Dean had said that he wanted Mineo to look at him in the ‘same way’ he looked (with desire) at the character that Natalie Wood was playing. Director Nicholas Rey had evidently wanted to go further, with an actual kiss, but the studio (Warner Bros) had completely ruled it out. It is true that if they had put a male/male kiss in, it would certainly have been cut by the censors, as there were some substantial cuts made to the film, before it was awarded even an ‘ X ‘ certificate from the BBFC censors, thus limiting its youth audience considerably to those over 16 years. It was then resubmitted by the studios to see if an ‘A’ certificate was possible but the censors then required ‘so many cuts as to make the continuity nonsensical’, and the studio did not pursue this option any further at the time. The necessity of coensorship when a film is to be publically displayed was to haunt me later, when I too was making films.

However, in 1976 it was resubmitted without the cuts made for the X certificate in 1955 and passed as an ‘AA’, thus allowing those aged 14 and over to see it in the cinema.  In June 1985 it was again resubmitted to the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors)  for a modern video classification and was awarded a PG (Parental guidance advised) certificate, with the Examiners describing the film as seeming “both old fashioned and harmless” compared to modern programmes aimed at children, such as Grange Hill’.There is now a scene in it where Dean’ pout kisses’ Mineo -almost- on the cheek. I think there is no doubt that if it was remade today it would look quite different to what was shot in 1955, though it is unlikely it would be the ‘classic’ film that the original ‘Rebel’ remains, to this day.

The film has achieved an almost mythical cult status with the LBGTQ community since, perhaps especially for gay and bisexual men as a result of these stories. Certainly it was what particularly attracted me to it, in the mid seventies, when I first viewed it. I have a photo taken then of me that is almost a look-a-like resemblance of Dean, (this more by luck than reality) and I also had a ‘Dean’ T shirt I wore in the period (as did many others) but he was an important character for me, not so much as a role model but more for his angst and interpretation in ‘Rebel’ (but also in his two other key films, East of Eden & Giant) of being misunderstood.

There is something here for me personally when I was a teenager, of being misunderstood by my parents in particular, because of the way I was behaving but not being able to explain why I was behaving in such ways. This isn’t something just confined to gay teens of course but it did strike a particular chord with me. I interpreted the film as seeing his main relationship as being with the Sal Mineo character and of Natalia Wood as being the figure he turned to, in frustration, to express the related emotions. It is an interesting example of how we all view things in very different ways, depending on our lifestyles & emotional engagements.

There is a clip on You Tube (above) that shows, whether there was anything really there or not, that there seems to exists a definite ‘vibe’ between the two young men and I defy anyone to watch it and say there wasn’t! The song incidentally ‘Young as we are’ is sung by Sal Mineo himself but is not on the film, it was released by Mineo’s label in 1959. He did have a great voice and -arguably -was actually, or at least as, talented, as Dean himself. On You Tube debate rages as ever about whether it’s pertinent or appropriate to discuss and speculate on whether the two were gay or bisexual and had any romantic attachments. However, I add one of the responses to these criticisms, as it is put so well, in my opinion: 

There is a clip on You Tube that shows, whether there was anything really there or not, that there seems to exists a definite ‘vibe’ between the two young men and I defy anyone to watch it and say there wasn’t! The song incidentally ‘Young as we are’ is sung by Sal Mineo himself but is not on the film, it was released by Mineo’s label in 1959. He did have a great voice and -arguably -was actually, or at least as, talented, as Dean himself.  

It’s important to document the contributions people of color and members of the LGBTQ community have made to the history of politics, the arts and sciences. For way too long the history books were filled with straight white men and their achievements. ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ contains a very bold, while at the same time coded, gay infatuation. Something that could not be said outright in the film and the actors themselves could not express and hold onto their careers in the repressed climate of 50’s & 60’s Hollywood. So discussing their sexuality is something that can be done now that couldn’t be done then and is important to understanding the history of film and the society it was created in.

I would agree. It was as important then as now (if not more so) to be able to have some kind of role models, aspirational or otherwise and both these two men fit the bill, though both were dead before they were middle aged.  In some ways though that completes the fantasy.

To accompany the magnificent performances from the cast and especially Dean, was a film score that many believe revolutionised film music. Dean took Elia Kazan to a concert of Rosenman’s music, the director was impressed enough to commission him to score East of Eden, though both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein had to encourage him to accept it.Receiving an Academy Award and Oscar nomination for the work, he merged serialism, jazz and classical rhythms to construct what is still considered to be one of the best modernist film soundtracks. Equally, in music in the late fifties there was an element of liberation in the sounds that were being made, especially in much of western Europe & the USA and broadcast through radio, television & distributed on disc.

So we can see, that the during final years of the fifties, from when I was born in that Portsmouth hospital until aged nearly three and just starting to go to a Nursery school in Cowplain, there were events ongoing, way beyond my personal comprehension, that were just starting to release the handbrake, on a decade of repression. This is not to say that public opinion was suddenly very positive about homosexuality though. Surveys at the time showed that opinion was still overwhelmingly negative in relation to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the government knew this. It would take many further changes in society in the UK, as we entered the early sixties, to make any impression at all on this engrained prejudice, the result of years of negativity by both the key institutions and public faces of the day.  

ON to Sex, love and life 1.8 Into the  Swinging Sixties: surrounded by pervasive conformity(part 1)

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Whilst the end of the 19th century saw the advent of the concept of homosexuality as a pathological medical or psychological condition this also legitimised ‘treatments’ to try to change it in individuals and in fact such treatments were practised from them and peaked as late as early 1970s.⁷  Why did people accept the need for such treatments? Well, in a groundbreaking survey in the 1990s,* which questioned those who grew up between 1940 and 1970 and underwent such treatment, they often commented on the extremely negative influence of the British media on them, one said:

‘There were no positive role models and the newspapers were full of the most vituperative filth that made me feel suicidal. I felt totally bewildered that my entire emotional life was being written up in the papers as utter filth and perversity’.

Treatment was often prescribed by doctors when patients visited them, as they felt they could not share such feelings with anyone else, telling of the negativity that it was having on their lives. The age at which most people received treatment was in their late adolescence and early twenties. These treatments were mainly administered in NHS hospitals throughout Britain and those treated privately usually underwent psychoanalysis. The most common treatment (from the early 1960s to early 1970s, was behavioural aversion therapy with electric shocks (eleven participants) and nausea induced by apomorphine these patients often having to be admitted to hospital due to side effects of nausea and dehydration and the need for repeated doses, while those receiving electric shock aversion therapy attended as outpatients for weeks or in some cases up to two years.

Other treatments that we know were used then included the use of oestrogen to reduce libido, religious counselling, electroconvulsive therapy, discussion of the evils of homosexuality, desensitisation of an assumed phobia of the opposite sex, hypnosis, psychodrama, and abreaction. None were very ‘successful’, even those administering the treatment really only going through the motions. For many patients, the contrast between the depth of their sexual feelings and the ‘simplicity’ of the supposed treatment made many doubt the wisdom of the approach and they became disillusioned and stopped the treatments themselves. Sometimes treatment ended abruptly, one person in the survey noting:

I said, “when am I going to find a breakthrough? You keep saying things will change and everything’s going to be OK.” She [the psychiatrist] said, “well, I’m going to have to tell you now I don’t think we are going to get anywhere. To be quite honest I never expected we would in the first place. You’re going to have to go home and tell your wife that you’re gay and start a new life.” Boom!

More famously now, in 1954 Alan Turing, the English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, influential in the development of computer science, committed suicide by taking cyanide, having been given a course of female hormones (chemical castration) by doctors, as an alternative to being sent to prison, after being prosecuted by the police for gross indecency, because of his sexual relations with a 19 year old man Arnold Murray, in January 1952. However there does remain some dispute about whether his suicide by ingestion of cyanide was deliberate or accidental.

In 2009 following an internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for “the appalling way he was treated”. Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The “Alan Turing law” is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. He has recently been celebrated in the film The Imitation Game and by the inclusion from the 23rd June 2021 of his portrait on the fifty pound note in the UK. For many it is still too little, too late.

In 2018, it was also announced that controversial “gay conversion therapies” were to be banned as part of a government plan to improve the lives of gay and transgender people. At the time, the government did not offer a definition of “conversion therapy”, but its report said it “can range from pseudo-psychological treatments to, in extreme cases, surgical interventions and ‘corrective’ rape”. However, A national survey of 108,000 members of the LGBT community recently suggested that 2% have undergone the practice, with another 5% having been offered it. So clearly it is still something that is practised even today in countries like the UK, so it can be imagined what the situation must be in those countries with less progressive outlooks, of which there are still many.

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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.

ON to Sex, Love and life (The Backstory) 1.6 You will conform: aversion therapy as practised in the fifties and sixties

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Contents:

Introduction On pandemics, Big Society or Big brother?

Preface A personal story

Part 1 The backstory contains 9 chapters, of which all are now online

1.1 Early days, early doors

1.2 Morals and mores: sexuality undercover, during the eighteenth century

1.3 Fledgling alternative communities in the early twentieth century: part 1, part 2

1.4 A chink of liberation, the countdown to war and changing moralities

1.5 Mid century-a time of temporary setbacks and moral tightening

1.6 You will conform: aversion therapy as practised in the fifties and sixties

1.7 Ignorance is not bliss

1.8 Into the  Swinging Sixties: surrounded by pervasive conformity part 1, part 2

1.9 The Seventies- with high shoes on, bolting through closing doors

Part 2 The rituals contains 28 chapters of which all are now online

Introduction

2.1 Exploration with some trepidation..

2.2 Kew and a long lasting love affair

2.3 Disco and the dance floor

2.4 1975: The rise and rise of political activism; GLF and CHE

2.5 Icebreakers and the beginnings of an ‘alt gay’ scene

2.6 1977: I’m coming out, I want the world to know..

2.7 The glory days of the gay contact ad

2.8 The films that moved me and moved me on

2.9 Soho, oh Soho: into the gay ghetto

2.10 1979: Rise of the body politic & political activism

2.11 Development of music as a political statement in London and the UK

2.12 The very best of gay watering holes through the eighties:  Life and love at the ‘LA’

2.13  1980: A completely new ‘flikker’ agenda..

2.14 Living together – a short 101 primer on how we learned to alt.live together, as lesbians and gay men 

2.15 Icebreakers and the early’ alt discos’

2.16 Papers, politics and politico’s: Gay Noise & the Carved Red lion

2.17 1981: Joining ‘London Gay Switchboard’: ´´the best thing the movement ever made´´

2.18 1982: A Brief Encounter with The Pied Bull

2.19  1983 Ch, ch, changes: Traffic & getting to know the outdoor cruising scene 

2.20  1983 Back to school, protest and the rise and rise of the alt political march

2.21  1984- The best of the best – all about ‘The Bell’

2.22 1985 Changing the World and a Centre all of our own

2.23 1986 Cleancut & ‘Gearing Up for Safer sex’,

2.24 1987 The big one: Mark Ashton’s funeral  

2.25 1988 Filming ‘Pride’ for posterity

2.26 Love out on its own: the trials, tribulations and magic of Hampstead Heath

2.27 1988 Sex, Love and Life..

