Sex, Time

and Place
 Sex, Time
and Place
Queer Histories of London,
c. 1850 to the Present

EDITED BY SIMON AVERY AND

KATHERINE M. GRAHAM
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 CONTENTS

List of Figures vii

List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii

SECTION ONE Framing Queer London 1

1 Structuring and Interpreting Queer Spaces of London

Simon Avery 3
2 Queer Temporalities, Queer Londons
Katherine M. Graham 23
3 Mapping This Volume
Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham 41

SECTION TWO Exploring Queer London 47

4 London, AIDS and the 1980s

Matt Cook 49
5 Bigot Geography: Queering Geopolitics in Brixton
Emma Spruce 65
6 Representations of Queer London in the Fiction
of Sarah Waters
Paulina Palmer 81
7 Are Drag Kings Still Too Queer for London?
From the Nineteenth-Century Impersonator
to the Drag King of Today
Kayte Stokoe 97
vi CONTENTS

8 Claude McKay: Queering Spaces of Black Radicalism

in Interwar London
Gemma Romain and Caroline Bressey 115
9 The British Society of the Study of Sex Psychology:
‘Advocating the Culture of Unnatural and Criminal
Practices’?
Lesley A. Hall 133
10 Cannibal London: Racial Discourses, Pornography
and Male–Male Desire in Late-Victorian Britain
Silvia Antosa 149
11 ‘Famous for the paint she put on her face’: London’s
Painted Poofs and the Self-Fashioning of Francis Bacon
Dominic Janes 167
12 Mingling with the Ungodly: Simeon Solomon in Queer
Victorian London
Carolyn Conroy 185
13 Alan Hollinghurst’s Fictional Ways of Queering London
Bart Eeckhout 203
14 Sink Street: The Sapphic World of Pre-Chinatown Soho
Anne Witchard 221
15 Chasing Community: From Old Compton Street to the
Online World of Grindr
Marco Venturi 239
16 Being ‘There’: Contemporary London, Facebook and
Queer Historical Feeling
Sam McBean 255

Bibliography 270
Index 291
 LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 View of pavilion in Vauxhall Gardens. (De Agostini Picture

Library/Getty Images.) 6
1.2 Grand view of Park Entrance and Vauxhall Tavern at Dusk.
(Photo by View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images.) 16
7.1 Actress Vesta Tilley and her bicycle pose for a publicity postcard
circa 1910 in London, England. (Photo by Transcendental
Graphics/Getty Images.) 99
8.1 Jamaican writer and poet Claude McKay (1889–1948), 1926. (Photo
by Berenice Abbott/Getty Images.) 116
11.1 ‘Portrait of an unidentified transvestite, possibly the artist
Francis Bacon in drag, England pre-1945. The cleavage raises
questions, but may be the result of photo manipulation.’
(Caption provided by Getty Images. Photo by The John Deakin
Archive/Getty Images.) 168
11.2 Francis Bacon, Figure Study II (1945–46), oil on canvas,
145 × 128.5 cm, Huddersfield Art Gallery, reproduced courtesy
of the estate of Francis Bacon, all rights reserved, DACS 201x,
photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. 170
11.3 Fitzroy Sq., group, evidence presented at the Central Criminal
Court, Rex v. Britt and Others, 1927, CRIM 1/387, reproduced
courtesy of the National Archives, London. 177
14.1 Sandy’s Bar. 232
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Silvia Antosa is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of

Enna “Kore” (Italy). She is the author of Richard Francis Burton: Victorian
Explorer and Translator (Peter Lang, 2012) and Crossing Boundaries: Bodily
Paradigms in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction 1985–2000 (Aracne, 2008), and
editor of several interdisciplinary volumes on queer studies: Queer Crossings:
Theories, Bodies, Texts (Mimesis, 2012), Gender and Sexuality: Rights,
Language and Performativity (Aracne, 2012) and Omosapiens II: Spazi e
identità queer (Carocci, 2007). She has published on Victorian fiction, poetry
and travel writing and contemporary British fiction. She is co-editing with
Joseph Bristow a special issue of Textus on Narratives of Gender, Sexuality
and Embodiment in Modern and Contemporary English Culture.

Simon Avery is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and

co-director of the Queer London Research Forum at the University of
Westminster, London, UK. His research interests include the relations between
literature, politics and gender; historiography and queer histories; the 1890s;
and the contemporary historical novel. His publications include Elizabeth
Barrett Browning (Northcote House, 2011), Poems of Mary Coleridge
(Shearsman, 2010), Thomas Hardy: A Reader’s Guide (Palgrave, 2009) and
the Broadview edition of Hardy’s The Return of the Native (2013).

Caroline Bressey is Reader in the Department of Geography, UCL. Her

research focuses on recovering the historical geographies of the black
presence in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, especially the lives of women
living in London. Her research draws out biographies from prison, hospital
and asylum records as well as remapping the working lives of black women
and their families. Parallel to this are her interests in ideas of race, racism,
early anti-racist theory and identity in Victorian society. These themes were
the focus of her first book on the historical geographies of Victorian anti-
racist periodical publishing, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

Carolyn Conroy is an independent scholar, writer and researcher. She is a

former post-doctoral tutor and researcher in the History of Art Department
at the University of York and has worked on art historical research for
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix

private collectors and organizations such as the Paul Mellon Center for
British Art at Yale University. She is currently writing a biography of the
Anglo-Jewish homosexual Victorian artist Simeon Solomon and edits the
Simeon Solomon Research Archive at www.simeonsolomon.com.

Matt Cook is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck, University of

London, Birkbeck Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre and an
editor of History Workshop Journal. He is the author of London and the
Culture of Homosexuality (2003) and Queer Domesticities (2014), and
editor of A Gay History of Britain (2007), Queer 1950s (2012 with Heike
Bauer) and Queer Cities, Queer Cultures (2012, with Jennifer Evans).

