West End Vice

Homosexuality:​ do we really have to talk about it? Earl Winterton, aged 71, introducing a debate in the House of Lords in 1954, apologised for bringing forward ‘this nauseating subject’. In his youth it was never mentioned in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter in the House. The government had just announced that it would set up a committee to look into homosexual offences, and the trouble was that you couldn’t legislate for homosexuality, or preferably against it, without naming it and going into the subject a certain amount. Some in the press had shown they were ready to do so: Douglas Warth, in the Sunday Pictorial, warned that ‘the natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence’ was providing cover for an ‘unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip in this country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly unsavoury’ subject. For Gordon the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage of exactly what was being written on this subject, in public and in private, during a period when it was being talked and thought about with new openness. By the end the Lords are briskly debating the danger of ‘buggers’ clubs’, and the good old English cognomen is all over Hansard.

Some Men in London is rare among really good anthologies in containing a huge amount of rubbish. It is divided, broadly, into writings by the gays and by the anti-gays, and since the gays, through most of this period, had to keep things to themselves, it’s their opponents who have the advantage. Long-dead and forgotten bigots and nutcases air their theories and hatreds once more, and offer their confident prescriptions for dealing with the gays. These range from impossible cures to savage punishments – imprisonment, flogging, castration, deportation. For this seventy-year-old gay English reader, Parker (who’s the same age as me) has clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a deepening preoccupation of my own. I can see my father’s Times and my mother’s Mail raised on either side of the fireplace, and catch still the slight discomfort in the air, though I can’t recall their saying anything about the great question in my presence – a wholly typical reticence, and a great relief to me. Now I know the sort of stories they were reading and the opinions they were absorbing. Fifty-eight years later I look at these popular columnists and local vigilantes, these magistrates and bishops and members on both sides of both Houses of Parliament, with a kind of wincing fascination, glad of the recurrent bursts of inadvertent comedy, laughing too at the sheer benighted idiocy of a bygone era, but also with a colder feeling about the status of minorities, and the undying capacity of states to persecute them.

Parker’s narrative opens in the libidinous free-for-all of the VE celebrations, with John S. Barrington, a 25-year-old beefcake photographer, moving through the crush in Piccadilly Circus and ‘kissing every soldier, sailor and airman I could meet’, before picking up a ‘superb sailor’ and taking him back to his office to ‘fuck him “silly”, an exceptional activity for both of us’. The festive delirium won’t last long, and happy and forthright accounts of sexual acts will be rare in the ensuing eight hundred pages; the verb ‘fuck’ won’t be seen again until Joe Orton’s account of a Holloway Road pick-up 22 years later. There are glimpses of casual sex, often paid for, in gay men’s diaries, and of longer, sometimes anxious affairs. There are court reports about those unlucky enough to be found out, and the evidence to the Wolfenden Committee tells us a fair bit about what gays got up to, if often filtered through the attitudes of those who policed or otherwise objected to such activities. For Parker’s purposes, those activities are confined to London. Now and then I found myself wondering about gay life elsewhere, ‘Some Men in Leamington’, perhaps, or Liverpool; about queer enclaves in the provinces, and certain seaside towns – Bournemouth is asserted by a homophobic journalist in 1952 to be a favourite resort of ‘Evil Men’. But the focus on the capital makes sense – the huge city, with its resources and possibilities, being a magnet for gay men seeking to lose and find themselves in the near anonymity it provides.

The queer topography of London emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on disgust, observes ‘that misguided collection of misfits known as The Queers’ assembling after dusk (they sound like a band from a couple of decades later). Hampstead Heath gets a few mentions, with police agents provocateurs getting up to ludicrous antics, as does the Coleherne in Earls Court, later London’s most famous leather bar, where in 1964 Keith Vaughan finds the pianist playing early Beethoven sonatas and Schubert’s Moments Musicaux – ‘marvellously inappropriate for a Saturday night crowded queer bar’, yet also aptly ‘stressing the heart & pathos behind the sparklingly “gay” exterior’. Both areas feature more dimly than they would have done a decade after Parker’s cut-off. Marble Arch, much nearer the centre, is a bright nexus for cruising and for picking up guardsmen, and thermal imaging would have captured multiple couplings in the umbrage of Hyde Park beyond. But the burning centre, inevitably, is the West End, where everything conducive to fun seems to concentrate. (The City, by contrast, is a sexless blank.) The West End as a figure for the theatre, where queers have a nearly unassailable hold, is a recurrent motif in this story, and the ‘West End vice’ a journalistic catch-all for homosexual activity. This was the city from which Wolfenden’s committee drew nearly all its evidence, and where the long labyrinthine process leading to decriminalisation would play out: a decade of delay, prevarication and slowly advancing opinion between his report and the change in the law.

Wolfenden was a former public school headmaster, aged 48 when his committee was set up (it also examined the issue of prostitution). At the start he showed a wary enthusiasm for the task: ‘I know that this is going to be a difficult and in many ways distasteful operation; but in a queer sort of way I am rather looking forward to it.’ He had a brilliant gay son, and must have had subtler intuitions about the whole subject than he let on publicly. When presenting his report three years later he made the legal case for decriminalisation, while stressing in a press conference that the committee did not want to be seen as ‘approving or condoning’ homosexual behaviour, ‘which we regard, most of us, as morally repugnant’. As quite often, a declaration of repugnance seems a precondition for supporting more advanced positions, as does a readiness to imagine the repugnance of others. Even E.M. Forster writes, in 1953, that ‘the great majority of people are naturally repelled by the subject.’

Among the forgotten multitudes resurrected by Parker are some appealing characters. I especially enjoyed PC Butcher, one of two plainclothes constables who gave extended evidence to the committee about activity in men’s toilets in Mayfair and Soho. They provide a description of what went on that is unrivalled, in these volumes, by any account by an actual queer before Orton. Butcher is expansive and non-judgmental in tone, and his pride in his work seems connected with the fact that his beat is such an important one: ‘I think I can safely say that the Mayfair area is strongest in the lunch hour … There are three urinals that are quite famous throughout the world.’ He knows from observation the routines and practices of the men who go into them, in their lunch break or in the early evening, and speaking to the committee he finds himself with a rare audience, eager for his accumulated knowledge.