2.28 Section 28 and a question going forwards..

Part 3 The sacrifice contains 12 chapters and will be going online in the next few months

3.01. 1987 The Foster years, an HIV/AIDS helpline and a hard hitting national campaign

3.02 The Creation of a ‘Department of Health’ versus the ‘HEA’

3.03 In at the deep end- stepping into the HEA

3.04 BMP and the Ritts men

3.05 MESMAC strides out..

3.06 One month in and heads down..

3.07 ‘Lurch, launch, and feedback’

3.08 The Heat on the beat in San Francisco

3.09 London life at the end of the eighties..

3.10 Two steps forward, one step back

3.11 The Mondino Men

3.12 End of an era

A postscript

Index

Ending just over a decade before I was born, the Second World War (WW2) still maintained something of a hold our family, as I was growing up at 5, Padnell Avenue, in Cowplain, a small village just north of Portsmouth. Due to its naval base, Portsmouth had been very heavily bombed during the war years and a lot of social housing (known as prefabs) had been built in Cowplain & its surroundings, to quickly house those made homeless in Portsmouth; in fact we lived close to a large prefab estate. My father did national service in the post war years before becoming a teacher. His first job, teaching at Milton Secondary School for Boys, had a bomb crater as the playground. Like many cities in the 1950’s, Portsmouth still very much bore the scars of the war but my parents saved to buy Padnell Avenue, brand new in 1960.  

What was not talked about then (at least openly) and something I only discovered well after I had come out in the late seventies, (in fact only really in the last few decades) is that in a similar way to the First Great War, the changed social conditions in the period had a particular influence on some of the men and women who served in it & lived through it. Even on just the Allied front, it is estimated that as many as 250,000 people may have defined as ‘homosexual’ and up to 1.1 million people may have experienced some form of same sex intimacy, that came about as a result of the particular conditions that existed during the period (and, it is fair to say to a lesser extent, the changes that had been occurring in the thirties). ‘Indecency’, the catch all term for sexual activity between men, still contravened military law and prosecution would likely result in a lengthy prison sentence and dismissal. In the women’s services, same sex activity was not illegal but lesbians were overwhelmingly viewed as a ‘dangerous contagion’.

However, the experience of men who have spoken about it since, shows that there was in fact an increased acceptance of what has been termed ‘homosex’ (sex between men or what the HEA, had it existed then, would have called ‘MWHSWM’) in the forces during the war years. To some extent, it seems the ‘unusual’ situation of forced intimacy acted as an excuse or a reason to engage in activities that would not normally have been felt to ‘acceptable’ by many of those involved (similarly in fact to the conditions that I mentioned in the First War). In all areas of the services, both in the UK and abroad, there existed fairly widespread examples of same sex engagement. Whilst many of the men involved had, or had had, girlfriends ‘back home’ and would in no way have defined as being ‘homosexual’, to use the clinical term that was fairly widely used then in official literature, clearly some would have and the opportunities presented actually served to help clarify and to some extent define their sexuality. It goes some way again to explaining, why some people quite enjoyed this time in their lives, during the war years 

As Emma Vickers writes in her book ‘Queen & Country: Same sex desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-1945′, after examining interviews with various men who defined as ‘homosexual’ by the end of the 20th century and had formative experiences in that time, whilst in the British services as relative youngsters and since: 

‘For many of the queer men and women who served as part of the Armed Forces, their service was sacred. (For example)… Richard Briar believed that he developed ‘socially and sexually’ as a result of the war,and likewise John Booker emerged from his Army service with a better understanding of himself and his sexuality.

Without the war and his service within it, Booker believed that he would have ‘continued at Cambridge and probably been even more closeted. I developed subsequently’. So in this sense she writes ‘the war played a significant role in accelerating the sexual maturity of my interviewees‘. They met like minded people, formed social circles, patronised formal homosexual spaces together and manufactured their own. ‘They fell in love (and out of it) and some became surer and more secure in their identities’. It is very likely that similar activities occurred in the First ‘Great’ World War as well, though this activity has been less well documented, in part because there was less attempt to document it before those involved had died natural deaths. Attitudes then were even stricter and more dogmatic, regarding such behaviour. 

Equally there were other men, like the marvellous Dudley Cave (1921-1999), whom I met years later on in the eighties, when we both worked together on Lesbian & Gay Switchboard in London. Dudley and his partner Bernard lived together (with his ex wife in fact; very ‘Bloomsbury’) from 1954-1994, when Bernard died. He had a fascinating life, having joined the Royal Army Ordinance Corps in 1941, aged 20, (“I was basically a pacifist, he said later but I thought the Nazi persecution of the Jews made it a just war.”) and had been openly homosexual there without great problems, then having fought the Japanese but been captured in the fall of Singapore, set to work on the River Kwai railway.

After becoming ill with malaria there (in fact three quarters of his fellow prisoners died) he was incarcerated in Changi prison in Singapore in 1944. There a British army medical officer gave him a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “enlightened, eye-opening” 1920 book Sexual Inversion. Talk about a role model! It made him feel “much better about being gay” he later said. Dudley became one of the first volunteers on London Gay Switchboard in 1974, doing countless shifts there, talking to others about coming out and he also set up the important Lesbian and Gay Bereavement Project in 1980 as he realised that the partners of lesbians and gay men were often getting little conventional support when their partners died. It went on to encourage many same-sex couples to make wills, to ensure that their relationship and wishes were properly recognised when they died and was in fact the very organisation with the word ‘gay’ in its title to win charitable status (despite initial objections from the Charity Commission!). So yes, here was a role model I would have been proud to have learnt from, when I was younger. The ‘tragedy’ of it all, was like so many other gay men of my own generation I had no idea of any of this, until I met him in the mid eighties and actually even later, as he never really ‘bragged’ about his past . It was still relatively unusual yes but the fact is there were ordinary men (and women) living together in the period from after the Great War until the sixties. It was possible.

This is not to say that the social privations during the Second World War gave carte blanche to all ‘homosexually minded’ men to express their feelings, either openly or otherwise. It was still a risky thing to do for many reasons. Another soldier who recognised that he was himself homosexual during the war, explained at a later date why he did not act on his feelings:

‘There was no sexual contact I hadwith anybody in the services. The simple reason [for me was], I got promoted to Sergeant from Corporal. As you’re getting promotions, you couldn’t take no chances. I had several chances, mind you,with two or three different private soldiers I knew. You can gauge ‘em, but the point is, when you come to look at it you say to yourself – well, is it mind over matter? You know, you say to yourself, No, I mustn’t. You’re jeopardising your chances, because if something happened you’re going to get a court martial.’

 Interestingly, there is a contrast between the attitudes of society at large- in both wars but especially the first- to the ‘conscientious objectors’, pacifists, who refused to fight on moral grounds, who were often called what were derogatory phrases such as ‘pansies’ and ‘effeminates’ in the press and public and those, like Gerald Brenan, who in the First War enlisted and went to the front and found some kind of sexual and social liberation there as a result but who were awarded military medals and crosses for valour, courage and service to country.      

Whilst all this is in no way to suggest, that the terrible sacrifices that were made by many forces personnel have any positive redemptive features, it is nevertheless to recognise that for certain people it provided a kind of escape from the heterogenerative norms that day to day life offered outside of this enforced service life and an opportunity that allowed them to explore their sexuality in a- relatively- safe environment, away from the battlefront, air raids notwithstanding.    

Some large cities also developed a network of meeting places for forces personnel that wanted company of a ‘like minded kind’. London, in particular during the war years has been frequently described in literature as ‘a melting pot’. Very early in the war, troops arrived from Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth, then from Poland after 1940 and from the United States after 1941. The influx created a new mix of people, when even those stationed in the suburbs or the country at large, came to the inner city to spend their leave.

As Merryn Allingham writes ‘London was a good place to lose oneself, and the flux of people gave men and women the opportunity to assume new identities if they wished. Greater anonymity and new opportunities for sexual adventures led to changes in sexual attitudes. Socialising between the sexes became easier, boundaries were more often breached’. Fire watching duties, for example, had the effect of obscuring boundaries between workplace and home with many offices establishing sleeping rooms for those on duty or for use as shelters in air raids.

The fact that there were ordinary homosexual men and women about in the early twentieth century can be ascertained now by simply examining the evidence which shows that there were a significant number of meeting places for them to go to (in London in particular but in other larger cities also ) which would not have been there should not have been a need for them to exist in the first place. More to the point though they were still taking a great risk in opening their doors in this period, for much of the time.   

Although homosexuals in London had always socialised in public places such as pubs, coffee houses and tea shops, it had became a little more overt, even by the early 1900’s. Waitresses ensured that a section of a Lyons Corner House (the ‘Wimpy’s or MacDonalds’ of their day) in Piccadilly Circus was reserved for ‘homosexuals’. The section became known as the ‘Lily Pond’. In 1912, London’s first gay pub (as we now know the term), Madame Strindgberg’s ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’ opened in Heddon Street, off Regent Street.

By the 1930’s there were in fact many gay establishments in central London, both cafes & public houses; perhaps the busiest in the period was The Running Horse in Shepherds Market. There were also a few gay-friendly cafés in Soho of a bohemian nature. Quentin Crisp writes about sitting for hours with his friends, making one coffee last, in the Black Cat in Old Compton Street. This was an exception though, as Soho itself was not especially gay in the inter war years, more a place for older men to pick up younger women. 

 In particular though there was The Caravan Club, in a basement in Endell Street near Covent Garden, run by Billy Reynolds and a former strongman and escapologist called Jack Neave, (known as “Iron Foot Jack” because of the metal platform he wore to compensate for a shortened leg). It was raided and shut down in September 1934. A total of 103 men and women were arrested and taken to the nearby Bow Street police station. any of the young men there were working class – labourers, shop assistants, waiters – and the majority were found not guilty in court, on the condition that they never frequented such a club again. There was, however, no leniency for Reynolds and Neave, respectively given sentences of twelve months and twenty months hard labour in prison.

Billie’s Club on Little Denmark Street attracted an alternative audience, and the acts that appeared on stage reflected this, including openly queer music hall performers. The impressive club room consisted of a dance floor and grand piano, and was a more formal and less bohemian set up than at similar clubs such as the Caravan Club.

However from May 1936 the property was under plain-clothed police surveillance; observations intensified in early November 1936, and return visitors to the venue were noted by undercover police. It was raided on the 14th November and thirty-seven people were arrested.

Another club in this period,  perhaps culturally the most interesting of all, in retrospect, was the Shim Sham Club, a gay friendly jazz venue, a ‘shim sham’ being a lively tap dance originating from Harlem, New York. However, a complainant known only as ‘HC’ who was a neighbour, in the rear of Wardour Street wrote a letter to the Commissioner of Police at New Scotland Yard on the 14th May 1935 stating ‘In the Shim Sham there is a negro band, white women carrying on perversion, women with women, men with men.. a second Caravan Club’.  It was documented as being even more shocking because it was frequented by black men “dancing with white women”. Another letter noted, ‘the encouraging of Black and White intercourse is the talk of the West End’. The police raided the club in July 1935 and it was closed but soon reopened as the ‘Rainbow Roof’; there was clearly a demand for these establishments. 

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Mad about the Boy, written by Noel Coward was released in 1932 and it is very likely it would have been played or sung live in such central London gay establishments as the´Caravan´ and ´Shim Sham´clubs.

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In retrospect, writes Vicky Iglikowski-Broad, as part of a National Archives blog article:

‘The Shim Sham’s subversive mix of race, music, politics and sexual openness made it stand out to both the police and public. It can now be seen as progressive venue that has since been championed as a black queer space and a key source of new music’.