Bart Eeckhout is Professor of English and American Literature at the

University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he teaches queer fiction and queer
studies and supervises doctoral dissertations in the field. His other long-term
specializations are the poetry of Wallace Stevens and interdisciplinary urban
studies. He has authored and edited more than twenty books and journal
issues. His publications on LGBT/queer topics have appeared in Queer in
Europe and the Journal of Homosexuality, and have repeatedly figured the
writings of Alan Hollinghurst. He is currently co-editing a collection of
essays entitled LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe.

Katherine M. Graham is a Lecturer in English Literature (Theatre) at the

University of Westminster and co-director of the Queer London Research
Forum. Her major research area is revenge, especially revenge in the
drama of the early modern period. Katherine has forthcoming articles that
consider the queerness of time and the queerness of the female revenger in
late-Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies, as well as an article on
John Fletcher’s play The Tragedy of Valentinian. She also has a forthcoming
chapter on gender and objects in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Katherine works
as a theatre reviewer for The Morning Star newspaper.

Lesley A. Hall is a Wellcome Library Research Fellow and Honorary Lecturer

in History of Medicine, University College London. She has published
several books and numerous chapters and articles on sexuality and gender
in the UK from the nineteenth century to the present, including Sex, Gender
and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (2nd, revised expanded, edition,
2012), The Life and Times of Stella Browne, Feminist and Free Spirit (2011)
and (with the late Roy Porter) The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual
Knowledge in Britain (1995). Her website is www.lesleyahall.net, her blog
lesleyahall.blogspot.co.uk, Twitter handle @erinacean.

Dominic Janes is Professor of History in the School of Humanities at Keele

University. He is a cultural historian who studies texts and visual images
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

relating to Britain in its local and international contexts since the eighteenth
century. Within this sphere he focuses on the histories of gender, sexuality
and religion. His most recent books are Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy
and Homosexual Visibility in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015) and
Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman
(University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Sam McBean is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary American Literature

at Queen Mary University of London. She has published on contemporary
literature, new media, queer theory and feminist theory in journals including
Feminist Review, Camera Obscura and the Journal of Lesbian Studies. She is
the author of Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (Routledge, 2016).

Paulina Palmer has retired from a senior lectureship in English at Warwick

University, where she helped establish the MA in Women’s Studies. She has
also lectured for the MA in Gender and Sexuality at Birkbeck, London
University. Her publications include Contemporary Women’s Fiction:
Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory, Contemporary Lesbian Writing:
Dreams, Desire, Difference, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions and
The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic. She is currently
writing a book entitled Queering Contemporary Gothic for Palgrave
Macmillan.

Gemma Romain is a historian based in the Equiano Centre, Department

of Geography, University College London. She is also an Honorary Fellow
of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations,
University of Southampton. Her research explores modern Caribbean and
Black British history, specifically in relation to visual cultures and queer
histories. She also has a particular interest in public history, museums and
curating and has curated/co-curated exhibitions and displays at institutions
including Tate Britain, the Women’s Library and the Petrie Museum, UCL.
Her forthcoming biography of Patrick Nelson, a queer black Jamaican man
who first migrated to Britain in 1937, will be published by Bloomsbury
Academic.

Emma Spruce is a graduate researcher at the Gender Institute, London School

of Economics. She is undertaking an ESRC-funded PhD that explores the
appeal and effects of gay progress narratives. The project seeks to identify
and analyse new discursive and material inclusions and exclusions, arguing
that these borders have been reconfigured through the changing position
of homosexuality in stories of progress that are told about the world, the
nation, the city and the neighbourhood. Previously, Emma worked on
LGBTQ asylum and the constrained sexual stories told through asylum
applications.
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xi

Kayte Stokoe is a PhD candidate in French Studies at Warwick University.

Her thesis, which re-evaluates three decades of French and Anglo-American
queer and feminist reflection on drag performance, is supervised by Oliver
Davis and funded by an AHRC studentship attached to the Queer Theory
in France research project. Kayte’s wider research interests include gender
identity, expression and embodiment; and critical disability studies. Kayte
is currently developing her paper ‘Textual Drag in Woolf’s Orlando and
Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien’ for Queering the Second Wave, a forthcoming
special issue of Paragraph, edited by Lisa Downing and Lara Cox.

Marco Venturi is a final year PhD researcher in Gender and Sexuality Studies
(CMII) at University College London. He is originally from Bologna, where
he graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures. In 2009, he moved
to London and completed an MA in American Studies at King’s College
London with a dissertation on the political activism and street performances
of the gay community during the AIDS crisis in the United States. He is
currently writing up his PhD thesis titled ‘Out of Soho, Back into the Closet:
Re-Thinking the London Gay Community’, which reconsiders the role of
Soho for gay men in London as well as ideas of gay communities and gay
spaces more broadly.