Butcher is not an agent provocateur, but since his work keeps him going into the urinals he sometimes finds himself part of it: ‘They come up to me and say “Are you interested in this sort of thing?” and I can honestly say “Yes” and an arrangement is made’ – ‘but I do not keep it, that is the only thing.’ He has noticed that the gays are turned off by the smell of Dettol first thing in the morning, but once the ‘smell of cleanliness has worn off you can see these people definitely working themselves up into a frenzy inside … and once they have the scent there is no holding them, they are oblivious to everything else.’ Normal criminals pick up the separate scent of a six-foot-three plainclothes copper in size eleven shoes, but not the queers: ‘to my mind the stronger and the bigger the man the more interested they are in getting to know the other side of him.’ Once he had a chap who was interested in him: ‘I gave him a smile,’ and the man followed Butcher right across town and in at the back door of the West End Central Police Station. ‘I there arrested him, and he said, “I thought we were going to your place,” and that was true!’

Butcher’s colleague PC Darlington offers more detail about the atmosphere in the toilets, the ‘deathly quiet’, no one urinating, ‘practically everyone you see will be masturbating himself.’ Some of them pick up a ‘friend’ (a friendly term in itself) to take back home ‘to indulge in what we call the finer arts’ – ‘what they are I do not know,’ he says firmly. One gets the sense of these two constables as comparatively humane: daily inhabitants of a gay world whose codes they understand. They seem unlike the policemen who give evidence elsewhere in the volumes about the goings-on in cottages: ‘The defendant looked about him continually and down [at] penis of man on his right’ etc. These are records of degrading work which brought presumably straight constables into an intimate dance of other men’s hands, mouths and erections. The detached tone is both comic and horrible, as is the picture of them vying with one another to make the most arrests.

What personal attitudes lie, barely perceptibly, among the standard expressions of repulsion, is hard to say. In his submission to the committee Sir Laurence Dunne, the chief metropolitan magistrate, combines a tone of military contempt with a hint of excited conjecture, declaring (prematurely, Parker shows) that ‘the old unholy traffic between soldiers of the Guards and Household Cavalry and perverts in the Royal Parks is now a thing of the past,’ and explaining that the ‘abolition of the old tight overalls worn by other ranks’ has helped: ‘battle dress or khaki serge lacks the aphrodisiac appeal of the old walking out dress.’ Tight trousers had for centuries been a way of advertising something otherwise unmentionable, and they’re a recurrent signifier here, sometimes thought sufficient evidence in themselves of the wearer’s sexual tastes. Parker’s survey ends at the moment when exposingly tight trousers were becoming emblems of a new sexual freedom, ushering in a decade or more of eye-popping display for gay and straight alike. As an anonymous queer man explained to the Evening Standard in 1964, ‘fifteen years ago, almost anyone wearing tight trousers … was probably gay. But now the normals have taken over our kind of dressing and you simply can’t tell from clothes any more.’

The cases that came up before Dunne were mainly importuning in public lavatories, and above all – ‘I make no attempt to explain it’ – in the ‘Brighton and Chatham section lavatories at Victoria Station’. As with PC Darlington’s ‘I do not know,’ you wonder: is his not explaining a form of pudeur or genuine ignorance of Brighton’s reputation for loucheness and the concentration of naval cadets at Chatham? His tone grows fiercer as he goes on. Male prostitutes make the gents at Piccadilly Circus and elsewhere ‘plague spots after dark’, host to ‘male harpies’ luring decent heterosexual boys back to their flats. Pubs that get a name among the perverts are a recurrent problem – ‘these pests descend like locusts’ and ‘perverts in a mass are even more noisome than singly.’ Dunne is doing his duty but is perhaps rattled by his contact with brute facts, falling back instinctively on a lexicon of classical and biblical abomination.

Such terms​ and images are repeated, with differing degrees of vehemence, throughout Some Men in London – now so obviously founded on ignorance, prejudice and fear that it’s an imaginative exercise to re-enter the world in which they were found so satisfactory. A stalled vocabulary of contempt circles through the books. From the start the dismissive though faintly technical-sounding ‘pervert’ is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when he says: ‘I prefer the word “pervert” to “homosexual”, because “homosexual” is too friendly a word for these horrible people.’ In 1945, the lord chamberlain’s office (tasked with passing, or censoring, plays before production, and like the Lords a source of long-running low-wattage comedy here), was moved by one play to state that ‘sentimentalising about perverts is a most insidious method of encouragement’ and emphatically refused it a licence for performance. Statistically, ‘pervert(ed)’ tapers off, occurring seventy times in the first volume but only thirteen in the second, where Parker has more intelligent and informed material to explore.

Of course ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ recur throughout (more than 1500 times), though earlier on it is so perplexing and alien to members of the police, press, armed forces etc that it appears in a number of items with a redundant hyphen: in 1950 there is a long report, by DI Norman of the marvellously named ‘C.O.C.1’, on the surveillance of ‘Guardsmen engaged in homo-sexual offences’. On repeated acquaintance it strikes one as a word with a peculiar valency, a bastard Greek-Latin compound whose intrinsic meaning of same-gender coexists with a clear suggestion of man-sex. Like other terms and modes of speech in this period, it blurts out the thing that it’s trying – out of principle, good manners or revulsion – not to mention. To some of the revolted it seemed to imply an unacceptable scientific tolerance. In a memoir published in 1955, a guardsman called Alan Roland echoed Winterton’s remarks of the year before when recording his disgust at the type of man he found hitting on him: ‘The police call him a homosexual – a too-pleasant term for a vile creature.’ ‘Queer’ was so much quicker and more adaptable than this five-syllable shot at classification, which the reformer had to deal in matter of factly while to his opponents it had the savour of a slippery exemption from censure. ‘Queer’, of course, has now come full circle, or is on its second lap: in Parker’s subtitle it has a narrower sense than its present-day usage, which embraces both bolder and subtler understandings of sexuality. In these books, it’s the term used most naturally by the queers themselves.

When he called homosexuality ‘filthy, disgusting, unnatural’, Winterton noosed in one phrase three of the most prominent and mindlessly routine terms of condemnation. Of these keywords, ‘unnatural’ is the most common here, occurring more than forty times. Its assertions are both biological and ethical. It conveys contained disgust, while making a loftier and more impersonal claim – that ‘love-making between persons of the same sex is a perfidious contradiction of nature.’ At its most absurd it relates to the alarmist notion that the nature of British manhood, perhaps even the future of the British race, was under threat from homosexuality. Something close to a great replacement theory was embraced in 1958 by the Labour MP Frederick Bellenger, who said that if the ‘malignant canker … were allowed to grow, it would eventually kill off what is known as normal life’. During the second reading of the Sexual Offences Bill in the Commons eight years later, the alarm is shriller: legalisation would be a boost to the canker, and the 5 per cent of the populace presently thought to be queer would get ‘higher and higher’; what if ‘the figure jumps from 5 per cent to 50 per cent’? This is from a Tory MP, Cyril Osborne, and it’s a line of thought that resurfaced two decades later in the Thatcher government’s notorious Clause 28, which banned local authorities from doing anything that ‘promoted’ homosexuality. This fear, that with the right promotion homosexuality might really catch on, implies an unconscious conviction that the ‘unnatural’ is natural after all, merely awaiting, in everyone, the licence to blossom.