The Shim Sham Club: ‘London’s miniature Harlem’

Police surveillance and raids of such establishments continued well into the latter part of the 20th century. A note added by Nicholas Billingham to the aforementioned article adds:

‘Plain-clothes police operations in clubs and around gay pubs continued well into the 80’s. In 1984 there was a famous case when a Tory MP was arrested by plainclothes officers in a gay theatre/strip show and there was a long debate in the Commons that year on the report stage of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act about plain clothes police entrapment of gay men including outside the Coleherne pub in Earls Court. I helped to gather evidence to brief MPs on that occasion and have plenty of documents about it including police witness statements in cases that went to court‘.

The London Gay Switchboard received calls about such events quite regularly in this period and kept a list of solicitors who would take on such cases.

However, according to an article in QX magazine by Hayden Bridge,* during the war years London during the blackout became ‘the largest and best dark room in gay history’. During the daylight, cinemas were used. The ‘best’ were little news theatres, which never put up the lights during continuous screenings of newsreels and cartoons. As I have mentioned already, one such cinema in Victoria, England’s second cinema The Biograph (originally the Bioscope), was popularly known as ‘the Biogrope’ until it was demolished in 1983. I went there in 1977 as an innocent lad taken by my hostel roommates, of which more later, to see ‘Le Grand Bouffe’  (link to trailer , a 1973 French–Italian film directed by Marco Ferreri about a group of french aristocrats that literally eat themselves to death) and can testify that it was still pretty seedy even then. I was entirely innocent of the building’s long reputation at the time. I had my film ticket held in my mouth as I was carrying various other things. ‘Ere, don’t put it in your mouth luv’ observed the laconic, weary attendant.

The Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT) remains one of the oldest ongoing LGBTQ venues in London and indeed in England. It has been recognised for its notable drag performances since the 1940’s (the late lamented Paul O Grady aka the infamous Lily Savage, called it The Royal Vauxhall Tavern School of Dramatic Art” as well as his ‘spiritual home’) though it became more particularly recognised as a gay venue early in the ’50s. In fact it was built on the site of the infamous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a known cruising spot in London since the 1800s. It became a grade II listed building in 2015, because of its long gay related history. Also in 1946, the City of Quebec Tavern opened (in Quebec St) and this has somehow managed to remain gay ever since, making it one of, if not the oldest gay pub now in London.

But there were ‘private members clubs’ also, where you had to be signed in by a member. The A&B (Arts and Battledress Club) was one such private club and opened in Orange Street, in 1941, behind the National Gallery. In 1952 it moved to Rupert St in Soho and was still going, as the ‘A&B’, even in the mid 1980’s. The Swiss Tavern in Old Compton St opened in 1941 and had a reputation even then, during the war years. It became the famous ‘Comptons Of Soho‘ in 1986, described as Britain’s highest grossing pub for its size; QX Magazine referred to it as “The Grand Dame of Queer Street” . Others clubs included the Gateway (informally known as The Gates) in Chelsea, one of the very few places in London which lesbians could openly meet at (although it was quite mixed in its early years). Now all are long gone (besides Comptons). Several other British cities had pubs and clubs in the early twentieth century where gay men (and  to a lesser extent lesbians) could meet openly. All this (and so much more) was awaiting my discovery a few decades later.

On to Sex, love and life (The Backstory) 1.5 Mid century-a time of temporary setbacks and of a moral tightening

BACK to Sex, Love, Life: an index

It would also be remiss of me, after discussing somewhat flawed playrights and poets, in part 1, not to mention the famous hispanic poet and playright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 -1936). He is not someone I ‘discovered’ until relatively recently, as I explored my hispanophilia more fully and so I cannot claim to have even considered him a potential role model in my youth. However, he would certainly have been someone worthy of consideration at the time, had I known more about him.

Most of the classic texts on Lorca were not published until the late seventies and eighties and perhaps one of the most famous biographies ‘Federico Garcia Lorca’, by Ian Gibson was published in 1989, explores far more of the way his homosexuality shaped his work (which, as it turns out was considerable) than previous work. He was obsessed by death and was of course infamously, shot for his support of the Republicans, and what was deemed then his ‘blasphemous’ work and his assumed ‘deviant sexuality’, by Nationalist troops in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. At the time of his death he had been seeing his novio,boyfriend, Rafael Rodriguez Rapun for some years, although was being relatively secret about it, and as the era became ever more repressive, little documentation of their relationship exists. Rapun also died, a year to the day after Lorca’s death, in the Civil War whilst fighting on the front, as Franco’s troops tried to take Santander in August 1937. Some say he deliberately sacrificed himself; he was just 25.

One of the famous artists and protagonists that Lorca mixed with (and my goodness he mixed with so many..) and was inspired by, in his earlier life and work was Salvador Dali, (1904-1989) with whom he had a relationship, in the late twenties for some years. He also met and became friends with Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) in this period and was inspired by his creative output and energy, though Bunuel’s rather curt dismissal of his play Mariana Pineda and then of his sexuality, turned the relationship less than luke-warm. In truth though, all three sparked off each other, in this exceptionally creative period in our recent European history (though Lorca actually had quite an important role in developing and encouraging literary creativity in South America as well: he loved for example the vibrancy of Buenos Aires).

In retrospect, Lorca would have been (indeed still can be..) a reasonable role model, despite his ‘demons’, as although he lived his personal life very carefully and secretly initially, afraid in particular of his families disapproval, (especially his fathers’), eventually he was relatively open as a gay man in the early thirties, as indeed was Dali, although Dali very much less so later on, as his fame and career blossomed. In fact Dali in later years, sought to play down this aspect of their relationship, claiming that Lorca was more effete and much more into him than he was into Lorca, even suggesting that Lorca tried to have penetrative sex with him a number of times but that he had to rebuff him. I cannot help but notice he did not rebuff ideas that he had penetrative sex with Lorca however. Dali was always (or perhaps as his fame grew, became) a hugely egotistical character and there was a tendency in his later career that anything which might have been seen as ‘negative’ in the past was always rebuffed, denied, if at all possible.  

There is however something else that reading Lorca’s biography reveals, which I think is particularly important and relates to something that it took me many years to learn, to realise. History records many things about the men and women whom we look back upon, that we may try in some way to learn from, to see if they could be our own role models. All too often however it only records their successes: the things that they wrote, discovered, said or imagined that were feted. Yet too little attention is paid to recognising that for all the success that such people eventually enjoyed, there are often a myriad of projects, ideas, thoughts, that are ‘failures’. Failures in the sense that they do not get any attention, they fail to get off the ground or ignite peoples passion or interest. 

The reality is that everyone has failures and has to come to accept that a lot of creative activity: thought, sweat, tears, has gone into something which does not progress, does not receive wider kudos and is not perceived as a success. Philosophers have taught us about the acceptance of failure. Socrate’s view was that philosophy itself is a lifelong lesson in preparation for our own death, in that it attests to the eventual ‘failure’ of us all. Becoming mindful of death makes us honest about our universal impermanence, argues William Desmond in ‘Philosophy and Failure’. Indeed, within society we have long nurtured those writers, poets, playrights who have created work that has the ability in tragi and comic forms (or indeed both), to name and transfigure failure. A more modern philosophical interpretation of failure is one of defiance. Philosophy is perhaps in the best position to address failure because it knows it intimately with every new philosophical generation taking it as its duty to point out the failures of the previous one.

Costica Bradatan, in an 2013 article entitled ‘In praise of failure’ in the New York Times argues that:

We insatiably devour other species, denude the planet of life and fill it with trash. Failure could be a medicine against such arrogance and hubris, as it often brings humility.Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are.

We need to preserve, cultivate, even treasure this capacity. It is crucial that we remain fundamentally imperfect, incomplete, erring creatures; in other words, that there is always a gap left between what we are and what we can be. Whatever human accomplishments there have been in history, they have been possible precisely because of this empty space.

This strikes me as something which needs to be essentially recognised, a part of our very being. Yet our written history generally ignores these things and tells us all too often that ‘life was beautiful’. It took me years to realise and accept that just because something does not ‘make the grade’, get accepted or work out, it does not mean that you should give up trying. That in fact, some of the greatest people in our history books are those who experienced failure and yet did exactly this, kept on trying. My point being that I initially thought that my role models had to be perfect, pristine. I realise now that they do not. Now, I would never consider someone’s life – or my life- a failure if things simply did not work out sometimes. I have beaten myself up too many times for personal failure before coming to recognise that it teaches us many important things about ourselves: it is humbling, it is a natural thing, and a very useful learning experience.

I would have liked to have known long before I did, that it does not matter to sometimes fail at what you set out to do, as long as you can learn from that and move on. Lorca, we realise in Ian Gibson’s marvellous erudite biography, had many projects he was working on that never came to fruition and a good biography will always tell you about those times along with the successes, the ‘good times’. There were things that I attempted in my life that never came to fruition and I felt an abject sense of failure about. Equally, in the same way for Lorca, we understand that his relationship with Dali was never what he really wanted it to be. Some things in a budding relationship are simply outside of our control. For Lorca it really did not help that Bunuel more or less poisoned Dali against Lorca for some time (a strong word but I believe it is justified by the evidence Gibson presents in Lorca’s biography). There is a relatively happy ending to this tale though, in that although they didn’t see each other for many years, just before Lorca’s murder they did meet up again one last time: there was a reconciliation and a realisation that they still thought in much the same way and still understood, had an empathy, for each other. Lorca was very happy that they had done this and presumably went to his grave with this knowledge. Equally on learning of Lorca’s death, I think Dali would have been comforted by the reality of their last meeting.    

Bunuel, (however negative his views on homosexuality, although I did not know this then) sparked an interest fairly early in my own life, as I had developed a particular passion for films and filmmaking, in the period after I had come up to London and had joined the National Film Theatre (NFT), which was (and remains) a marvellous cultural oasis on the South Bank in the late seventies, along with the South Bank Centre and the National Theatre. I went to see a retrospective of Bunuel’s work there one evening and was introduced to the selective delights of ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (An Andalucian dog) (link to whole short film, 1929, 16 mins, warning.. this is absolutely not for the faint hearted!) Bunuel’s early short masterpiece, made in collaboration with Dali in Paris in 1929 (and now reputed to be a ‘put down’ of the Andalucian Lorca). It soon became clear to me from their programmes, seasons & catalogues that there was also a historical context in which sexual alternatives and difference had been portrayed in the cinema for many years previously. 

I discovered for example, that just after the First Great War ended in 1918, around a decade before Bunuel became active, perhaps remarkably, a German film titled Anders als die Andern (link to whole restored film on Vimeo, ‘Different from the Others’, 1919) was released, starring Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel. The story was co-written by Richard Oswald and Magnus Hirschfeld, who partially funded the production, through his groundbreaking work at the Institute for Sexual Science. The film was intended as a polemic against the then-current laws under Germany’s Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense, as in the UK. It is therefore believed to be the first ‘pro-gay’ film made in the world. 

The cinematography was by Max Fassbender, who two years previously had worked on Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray, one of the earliest cinematic treatments of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Veidt himself became a major film star the year after Anders was released, in the rather more famous but less controversial film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Anders als die Andern is one of the first sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals in cinema, even though it concerns the blackmailing of a gay couple. In fact the film’s basic plot was used again in the 1961 UK film, Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde and was considered groundbreaking even then, over 40 years later, an issue on which I will return. However, unfortunately it served to highlight the issue in a negative way, with the censors and laws enacted in reaction to films like Anders als die Andern, eventually restricting viewing of the film specifically to doctors and medical researchers. It is no great surprise that prints of the film were among the many “decadent” works burned by the Nazi’s, after they came to power in 1933.