Anne Witchard is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics

and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of
Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell
of Chinatown (Ashgate, 2007), Lao She in London (Hong Kong University
Press, 2012) and England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War
(Penguin, 2014). She is co-editor, with Lawrence Phillips, of London Gothic:
Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum, 2010) and editor of
British Modernism and Chinoiserie (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A volume such as this is a collaborative effort in the widest sense and there are
many people who have helped us bring it into being and to whom we would
like to express our thanks here. The point of origin for the volume was the
‘Queer London’ conference which we held at the University of Westminster,
London, in March 2013. Bringing together academics, practitioners, people
working in charities and political and cultural institutions, and other
interested participants, the conference enabled the speakers and delegates
to debate a wide range of issues concerning the construction and workings
of queer London from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We would like
to thank everyone who attended the conference for their contributions
and enthusiasm and for confirming what an exciting and complex area of
investigation Queer London studies is.
It was in the light of this that we subsequently established the Queer
London Research Forum, housed in the Department of English, Linguistics
and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. The aim of the
Forum has been to extend that energetic discussion between people from
different groups and backgrounds which was begun at the conference, and
to establish a space where issues to do with London and its queerness can
be examined in exploratory and expansive ways. To date, we have held a
number of seminars on areas such as queer archives, queer literatures of
London, queer London film and queer ageing, and we would like to thank
our amazing speakers from these events: Jake Graf, Lesley A. Hall, Kate
Hancock, Christa Holka, Nicola Humberstone, Jonathan Kemp, Sam
McBean, Neil McKenna, Ian Iqbal Rachid, Sonny van Eden and Matt.
Without their thoughtful, challenging and inspiring talks and presentations,
the Queer London Research Forum could not have developed in the ways
that it has. We would also like to thank the Research Management Group in
the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies for financially
supporting the Forum, and colleagues across the wider Faculty of Social
Sciences and Humanities for their encouragement, enthusiasm and help.
In particular, our thanks go to Alex Warwick, Martin Willis, John Beck,
Monica Germanà, Anne Witchard, Lucy Bond, Matt Morrison, Nigel Mapp,
Georgina Colby, Helen Glew and Francis Ray White.
It is within this context that we have been able to produce this volume of
essays, and working with the contributors has been an enormous pleasure
and privilege. Each of them has approached the project with commitment,
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii

patience and good humour, and our deep gratitude goes to them for their
dedication to the volume over the past two years. It has been a wonderful
experience to be able to bring together the work of such a diverse group
of academics in order to address what Queer London might mean both
historically and in its contemporary forms. Our thanks, too, go to Frances
Arnold and Emma Goode at Bloomsbury, who have been enthusiastic about
the volume throughout and offered valuable guidance along the way, as well
as to the readers of our initial proposal whose comments and suggestions
enabled us to think about the project in different ways. Thanks also to Chris
Waters, whose thoughtful comments on the final manuscript were extremely
helpful.
Finally, we would like to thank Dave, Sam McBean and Thomas Moore
for their support, encouragement and help in so many ways, and for making
Queer London even more interesting.
 SECTION ONE

Framing Queer
London
 CHAPTER ONE

Structuring and Interpreting

Queer Spaces of London
Simon Avery

The subtitle to this collection – ‘Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the

Present’ – provokes a number of pressing and complex questions. What do
we mean by ‘queer’? How do we construct models of history (and whose
history are we constructing)? What do we define as ‘London’ and how might
it be constituted? As the following chapters in the collection make clear,
the answers to these questions are many and varied, and they point to the
diverse ways – politically, ideologically, methodologically – that ‘London’
and its ‘queerness’ can be read. As these categories shift, overlap and are
modulated by one another in ways which are both exhilarating and possibly
bewildering, the complexity of thinking about ‘Queer London’ – or, more
rightly, ‘Queer Londons’ in the plural – is clearly evident.
In this chapter, I consider the concept of queer urban space as a way of
reading through, and framing, the range of material we have drawn together
here. I am interested in how queer space might be structured, interpreted
and theorized, and how queer spatial relations might operate in the urban
matrix. To this end, I draw attention to the importance of both material and
imaginative constructions in the formation of London’s queer spaces and
reflect upon the critical work that has been undertaken to date, as well as
areas which would benefit from more extensive examination and analysis.
In her chapter, Katherine M. Graham traces a history of the term ‘queer’;
here, I use ‘queer’ to indicate a series of approaches and politics to do
with sexuality, desire and intimacy which trouble and disrupt orthodoxies
and categories, particularly those which are ‘normalized’ by hetero-
patriarchy or, increasingly, ‘homonormativity’, and which are also associated,
4 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

in Heike Bauer and Matt Cook’s phrasing, with ‘the seeking out of blind
spots in existing narratives about the present and the past’.1 As Nikki
Sullivan emphasizes, the queer project seeks ‘to frustrate, to counteract,
to delegitimise … heteronormative knowledges and institutions, and
the subjectivities and socialities that are (in)formed by them and that
(in)form them’.2 Yet I am also drawn by the interactions between these
definitions and the more colloquial meaning of queer as odd, strange and
eccentric in the process of shaping space. Here, I am following Sara Ahmed’s
insistence in Queer Phenomenology that we keep both meanings in mind, in
a way that ‘allows us to move between sexual and social registers, without
flattening them or reducing them to a single line’.3 To this end, then, I would
like to begin with a specific case study – that of the Vauxhall Pleasure
Gardens. Although the Gardens were established earlier than the historical
parameters of this collection, they nevertheless help to open up some of
the key questions about queer space – regarding non-normative and
perceived transgressive behaviours and sexualities – that I explore further in
the remainder of the chapter.
The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (originally known as the New Spring
Gardens) was a space of night-time leisure and entertainment, initially
established in the mid-seventeenth century on a twelve-acre site in Lambeth
on the south side of the river Thames. Until the building of the Regent
Bridge in the early nineteenth century, most visitors arrived at the Gardens
by boat and the area quickly became associated with flamboyance and
excess, drinking, dancing and potential cross-class socializing.4 Over its 200-
year existence – which concurrently saw the metropolis rapidly expanding
in population, geographical reach and technological advancement – the
Pleasure Gardens maintained its associations with the startling, the ‘exotic’,
and what we might consider, drawing upon the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, as
the ‘carnivalesque’.5 All kinds of fantastical and defamiliarizing structures
were erected in this space during its lifespan – artificial ruins, a grotto,
a watermill and cascades, trompe-l’œil scenes, a Moorish tower and a
Chinese pavilion – and there was much diversity and experimentation in
the entertainments offered, which included musical recitals, masked balls,
firework displays, tightrope- walking, ballooning competitions, horse races,
large-scale battle re-enactments and performances by clowns, acrobats and
ballet companies.
This ‘queerness’ of the Gardens in terms of defamiliarization, strangeness
and challenge to hierarchies was also augmented by a queer playing with
subversive and non-normative sexual behaviours. The designers of the
Gardens created meandering walkways through wooded areas, which
offered the possibility of romantic and sexual assignation – a situation which
was quickly taken up by prostitutes working the space. As early as 1712,
for example, a friend of Joseph Addison’s commented, in a now-famous
remark, that he would be a more regular patron of the Gardens ‘if there
were more Nightingales, and fewer Strumpets’.6 Recent work by historians
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 5