‘Disgust(ing)’ occurs 22 times in the first volume, and fourteen in the second. With its expressive fusion of the physical and the moral, it’s a more visceral word, impossible to say without some amount of feeling, and conveys a strong reaction to what it generally disdains to name (indeed stresses its unnameability). Deep down the disgust is surely focused on the bodily facts of sex between men. ‘Filthy’, of course, occurring six times in each of Parker’s volumes, has a moral dimension, but its focus is physical, and galvanises primitive fear and shame about buggery itself.

What of such sex acts, PC Darlington’s ‘finer arts’, here veiled by euphemism or the expressionless formulae of the copper’s report, but at the heart, or the bottom, of centuries of fuss? Buggery itself is never explicitly described or discussed. Taking evidence as a member of the Wolfenden Committee, Desmond Curran, who was psychiatric consultant to the Royal Navy and must have dealt with these issues before, remarks that when he was in the US ‘the mouth was very popular’, and asks PC Butcher: ‘Is that very popular here?’ Butcher, alert to the antics of foreigners of all kinds on his beat, says of course the West End is full of American servicemen, many committing ‘gross indecencies in doorways’ in Coventry Street after 11 p.m., but he has not yet been required by the committee to enter into the specifics of sexual acts. When pressed he agrees that ‘the mouth’ seems ‘to go more with them, yes’. This method of squaring up to a topic while naming it only by a metonym is telling – perhaps intended, too, as a small frowning courtesy to the three lady members of the fifteen-strong committee.

Court cases are inevitably a key part of the record: often pitiful in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray Bt, chairman of Berkshire County Council, spent a drunken hour in Piccadilly Circus underground station, where he ‘smiled, nodded and looked’ at other men. In court he explained he was happily married with three children and at home ‘drank barley water’, but at a meeting in London he’d had four large gins and two glasses of port, and afterwards thought it wise to park his car in Regent Street and go into the station for an hour to sober up. It’s hard not to see this as a poignant image of a moment’s disinhibition, a glimpsed opportunity which he was then unable to act on. Since nothing sexual had happened, his conviction for importuning was quashed on appeal. What effect the case had on his career, and on the attitudes of his family and friends back in the village of Mortimer Common, is not revealed.

There are other occasions where nothing sexual is spelled out, or where a well-to-do man has the misfortune to pick up a violent criminal. When Viscount Sudley was robbed by two young low-lifes he’d chatted up in a West End club, his explanation that he’d ‘invited them to his house for a few friendly bouts of wrestling’ was apparently taken at face value. (Sudley, as Parker points out, was the elder brother of Lord Arran, who in 1965 had introduced the private members’ bill in the Lords that led two years later to the Sexual Offences Act.) Sir Edward Boulton, ‘baronet-stockbroker’, was gagged, bound and robbed by a guardsman he’d met in a pub and invited back to his flat for a conversation about ‘landscape gardening’. This delicately ludicrous detail quite possibly conveys the actual pick-up line used by Sir Edward as a transparent cover for a bit of fun, and the euphemism is kept up respectfully in court. Class solidarity sometimes led magistrates to express their regret at inflicting ruin on MPs or men with distinguished military records. ‘This case is a tragedy,’ declared Mr Pratt, fining Major Fitzroy Fyers for persistently importuning in the tube station at South Kensington, but his sympathy was stern: ‘Whatever penalty I inflict will be as nothing compared with the punishment he has brought upon himself by his own action.’

The attention paid to cases involving toffs, most notably Lord Montagu’s trial and imprisonment in 1954, creates a tabloid impression that homosexuality was a practice of the titled and rich. This was a view encouraged by the far-right National Labour Party, which saw any possible legalisation as ‘pampering of pansies’ and ignoring the working class, ‘who as yet are still healthy in their instincts, thank God!’ But Parker points out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 years after his death, of an exposed sexuality.

Parker​ uses two remorselessly productive diarists to cast light on very different class experiences. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was dead at 61, nine years before the 1967 Act decriminalised the kind of affairs he’d been having before, during and after his marriage to the fabulously wealthy Honor Guinness. Parker gives us extracts from Chips’s diaries, during the period when he was having an affair with Terence Rattigan, fourteen years his junior, already a famous playwright and according to Chips a ‘very great Roman beauty’. A long-term and ‘fair very beautiful’ boyfriend called Peter Coats was also on the scene, and Chips vacillated in his usual fashion. The diaries are frank – ‘Terry … smelt seductive, and was altogether unforgettably enchanting’ – but not sexually explicit. Chips notes ‘extravagant “romps”’ and ‘frolics in the afternoon’, memoranda which oddly have the ring of news-stand headlines when others less fortunate were caught out. He gets wind that his affair with Rattigan is becoming too widely talked about – ‘public property, and almost ahead, a scandal’ – though he doesn’t fret for very long. He intended his diary to be read and published fifty years after his death, but maintains a degree of prudence even when showing off. ‘I went home with Nigel Davies to his flat in Curzon Street and had an amazing connection and etc etc etc.’

Channon was drawn to men in his own elite circle, but the trend in these books is for well-to-do men to seek sex and romance outside their own class, among soldiers and working men, often paying for it. The writer James Pope-Hennessy, living in Ladbroke Grove with a former paratrooper called Lenny, loved inviting cabbies back to the flat and asking them what they did in bed: ‘how I adore getting a total stranger to speak freely about sex.’ When he gets out around the pubs or into the major cruising area at Marble Arch he finds himself excited by ‘cocky little London boys … grubby but desirable’, but is disgusted by the commerce of the ‘pavement world’: ‘they are only interested in one thing, money; and there is no justification for romanticising this profession whatever.’ At Marble Arch he might well have strolled unnoticing past George Lucas, a civil servant who was there a great deal and who did romanticise soldiers (‘civilians leave me cold’). Lucas kept a gloomily detailed diary from 1948 until 2014. He was despised by his parents – his mother said ‘she would rather I was a murderer than a homo’ – and was clearly and doggedly in search of companionship and sympathy all his life. At 23 he was already the Pooter of the postwar London queer scene: ‘I have succeeded in forming an acquaintanceship with a young Grenadier Guardsman. His charm is undeniable; and I am not wholly despondent of bringing about some amorous relationship between us.’ His novelettish phrasing makes one fear for his skills as a lover and a chatter-upper. But his diaries, exposing his generally reactionary views and conventional mind, cast light on a life very different from that of the artists and aristos who flit through the same bars and parks, and through whose writings we tend to get our sense of the period and its networks.