The film premiered in May 1919 and was initially successful at the cinema. However shortly after the premiere, conservative Catholic, Protestant, and anti-semitic right-wing groups started to protest and disturb the public screenings. This initiated an extensive public debate on censorship in general in the still relatively new medium of cinema. The constitution of the Weimar Republic had initially assured freedom of speech and expression, but after the debate, special qualifications were created for cinema in response to the production. It was decided that in future films which were characterised as ‘obscene’ or as dangerous to young people’ were to be censored. Whilst Hirschfeld organised screenings of the film for members of the Weimar National Assembly, the Prussian State Council, and Landtag of Prussia, along with government officials in Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, hoping to impress them of its merit, this did not yield any positive results.

In May 1920, specific censorship provisions for films were approved by legislators, a censors office was created in Berlin and its first review was of Different from the Others. Unfortunately the censorship commission consisted of three psychiatrists: Emil Kraepelin, Albert Moll, and Siegfried Placzek, and all were opponents of Hirschfeld and his advocacy of the legalisation of homosexuality. The panel eventually recommended a ban on the public screening of the film, which was put in place in October 1920.

The judgement was that the film was biased towards Paragraph 175 and thus presented a one-sided view, hence confusing young audiences about homosexuality, and also that it might be used for the recruitment of underage viewers to become homosexuals (and this was a theme that was to become very popular in conservative circles throughout the next half decade and even beyond: a classic moral panic in fact). The film was allowed to be shown only in private and to medical professionals. At the end, the only venue where the film was screened for public viewing was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, where it was shown for education and at special events.

The film, which co-starred and was co-written by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, refers to Hirschfeld’s radical theory of “sexual intermediacy”. The theory places homosexuality within a broad spectrum comprising heterosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and transvestism (a word invented by Hirschfeld). The film’s protagonist first meets his blackmailer at a costume party, and the blackmailer also frequents a drag club; these scenes are the earliest film footage of gay men and lesbians dancing. The film was initially distributed with 40 copies throughout Germany and the Netherlands. The Nazis however destroyed the majority of the prints and at one stage only one copy of the film was known to have survived. I could not find any evidence that a copy was ever screened in the UK around the time of its original release. Interestingly the german film, ‘Mädchen in Uniform’ (link to a pristine, colourised version of the film, with English subtitles, 1931, English title; Maidens in Uniform) of which a fresh new print has been recently exhibited, was also the first pro-lesbian film in the world, although it too attracted censorship by the Nazis after 1933.

Whilst homosexuality in any form was never openly accepted in mainstream society in the UK in this period, it does seem that coded references to it became ever more frequent after the early 1920’s and more especially so in the early thirties. The partial liberalisation of culture and emancipation of women played some part in this, as did slightly more liberal concepts of gender stereo-typicalisation which allowed a somewhat greater ‘fluidity’ in how both men & women presented themselves in society, though this was mainly confined to the larger (or largest) urban metropolises. It would remain something that was not discussed- at least openly- in ‘polite society’ for some generations yet. 

Certainly, there was an increase in prevalent artistic and cultural bourgeois countercultures of the late twenties and early thirties, exemplified, for example, by the young short skirted, bobbed haired dancing, smoking, female Flappers, the literary ‘Bloomsbury set’ in the UK, and artistically by the Dada pacifist movement originating in Switzerland, which begot Surrealism, the Wandervogel health & naturist movement in Germany (before it became infused with strongly fascistic overtones after the mid thirties), and in the later thirties & throughout the Second War War, the Swingjugend movement influenced by American Jazz sounds & culture in the late thirties and early forties originating in parts of north Germany but eventually spreading more widely through Germany into France, Poland & Czechoslavakia, which opposed fascism (though it was not especially ‘pro-gay’, as for example, they nicknamed the Hitler Youth movement the ‘Homo Youth’, who in turn described them as ‘effete’, both sides trading insults), although they did at least welcome Jewish youngsters. In fact many of its more open exponents were eventually interred in Nazi concentration camps.  

Its artistic legacy remained one of the reasons why the Liverpudlian Beatles went to Hamburg for some time in the late fifties. With similar ideas about permissiveness and with jazz music as its key moniker, there were also the Zazou youth movements in France, the Potapky in Czechoslavakia and the Schlurfs in Austria, right through the late 1930’s and into the 1940’s. In the UK itself American jazz styles were even more pronounced in clubs in the largest cities, helped in the Second World War by the influx of -in particular- black American soldiers. But I am moving forwards a little too rapidly now.

On to Sex, Love and life,(The Backstory) 1.4 Chinks of liberation, the countdown to war and changing moralities

BACK to Sex, Love and Life: an index

If we look more closely at the first few decades during the last century, specifically in the UK and especially the period around and just after the First Great War, there is clearly an increase in the number of cultural references in documentation that we can find about sexuality per se, (an increase which seems greater than that which would have occurred simply because of the fact that it is generally better documented). The effect of an ‘alternative culture’, styles, literature and society norms of the period. in western Europe at least, seems distinct. Increasingly, we find that literature from this period is suffused with the stories of those who have refused to define themselves within the parameters of ‘normalative’ sexuality.

Increasingly too, this built into a cultural milieu, which came to accept that some of the most important artistic work of the period was, in fact, being created by what we now see as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people. The notion of these groups of people as being ‘sexually deviant’, both legally and in terms of mainstream societal attitudes to them, was increasingly seen, at least in artistic and literary circles, as something that was positively important: integral to their cultural output. Just an inkling of something that might be grasped by those looking, searching, in relation to finding positive role models.

Sometimes though, this has only been recognised with hindsight. In the biography of the traveller and hispanophile Gerald Brenan, (1894-1987) who as a writer saw military service and wrote about France in the First Great War and then later became involved with the rather boyish (Dora) Carrington of the ‘Bloomsbury set’ in the early 1920’s we find that many of Brenan’s views were rooted in the deeply patriarchal society that he grew up in and that his father, in particular, represented for him, I think to some extent he never really grew out of or away from these values, despite his wish to escape this and his subsequently relatively unorthodox (though by no means completely unorthodox) lifestyle and fraternisation  with the Bloomsbury set and the Yegen peasantry in southern Spain.  

His biographer, Jonathon Gaythorne-Hardy, nevertheless writes of the strong fraternal bond that existed between him and his wartime friend Ralph Partridge, whom, like Gerald, also served and was decorated in the First War. It now seems clear to me, from studying much of his literature and letters, that Brennan repressed and indeed felt repressed by aspects of his sexuality most of his life, though in his autobiographical work he tends to concentrate more on his early problems with impotence. It was only when well into his sixties, Gaythorne-Hardy writes, that he even felt able to discuss more openly what homosexual men actually did (this observation likely comes from conversations both directly and in his letters to Ralph Partridge in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s).

His closest friend when young, Hope Johnson, with whom he shared many aspects of his life and whom we know was at least bisexual, though predominantly homosexual, was certainly ‘in love’ with Gerald when Gerald was in his late teens and early twenties (Hope was around five years older than Gerald) but we also know that Brenan convinced him to repress this aspect of their relationship, or at least the physical side of it, in correspondence that survives. It perhaps goes some way to understanding why Brenan always said he had a ‘lovely war’; (in his letters to Ralph Partridge, during the second war, he again references this feeling, almost attraction); a war where, for the first time, aspects of the highly repressive and rigidly conventional society that he and many other men (and women) like him in the late Victorian & early Edwardian period had grown up with, were of necessity, (to some extent at least) thrown off or at least relaxed. 

Arguably, his early life and the periods spent living in the small pueblo of Yegen, in the remote (at the time) Alpajarra´s region of Spanish Andalucia, were attempts to escape the stifling conventional morality of the period. Equally, much of his early life was spent trying to ensure that he met with his parents approval and it must always be remembered that this played a large part in young people’s lives generally, throughout much of the nineteenth and  twentieth centuries, as admitting openly to what was then seen as ‘deviant sexuality’ would of course have been a huge scandal, that one’s parents and close family would have to have a share in.

Brenan always aspired to become a poet, although he never really quite achieved this in his life (he became better known for his contemporary and literary histories of Spain and autobiographical material). However, there were certainly gay poets in the period just before the First War producing a lot of work, though such material was usually heavily self censored.

Constantine Cavafy, (1863-1933) the Greek poet, is perhaps the most obvious example and for me personally one of the first poets presenting ‘otherness’ that I became aware of, in my late teens. I managed to buy a book of his collected works at the age of 18 and found some of his work resonated very strongly.

There was a wonderfully gritty reality that I found in them (more especially the erotic poems, it is true) that I felt I could relate too, I could visualise myself having the kind of encounters that he was writing about and relate to him. In particular, even I, understood then what he was saying in poems like ‘Understanding‘ written in 1918:

My younger days, my sensual life-

how clearly I see their meaning now

In the loose living of my early years

the impulses of my poetry were shaped.

the boundaries of my art were plotted

That’s why the regretting was so fickle

And my resolutions to hold back, to change,

lasted two weeks at the most.

I could see that he was already, in looking back, realising there had been an underlying pathway his life would take, whether he consciously knew it or not and that efforts to change it were doomed to fail. I saw how he explores the idea that the creativity he has in him is being shaped, moulded, by these desires. It is the very essence of him, his being. We see homosexual writers, playrights, poets return to this theme again and again, in their work. This was an important realisation for me: this thing inside was my very ‘essence‘ and could not, would not, be shaken off lightly. 

 WH Auden noted as much in his introduction to the 1961 volume The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy when he wrote, “Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact.” Auden added:

“As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest. He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles. The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs. Love, there, is rarely more than physical passion … at the same time, he refuses to pretend that his memories of moments of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.”

I’m not entirely sure however, that I agree with Auden here; even the poem above, for example, to me seems to indicate something deeper than lust exists for Cavafy on the sensual plane, although he may not call it ‘love’. In fact he constantly yearns for lost love in many poems, ‘In the Evening’ (1917) for example, where he reads again and again a lovers letter and becomes sad, as he reflects over these lost times.  

CM. Bowra, in his essay “Constantine Cavafy and the Greek Past” (published in The Creative Experiment), affirms his belief that Cavafy was an individualist,who did not attempt to boderalise any particular literary convention or thematic style:

“Cavafy used neither Greek nor Western European models. Still less did he owe anything to the East. His manner was his own invention, the reflection of his temperament and his circumstances, guided by a natural instinct for words. Even in his language, he went his own way.” 

With no role models available to him (as far as we are aware), Cavafy very much forged his own path. Maybe, I thought, I would need to do the same? Although born in Egypt, one wonders whether his early to mid teen childhood upbringing in Liverpool, England, over a formative seven year period during his youth had anything to do with shaping his direct style. In Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy, (link to book preview, Princeton University Press, 1977) Jane Lagoudis Pinchin too, makes the point that: 

‘Cavafy’s erotic poems are grittily realistic … lovers meet ‘On the Stair’ of wretched brothels, ‘At the Theatre,’ ‘At the Cafe Door,’ in front of ‘The Windows of the Tobacco Shop’… [They] work in dull offices, or for tailors, ironmongers, or small shopkeepers‘.

Though his work was unpublished throughout his lifetime (he died, aged seventy of cancer in 1933), due to the nature of much of his creative output, it became more widely established after the 1935 publication (in Egypt) of a collection simply entitled ‘Poems‘. (link to all the work in the book Poems, a marvelously readable selection). The writer, EM Forster knew him personally, writing a memoir of him, contained in his book Alexandria. In fact Forster, Arnold  Toynbee and TS Eliot were among the earliest promoters of Cavafy in the English-speaking world, immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

Was Cavafy then perhaps the role model I had been hoping to find? Well, yes: perhaps.