and geographers has also gestured towards the Gardens as a potential

transgressive space for male same-sex desire, with Miles Ogborn analyzing
the ‘malleability of identity’ associated with the Macaronis, whose ‘luxurious
effeminacy’ sought to ‘disrupt the heterosexual structuring of gazes’, and
Michael Chanan and Rictor Norton pointing towards examples of a molly/
cross-dressing culture there.7 While it is important to resist reading this
cross-dressing transhistorically in an easy alignment with contemporary
drag cultures – as Alison Oram’s work has emphasized, such moments must
be related to their specific sociopolitical contexts8 – the situation nevertheless
gestures towards both a history of queer transgression in this area and those
fascinating concerns which the Gardens raise regarding the relationship
between the sexed body and the urban space. Indeed, some of the Gardens’
pathways, known as the Dark Walks, remained unlit and were particularly
associated with what Penelope J. Corfield has termed ‘the eroticisation of
leisure’ associated with spaces like Vauxhall and its Danish counterpart,
the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.9 Yet by 1825, it was thought that the
Vauxhall Gardens were becoming too popular in this respect and the local
magistrates ordered that lighting be put in all the walkways. The culture of
consumption, which had always been intricately bound up with the pleasures
that the Gardens had to offer, was evidently too much for some in the early
nineteenth century. Certainly, as Deborah Epstein Nord has suggested in her
treatment of the complex relationship between illumination and darkness
in the Gardens, Vauxhall ‘seemed to epitomize, to concentrate within a
circumscribed space, metropolitan pleasures, opportunities, and … dangers’,
and can clearly be read ‘as an instance of the need for fantasy and a world
turned briefly upside down’.10
With this commitment to subversive and transgressive practices and
behaviours, the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens constituted a ‘queer’ space in
both the more colloquial and more recent theorized meanings of the term.
In their repeated collapsing of categories – between the urban and the
rural, upper and lower classes, ‘reality’ and artifice, and the ‘civilized’ and
the ‘debauched’ – the Gardens promoted what Epstein Nord identifies as
‘utopian impulses’11 and ushered in a new concept of modern leisure. Indeed,
the space can be read as both a product and enabler of modernity and, in its
boundary crossings, its fluidity and its challenge to hegemonic structures and
authority, as an embodiment of a specifically queer urban modernity. By the
mid-1830s, however, the popularity of the Gardens was beginning to wane,
despite – or maybe because of – an attempt to attract more visitors through
daytime opening. In his early journalistic piece, ‘Vauxhall-gardens by Day’
(October 1836), for example, Charles Dickens wrote of the disappointment
engendered by the space without the cover of night time and the illusory
performance which the darkness provided:

We walked about, and met with a disappointment at every turn; our

favourite views were mere patches of paint; the fountain that had
6 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

sparkled so showily by lamp-light, presented very much the appearance

of a water-pipe that had burst; all the ornaments were dingy, and all the
walks gloomy.12

As Dickens puts it, daytime opening ‘rudely and harshly disturb[ed] that veil
of mystery which had hung about the property for many years’.13 Various

FIGURE 1.1 View of pavilion in Vauxhall Gardens. (De Agostini Picture Library/
Getty Images.)
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 7

new incentives were trialled as the Gardens passed through different hands,
but in 1848 the building of the viaduct through Vauxhall, designed to carry
the railway to the new Waterloo Station, was another nail in the Gardens’
coffin. The trains brought noise and soot to the vicinity and the privacy on
which the Gardens had relied was seriously compromised by their being
constantly overlooked. Indeed, by now, Vauxhall was frequently being
referred to as ‘Old Vauxhall’, the epithet suggesting a sense of nostalgia, loss
and the inevitable processes of change.14 As London Zoo (recently opened
to the public), the Great Exhibition of 1851 and quicker train travel to the
seaside drew more customers away, Vauxhall became, in Sarah Downing’s
phrasing, a ‘pastiche’ of itself.15 Stumbling on through the 1850s, the
Gardens finally closed on 25 July 1859, the same year that Charles Darwin
published his revolutionary work on evolution, On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection. Evidently, to draw on Herbert Spencer’s later
Darwinian phrasing, Vauxhall Gardens was not the fittest to survive in the
rapidly shifting mid-Victorian period.
Yet the queerness which the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens could be seen
to embody in its promotion of transgressive and non-normative encounter
and recreation was not so easily eradicated. For within three years of the
Gardens’ demise, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT) was established on the
site, functioning originally as a music hall. By the post-Second World War
period, the RVT was being recognized as a queer venue, known particularly
for its drag performances, an association which has developed across
the twentieth century to the present day with key figures like Lily Savage (Paul
O’Grady) having held residences there and the internationally recognized
queer performance group Duckie – which showcases ‘audience interactive
experiences that blur the boundaries between theatre, nightclubs and arty
show business’ in ‘the tradition of British illegitimate theatre’16 – having
run there continuously since the mid-1990s. Events like the weekly Bar
Wotever, the ‘Royal Queer Variety Show’ with its mix of drag, burlesque,
mime, spoken word, film and live music,17 add to the celebratory status
of RVT as nothing less than the oldest consistently queer venue in the
UK, with its diverse experimental and challenging entertainments clearly
drawing a historical link back to the original Pleasure Gardens.18 Indeed,
the Tavern’s investment in LGBTQ+ identities and communities in the
widest sense is particularly important in this ongoing construction of
queer space. It is also particularly resonant that the arches of the same
viaduct which helped kill off the original Pleasure Gardens have been
used in recent decades to house the new ‘pleasure gardens’ of modern
queer Vauxhall in clubs like Crash, Barcode and Fire; in Chariots, one
of London’s most popular gay men’s saunas; and in the fetish club Hoist
which, in its hosting of leather, rubber, uniform and other dress code nights,
has enabled, as RDK Herman’s theorizing about fetish spaces suggests,
‘a celebration of “perversity”, and of difference, consistent with many of
the ideas embraced within queer politics’.19 Through these shifts, then,
8 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Vauxhall has maintained its status of being a space of liberty in the urban
matrix and an area of potential transgression, social mixing and sexual
licence. The queerness that might be lost at one time can emerge with full
visibility in new sexual cartographies – even within the same space.
What is particularly interesting about this history of Vauxhall – a history
to which I will return later in this chapter – is its connection with a process
of changing (or constantly becoming) spatial dynamics. Its transformation
from an area associated with the Pleasure Gardens to an area associated
principally with queer sexualities and subcultures signals much about the
overlayering of history and the shifting use of the urban space, as well as the
complex relations between the built environment, spectacle, consumption
and implicitly, mechanisms of control such as the law and policing. For
as Kath Browne, Jason Lim and Gavin Brown usefully argue, ‘[i]t is this
continual process of becoming that challenges essential or pre-determined
bodies, identities or spaces [and which] prompts questions about how things
come to be materialised and about the regulation of such materialisation’.20
It is to these ‘challenging’ spaces and their ‘materialisation’ that I now turn.

