Three very different books cast new light on the rise of the gay community and its place in the wider sexual revolution.
In May 1955 Dr Patrick Trevor-Roper attended a committee meeting in a small bare room at the Home Office in London. Trevor-Roper was a distinguished eye specialist, with a large practice and rooms in Harley Street. He was also a very well-connected member of the British establishment. His brother Hugh was Regius Professor of History at Oxford. From his school days at Charterhouse and his higher education at Cambridge, as well as through his well-heeled patients, he knew many of the wealthy and powerful. Today, however, he had come to tell a committee of civil servants, doctors, lawyers and clergy about the other side of his life. He had come to tell them he was a homosexual.
Trevor-Roper was one of three gay men (to use a term that none of them would have recognised) who agreed to tell the committee what it was like to be homosexual in Britain in the 1950s. The others were Peter Wildeblood, former diplomatic editor of the Daily Mail, who had been convicted of homosexual offences at a spectacular trial in 1953, and Carl Winter, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. This was a momentous occasion. It was the first time self-declared gay men had spoken directly, as gay men, to the British state, in the form of a committee appointed by the Home Secretary, and put the case for homosexual behaviour to be decriminalised.
The committee was chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, John Wolfenden. It had been appointed in 1954 by the Conservative Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, to make recommendations on two social problems which a series of unpleasant trials and subsequent newspaper campaigns had brought to the government's reluctant attention: street prostitution (heterosexual), which was thought to have increased markedly since the war, and male homosexuality, which was also thought to be increasing, or at least becoming more open, and to which the Wildeblood case and other like it had brought unprecedented publicity in the postwar years.
Wildeblood was an unfortunate witness. He was a self-hater, and his conviction had given him a martyr complex. His main concern was to distinguish himself and other "respectable" homosexuals from all the others. "The imprisonment of men like myself is logically indefensible and morally wicked," he said. "It weakens the whole concept of justice." But the "other" homosexuals "attract a tremendous amount of attention - and I think they cause a lot of public feeling against homosexuals." "Good homosexuals," he said, "wanted to lead their lives with discretion and decency, neither corrupting others nor flaunting their condition."
"Completely at ease"
Trevor-Roper and Winter came forward mainly because they had heard that Wildeblood was to testify and they wanted to counteract the bad impression they knew he would make. They both said that sexual orientation was innate and not the result of "seduction" or "recruitment": a vital point in persuading the committee, and thus the government, to agree to decriminalisation. They both asserted that the majority of gay men were perfectly happy with their sexuality and led generally ordinary, well-adjusted lives. "I am content to know the sort of people I do know, which covers a very wide field," said Winter, "and we are all completely at ease in one another's company and the world in which we live, which is a much more extensive world, I think, than many people would suppose."
Trevor-Roper said that he knew perhaps 150 other gay men. "My private life tends to be virtually restricted to almost the purely homosexual world and has become increasingly so," he said. He said that gay men posed no "threat" to heterosexual youth and proposed decriminalisation with an age of consent of 16: something Wildeblood, with his concern for respectability, had opposed. He told the committee that he had collected evidence of the extent of blackmail of homosexuals as a result of the state of the law, and said that the level of intolerance led to a "large number of young men taking their own lives." Both Trevor-Roper and Winter argued effectively against the pretexts for criminalising male homosexuality which the more conservative members of the committee put forward.
Partly as a result of the courageous testimony of Trevor-Roper and Winter, the Wolfenden Committee recommended in 1957 that male homosexuality should be decriminalised. This report led, after a long and complicated ten-year campaign, to the passage of a very restrictive private member's bill, introduced by the Labour MP Leo Abse, which established the "consenting adults in private" formula. "Adult" meant 21, and "in private" meant that only two people could be present, in a private home with the blinds drawn. The bill did not cover Scotland, Northern Ireland, the armed forces or the merchant marine: "Hello, Sailor" remained an invitation to a criminal conviction. Law reform for Scotland and Northern Ireland took further years of campaigning, and it took another 27 years to lower the age of consent to a still-discriminatory 18.
The most interesting thing about the Wolfenden hearings, however, is what they reveal about the state of gay life in Britain in the 1950s. Trevor-Roper and Winter told the committee that they and many other people lived happy and rewarding lives in a "homosexual world," and Wolfenden actually referred to "the homosexual community" (Wolfenden, we now know, had other sources of information: his son Jeremy had already come out to him, a fact which he wisely did not reveal to his fellow committee-members). At a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence and received nothing but hostile reporting, and when virtually no accurate information about homosexuality was available (D J West's Homosexuality appeared in 1955), gay men had already created a hidden but recognisable gay community, decades before the modern gay movement was born.