The more I delved in my late teens, the more I realised there were in fact other contenders, closer to home, that might act as potential role models. Although they had less impact on me personally, equally and rather better documented in their lifetimes, many of their finest poems spawned by experiences during the Great War (including Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est”) might not exist, were it not for the pivotal bond between three men, whom it is generally acknowledged, were the era’s finest (First) War poets: Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1987), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Robert Graves (1895-1985). All three have been defined, in hindsight, as being either bisexual or homosexual men. It is more difficult in my opinion, to see however, again in hindsight, how these three- though clearly influential -might have become role models as they, all three in fact, were rather flawed at various times in their lives (this begs the good, indeed important question as to why we might not simply accept them as flawed role models of course, to which I will return later..) but, nevertheless.   

Sassoon, the eldest of the three, came from an upper middle class background, his father a part of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish merchant family, enlisted in the British Army in August 1914, Wilfred Owen, who was from a less affluent working class family, also enlisted in October 1915. The writer Laura Bateman has explored the meeting of Sassoon & Owen in an article entitled ‘Sassoon and Owen: A meeting that changed the course of literature’, indeed the meeting itself became a part of the basis of the tremendous trilogy of books by Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy (link to an analysis of the trilogy Regenerational Haunting with previews) published between 1991-1994). It is hard not to be profoundly moved, when Barker introduces this meeting into the narrative, in chapter three. 

During active service, both men endured traumatic experiences, but whilst Owen became neurasthenic (shell shocked), Sassoon became exceptionally disillusioned with the conduct of the war. He was in the same battalion as Robert Graves, the 3rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers and though eight years his senior, they shared digs together in Liverpool (again!) during January 1917, whilst awaiting further action in France. He was strongly influenced by Graves’ war poetry as well, already published as Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers (link to whole text, quite a risque, daring title for the time). In ‘Goodbye to All That’, Sassoon, in later correspondence, remarked upon the “heavy sexual elements” within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men, although Graves was to later assert that ‘he never loved Sassoon in the same fashion that Sassoon loved him’ (Graves). Barker in ‘Regeneration’ has Sassoon as very much accepting his sexuality in a way that Owen and Graves seemed to find more difficult (though for differing reasons). She has him talk to the therapist at Craiglochhart about it, though it is still ‘encoded’, to some extent, as such conversations would most likely have been then; she notes how Sassoon was influenced by letters and a meeting with Edward Carpenter and his book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ (link to book preview) though has the therapist suggest this is not necessarily a very helpful definition of sexuality.

We know from archive correspondence, that in his first letter to Carpenter (dated 27th July 1911), Sassoon writes about how his mind has been opened since reading Carpenter’s works and it has helped him realise his own (homo)sexuality. In fact he had read Carpenter’s 1908 book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ in 1910 and his letters to Carpenter call him both “the leader and the prophet”.

“What ideas I had about homosexuality were absolutely prejudicial and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be… the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathies for women a mystery to me..

Again, we have this notion that his sexuality was almost a ‘given’, something ‘innate’; feelings similar to those that Cavafy was exploring in his work around a decade or so earlier and indeed at that time also.  

“I cannot say what it [The Intermediate Sex] has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on.”

He is clearly full of admiration for the Sheffield socialist and signs off his first letter to Carpenter with a motto: “Strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.” Strong stuff. Sassoon came from a wealthy family but his eyes were opened by Carpenter’s socialist idealism, which he later put into practice, at least to some extent, in his own life.

Here we very clearly have Carpenter acting as a ‘role model’ for Sassoon as early as 1911. I find it now, immensely sad that this was not something I came across earlier in my life and almost shocking that Sassoon was able to write this at this time, whilst I would find nothing of this value sixty to seventy years later. Sassoon thus comes as close as anyone perhaps to the role model I never quite had.

Through Sassoon, Graves also became a friend of Wilfred Owen, they being very much closer in age. In 1960, he recollected that ‘he often used to send me poems from France, in late 1917, through until his death in 1918’. Though Graves was at least bisexual, in fact he called himself a “pseudo-homosexual, in his autobiography, the tendency having been inflicted on him by his public school education at Charterhouse, as for every one person born homosexual, he felt at last ten others became homosexual due to their public school upbringing. Today, it might be argued that in fact the experience just brought out the always latent potential homosexuality in nearly everyone, in such an environment. Equally, it usefully served to distance himself from such difficult subject matter in that period, as a married man. 

He also developed a close bond with (the nine years older) George Mallory, the climber lost on Everest in June 1924, who became a role model or perhaps more accurately, a mentor to him. George Mallory, like Gerald Brenan was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury set, who also wrote a cache of quite flirtatious letters to Lynton Strachey, discussing the beauty of Rupert Brooks amongst others. We know from letters that Strachey was certainly very taken by Mallory’s dark, handsome good looks.

Graves soon married after the war, although his subsequent relationships with women were all generally rather fraught and complex; he went on to father eight children, becoming a hugely prolific writer, publishing his own autobiography ‘Goodbye to all that´in 1929, and also wrote the novel ‘I Claudius’ in 1934. His experiences in the war continued to exercise a powerful influence on him until his death in Majorca, like Gerald Brenan another hispanophile, in 1985. Reading his autobiography however, in my late teens, did not strongly predispose me to think of Graves as a role model though, as if anything it complicated my thoughts and feelings on the matter.  Was I in fact also a ‘pseudo homosexual’ who would still grow out of these feelings? 

For Sassoon, just a few months later in July 1917, his now infamous letter ‘Finished with War: A Soldier’s Declaration‘ was published in The Times, outlining his anger at the War Office for the “callous complacence” with which they treated the British soldiers. Worried that he would be court marshalled and dishonourably discharged for his views, Graves wrote to the Military Authorities and suggested that in fact Sassoon was suffering from neurasthenia; this rationale was accepted by the authorities and he was sent for treatment to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where Owen was also receiving treatment.

Bateman writes:

‘In Sassoon’s diaries, there is a wonderfully vivid description of Owen (who hero-worshipped Sassoon for the truthfulness of his work, and possibly also because there is no getting away from the fact that Sassoon was what we might now call quite a looker..) knocking timidly on the door of Sassoon’s room with a stack of Sassoon’s latest poetry collection, ‘The Old Huntsman‘, to be signed. Sassoon obliges, and what will prove a fateful friendship begins.

Owen was unpublished and unknown at this point; he (had) not written about the war, feeling it to be “too ugly” for the beauty of verse. His doctor, Arthur Brock, and Sassoon in particular encouraged him to try it as a form of therapy, and so the earliest drafts of some of Owen’s most acclaimed work- Dulce et Decorum est, Strange Meeting and his generally accepted masterpiece, Anthem for Doomed Youth– were born. 

We know from archive correspondence, that in his first letter to Carpenter (dated 27th July 1911), Sassoon writes how his mind has been opened since reading Carpenter’s works and it has helped him realise his own (homo)sexuality. In fact he had read Carpenter’s 1908 book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ in 1910 and his letters to Carpenter call him both “the leader and the prophet”.

“What ideas I had about homosexuality were absolutely prejudicial and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be… the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathies for women a mystery to me..

Again, we have this notion that his sexuality was almost a ‘given’, something ‘innate’; feelings similar to those that Cavafy was exploring in his work around a decade or so earlier (and still indeed in that period also).  

“I cannot say what it [The Intermediate Sex] has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on.”

He is clearly full of admiration for the Sheffield socialist and signs off his first letter to Carpenter with a motto: “Strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.” Strong stuff. Sassoon came from a wealthy family but his eyes were opened by Carpenter’s socialist idealism, which he later put into practice, at least to some extent, in his own life.

Here we surely have Carpenter acting as a ‘role model’ for Sassoon as early as 1911. I find it now, immensely sad that this was not something I came across earlier in my life and almost shocking that Sassoon was able to write this at this time, whilst I would find nothing of this value as I tried, sixty to seventy years later. Sassoon thus comes as close as anyone to the role model I never quite had, at least in this experiential and experimental period in his life.

Owen was not so fortunate in life. At the very end of August 1918, Owen returned to the front line and was awarded a Military Cross for an offensive he led near the village of Joncourt. However, whilst crossing the Sambre-Oise canal, Owen was killed in action. This was on the 4th November 1918, exactly one week almost to the hour, before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war; he was also promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death. With great poignancy, his mother received the telegram informing her of his death on the Armistice Day itself, as the church bells in her home in Shrewsbury were ringing out in celebration. His work was mainly published post-humously and his reputation has grown from that.

I think, in hindsight, there was plenty to admire about the characters of all three men and particularly the way they were able to express their emotions through their literary work. I would have been happy to understand these experiences in this context, in a positive way, when I was growing up and I think it would have encouraged me to envisage the potential of at least trying different relationships to see what might have worked for me. As it was, I too was to experiment with expressing my emotions in this way, in my early twenties, finding it a useful creative outlet for putting intense feelings to bed, so as to speak, although I cannot claim any kind of great accomplishment in the quality of what I wrote. Nevertheless, I was to wonder, some decades later, at the very start of the nineties, what exactly led me to experiment with verse, as a way of releasing some of the emotions I was experiencing, in the late seventies and decide that it was certainly at least partly a result of having seen others creative writing and poetry, in this early period of my life.

Sassoon in particular, certainly had no qualms in his early life with experimentation. He won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the “Sherston Trilogy’‘ (on the Internet Archive, borrow the whole trilogy) and lived a full and active life, only dying in 1967. He also went on to have, what, on the surface, seems a rich and fulfilling emotional life, having consummated sexual relationships with a number of men, some famous (along with others) including Ivor Novello, the Welsh actor, (his real name being David Davies); Prince Philip of Hesse, a German aristocrat; Beverly Nichols, the English writer and he also had a long term affair with the Hon. Stephen Tennant, (1906-1987), the flamboyant English aristocrat and artist, who also wrote ‘Love in A Cold Climate’ (the inspiration for ‘Brideshead Revisited’).

Tennant, who was a ‘bright young thing’ whom later went about with the infamous (and vehemently homosexual) Noel Coward, amongst others, does at first glance seem a slightly odd choice for Sassoon.However, the connection, the fraternal bond, is there. His brother Lt. Edward Wyndham Tennant (known as Bim or Bimbo by friends and family) was also a war poet and was killed in the Somme aged 19, on the 22 September 1916. It seems likely that Sassoon recognised a kindred spirit in the family line and that both he and Tennant were already highly emotionally involved in what we would now call ‘the backstory’. Both Tennant’s and Sassoon’s personal diaries (only released since 2005) document their passion though quite clearly. Tennant describes in his, how ‘He (Sassoon):

‘..put his mouth over mine crushing it – some kisses seem to draw the very soul out of one’s body – his do mine. I feel all my heart swooning at the touch of his mouth – my soul dies a hundred million deaths when his face is on my face and neck.”

Yes, I think we´ve all been there. It may also be that Sassoon admired the courage in Tennant’s overt flamboyancy. The passionate, and at times fiery romance lasted for a full six years from 1926 to 1932. Of course The Times profusive obituary of him in September 1967, mentioned none of this. A year later, in 1933 Sassoon married, to a much younger wife, Hester Getty, (which of course was mentioned in his obituary) and they had a son, George, together, which he had always wanted. Another example of how difficult it was to untangle the reality in those days. Although I would like to think and say that things worked out well for him, the diaries and Egremont’s lengthy autobiography from 2005, show us that Sassoon was in the end still a somewhat tortured soul, never completely coming to terms with his sexuality. In fact he ended up hating Tennant, divorcing Hester in 1945 and converting to catholicism (as too for example, had ‘Bosie’ before him). 