Theorizing queer urban space

Since the publication of Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, edited
by David Bell and Gill Valentine, in 1995, the theorization of the multiple
and complex relations between sexualities and space has become a growing
area of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary concern.21
As part of the wider ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences,
such theoretical work offers a number of ways through which we are able
to interrogate how spaces create, promote, control or close down sexual
identities, practices and communities – and how, in turn, these identities,
practices and communities influence and structure particular spaces. Many
commentators have emphasized the central role of the expanding urban
space – and particularly the metropolis – in the history of the formation
of the modern sexual subject from the mid-nineteenth century onwards,
citing its size and diversity of spaces and bodies as key to the proliferation
of sexual possibilities.22 Indeed, as Lawrence Knopp has suggested in his
insightful essay ‘Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis’,
‘[t]he city’s sexuality is [often] described as an eroticisation of many of the
characteristic experiences of modern urban life: anonymity, voyeurism,
exhibitionism, consumption, authority (and challenges to it), tactility,
motion, danger, power, navigation and restlessness’.23 With what Knopp
identifies as its ‘permanent cluster of heterogeneous human beings in
circulation’,24 the city can be read as both a shifting signifier of desire and
the signifier of shifting desires.
Within this context, however, the construction of queer urban space is far
from straight/forward. For as a number of urban theorists have emphasized,
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 9

drawing upon Judith Butler’s ideas of performativity, urban spaces are often
produced and enacted as ‘prediscursively straight’.25 That is, a set of repeated
acts, and of social and discursive conventions, here to do with ‘heterosexual’
behaviours, congeal over time in order to appear ‘natural’ in these spaces
and thereby confirm that these spaces are ‘naturally’ heterosexual – a
situation which is also reinforced by repeated patterns of regulation and
control. As Gill Valentine notes:

[t]his repetition takes the form of many acts: from heterosexual couples
kissing and holding hands as they make their way down the street, to
advertisements and window displays which present images of contented
‘nuclear’ families; and from heterosexualized conversations that
permeate queues at bus stops and banks, to the piped music articulating
heterosexual desires that fill shops, bars and restaurants.26

At the same time, however, this ‘straight space’ has the potential to be
contested and challenged, both implicitly and explicitly.
In a significant account of queer spatial formation, the cultural geographer
Affrica Taylor has offered a study of the interconnections of what she terms
‘closet space’, the ‘symbolic community’ (that which we imagine we might find
in the urban matrix), and the dynamics of actual ‘ghetto space’. The closet/
ghetto dichotomy might appear dated now in some ways but it persists in
much critical thinking and Taylor’s essay, ‘A Queer Geography’, is effective
both in its drawing out of the complexities of meaning associated with these
different spaces and in its resisting any easy ‘progressive’ spatial narrative
(that LGBTQ+ subjects are ‘freed’ from the entrapment and claustrophobia
of the closet space by their entrance into the ghetto). For Taylor, ‘closet space’
is always potentially subversive since ‘the closet conceals something that can
at any moment be revealed’ and which therefore always has the potential to
disrupt seemingly established models of heteronormativity (for example, in
the family home).27 Moreover, the idea of the closeted homosexual passing
for straight in public space has wider disruptive potential given that ‘[a]s
long as anyone can successfully keep the (known) secret of homosexuality
by carrying off the performance of heterosexuality, all heterosexuality can
be seen as performance, all heterosexuality becomes open to question, and
all spaces become sexually ambiguous’.28 In terms of her analysis of the
‘ghetto’ space, Taylor emphasizes how LGBTQ+ communities are often
‘imagined’, in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the term,29 an idea that Marco
Venturi also returns to in his chapter in this volume. For both Taylor and
Venturi, the idea of a unified community is often only symbolic. While there
might be embedded in it a notion of protection and cohesion, the ‘ghetto’
or ‘village’ frequently exposes the exclusions – based on gender, sex, class,
ethnic, racial or national differences – that lie just beneath the surface of
the concept of ‘community’ (a point to which the chapters by Lesley Hall,
Anne Witchard, and Gemma Romain and Caroline Bressey in this collection
10 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