"Waves of social puritanism"
The information in the above paragraphs comes from a new book by Patrick Higgins called Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (Fourth Estate). Higgins is a university lecturer and author of the 1994 anthology A Queer Reader. After an 18-month "guerilla war" with the mandarins of the Home Office he became the first historian to be allowed to read the full transcripts of the Wolfenden Committee's hearings. Higgins is concerned to show how oppressed gay men were in the dark days before the advent of gay liberation: hence the rather scary title he has given his book. And indeed he is able to give extensive evidence of the sorry saga of police entrapment, blackmail, press vilification and public hostility which faced gay men in the '50s. But, paradoxically, his diligent researches also serve to show that many gay men, despite all this, managed to live happily and (within limits) openly as gay men through most of this period.
In this respect Higgins, perhaps against his will, follows a trend in recent gay/queer (I take no sides on that question) historiography. In 1994 George Chauncey published Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay World 1890-1940 (Basic Books), which uncovered the rich and surprisingly open lifestyles of prewar New York gay men, particularly in the 1920s. Reviewing Chauncey's book, Melbourne historian Graham Willett (who is writing his doctoral thesis on the history of the Australian gay community) wrote: "We have tended to assume that before World War II homosexuals lived secret lives of fear and misery, closeted away, maybe coming out to one or two close friends. Instead, what Chauncey has found is a startlingly vibrant gay life, much of which would not be all that unfamiliar to us today. The beats and saunas and cafes were all there. . . There were even gay neighbourhoods, enclaves in which lesbians and gay me could live and socialise in large numbers."
It is unlikely that Britain in the drab and austere years of the 1950s offered anything quite as flash as Greenwich Village in the Roaring '20s. As Higgins notes, "successive waves of social puritanism made Britain an increasingly dull place in which to live." Higgins agrees that a gay subculture of sorts survived in these discouraging times, but stresses mainly the extreme fragility of what gay social institutions there were, as evidenced by a succession of police raids, trials and press witchhunts against "dens of sodomy." Since his is essentially a history of political events, and given his position that postwar Britain was a "heterosexual dictatorship," this gloomy view is not surprising. For a perhaps less academically rigorous but certainly more cheering account of gay life in pre-liberation Britain, it is necessary to turn to James Gardiner's Who's a Pretty Boy Then?, subtitled "One hundred and fifty years of gay life in pictures" (Serpent's Tail 1996).
Gardiner does himself something of an injustice with his subtitle, which suggests that has produced a mere picture-book. In fact this is a carefully researched piece of scholarship in its own right, based on Gardiner's 25 years of patient collecting and detective work, and is a fine example of the trend for serious historians to pay greater respect to photographs and other "non-textual texts." As Gardiner says in his introduction: "Photography brought about the most significant change in the way history is recorded. Written history can provide us with facts, but can only suggest reality. . . But the camera provides us with the detail that makes history live: the cut of a frock, the look on a face, the snapshot you chose to keep. These details are all the more important when the history that is being recorded is often a hidden one."
"Queens were right there"
It is indeed striking that people who faced the ever-present danger of exposure, arrest, blackmail or dismissal if their sexual preferences became known should have been so keen to produce photographic evidence of those preferences. People living under genuine dictatorships are generally more careful. Gardiner observes that "Some queens [his preferred term] seem to have realised the special power of the photographic image very quickly: just as soon as it became possible to have your portrait taken, in the 1860s, queens were right there in the studios, in their full regalia." He suggests that photography gave gay men a way of recording and preserving their hidden lives in a way no other medium could do. As he also notes, it enabled for the first time the easy production of male homosexual erotica, a genre which was flourishing by the late 19th century.
Gardiner's book does indeed go back to the 1860s, though some of the earlier images are ambiguous: as other writers have discovered, it is easy but not always correct to read sexual implications into the more gushy manifestations of Victorian romanticism. But by the turn of the century it is clear that we are looking at recognisably "modern" gay men, self-confidently looking into the camera as if to defy the wave of homophobia which accompanied the fall of Oscar Wilde. By the late 1920s, when The Well of Loneliness was banned and Ivor Novello, Noel Coward, John Gielgud and Emlyn Williams were young and famous, the imagery becomes more blatant, and the gay world seems almost ready to burst into full public view, as it already had done in Germany. But the 1930s, the decade of Depression, fascism and stalinism, brought a reaction: not as violent as that in Germany, but sufficient to drive the gay world underground again for another 20 years.