Regarding his intense relationship with Tennant, Philip Hoare, the writer, (who incidentally hung out with exactly the same group of friends as myself at school in Falmouth, back in the early seventies, already a rather fine aesthete. Hoare also edited a catalogue for the Pet Shop Boys in 1996. In researching this book, I noticed there was a remarkable similarity in looks between the young Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and Stephen Tennant at a similar age. I cannot find anything which would suggest they are related! I did come to wonder whether Neil uses this fact in his song ‘Being Boring’ however, (.. ‘a cache of old photos from the twenties’..) of which more later) wrote an interesting book ‘Serious Pleasures‘ about Tennant in the early nineties. Dickon Edwards reviews the book rather well on Good Reads:

Stephen Tennant was just a flamboyant gay who didn’t really do anything,” says one of the many supporting players in Mr Hoare’s exhaustive doorstopper of a biography..

True, this is the life of a man who essentially is best known for being a striking-looking girlish boy at London parties in the 1920s (as one of the ‘Bright Young Things’), then spending the rest of his life loafing about in his mansion. He was born into wealth and could do whateverhe liked. There was no need to prove himself, no ambition, no drive. He did manage to have some modest success as a painter, but never really advanced past the status of cult figure, at best. There’s just something about Stephen. The ultimate lonely gay aristocrat, so free yet so trapped. This book redeems him, in a way, proving that just being a beautiful boy turned reclusive eccentric is an achievement of sorts’.

I think Dickon Edwards is being a little harsh here. Tennant did have notable success as a writer and artist in his lifetime, his wealth however allowed him the freedom to have a lot more leisure time than most of us ever have in our lives.

Returning to Sassoons life however, with regard to his homosexuality, although it had consistently featured as a major theme in his plans for a prose book in the early 1920s, it was eventually never discussed in either the ‘Sherston’ memoirs he wrote between 1928-36 or his later trilogy of autobiographies, penned between 1938-45, the latter written well after his period of homosexual relationships had finished. This rather tarnishes his status as a potential role model, especially in his later years, at least for me personally, as there is a feeling that he was not being true to himself in recounting this early period. True, this must be set against the likely restrictions set by the publishers of such material in this period and the effect that such revelations might have had on his status at the time in society, both personally and in respect of his literary reputation. You will have your own opinions as to whether such omissions in these works were acceptable.

And yet…and yet, a recently discovered unpublished late poem from 1964, three years before his death, shows us Sassoon talking to his ‘intellect and intuition’:

Capricious indecisive intellect,

Now that our busy work is left behind

Despite your claim to be the march of mind

Your rulings have not won my whole respect.

and ends:

Love is the law of life, and love we must

Our first and final purpose to pursue. This seems to tie up love: love for ones parents or keepers as we grow up and a divine love for God, as we near the end. And yet my sense is that it is also imbued with a secondary meaning, as if to say how he has (finally)realised on reflection how important it is to find love per se, how we must go forwards with our heart, our soul, rather than purely our intellect and explore ‘love’ where we find its form comes to rest in our lives. Was he perhaps trying to finally reconcile these two parts of his life, as he approached death?

Whilst discussing the notion of flawed stories, it is probably also worth pointing out that just because someone defined as ‘homosexual’ in this period does not, should not, make them immediate candidates for potential role models. Take for example the case of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. whose diaries are in the process of being re-published as I write this, Simon Heffer having just edited the first tranche of, now, unexpurgated material, covering the period from 1918-1938. Although Channon (later Sir Henry Channon) who was the Tory MP for Southend West from 1935-50, was avowedly homosexual for most of his life, it turns out that he held some abysmal views on many subjects: he was racist, sexist, prejudiced, selfish and, if he wasn’t gay himself, would no doubt have been homophobic too. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) said of the early phase of Channon’s life in the 1920’s ‘adoring London society, privilege, rank, and wealth, he became an energetic, implacable, but endearing social climber’. After becoming married , into the wealthy Guinness family in 19 33, they divorced in 1936 and he begun a series of affairs with other men including, (like Sassoon) the actor and composer, Ivor Novello* and the playright Terence Rattigan. His diaries in fact are quite well written and incisive in their own way. However, Nancy Mitford, who had rather a way with words like Channon, said of the diaries:

‘You can’t think how vile & spiteful & silly it is. One always thought Chips was rather a dear, but he was black inside, how sinister‘!

He was initially an appeaser in the Second World War, being quite a fan of the Nazis (although this was not an unusual trait amongst many of British upper classes in the thirties). He met Goering and wrote that ‘his merry eyes twinkled’, was impressed by Joseph Goebbels and when attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, wrote ‘how one felt one was in the presence of some semi divine creature’.. ‘secretly I am pro-german and prefer even the Nazis to the French’. Clearly as a homosexual man he was not the best role model material. It is important to see the whole picture in making an assessment, though this too has often been obscured for reasons other than the subjects sexuality.

Interestingly, Ivor Novello, could also have been a candidate as a role model; he had primarily one partner his whole life, the actor Robert ‘Bobbie’ Andrews but they had an open relationship in the latter part of it and until Novello died in 1951. His last success was the rather fitting musical ‘Gays the Word’ starring Cicily Courtneidge.  A rather famous London based bookshop would go on to take the name in later years. In fact (though it shouldn’t be surprising) the more you look at source material, the more evidence of a thriving homosexual culture in the early part of the twentieth century you find now. It is perhaps more surprising that so much was covered up of this culture; that quite so much remained unknown to me, as I grew up, feeling both alone and confused.

On to Sex, Love and Life, (The Backstory): 1.3 Fledgling alternative communities in the early twentieth century (part2)

BACK to Sex, Love, Life: an index

Many recent historians, biographers, have made much of the fact that, particularly now, (but even half a century ago if one really wished to do the groundwork & follow the paper trail) we can discover, by careful perusal of the available documentation in historical archives and (still) some reading between the lines, that there was a large amount of -mainly clandestine- same sex activity, especially in the larger cities & towns in the western world and indeed more widely, in many, perhaps even most civilisations in our historical records. The penalties for such behaviour were often severe, although this was not always necessarily the case. Often it depended on whether there were laws set out at the time, explicitly forbidding such practices, how they were interpreted and to what extent they were being strictly enforced.  

There was an article in the ‘Guardian‘ a daily paper published in the UK, a few years ago, which was entitled ‘Highwayman’s 1750 confessions reveal ‘unusual’ ambivalence about gay sex’. The sub heading read: ‘Rare pamphlet includes roistering criminal’s surprisingly enlightened attitude to the advances made to him by an innkeeper’s son’, and we are told in an “incredibly rare” deathbed confession from an 18th-century highwayman, written just before he was “hung in chains” for robbing the Yarmouth Mail, detailing his supposedly enlightened response to a failed gay seduction. Entitled ‘The Life of Thomas Munn, alias, the Gentleman Brick-Maker, alias, Tom the Smuggler’ it is twenty four page long pamphlet that is a part of the once-popular genre of ‘deathbed confessions’, as detailed by Munn to the Yarmouth gaoler on the morning of his execution on 6 April 1750. In part of it he describes an incident in a Southampton inn, when the son of the innkeeper evidently joined Munn in his bed, informing him that “I love to lie with a naked man”. The text explains that: 

‘He had not been long in Bed but began to act a Part so Contradictory to Nature that I started up in Bed, wanted Words to express my Confusion, Surprise and Passion, at his Propositions,” Munn says. The lad evidently leaves however, after Munn threatens him with a penknife, and makes “many Excuses” the following day.

As Munn tells it:

“It was what I never met with before, nor since, but had Philosophy enough in me, to think it a pity to expose a young Man, tho’ he pointed at a very heinous Sin; and certainly we that commit Crimes beyond what is common, ought to be pitied, for no Man is certain if he comes under the same Temptation, that he shall be able to withstand it.”

So we are led to believe that Munn resisted the advance, by threatening him with a knife, but nevertheless took pity on the young man and felt he should be excused. But is it not more likely, that in fact Munn had had sex with the boy, enjoying it at the time but then been left feeling guilty about it all his life, and had wanted to explain it away as a ‘temptation’ that he resisted, despite how difficult this had been? We might like to think this is a an example of liberal thinking but it strikes me it is more a ‘plea for pardon‘ in the next life. What other possible reason would Munn have for relating this story on his deathbed?

My point being that we tend to understand things now in the past, through the prism of our lives in the 21st century, and not in the context of how Munn might have actually felt in the 18th century about the incident. There is also a temptation to rewrite our history books to explain peoples actions through the prism of a 21st century viewpoint. Some people now accuse those who define themselves as ‘woke’ of seeing and acting too much through today’s cultural and social prism, in their assessment of the past. I can empathise with both viewpoints. Much also depends on the definitions that we utilise to define the parameters of what we are documenting. We have a swathe of definitions that we can use now to define ourselves, (all of us) for better or some might say, worse. A century and a half ago even the clinical terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ were not known or used before about 1870; the first public appearance of the term homosexual in print can being found as late as 1869, in a German pamphlet entitled (when translated) “Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code and Its Maintenance as Paragraph 152 of the Draft of a Penal Code for the North German Confederation”, and was written by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, whom I suppose we would now call a ‘closeted’ Hungarian writer and journalist, as he had published it anonymously. And the use of and concepts inherent, in the words ‘bisexual’ or ‘transexual’ were not being discussed at all.

It is often the case, that those engaged in same sex partnerships or sexual activity would not have thought of themselves as ‘homosexual’, let alone documented the matter. In fact, arguably, in some respects, perhaps gender fluidity was a more widely accepted and acceptable concept for some pre 20th century western societies than it was in, say, the last half of the 20th century (or even, dare I say, now).

In any research, we often have to look at the ways in which the statutory laws of the period were prosecuted against such behaviour to uncover the activity itself, and this itself varied widely in different periods, regions and countries, even throughout Western Europe. The terms that men in same sex relationships have used to define themselves over time, have varied widely, indeed still do so. For some, in western culture particularly, the pejorative term ‘queer’ became the definition of choice of some men from around the mid 1990’s onwards, replacing ‘gay’, which itself replaced the rather more clinical term of ‘homosexual’.

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GQ April 2016: Having Sex with a man doesnt make you gay.. but if you’re man enough to do it and still call yourself straight, be man enough to talk about it

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Even as recently as the early 1990’s for example, the Health Education Authority (HEA), for whom I worked in this period for over ten years, decided to use the abbreviated, perhaps rather clumsy term ‘MWHSWM‘ as a catch all category, to target health information at ‘Men Who Have Sex With Men’, whom for various reasons did not define as gay. ‘Not all men who have sex with men are gay’ ran the advertising strap promoting safer sex, in British magazines, such as the -very mainstream- Radio Times. Issues such as trans-sexuality were not really covered by the HEA’s sexual health campaign in this period at all; equally (being involved in developing that campaign myself) we didn’t stop to ask ourselves whether (as we are asking now about the Coronavirus), the epidemic might also have changed the cognitive patterning of those affected by the virus and whether the mental health as a whole of all the groups affected might need greater support and related information. To be fair, research projects later set up by the HEA with government funding- more targeted, locally funded projects, did so, in a few areas across the UK in what was also acronymised as the MESMAC (link is to Yorkshire MESMAC) (MEn who have Sex with Men, Action in the Community) programme and others, which were evaluated and then copied in many cases with local funding by local authorities.  One such project in London was managed by the Terence Higgins Trust, the key community based organisation that sprung up at the time to work with and support those affected by HIV/AIDS, though others soon followed.  