also speak). These ‘utopias of belonging’, to use Taylor’s phrasing, might

be just that – unachievable utopias.30 Indeed, this can certainly often be
seen in Soho’s ‘gay village’, a very different fabrication of the sexualized
urban space from Vauxhall. Old Compton Street and its surrounding locale
is undoubtedly important for a particular kind of queer (albeit essentially
gay male) politics – one which is invested in visibility, a concept of ‘safe
space’ (although this can also lead to targeting, as seen in the 1999 bombing
of the Admiral Duncan pub), and a notion of community and solidarity
(albeit, as Taylor suggests, somewhat nominal for particular groups). Yet it
might also be argued that Soho’s potential for more radical activism has to
a degree been sacrificed to a particular kind of ‘pink pound’ consumerism
and, increasingly, a politics of homonormativity centred predominantly on
white, gay male capitalist culture.31
Both Taylor, and Bell and Valentine, among others, have used the notion
of queer geography to transcend the limiting binary of ‘straight’ community/
LGBTQ+ ‘ghetto’ (where spaces are constructed as either/or). Instead, they
argue for the potentially more radical possibility of queering all ‘straight’
space through ‘fracturing and rupturing’ queer acts which effectively
function as moments and/or sites of resistance and transformation – for
example, the lesbian couple kissing in the ‘family’ pub in St John’s Wood;
the bisexual man reconfiguring the function of the public urinal at Victoria
Station; the patterns of cruising in spaces like Brompton Cemetery; or, on a
larger scale, the occupation of the streets of Central London by the annual
Pride march.32 In this model, the seemingly ‘restrictive, bounded and strictly
coded territory’ of the ghetto/village is transformed into the idea of the queer
city as ‘a site of open-ended difference’ regarding sexualities and desires and
the spaces they inhabit.33 And this is, of course, manifestly political in its
challenge to the ideological privileging of heterosexuality.
What queer thinking about space shows us, then, is the potential for all
space to be in flux, unfixed and changeable, in a challenge both to heterocentric
models of the urban and the potentially problematic closet/ghetto binary.
At the same time, however, this politics of possibility might be overlaid
and intricately bound up with a wider set of anxieties, particularly among
dominant groups, concerning the ordering of the urban space and the need
to police what is perceived as (un-)acceptable sexual conduct and ‘morally
threatening’ expressions of desire. As Matt Houlbrook demonstrates, these
anxieties are often part of a wider set of concerns regarding population
density, crowding and anonymity in the city.34 Subsequently, there is a keen
focus on the disorderly, undisciplined body which requires policing in its
assumed challenges to urban and, by extension, national order (a concern
which Chris Waters sees as emerging in the nineteenth century in response
to Malthusian and Darwinian ideas).35 Individuals are therefore constantly
subject to the gaze of the state and the law, as well as other members of
the population who function as agents of surveillance, as part of a wider
Foucauldian biopolitics of the everyday – whether this takes the form of a
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 11

same-sex couple receiving offensive comments when kissing in the street or

the prosecution of an individual for engaging in a sex act in public.36 The
effect of this, of course, is that policing and mechanisms of control effectively
work to help shape the urban matrix and are testament to anxieties about
boundaries, order and the ‘training’ of subjects to self-discipline. Certainly,
in this line of thinking heteronormative space is not as secure as some might
wish. For as the ongoing work on ‘recovering’ queer London to which I
now turn attests, the ‘rupturing’ and ‘fracturing’ of the urban space through
queer challenge can take many different forms.

Recovering queer London

The recovering of the spaces of historical Queer London is undoubtedly a
distinctly tricky affair. How can we uncover what those spaces might have
been? Where do we find the traces of London’s queer past in its spatial
dynamics? Documentary evidence might not have survived (if, indeed, it ever
existed), and records might have been suppressed for all kinds of personal,
political or legal reasons. As Simon Ofield emphasizes, the queer historian is
forced to become detective, piecing clues together and trying to read codes
and signals in the search for sexual/textual evidence: ‘you can never be quite
sure if you will find what you are looking for’, Ofield maintains, ‘or if you
will come across something you never knew you wanted, or even knew
existed’.37 On one level, then, attempting to map queer spaces – to seek out
places of queer meeting, socializing, assignation and cruising – is as much
about how we ‘do’ queer history and how we uncover our shared pasts in
ways which are politically significant as it is about challenging and revising
heterosexist models of the metropolis.
Much of this recovery work concerning Queer London was undertaken in
the first years of the twenty-first century, galvanized variously by developments
in queer history, human geography, urban studies, literary studies and cultural
studies. Matt Cook’s London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914,
published in 2003, was one of the first of these full-scale interventions into the
developing field, a text which examines the period from the introduction of the
Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) to the outbreak of the First World War
and which seeks to ‘counter the largely unchallenged orthodoxy’ that, after
the Wilde trials of 1895, ‘there was renewed repression and a recession in the
urban homosexual subculture’.38 Drawing on extensive archival work, Cook
traces a history of male same-sex desire in the capital from the anarchic Molly
House culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the increased
concentration of queer subcultures in the West End in the late Victorian and
Edwardian periods – particularly around theatre land, on the one hand (an
area which Neil McKenna has also examined in his study of the infamous
cross-dressing Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park39), and, on the other, the
burgeoning shopping areas of Regent Street, Oxford Street and Haymarket,
12 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