The increasing number of frank, fact-based books and articles in the second decade of Parker’s narrative are mainly by gay men, most of them using a pseudonym. Plummer (real name John Montgomery) opens Queer People with a declaration: ‘I am a homosexual, a so-called “queer” or “pansy”. I admit it without shame, although I must hide behind a false name because of fear of the law, vindictiveness and ignorance.’ He tells the truth, about himself, and about the now familiar ancestry of great gays, Michelangelo, Tchaikovsky and so on, brought up to date with figures such as Edward Marsh and Ivor Novello, as well as unnamed heroic soldiers and airmen still living. He works out that a million men and a million women in Britain are queer, and turns the tables in one indignant phrase: ‘I sometimes think we homosexuals are absurdly tolerant.’ Frustrated common sense had marked an essay by the married but gay-friendly Edward Hyams in a special issue of the New Statesman in 1960 on ‘The Homosexual and the Law’: the deemed ‘seriousness’ of the homosexual ‘problem’ appears ‘to be entirely bogus. There is no problem except in so far as one is created and daily recreated by the ridiculous law.’ Hyams decried ‘officious nosey-parkering into the individual’s management of his own life’, and saw that those who advocated ‘cures’ for homosexuals were really punishers under a guise of compassion.

Later the same year A Minority by ‘Gordon Westwood’ (the sociologist Michael Schofield) presented the results of interviews with 127 queer men, with statistical breakdowns of where and how often they found partners, and of patterns of friendship and courtship which turned out to be much like hetero ones. The result is pleasingly complex, containing a range of experiences and feelings no novelist of the period came close to representing. Homosexual clubs, though not named, are central; some men like them, some almost live in them, others admit clubs ‘revolt me up to a point’ or find the men there night after night are ‘like lost souls’. One says he goes now and then as he might to a museum, ‘to see if they’ve changed the exhibits’: anyone who’s frequented a particular gay bar or club will know just what he means, and himself run the risk of becoming such a specimen. The lexicon is examined (‘queer’ versus the now spreading ‘gay’), and districts specified – ‘when I walk through Notting Hill Gate I feel I’m at a gigantic homosexual party.’

Gaydar was yet to be defined but had always been employed: gays knew one another by their eyes (‘liquid’, ‘hunted’, ‘sharing’), by walk, voice, hairstyle, eyebrow inflection, the way they held a cigarette. This has an unmissable relation to the notorious Sunday Mirror feature on ‘How to Spot a Possible Homo’, published in 1963 after the exposure of the civil servant John Vassall as a Soviet agent and illustrated with a photo of him lying on his bed in white underpants, ‘a spy and homo – a gilt-edged specimen of his type’. This gay-basher’s guide to ‘THE CRAWLER’, ‘THE FUSSY DRESSER’ etc sums up and hopes to activate prejudice, but is perhaps less revealing than the Daily Herald’s ‘What I Found inside Vassall’s Flat’, a flinching semiology of telltale possessions: cut-out photos of ‘stocky hirsute Rugby players’, cuddly toys ‘one would not expect to find in a man’s flat’, bedroom and bathroom full of perfume bottles, ‘all there for anybody to see’ just like in ‘a woman’s flat’: ‘I washed my hands and the smell lasted for two days.’

At the end of 1960 Simon Raven wrote a remarkable piece for Encounter on male prostitutes in London, distinguishing five types with the alert eye of a Mayhew addressing an undescribed trade. He deduces that all come from homes where they were unwanted or misunderstood. There are soldiers, who think of the work as no more than a form of masturbation, but have, Raven says, ‘a definite if narrow homosexual streak’; there are boys with jobs as shop-walkers or as ‘low-grade couturiers’ which give them notions of sophistication, and they have no ‘uneasy conscience’ about their sex work. There are poor and unintelligent boys; there are layabouts; and there are the full-time prostitutes, ‘sometimes to be found living in very good circumstances indeed’. Raven gives names – Tom, Rodney, Len, Micky and Conrad – to his five exemplars, and pictures their lives and their probable futures with dry wit and what readers may have felt was an unusually fine grasp of detail. His types hover somewhere between reportage and fiction, each showing a different reaction when offered a bath by their client in his ‘nicely furnished bachelor apartment’. Len ‘ungraciously accepts, on the off-chance of being able to palm a razor or a comb’, and after he’s performed lopes off with the money, ‘a purloined nail-brush in his trouser pocket, and some thirty loose cigarettes, scooped out of the open and opulent box, already crumbling to pieces in the rotting lining of his jacket’.

By the time of The New London Spy, an eccentric guide to the city’s pleasures published in 1966, the chapter on ‘Homosexual London’ is bursting with barely coded inside knowledge. The book’s contributors are listed but the chapters themselves unassigned; my guess is that the survey of the queer scene is by Anthony Blond, also the book’s publisher. Its tone is both hip and cagey, totally au fait with bars, clubs and cruising spots that the writer cannot yet name: it’s a tantalising guide, innuendo just short of the really useful statement. On the north side of the Thames ‘there are two pubs which attract queers with more esoteric interests’ – i.e. ‘the leather, plastic and rubber cult’ – but the ‘homosexual motor-cyclist enthusiasts’ who might like to drop in are left scanning the shore for the exact locations. In a Fulham Road ‘bar club’, ‘dancing is not discouraged. In fact, on busy Saturday nights it becomes like a rugger scrum and has even been known to approach the orgiastic’: the horny tourist consulting his map then discovers that the Fulham Road is more than two miles long. Throughout we get glimpses of practices not seen elsewhere in the guide, a world waiting to be uncovered by writers and readers as much as by the expectant visitor. A tart note is sounded: West End Turkish baths cannot rival those of ‘Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam or Vienna but they might possibly please gerontophiles or collectors of Edwardiana’ (those museum exhibits again). The well-travelled writer is on the side of the young, who have grown up ‘with a much more sophisticated awareness of sexual deviation’ than their parents and grandparents. He bemoans the age-old tendency of a gerontocracy to impose its laws on a young generation with quite different values, and signs off with the hope that ‘perhaps, in a year or two, the archaic laws of the country will be changed’ and the manifold dangers to the homosexual in London alleviated.