Between women, whilst lesbian sex was generally not prosecuted in the same way as sex between men (the story that Victoria famously refused to believe such acts between women existed at all, turns out -perhaps sadly- to be entirely apocryphal and was probably invented in the 1970’s), often other charges were levelled in their place, such as the practice of sorcery and witchcraft. However statistics from 1929, just a few decades after Victoria died, show that far from being unheard of, fourteen per cent of single women and- quite remarkably-  twenty per cent of married women reported some form of sexual contact with other females. 

However, part of the problem has been that for decades, centuries even, those writing the history of people famous as artists, musicians, politicians, scientists have written out some of the defining characteristics of their subjects, or at least not dwelt upon them in any detail. To some extent this was often the result of pressure on them by the subjects estate, where papers were hidden, obscurification was practised or relevant material was simply destroyed.  

Whilst I will concentrate the discussion on men here in the main, as being potential role models for gay men, it should be made clear that there were plenty of women in the period who were living their lives as lesbians (whether or not they used this word to describe themselves), some of whom became famous or well known in the Victorian and later periods in their various areas of study or trade. To take just one example: Rosa Bonheur, lived from 1822-1899 and was a naturalist painter.

Living in France, she became its most famous (and indeed richest) female artist of the period and was feted in both France and Britain at the time: indeed Queen Victoria was a huge admirer of her work. She was the first woman to be awarded France’s highest decoration, the Legion D’ Honneur.

She was not a great admirer of most men, although her father was an exception, who encouraged her ardent feminism. ‘He told me again & again it was a women’s mission to improve the human race’. She gave herself to her art: ‘I wed art. It is my husband, my world, my life dream, the air I breathe’. She specialised in painting canvases of the natural world, especially of animals. In the epic, eight foot wide canvas, that made her name Ploughing in the Naivernais (1849) four farm workers are completely overshadowed by the twelve great Charolais cattle they are driving in the plough. She is buried with her first companion and childhood friend Nathalie Micas and her later companion, the american painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, along with various other iconic figures, such as Oscar Wilde.  

As another example, in this period, take the case of a very famous musician, where only now, as late as 2020, things are becoming a little clearer. Frédéric Chopin, (1810-1849) was born in Poland, before moving to Paris in 1830. As Philip Oltermann & Shaun Walker discuss, in a recent article about his ‘hidden sexuality’ in the Guardian,  

‘archivists and biographers have for centuries turned a deliberate blind eye to the composer’s homoerotic letters in order to make the Polish national icon conform to conservative norms”

‘Chopin’s Men’ was a two-hour radio programme that aired on the Swiss public broadcaster SRF’s arts channel, which argued that the composer’s letters have been deliberately mistranslated: rumours of his affairs with women have been exaggerated whilst hints of an apparent interest in what we now call “cottaging” (or looking for sexual partners in public toilets) are simply ignored. When the music journalist Moritz Weber started researching Chopin’s letters in more detail, he discovered a “flood of declarations of love aimed at men”, sometimes direct in their erotic tone, and full of playful allusions. In one, Chopin specifically described rumours of his affairs with women as a “cloak for hidden feelings”.

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Chopins Men https://www.srf.ch/play/radio/redirect/detail/67b92c60-dbd4-4743-8232-a007f1ec101c a radio programme from SRF

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His letters (twenty two in all have survived) to his long time school friend Tytus Woyciechowski (whom was actively involved in Poland’s infamous January uprising of 1863) are quite explicit and often start with “My dearest life” and end with: “Give me a kiss, dearest lover.” In one he wrote: 

“You don’t like being kissed.. please allow me to do so today. You have to pay for the dirty dream I had about you last night.”

These letters still make for awkward reading to some, in a country whose main airport is named after Chopin but whose president, until recently, Andrzej Duda, had recently denounced the LGBT rights movement as an “ideology worse than communism”. Some may argue (and indeed it is often said nowadays), ..but why do we need to know of such details? What relevance does his sexuality have to his output as a great musician?  and ‘why must activists insist on bringing the subject up so frequently’?

Well, in an 1829 letter to Tytus, Chopin refers to him as “my ideal, whom I faithfully serve, […] about whom I dream”, and tells him that it is he who has inspired an adagio in his recent concerto. Yet the journalist Weber, references the translation of Chopin’s letters published in 2016 by Warsaw’s Fryderyk Chopin Institute who have assigned the “ideal” in the letter a feminine pronoun, even though the Polish noun is clearly masculine in the letters. In 2018, a Chopin biography by English-Canadian musicologist Alan Walker described Woyciechowski simply as a mere “bosom friend”. 

Weber says his research found no evidence of Chopin’s love for a women that he has long been closely associated with called Gładkowska, or the supposed engagement to a 16-year-old called Maria Wodzińska. He asserts that “these affairs were just rumours, based on flowery footnotes in biographies from the previous two centuries”. Asked about the content of the letters, a spokesperson for Chopin’s estate said their erotic language was a product of the Romantic age and Chopin’s educated social circle:

“If you read them in the Polish original, it sounds a little bit different…, the way Chopin uses language is so musical and complicated, to translate all that is madness.”

“The fact that Chopin had to hide part of his identity for a long time, as he himself writes in his letters, would have left a mark on his personality and his art,” says Weber. “Music allowed him to express himself fully, because piano music has the advantage of not containing any words.”As Chopin himself put it in one of his letters to Woyciechowski: “I confide in the piano the things that I sometimes want to say to you.”

So it is pretty clear here, that to understand his output fully, we need to be aware of the undercurrents in his emotional life, and that much of his celebrated output represented something that was repressed by society and only allowed publically in his music. Even if he was in fact bisexual, this surely has relevance? This, I would argue, is not uncommon in the output of (literally) hundreds of men and women in this period, some well known like Chopin, but many others also, whom history has forgotten or been less kind to. All this was hidden from us (and specifically from me), as we grew up in the sixties and seventies and indeed, as the example above shows, even more recently than that. 

Of course, there were a few people about in the late Victorian period for whom it was simply not possible to completely cover up their emotional & sexual lives, of whom the playwright and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is perhaps the most well known.

His tempestuous and complex relationship with Alfred Lord Douglas or ‘Bosie’ (according to Bosie ‘The love that dare not speak its name’), the related public scandal and his subsequent trial in 1895 for indecent activity & imprisonment is very well documented. This I did know about when I was growing up as a teenager but only in so much as it was couched in terms of those red ‘danger’ lights: shame, scandal, and subsequent downfall (for both parties involved). Another, slightly less infamous person of that period, is the writer and poet AE Housman (link to podcast about Houseman) (1859-1936, the famous bookshop on the Caledonian Rd in London’s Kings Cross, above which Lesbian and Gay Switchboard had its offices for many years, still proudly carries his name).

He had published a collection of poetry in 1896, when he was thirty seven, just after the Wilde trial, entitled ‘A Shropshire Lad’. In fact the first publisher to whom the anthology was offered, had refused to publish it, on the grounds that it was too controversial, with a second publisher only doing so, on the condition that he self fund it. Housman was a deeply secretive character, who kept his life strictly compartmentalised but nevertheless used his poetry as an ‘outlet’ for strong feelings. In addition to clear homosexual undertones, the controversy was perhaps also related to some extent to those poems which focus of the tragedy of the useless waste of young lives during war (a theme that was also to become ever more pertinent to poets, just a few decades later).

For Housman, homosexuality had come to the forefront of public attention with the trial of Oscar Wilde. At that time the impact upon men like Housman must have been both devastating and frightening. In fact, the events leading up to Wilde’s trial coincided with Housman’s burst of creativity and his biographer Norman Page, suggests that he used the poetry to release a truthfulness about his life, that it was then impossible for him to show in reality. We also know, a touching gesture and in solidarity, that Housman sent a copy of A Shropshire Lad to Wilde when he was released from prison, before Wilde fled to Paris. 

In fact he later wrote the poem “Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?“, (link to detailed exploration of the poem) in relation to Wilde’s trial, which addressed the prevailing attitudes towards homosexuals in that period. In the poem, the prisoner is suffering “for the colour of his hair”, a natural quality that, in a coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as “nameless and abominable, the ‘horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians.

So, again we find in Housman a man whose output was very clearly shaped by his feelings and what was going on in the world around him. Interestingly, Housman was one person whose life & narrative was not quite so overtly censored during the next few decades. It is tempting to think that this was because he became involved with a more progressive set of ideals, those prevalent in the fledgling Labour movement at that time. However, truth be told, the socialist movement was not especially comfortable with notions of the body politic at this time and generally, at least until relatively recently, always sought to underplay this aspect of his life.   

In the UK, for men like Housman and Wilde at the beginning of the twentieth century, the potential consequences of sexual activity between men were clear, at least on paper. In civil law, ‘buggery and indecent assault’ were outlawed by the ‘Offences Against the Person’s Act of 1861′. This was followed by the section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (the Labouchere amendment) which defined any act of ‘gross indecency’, whether in public or private, as a punishable offence. Sex between servicemen too for example, was a criminal act which carried severe and often, life changing consequences. So the law was quite clear (assuming you knew it, and there was no reason to suppose that many young men would of) about the potential consequences of activity between consenting men in the latter part of the 19th century and early half of the twentieth century.  

ON to Sex, Love and Life, (The Backstory), 1.3 Fledgling alternative communities in the early twentieth century (part 1)

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Echoes of Innocence: lotta soul version (Wiseman 2024)

Remember! Bluebells underfoot. Crisp leaves, shades- russet gold, brown.

Breathlessly sliding, fast, faster, downhill on top of pure white fresh fallen snow,

Building stones across valley stream;watching damned muddy water break and surge!

Long late summer days spent climbing up amongst a green canopy, making our camps;

Remember! When it seemed the whole world was ours to make, to take?

And bright starry nights, when it seemed the whole universe was close enough to touch.

How long ago now it seems, since we forgot time and played, so innocently,

Amongst those rivulets, now merely trickles in the torrent that is life.

Wiseman, 1978, On timeless innocence..

Although I was born in July 1957, I came, kicking and screaming, at two am one warm summer night, into a western world in which there were the seeds of ‘gay consciousness’ and a fledgling ‘gay scene’, (the term ‘gay’ was -just about- being used by then); seeds that had, albeit slowly, been sprouting shoots for much of the previous half century. In truth though, in 1957, it had been a pretty awful decade so far, for gay rights generally. In Britain at least, there was just a glimpse of a potential new dawn, as the ‘Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’ (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Lord Wolfenden, who had chaired its committee) was published.

Those hoping for liberation would have their hopes dashed. Although, after decades of discrimination, it finally advised the British Government that private, consensual homosexual acts should be made legal in Britain, they promptly decided that wasn’t what the report should be saying and chose to ignore the advice. In fact, it was to take the first decade of my life, before such change actually occurred.