In the 1950s, after some liberalisation during the war (when Quentin Crisp recalls London as being "one giant paved double bed" and the Labour MP Tom Driberg had sex with Norwegian airmen in air-raid shelters) British homophobia was fed by postwar austerity, Cold War hysteria, the Burgess and Maclean spy scandals and the appearance of queerbaiting tabloid newspapers. Gardiner records that drag acts disappeared from the theatres and that there were frequent purges of queens from the merchant marine. Gay men fled to Amsterdam, then the most liberal city in Europe, as they had fled to Paris in the 1890s and Berlin in the 1920s. But the times were changing, and it was the tabloid queerbaiting, particularly over the Wildeblood case, that finally led some Anglican clergy to persuade the Home Secretary to set up an inquiry.
Three who made a revolution
None of this happened in a vacuum. It is a common error of gay history-writing to see the rise of the gay community and/or gay movement as a self-contained phenomenon, springing into existence fully formed at the time of the Stonewall Riots. Both Higgins and Gardiner, in their different ways, remind us that the revolution in public attitudes to male homosexuality which began in the 1950s and gathered pace in the '60s was not quite as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, and had its roots in earlier events. But they do not seek to put that revolution in its wider context. That task has been taken up by an American writer, John Heidenry, whose new book, What Wild Ecstasy (Heinemann), is the first attempt at a complete history of that most complex phenomenon, the sexual revolution. Heidenry is not a professional historian, but a journalist: he is the former editor of Penthouse Forum. His book will certainly displease followers of Foucault and other postmodern theorists of the history of sexuality, since he appears to have no knowledge of their existence. Some readers may find this a recommendation.
Heidenry is so unfashionable as to see history as a narrative: he starts at the beginning, and works his way through to the present. He takes the beginning to be the work of three pioneer researchers into sexuality, Drs Alfred C Kinsey, John Rock and William H Masters. Kinsey studied the sex lives of American men and women, and in 1948 published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, revealing among many other things that 4% of white American men were exclusively homosexual. Rock was a Catholic gynaecologist who in 1956 invented the contraceptive pill, which was approved for use in America in 1960. Masters studied the physiology of heterosexual sex, disproving Freud's theory of the vaginal orgasm, and in 1966 he and Virginia Johnson published Human Sexual Response. Between them, Heidenry believes, they triggered the most profound changes in human affairs since the industrial revolution.
But Heidenry knows that the sexual revolution was fought on fronts other than the scientific. In 1953 Hugh Hefner launched Playboy, AmericaÕs first mainstream pornographic (by the standards of the time) magazine. The more explicit Penthouse followed in 1960, and Larry Flynt launched the completely unrestrained Hustler in 1974. In 1967 Deep Throat became the first hardcore porn film to get a general release: the Supreme Court found pornography to be a form of free speech. In 1976 Sony unleashed the VCR, a technical innovation which rates with the invention of the camera in putting porn in the hands of the masses. Heidenry is at his strongest when he traces the way sex became a winning and increasingly respectable commodity in the 1960s and '70s as American capitalism overcame its puritan scruples and moved into the field of mass-market eroticism.
Heidenry recognises that there were in fact two sexual revolutions in this period: one for heterosexual men, which essentially meant (as they thought) the freedom to have sex of whatever kind they liked with all the women they wanted, and one for women, which meant the right to control both their sexuality and their fertility. These two revolutions were bound to collide, and did so in the 1970s with the rise of the women's anti-porn, anti-rape, anti-domestic-violence and anti-sexual-harassment movements. The gender wars of the 1980s and '90s have flowed from this fundamental disagreement over what the sexual revolution was all about. Although Heidenry's treatment of the rise of the gay movement is not very original (some of it seems to be borrowed from Martin Duberman's Stonewall), he shrewdly observes that gay men have never quite decided which side they are on in these wars, hence the strangely schizophrenic tone of gay male life, where extreme sexual hedonism lives side-by-side with political self-righteousness of a high order.
Each of these three books makes a valuable contribution to the history of gay men and their political and social lives: in Gardiner's case back to the 19th century. But each has its weaknesses. Gardiner has not set out to write academic history, and his book needs to be used in conjunction with more scholarly work. Higgins suffers from his commitment to his thesis that gay men in the 1950s lived under a heterosexual dictatorship, a thesis he does not (in my opinion) prove. Heidenry necessarily spreads himself thin in trying to cover 40 years of complex history in 450 pages, and breadth has been achieved at the expense of depth. On the other hand, his book extends into the 1980s and the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and here he effectively debunks the myth that AIDS killed the sexual revolution. He observes that the puritan/feminist backlash was already well in train by the late 1970s and also that gay men, after an initial period of self-doubt, soon adapted to life with AIDS.
Heterosexual Dictatorship, by Patrick Higgins, Fourth Estate, London 1996, hardback, 340pp
Who's a Pretty Boy Then?, by James Gardiner, Serpent's Tail, London 1996, hardback, 223pp
What Wild Ecstasy, by John Heidenry, Simon and Shuster, New York 1997 (published in Australia by William Heinemann), softback, 448pp