well known in this period for female prostitutes and rent boys. Certainly, these
are spaces of consumption and commodity culture in the widest sense. Cook
also examines hotels, Turkish baths, gentlemen’s clubs, urinals, parks and
railway carriages – often spaces of transitory encounter – and considers the
vibrancy and variety of gay men’s London in this period through a variety of
interpretive frameworks including sexology, anthropology, and contemporary
debates around aestheticism, decadence and Hellenism. Unsurprisingly, these
frameworks are also intricately bound up with discussions about the law
and legal process, particularly with regard to a perceived ‘need to control the
sexual life of the growing city’.40 For as Cook has argued elsewhere, legal
process has been ‘the primary means through which the state [has] attempted
to regulate “morality” and people’s supposedly private lives’ and legal records
and archives have consequently been central – if not unproblematically – to
the writing of sexual histories.41
Published in the same year as Cook’s study, Mark Turner’s Backward
Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London reconsiders
the transient nature of sexualized encounter that Cook often emphasizes
by focusing on the fabrication of the figure of the cruiser from the late
nineteenth century to the present. As a particular way of experiencing the
modern city, Turner reads cruising as ‘a counter-discourse in the literature
of modernity’ and ‘an alternative street practice … a way of both imagining
and inhabiting the spaces of the city that challenge other ways we have come
to understand urban movement, in particular through the overdetermining
figure of the flâneur’.42 For Turner, the cruiser is particularly adept at
exploiting the ‘indeterminacy and fragmentation’ of the modern city,43 an
exploitation which he elucidates through insightful consideration of sources
as wide ranging as newspaper reports, Walt Whitman’s notebooks, David
Hockney’s art, pornography and autobiography – a practice which itself
questions the very idea of what might constitute ‘evidence’ in the way that
Ofield suggests. Backward Glances significantly refuses a linear narrative
of the kind which might underpin a celebratory, progressive view of queer
existence, and subsequently uncovers much that is exciting and previously
marginalized in the queer histories of these two major cities.
Effectively picking up where Cook’s study leaves off in terms of historical
positioning, Matt Houlbrook’s meticulously researched and wide-ranging
Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957
is concerned with the queer urban geographies, cultures and politics of
London from the time of the ‘Black Book’ trial to the publication of the
Wolfenden report. Like Cook, Houlbrook is keen to resist any notion of
‘a unified “homosexual” experience’ and rather seeks to examine ‘the
complex interrelationship between modern urban life and the organization
of sexual and gender practices’.44 Divided into four major parts dealing
with ‘Policing’, Places’, ‘People’ and ‘Politics’, Queer London draws on
impressive archival research, as well as newspapers, memoirs and novels,
in order to complicate the varying relations queer men had with the law
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 13

and the variety of places (both public and commercial) which shaped male
sexual experiences and which also often foregrounded class and economic
differences. Certainly, this sense of difference is central to Houlbrook’s work
in his attention to the often problematic relations between the effeminate
quean, the ‘normal’ working-class man who sought sex with men as well
as women, and the ‘respectable’ middle-class homosexual – relations which
open up the ‘fragmentation and antagonisms of queer urban culture in the
first half of the twentieth century’.45 Indeed, in his consideration of the
period leading up to Wolfenden and his looking forward to the 1967 Sexual
Offences Act, Houlbrook shows how these ‘antagonisms’ would contribute
to a post-war sense of the wider threat to the nation by the (criminalized)
urban homosexual. For Houlbrook, then, the history of queer London in
this period is both one of opportunity and one which is problematically
‘exclusive and exclusionary’.46
What repeatedly emerges from these major studies, therefore, along
with other key interventions like Morris B. Kaplan’s Sodom on the Thames
and Anthony Clayton’s Decadent London,47 is a sense of the plurality of
queer spaces in London and the variety of ways in which they have been
deployed from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Importantly,
too, these studies reveal the variety of sources which might be mobilized
in the uncovering of queer London, a mobilization that Cook has taken
in different directions in his more recent work on the formations of queer
domestic space in the capital and the ‘ways in which queer men orientated
their sense of themselves … behind closed doors’.48 But what might be
seen to be as equally important as this recovery of ‘real’ material spaces
to the fabrication of queer London is the place of literary and imaginative
constructions. For as Sebastian Groes argues, ‘[o]ne particularly insightful
way of understanding London is to study the lives the city is given by writers
who make and remake it in their imagination’ and which are therefore
‘implicated in shaping our understanding of the city’.49 Indeed, literature has
been crucial to the circulation of ideas about the capital’s queer spaces from
Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray, with its subtle but careful mapping out
of the spaces of erotic possibility for the West End gentleman, to the explicit
rendering of what might constitute this urban possibility in the contemporary
novels of Alan Hollinghurst (see Bart Eeckhout’s chapter in this collection),
Neil Bartlett (Who Was That Man?) and Jonathan Kemp (London Triptych).
Moreover, as Cook and Morris B. Kaplan have emphasized, the circulation
of pornographic narratives, such as the infamous late-Victorian Sins of the
Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann with its detailing of
‘how the sin of Sodom was regularly practiced in the modern Babylon’,50
often worked to reinforce particular spaces of sexual encounter. Certainly,
the awareness-raising of such literary texts, whether they are meant for
mainstream publication or underground circulation, helps fabricate London
in different and telling ways and clearly has strong political import in the
shaping of the queer capital.
14 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Nevertheless, what will be clear from this discussion is the fact that
the recovery of ‘queer London’ has principally been used as a gloss for
(usually white) queer men’s experiences, a fact which Houlbrook flags up
in his brief consideration of the different socio-economic factors which
might – historically at least – affect women’s relations to the urban space.
As Houlbrook asserts:

Certainly, queer men and women inhabited many of the same

commercial venues, and their sense of self took shape within overlapping
understandings of gender and sexuality. Yet their experiences of London
were fractured by differences of gender … The association between
femininity and domesticity, familial and neighbourhood surveillance,
anxieties surrounding the moral status of public women, and the city’s
very real dangers constrained women’s movements … While female
sexual deviance – particularly prostitution – was inscribed within
forms of surveillance that echoed the regulation of male sexualities,
lesbianism remained invisible in the law and, in consequence, in the legal
sources … Lesbian London deserves its own study.51