It would​ be interesting to see further evidence – it is perhaps fragile, or irrecoverable – as to the role the various clarifying books of the late 1950s and 1960s played in the lives of the people they describe, as well as in the larger social context. When the literature in which queer men found themselves depicted and explained was so exiguous, any book on the subject took on an extraordinary charge. The blue-spined Pelican of D.J. West’s Homosexuality (1955) was my way of introducing the matter almost imperceptibly into the family home – left behind in my bedroom bookcase for a dusting mother to find while I was away at boarding school. Not that West’s thoughts on the ‘frustration and tragedy inherent in this mode of life’ would have been reassuring to her. ‘No one in his right mind would choose to be homosexual,’ he wrote, and I took away from the book a feeling that I wasn’t quite ready for the existence it described. Still, it was better than the advice in the book my parents had left almost invisibly for me to find, in a small built-in cupboard in the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the slightest word or act out of the way, HIT him; hit him so hard that he will carry the scar for life.’

In 1947, as Parker relates, a young man called Hibbert did just that to an actor called Shuttleworth, after taking up his offer of sharing his room at a hotel: he ‘struck him on the head with a piece of gas piping’ before trying to strangle him. In court Mr Christmas Humphreys, for Hibbert, said Shuttleworth was ‘a moral pervert’ whom the jury would no doubt consider ‘a loathsome specimen of humanity’; it took them one minute to find Hibbert not guilty of wounding with intent. ‘I taught him a lesson he will never forget,’ Hibbert said. Sixteen years later George Brinham, a former chairman of the Labour Party, met 16-year-old Laurence Somers in the street, took him out to tea and the pictures, and back in his flat put his arms around him and said: ‘Give us a kiss.’ Somers struck him three or four times on the head with a glass decanter and killed him. The defence argued that ‘one is entitled to kill if a man commits a forcible and atrocious crime against you.’ The judge agreed that ‘this is about as clear a case of provocation as it is possible to have’ and told the jury to ignore the murder charge; Somers was then found not guilty of manslaughter. You can see why a parent with no homosexual brothers or uncles or even acquaintances might worry about a fate like those of Shuttleworth and Brinham for their only son. Lives unfolded in a vacuum of knowledge, a fog of ‘delicacy’ pierced now and again by alarming factoids; fear and misapprehension thrived.

The various, often forgotten novels that Parker gives extracts from are hard to assess overall from such short scenes; they give off a mixed sense of exploratory bravery and uncertainty about what can acceptably be said. Some writers clearly felt they were taking great personal risks. James Courage, a New Zealander living in London, was tormented with anxiety and guilt about his novel A Way of Love, published in 1959: despite a good review in the Observer, ‘I feel as though I had thrown myself, as a homosexual, on the hostile mercy of the world: committed myself irretrievably to perdition, as it were; an anal outcast … Yet what have I to lose?’ He viewed his sexuality as a ‘tragedy’, and felt even ‘a prison sentence couldn’t be a worse fate (punishment)’ than the depression and inertia that dogged him. But he knew he must write, and publish, the novel: ‘It was in me and had to come out.’ Others showed a good deal more confidence, and their work transcends mere period interest. In Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After (1952), fellow gay writers and readers found their world described with a liberating candour and naturalness new to British literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer Bernard Sands is the excited witness to a young gay man’s arrest for importuning in Leicester Square – a moment almost too complex to be properly grasped in a short extract. There is also Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), a marvellously subtle and original novel about the liminal sexual status of a Jamaican immigrant man, torn between a white boyfriend and an affair with an exploitative landlady.

And there is Gillian Freeman’s The Leather Boys, published in 1961 under the pawky pseudonym Eliot George, and written at the request of its publisher (Anthony Blond again), who wanted a ‘Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs’. This is a far less sophisticated book than Wilson’s and Salkey’s, but you feel at once, in the brief extract Parker includes, the power of an idea of queer romance that has been oddly absent up until now. We see two young men, unmarried Dick and unhappily married Reggie, sharing a bed, we see them kiss, and for the first time – after nearly five hundred pages, already into the second volume of Parker’s history – the words ‘I love you’ are spoken by one man to another. The monochrome world of suspicion and hatred, of snatched and risky excitements, is belatedly suffused with a glow of tender and completely natural feeling.

Two pages later Dirk Bogarde, star of Basil Dearden’s 1961 film Victim, celebrated as the first to tackle the plight of male homosexuals under British law, is taking credit for inserting into the script a stretch of dialogue in which a man says ‘I love you’ to another man for the first time on film. ‘I said: “There’s no point in half-measures. We either make a film about queers or we don’t.”’ Even so, the idea that a film about queers should be a film about love comes as a novelty, and a shock. In Victim, the word ‘homosexual’ is first uttered, half an hour in, by a senior policeman, the humane and sagacious DI Harris. The original trailer shuns the H-word, asking histrionically: ‘What crime linked an ageing hairdresser and a famous star of the theatre?’ The answer is blackmail, made so easy by anti-gay laws, and it can still come as a surprise that this, and not love between men, is what drives this gripping and historically important thriller. Otherwise the subject of homosexuality, by now of some urgency in contemporary debate, is handled largely through various kinds of euphemism – ‘the way I am’ or ‘how we are’ by the gays themselves, and a litany of abuse by anti-gays such as the venomous Miss Benham, a blackmailer herself, who says her victims ‘make me feel physically ill’ and must ‘pay for their filthy blasphemy’. As Some Men in London helps us to see, the film is a clever distillate of contemporary attitudes, and of the language in which they were couched; being made ‘physically ill’ or ‘physically sick’ is in the extreme category of reactions, and one assumes rhetorical rather than clinical. (In 1965 Lord Goddard, a former lord chief justice born in 1887, complained that judges of homosexual cases had to ‘sit and listen to these stories which make one feel physically sick’.) Victim is of course sharply critical of the existing law, and its central character, the brilliant 39-year-old barrister Melville Farr (played by Bogarde), is caught in the tragic paradox of a gay man who in order to bring down a blackmailer must destroy his own career.

What Victim never offers is an image, even a rumour, of love between men as a positive, happy or even practicable thing. Though the possible consequences of homosexual acts are painfully evident – Henry, the ageing hairdresser, has been to prison four times – there is clearly no possibility of even a friendly glance between queers being shown on screen. Farr reassures his frightened wife that he has never acted on the homosexual leanings he admitted to her before they married. A knowing post-1967 reading of the scant facts given might lead us to think he has in fact had an affair with Jack Barrett, the young working-class man he has repeatedly given lifts to late at night, but the emotional logic of the film requires us to take his word for it that he hasn’t: ‘I stopped seeing him because I wanted him.’ The snapshot taken with a telephoto lens by the blackmailer merely shows Farr in his car with his arm round Barrett, who is crying. Even this tender and touching image is kept from the audience – the photograph is glimpsed for no more than a moment as it shrivels in the fire and the closing credits roll. Bogarde’s insisted-on scene in which one man says ‘I love you’ to another didn’t make the cut.