But, more importantly for me, what I have come to recognise in time, is that throughout the first twenty-one years of my life, before I decided who, what I really was, there were a large number of significant influencers and influences already acting on my development, some of which I understood or had grasped at that time and others which existed for me on a more marginal level: perhaps even in my subconscious. A great deal of which I knew relatively little about, was already influencing my life choices. I was beginning to read about the people who had shaped cultural memes in the First ‘Great War’ years (1914-1918): poets such as Owen and Sassoon, and about the progressive, sometimes transgressive cultural movements of the twenties and thirties, both artistic and social, such as the Bloomsbury set; and recognising that in the Second World War (1939-1945) the set of social values and mores inherent in our western society, temporarily changed for some time, (in fact permanently for some), and that the society I was born into, in the mid to late ’50s had been shaped by a new generation of ‘angry young men’ (and let’s be clear right now, women), whether musicians, writers or playwrights. Equally, to realise that even the history books that I had been exposed to, only told a very limited part of the ‘back story’ about the world I was living in and even less about the many historical aspects that had shaped the rest of the world.       

And then later, I became aware of how, in the years after I had been born, rapidly some aspects of society had changed, that moral panics had come and gone, of how I had been sheltered from most of these changes and yet indirectly affected by them. How the decisions I took as a teenager, affected my life, both succinctly and in very specific ways and finally, finally, quite how lucky I had been, to have fallen on my feet, more or less by accident, having arrived in London from Cornwall in the mid seventies, as a young man with a particular set of values that could not possibly have seen me through the next few decades and were inevitably going to change.   

So, it is not my intention in this, my very own and personal backstory, to go into any great detail about ‘homosexual culture’ before around the middle of the last century, as so many other authors have now documented, and attempted to do justice to, relevant historical archival records (more especially in Europe) from ancient Rome through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, into the Industrial Revolution and Victorian England, (all of which are now readily available). However, I do at least want to try to document some of the things that happened in the half century leading up to my birth, that produced the changes in society that nurtured, created even, the society that I, in particular, grew up in and moulded the person that I was to become, by the time I was twenty one (at that time the legal age of homosexual consent) and onwards, and  how these were changes that were not just affecting me but my generation.  

In retrospect, there was a quite specific period; the decades from the twenties to the early fifties, that shaped me as I was discovering myself, and the people I present are those whom I came to identify with: call them my ‘role models’, if you will. Most importantly however, there was no clear trajectory, nothing like what it’s become fashionable to call a ‘road map’ when I was in my teens, to give any real clue in that period, as to how to live my life, if I chose to live it as a ‘homosexual’: a gay man. There were however, plenty of flashing red lights seemingly signalling ‘danger’.

Another relevant question at this point is perhaps why I should have needed specifically gay role models? Why not choose heterosexual role models for example? In fact, why indeed look for role models at all?

Various philosophers have weighed in on this thorny question. Whilst most suggest that looking for role models in our lives can assist us in becoming better ‘more rounded’ individuals there is no strong consensus on this or how best to go about it. Nietzsche famously said ‘Whoever does not have a good father should procure one”. He lost his own father to cancer, before he was even five. He and his sister were brought up by their mother, grandmother, and two aunts. Arguably this experience did him no harm at all, if his later life and works were anything to go by, though it is true he spent much of the latter part of his life living in seclusion. Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy was the quality of Selbstuberwindung, or ‘self-overcoming’, a kind of will power. He felt that to distract ourselves from the discomfort and hardships of life was to miss out on the opportunity to learn, grow and develop, and as a result bring out the best of who we are. He suggested that the person who could learn to deal with the difficulties and challenges of life, and in doing so rise above conventional wisdom, that is to make decisions based on the specifics and needs of their own life and loves, would be an Übermensch, or ‘superman’. For him the key question we should ask ourselves is: Are we growing each day, becoming better, stronger, wiser, smarter, and constantly improving? 

Of course Nietzsche was widely discredited in the mid twentieth century, as the Nazis adopted this creed and tainted it with their own notions of racial purity, and the role of the male in championing the superhero. Nevertheless, I think there was much to be said for his central ideology.  

In 1988, a decade or so after I’d been looking for guidance whilst I was in my late teens and twenties, Micheal Ruse wrote an interesting book Homosexuality: a philosophical enquiry. (Basil Blackwell, 1988). Whilst critics were somewhat divided in their views about his central treatment of the subject, nevertheless in my opinion he raised some interesting, important points. He agreed with the central premise that we are shaped by our (homo)sexuality, that it is central to our very being. Broadly he accepted Freud’s views on sexuality, was sympathetic  towards homosexuality and rejected the notion that it was any kind of sickness or mental disorder. By 2000, Rose recognised that the central tenets of his work had been superseded however by a more recent work entitled ‘Gay Science’ (link with preview pages) by Timothy Murphy in 1997 (Columbia University Press), deliberately named after a published book by Nietzsche in 1882 (which has nothing to do with being gay). Another work, LeVay’s ‘Queer Science'(MIT Press 1996) (currently out of print) was also influential and important, especially as in the concluding chapter, the author noted ‘I attempt to make the case that research into homosexuality is worth pursuing… because this research may indeed … help the larger society recognize what gays and lesbians have generally believed about themselves: that their sexual orientation is a central, defining aspect of their identity.”

Murphy’s own view was perhaps more radical and some might say alarming: that adults should be free to have their sexual orientation changed through biological manipulation and that “mothers would have the right to abort foetuses that tested positive for homosexuality”, if either of these things ever became possible’;  many critics found such notions disturbing, whilst being difficult to argue against. Importantly, these works were not to be available for a full seven years after the final year that I cover in this book, 1990. In many respects the complex debates about innate sexuality were still in their infancy in the period I discuss and so were not a great part of my thinking in the decades around which I was working through issues surrounding my own sexuality, though I undoubtedly had views on such subjects then.    

However, in terms of developing an ethical position on ones’ life, I would very probably have initially agreed, even then, that one could learn a lot from the heterodoxy: how more traditional men and women chose to develop and live up to various ethical & moral principles in their lives; how indeed there was often much to admire in such peoples’ lives, who ended up, for example, in a traditional marital relationship bringing up children in a loving family environment.

Given that I didn’t expect or imagine this to be the way forward I would take, in my life, I was looking for something which challenged these norms from around my mid to late teens. Almost before I had accepted I was gay (or different at least), I had accepted- at least to some extent- that I did not want to and would not live in this way.

One of the early books I bought from a fledgling ‘Gays the Word’ bookshop in London’s Marchmont Street, in fact that challenged the orthodox heterodoxy, was David Cooper’s rather dramatically titled ‘Death of the Family’ (Pelican, 1971) an influential work, already into its 5th reprint, on my now well worn, copy from 1978. ‘The end of the beginning!’ I have inscribed on its title page, showing by then I was already recognising that change from the heterodoxy was a long, complex process.

Actually, this is still a fascinating little book, very much of its time but carrying some interesting thought provoking concepts within its covers. In some respect it still reads as a pretty radical thesis. This is not too surprising as Cooper was for most of his life a radical marxist. He takes as his starting point though, that we should be free to express whatever form of sexuality we feel comfortable with in our relationships, which in 1971 was still pretty radical thinking. He is also not overly prescriptive in the relationships we should have but his key message to me at the time was that the ‘nuclear family’ was a relatively recent invention and was heavily enmeshed together in the rampant, consumerist culture of ongoing twentieth century capitalism. These ideas certainly affected my thinking in this period, of wanting to reject consumerism per se and was one clear reason why I wanted to try to live within a different model in society; one that was very much more heavily invested in the notion of communal living.  

Returning to notions pertaining to understanding my own sexuality however, (as war poet Sassoon, was also writing, when he was twenty five, in 1911) I could not quite understand, as he could not, why I was not attracted sexually to the female form. That whilst I could bond well with women: make positive, long lasting and meaningful friendships, there was no desire to consummate these in any way, sexually. Therapists might suggest I had been damaged in my childhood and developed this desire to confront normalative behaviour as a result. If I had had counselling in this period, maybe it would have led me back to a more ‘normal’ lifestyle? We have to be careful here, as following this path starts to lead us into the damaging kind of thinking that ‘change was necessary by whatever means’, and that the homosexual mathematician, who broke the German Enigma code during the Second War, Alan Turing, was exposed to, in the fifties.

In fact, it was only many decades later, when under the influence of ‘e’ (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) in mixed clubs (like for example Troll at the Soundshaft, Heaven in central London, a club someone once described as having an ´amazing atmosphere of complete abandon, I’d never experienced anything remotely like it´) especially when dancing, that I felt those ‘inhibitions’ (if that is what they indeed were) break. Suddenly I found myself assessing my sexuality in a far less binary way. Equally, for many heterosexual men on ‘e’ there was a uniquely elemental feeling that they could be more emotionally and physically connected with other men, which in mixed clubs in particular often included gay men. ‘He’s all luvved up’ we used to say (interestingly we didn’t use to say ‘she’s all luvved up’, (unless we meant a man anyway). Thus I am now left with an element of doubt, that tends to lead me to believe that it is quite likely that we all exist to some extent on a scale of  ‘bisexuality’, with the ability in the some circumstances to be sexually and emotionally attracted to an ‘other’ (although that ‘other’ may be a very complex concept for some of us).

It is also interesting to me, that some people, both heterosexual & homosexual, seem to have an inborn (or inbred?) desire to have and raise kids and others have none at all. All I know is that it felt entirely natural to me to seek out a lifestyle which incorporated elements of same sex partnerships within it and live my life where doing those things were the accepted ‘norms’. Retrospectively, in another world, if I had stayed in Cornwall, got married and had children would I have felt fulfilled? A part of me says and feels ‘no’; a part of me says (perhaps more honestly) ‘I just don’t know’, as I didn’t really try. Certainly a number of the men I had relationships with in my life did eventually choose to have children, outside of the ‘normal’ family structure and strictures.

However we live our lives and whichever creed we are born into or choose to follow, we are all, at least to some extent, making it up and learning as we go along. Fitting life decisions, jobs, love affairs, health concerns, financial obligations into our day to day lives, as we go forwards, ever onwards each year. For me, there was always a need to understand how my sexuality might better mesh with all these things though, and from the conversations I’ve had with hundreds of people now, in my life, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one thinking in this way, at this age, in this period. For this reason, it seemed important to me that I looked for others who had somehow managed to positively fuse their sexuality into their life choices and lifestyles. Going back to the late sixties and early seventies it was nigh impossible for me to have these discussions with others around me though, without feeling that they were imposing their morality or societies morality onto my choices.   

In that period of my life, although there were pop icons & idols dabbling with these concepts, you got the feeling (especially retrospectively), that they too were making it up as they went along – and why wouldn’t they have been; some of whom crashed and burned far too early, given the pressures this then put on their lives. It also still took quite a lot of painstaking study to search historical & literary archives then, for reasonably complete biographical details of many of the gay & bisexual people, we now consider icons of the early twentieth century; those people whom might conceivably have been my role models; in comparison with the ease by which such material is available today, (especially as the trustees of such material have slowly accepted that there is nothing to be ashamed about in revealing fuller, more intimate  details of lives lived) and how ‘openly’ it is now available.

What there certainly wasn’t in the seventies, to my knowledge, were any clear stories of ‘ordinary men and women’ who grew up as gay men or lesbians, in the two or three decades before my birth. If there were, by their very nature, ordinary probably wouldn’t have been quite the right description anyway. Extraordinary, maybe. So any role model that I might have tried to emulate, would have had to have been someone who had became famous- or infamous -enough to have been written about or who had been writing in that period. And of course they had existed: I just didn’t know at that time, that they had. 

ON to Sex Love and Life, (The Backstory) 1.2 Morals and mores: sexuality undercover, during the eighteenth century

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