When Victim is released, Parker’s voices of protest, sympathy and common sense are gaining in force, matched, as a change in the law seems more likely, by an ever wilder pitch of quasi-biblical commination (‘sink of filth’ etc). Parker illuminates this moment, of faint optimism hedged by nervous fear of a hostile reaction, by printing extracts from the letters the British Board of Film Censors, which liked to discuss synopses before production, sent to Victim’s makers. It’s clear that the censors were anxious to a craven degree that the film shouldn’t shock, or create any trouble for Lord Morrison, the incoming president of the BBFC, who would have to defend it. John Trevelyan, its secretary, wrote to the film’s producer that, while ‘intelligent people’ regard homosexuality ‘with sympathy and compassion’, to the great majority of cinemagoers it is ‘shocking, distasteful and disgusting’. As elsewhere in these pages, you hear a man hoping to be taken for one of the ‘intelligent’ lot while suggesting, in the force of his language, his covert concurrence with the majority view, or at least a fear of being seen to dissent from it.

Trevelyan was alarmed that the film outline gave an impression of a ‘world peopled with no one but “queers”’. ‘The less we have of groups of “queers” in bars and clubs and elsewhere the better’: ‘keep the homosexual relationships as far as possible in the background.’ When Janet Green submitted her script these objections were amplified: ‘Frankly we would not want this amount of emphasis on homosexual practices nor the somewhat frank dialogue about it that is in the present script.’ The censors certainly got their way there, as no trace of either thing survives in the finished film. It’s as if, in order to deal with the subject at all, the film has to keep it entirely out of view. Parker gives extracts from a hostile reader’s report on a revised script: ‘the only character who has any real impact is the Sandy Youth.’ This is the sinister, motorcycle-riding blackmailer, clearly himself queer, who was played by Derren Nesbitt. ‘Goodness knows what encouragement this film may give to potential blackmailers of the Sandy Youth type.’ There again is the immobilising paradox that the film dramatises and Some Men in London repeatedly documents: the law not only makes queers criminals but stimulates the committing of further crimes against them. It’s cheering, therefore, to read that the very gloom of Victim had a positive effect on public opinion, stirring sympathy and indignation – Lord Arran believed the film to be responsible for a critical swing from 48 to 63 per cent in favour of decriminalisation.

At one point in Victim, Farr is called to the mews house of Lord Fullbrook, a philanthropic businessman, and the scene that follows is a striking and surely unprecedented one: four well-to-do gay men discussing the blackmail that three of them are the victims of, and one indirectly touched by. It turns out that Farr hadn’t known before arriving that Fullbrook, who is a friend of his, is queer (in response to his surprise, Fullbrook interestingly employs a much older term: ‘You’re a sophisticated man. You know the invert is part of nature’). One wonders what percentage of the original audience knew, or guessed, that two of the actors, Dennis Price and Bogarde himself, were queer too. It must have been a curious scene to shoot, with actors openly discussing matters that in their real lives they were obliged to keep very quiet about.

How far​ were people, gay or straight, prepared to stick their necks out? When in 1958 A.E. Dyson (a shy 29-year-old gay academic) solicited signatories to a letter to the Times urging the government to act on the Wolfenden recommendations, he had more than thirty acceptances, including from Noel Annan, A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, J.B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, A.J.P. Taylor and Angus Wilson – in the full list, unlike in this sample, the heteros outnumber the homos. Encouraged by this apparently principled and broad-minded response, Dyson set up the Homosexual Law Reform Society, and applied to some of these supporters to support him further. Parker prints Taylor’s reply: ‘I don’t feel strongly enough to sit on a Honorary Committee or allow my name to be used further. I can think of so many causes that matter more. Indeed I can hardly think of one that matters less.’ Others were more timid, even ‘cowardly’, as Nigel Nicolson admitted (‘it would be sticking my neck out unnecessarily. I do not feel so strongly about the rights of homosexuals as to risk everything in their defence’) or ingeniously evasive, like John Lehmann (‘I am of the opinion that it will be wise if bachelors refrain from appearing among the public signatories of the appeal’).

There are various surprising moments, when someone you’d been counting on to be sensible says something awful. Priestley, in 1947, toes a popular line in stating in the press that we need a theatre that ‘is something better than an exhibition of sexual oddities and perversions’, but redeems himself later when he agrees to Dyson’s proposal that he become a founder member of the HLRS. John Osborne had, as Parker says, ‘a complex and somewhat obsessive relationship with homosexuality’. His very queer A Patriot for Me (1965) was seen by the theatre’s censors as a ‘Pansies’ Charter of Freedom’, and was indeed a calculated provocation which played a central role in the abolition of the lord chancellor’s veto. Osborne ridiculed the simplistic morality of an attack on homosexuals in the theatre by someone called John Deane Potter. (‘These are evil men,’ Potter wrote. ‘They have spun their web through the West End today until it is a simmering scandal.’) But he took an unexpected turn at the end of his riposte: ‘Ever since I started work in the theatrical profession I have tried to attack the dominance of homosexuals in all its field.’ He did so because ‘highly talented homosexuals’ had produced a stagnation in the art form: ‘unreal chintzy plays, gorgeous décor, and a glamorous selection of theatrical lords and ladies glittering over all. I detest this kind of theatre … and I shall go on attacking it because it is bad, boring and unadventurous art.’ It’s a slippery moment, where Osborne sides with the queers on solid moral grounds but attacks them as the propounders of the kind of theatre he is committed to doing away with; distaste for what he sees as typically gay glamour and chintz is dignified as a sterner principle. It was too bothersome a point for John Gordon: ‘He makes it plain that the public could end the power and crowing of the queers of the theatre by ceasing to support and applaud them. I doff my hat to him for that.’

One of Parker’s repeated points is how essential gay men had long been to the cultural life of the country, so the paranoia of anti-gays clearly had something to work on. In 1955, the outgoing deputy general administrator of the Royal Opera House, Steuart Wilson, told the People that ‘the influence of perverts in the world of music has grown beyond all measure. If it is not curbed soon, Covent Garden and other precious musical heritages could suffer irreparable harm.’ The People then claimed to give the view of the composer Walford Davies, that ‘singers who are perverted often get work because of this. And new works by composers are given prominence by some people if the writer is perverted’ – though since Davies, a former Master of the King’s Musick and popular broadcaster, had been dead for fourteen years the remark may well have been clumsily concocted to lend weight to the journalist’s own opinion about the postwar period. Two works of notably queer provenance which premiered at Covent Garden, Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951), the libretto co-written by Forster, and more particularly his ill-received Coronation opera, Gloriana (1953), the libretto by William Plomer after Lytton Strachey, were surely what he had in mind.

Parker picks up the insinuations in an anonymous review in the TLS of a 1949 study of Britten’s life and works, which attacked ‘the extraordinary emotional unbalance of the whole plot’ of Peter Grimes: ‘composer and librettist seem to be attaching some mystical value to the mere fact of being in opposition to society.’ The reviewer was the critic Martin Cooper, who had form in this area, having four years earlier decried Tchaikovsky’s later symphonies (previously found by major British critics to be masterly, impersonal and supremely inventive) as ‘hysterical … Quite unbalanced and, in the last resort, ugly … This man is ill, we feel: must we be shown all his sores without exception?’ This pathological view of Tchaikovsky’s music is one I grew up with, or grew into, encouraged and given new interest by an upper-sixth outing to see Ken Russell’s garishly sensational The Music Lovers (1971). Britten’s work too, in the fibre of my adolescence, came tinged with an ambivalence that was inseparably musical and personal. All this now feels part of a not quite unpackable density of rumours and impressions, covert excitements and more or less open speculation. Queer men were alert for any sign of the illicit subject, relying on a sort of cultural gaydar that detected and fed on subtext and suggestion; but a hostile straight man could sense something too, and be moved, like Cooper, to disgust instead of identification.

What the public actually saw and thought about queer stars is hard to know; performers who both in their own worlds and to gay eyes are conspicuously queer have often been heart-throbs for heterosexual women. Perhaps the very unattainability of a star makes it immaterial. In an enchanting piece in the People in 1950, a New Zealand journalist called Elizabeth Parsons quizzed ‘Britain’s three most eligible bachelors’ about what they might be looking for in a wife. The bachelors are Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan and Norman Hartnell. Parsons catches Novello in his dressing room applying his make-up before a show. He tells her: ‘There are few happy marriages in our profession … I’d rather free-lance, as they say.’ The ‘faultlessly tailored’ Rattigan says the woman he marries will have to be ‘very understanding and capable of putting up with all my vagaries. We writers keep very odd hours and sometimes demand complete freedom for weeks at a time.’ When it comes to Hartnell, ‘the Queen’s dressmaker and world’s leading designer’, Parsons decides that his fixation on female perfection makes marriage to a real-life woman impossible. And besides, he says that ‘a girl with a strong personality can be a blooming nuisance.’ The whole article is so guileless as to seem almost satirical. Is it a display of pure innocence, unruffled by suspicion, or an arch provocation?

The Gielgud episode​ , three years later, lacks any such ambiguity. Bringing together two major areas of Parker’s history, the dimly lavatorial and the West End stage, it’s an explicit outing. In court Gielgud claimed to be a clerk on a salary of £1000 per annum, and the magistrate, perhaps infected by the rare experience of sharing the stage with a stellar and recently knighted actor, went along with the pretence, accepting his story that this was a one-off event caused by tiredness and drinking too much (the familiar plea). He fined him £10 for being drunk and disorderly and advised him to see a doctor about his problem – the drinking, that is, not the cottaging. Noël Coward wrote Gielgud a gratefully acknowledged letter of support, but in his diary fulminated about a ‘day of horror’: ‘This imbecile behaviour of John’s has let us all down with a crash.’ It might have been all right, might even have helped the case for a change in the law, if ‘poor wretched John’ had been caught ‘decently in bed’ with a man, but this ‘descent into dirt and slime can only do dreadful harm from every point of view. The lack of dignity, the utter squalor and contemptible lack of self-control are really too horrible to contemplate.’ Coward, who never came out, appears torn between compassion, blame and the vehement disgust of columnists like John Gordon, who feasted on the case. He seems to own a vague idea of tactics towards legal change, but his shock at the spectacle of personal exposure registers more powerfully than his worries about a setback for the cause.

The magistrate told Gielgud that his sexual activities were ‘dangerous to other men, particularly young men’, and the corruption of youth is a recurrent theme, or alarm, throughout these books. In 1950, Herbert Read, reviewing the unexpurgated text of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, described Lord Alfred Douglas, who had died only five years before, as ‘the most complete cad in history’. The birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes, who’d been a friend of Douglas’s and thought his sonnets ‘second only to those of Shakespeare’, responded with furious words about the ‘abnormal and filthy practices’ Wilde had indulged in with stable boys. A brave and equally furious reply by the gay painter John Minton attacked her ‘bigoted moral fervour’, made worse by her ‘pretensions to a scientific approach’. Stopes was then provoked into setting out her view that many homosexuals ‘corrupt and destroy wholesome, normal young people’, and that there were ‘many homosexuals, potentially normal, who have been corrupted’ – a revealingly muddled phrase. This is an intriguing instance of Wilde still generating not just debate but active revulsion, half a century after his death; even nine years later the BBFC feared that a film about Wilde could be ‘corrupting to handsome young roughs with idle minds and not much in the way of principles’. The idea of corruptibility, of being changed in orientation by example or interference or by mere adolescent messing about, was looked into by the Wolfenden Committee, and the eminent gay eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper refuted it trenchantly as ‘totally devoid of any truth’.

The bishop of Rochester, in the Lords debate on the Wolfenden report, was having none of this. It grows wearisome typing out this stuff, but I’ll give a flavour of his pitch:

There is no more baneful or contagious an influence in the world than that which emanates from homosexual practice. It makes a life of leprosy. The most reverend Primate was quite right: there are such things as sodomy clubs … They draw in those who would otherwise be immune and turn them themselves into corrupters of their fellows … sucked in and held on to, as it were, by an octopus of corruption.

The leprous octopus sees off (or does it?) the newish idea about there being a homosexual element in everyone’s make-up: ‘homosexuals can be made,’ the bishop insists. And then he goes for a moment into one of the little flourishes of excitable imagination that provide incidental joys in these books. If only ‘your Lordships had known the problem we had in Chatham during the war, when men came down in great numbers to sleuth young naval ratings’. ‘Sleuth’ is especially good, with an air both technical and euphemistic; a means, very typical of their lordships here, of firmly asserting things they know nothing about and have quite possibly just made up.

Gutter-press journalists, such as Douglas Warth, fastened on cases where people in authority had indeed sexually abused boys, making them out as representative of the larger threat posed to society. The hostile conflation of paedophilia and homosexuality (still with us) was a persistent part of the campaign against decriminalisation. Parker unsettles the picture in interesting ways, partly by drawing on accounts of underage experiences of love and sexual pleasure. Michael Hastings’s novel The Frauds (1960) features a gay 14-year-old, while Robert Hutton’s 1958 autobiography, Of Those Alone, gives a straightforward picture of his teenage longings, hanging round in stations and at last being seduced at the age of sixteen by a man of 35: ‘I knew that this was what, both physically and mentally, I had been looking for … I was no longer alone.’ In The Homosexual Society (1962), commissioned by the Home Office Research Unit, Richard Hauser records cheerful interviews with particularly young rent boys: ‘I was a Camp [prostitute] since I was ten or eleven. The dirty old rich men went quite mad and were after me all the time.’ ‘It often gave me great pleasure but after a while you get used to it and it is just like smoking a cigarette.’ The work brings money, perks, clothes, self-esteem. ‘Before I was a nobody, now I am a queer. But this is the life!’ It’s rather as if the boys in Fagin’s kitchen had decided to explore their sexuality.

Parker also documents a prominent case of protracted abuse, by the former Conservative MP Sir Ian Horobin, who had been a Japanese POW for four years, and was the warden of Mansfield House in Plaistow, a boys’ home founded in the 1880s by students of Mansfield College, Oxford. In 1962 he was convicted on ‘ten charges of indecency and committing grave offences with boys and young men’ at Mansfield, where he had quarters on the top floor, and lured or summoned boys as young as thirteen to his room. Parker quotes the report in the Times, in which decency homogenises all the offences into ‘indecency’. Horobin claimed he was ‘virtually married’ to one boy, also charged, who’d been fourteen at the start of their relationship. The consensual pretexts of adult gay pickups were creepily repurposed: boys would be offered a ride in Horobin’s Rolls-Royce, or invited to his room to look at some stamp albums. Horobin himself was unrepentant – ‘it is natural for some people to love boys in this way’ – and objected sulkily that he had ‘helped far more boys than he had ever ruined’. He’d recently been offered a peerage for his work at Mansfield, but got four years in prison instead. On release he moved to Tangier – in part, he said, ‘to avoid the smell of urine’. He told John Betjeman, ‘I broke the law with my eyes open all my life until I went to prison. I broke it in prison. I broke it immediately I came out of prison, and I have not the slightest intention of ever paying any attention to it’ – a position not quite as heroic as it at first sounds. Parker devotes a fair bit of space to Horobin, which reminds us that, though his larger purpose is to describe injustice and the fight against it, his duty as historian is to show the way queer life was apprehended by the public through newspapers and other media. In a culture in which the exploitation and corruption of youth was a central talking point of anti-gay hostility, there were glaring instances of just such crimes, and they nourished the larger atmosphere of resistance to legalisation.

Both volumes​ have an appendix of biographical notes on the main people featured in the text, amazingly interesting and amusing digests full of unexpected ironies and connections. Individual lives, caught in the body of the text at the significant moment of an affair or the opening of a trial, stretch in these notes into longer perspectives that fit no particular pattern, but often cross: it was pleasing to learn that the half-Ghanaian actor Paul Danquah, most famous for his role in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, was later a consultant for the World Bank, and lived at different times with both John Minton and Francis Bacon. Such is Parker’s encyclopedic knowledge of this world. He made a wonderful start as a biographer in 1989, with a Life of J.R. Ackerley, an important literary editor and a brilliant minor writer. It was a book acutely responsive to the cultural and social milieux of English life in the early and mid-20th century, and showed a fascination with the networks of homosexual writers and artists and their friends and lovers – a subject, only some twenty years after the Sexual Offences Act, still ripe for exploration. Ackerley in fact died in 1967, aged 71, little more than a month before the conclusion of Parker’s second volume, which again mines what Henry James styled the ‘visitable past’, that rich period, at each juncture, still just within reach. Fifteen years after Ackerley came Isherwood, a mighty biography of a writer ten years younger, who escaped from the English scene altogether and was much more famously gay. It’s a magnificent book too, but I don’t think it’s just the change of continent that makes Isherwood a slightly remoter subject for Parker than Ackerley, in all his odd but embedded Englishness.

Isherwood makes a brief reappearance here in the first volume, on a return visit to London, at dinner chez Stephen Spender, where he finds the atmosphere stuffy and sterile, though it’s rich in the kind of connections Parker enjoys: Ackerley is a fellow guest, along with Angus Wilson and William Plomer. The world conjured up by Some Men in London makes it eminently clear why London, while being a magnet for so many gay men, was also a place to get out of. Thom Gunn, a fellow escapee from England to California, is briefly back in town in 1964: ‘I had all my lunches and dinners,’ he writes to his partner, Mike Kitay, in San Francisco, ‘which was awful enough.’ At one of them John Lehmann insists on kissing him – a disconcerting ‘dry peck’. ‘I wish he wouldn’t.’ On another visit three years later, Gunn has lunch with the Australian novelist Randolph Stow, ‘rather nice, very bright, very unattractive’, who pumps him full of whisky and then starts kissing him too. No doubt Gunn seemed to these other men, one older, one younger, to embody a liberated sexuality, a taking-for-granted from which he in fact recoiled. As in all Parker’s work you get an appreciation of the intergenerational interest, fundamental to his narrative but also to his own procedures as researcher and visitor to that steadily receding past.

His coda to Some Men in London is a downbeat one. After the passing of the 1967 Act, Arran acknowledged that ‘no amount of legislation will prevent homosexuals from being the subject of dislike and derision.’ He urged them to ‘comport themselves quietly and with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration … any form of public flaunting would be utterly distasteful’ and would make the sponsors of the bill regret their efforts; ‘while there may be nothing bad in being homosexual, there is certainly nothing good.’ Two days later, the 41-year-old Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary that he and Joe Orton agreed that legalisation ‘would accomplish little’; he himself was still ‘full of guilt and shame’ and sexually paralysed. Two weeks later the 34-year-old Orton, whose own cheerfully frank escapades glint through the latter part of the second volume, was murdered with a hammer by his partner, Kenneth Halliwell, who then killed himself.

It’s a grim note to end on, and it is the case that the following years saw a steep increase in prosecutions for non-private homosexual acts: the thwarted PCs were working flat out in the capital’s urinals. Parker has done us the great service of seeking out and trekking through a vast amount of material, and making from it a powerful and complex portrait of an era. But it’s hard not to feel that a third volume, covering the politics, the culture, the jubilation, the public flaunting and the large social easings of the next fifteen years until the onset of Aids, would be almost as interesting. The New London Spy had a second edition in 1971; its ‘Men for Men’ chapter is snappy, saucy and, with no need for euphemism, half the length of the version five years earlier. It tells it like it is, about pubs and clubs, and even about the police. ‘Cock-teasing is a national pastime … Usually reliable sources reveal that many of the things you hear about our delicious policemen are mostly true. But, as there is still a soupçon of “baiting”, follow those flat footsteps carefully.’