Houlbrook’s emphasis on lesbian ‘invisibility’ here obviously resonates

with Terry Castle’s famous notion of the ‘apparitional lesbian’, that figure
who is effectively absent from dominant culture’s world view, ‘never
with us … but always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins,
hidden from history’.52 Indeed, as Laura Gowing has argued, ‘[s]ex and
relationships between men have been culturally and legally more visible
than those between women’ since ‘[m]uch of lesbian subcultural life took
place in spaces and spheres that have been largely invisible to historians’.53
Yet while the full-length study of lesbian London that Houlbrook notes
is needed has not yet been forthcoming, insightful and engaging analyses
of the relations between urban space and lesbian identities and practices
more generally have emerged in the work of theorists such as Sally Munt,
Julie A. Podmore and Tamar Rothenberg. Munt, picking up on the earlier
work of Elizabeth Wilson on the female flâneur, has persuasively analyzed
the figure of the self-conscious lesbian flâneur in Brighton and New York
and subsequently demonstrated how ‘[l]esbian identity is constructed in
the temporal and linguistic mobilisation of space’.54 Podmore has analyzed
patterns of lesbian social interaction, place making and expressions of
desire in the ‘spaces of difference’ of inner-city Montréal, while Rothenberg
has challenged those theories of gentrification that erase lesbians by
examining the society of Brooklyn’s Park Slope and thereby drawing
attention to the complexities of lesbian communities and spaces.55 These are
all important approaches for the reconsideration of what might constitute
a spatial politics of queer women’s London. And just as the writings of,
and critical work on, the literature of Wilde, Hollinghurst, Bartlett and
Kemp have invigorated the analysis of queer men’s spaces in the capital,
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 15

recent reassessments of the lives and literature of women as varied as the

Victorian fin-de-siècle poets Amy Levy and ‘Michael Field’ (the pseudonym
of collaborating aunt and niece/lovers Katherine Bradley and Edith
Cooper), and later novelists Edith Lees Ellis, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall
and Sarah Waters, continue to ask pressing questions about queer women’s
relations to both historical and contemporary spatial formations of
London. The political value of such considerations, which often lay
material and imaginative spatial constructions alongside one another,
cannot be overestimated in the ongoing project of mapping marginalized
geographies. Indeed, it might be argued that the imaginative interventions of
these women have a particular radical energy precisely because our
knowledge of the material spaces experienced by queer women is so
slight at the side of that of queer men. As the chapters by Anne Witchard
and Paulina Palmer in this collection suggest, there is much more to be
considered in the complex relations between female same-sex desire and
the urban matrix, just as Kayte Stokoe’s chapter demonstrates there
is in thinking about London’s trans* spaces and Gemma Romain and
Caroline Bressey’s chapter demonstrates there is in relation to wider
intersectionalities – those ‘multiple modes of queerness’ as Houlbrook
terms them.56 The recovery and analysis of London’s queer spaces continues
to be an exciting and dynamic project which is opening up a wide array
of issues, concerns and insights. And yet, tellingly, this work is expanding at
a time when these spaces are again under threat.

Disappearing spaces
I opened this chapter with a consideration of the changing spatial dynamics
of Vauxhall in its shift from the site of the Pleasure Gardens to the site of
the queer Royal Vauxhall Tavern and an array of (principally) queer men’s
clubs. Over the past few years, however, that narrative has been complicated
further with a series of closures of key LGBTQ+ establishments across the
geographical spread of London – including the Colherne in Earl’s Court,
the Joiner’s Arms and the George and Dragon in East London, the Black
Cap in Camden, ManBar on Charing Cross Road, the burlesque/cabaret
venue Madame JoJo’s in Soho and, even more problematically given the
discussion above, the queer women’s spaces, First Out on Tottenham Court
Road and Candy Bar on Carlisle Street, Soho. Candy Bar’s location adjacent
to and yet separate from the main central hub of Old Compton Street, and
its subsequent relocation to the basement of a predominantly gay men’s bar,
highlights many of the potential issues regarding spatial placing, in/visibility,
economics, and the politics of assimilation and exclusion which are key to
the study of queer London. Certainly, the maintenance of physical queer
spaces is seemingly becoming increasingly untenable in a socio-economic
climate which is witnessing higher rental costs and rapid processes of
16 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

gentrification (an issue tackled by both Emma Spruce and Kayte Stokoe in
their chapters in this collection). As Ben Walters has argued, ‘[t]he LGBT
and drag scenes are the canary in the coalmine. For various reasons, not
least our society’s structural homophobia, the gay community tends not to
actually own many of the spaces it uses, so it is relatively easily disposed of
them’.57 In addition, queer venues have witnessed the impact of an assumed
acceptance of LGBTQ+ subjects in ‘mainstream’ society (who might now
go to other venues in their leisure time), and the proliferation of geosocial
networking apps like Grindr, Growlr and Findhrr. Indeed, as the chapters
by Marco Venturi and Sam McBean in this collection demonstrate, the
relationship of apps like Grindr and social media sites like Facebook to
a spatial understanding of ‘Queer London’, and their impact upon queer
identities, relationships and communities, is both fascinating and, potentially,
highly problematic.
The Royal Vauxhall Tavern has, in many ways, been at the heart of these
debates. The high-profile and widely reported buyout of the RVT in 2014
by an Austrian company which frequently acquires historical buildings for
redevelopment as high-quality hotels or residences, and the subsequent
battle to get the Tavern awarded Grade II listing based on a combination of
its architectural significance and its historical significance for the LGBTQ+
community, is a prime example of the potential fragility of queer space.58

FIGURE 1.2 Grand view of park entrance and Vauxhall Tavern at dusk. (Photo by
View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images.)
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 17

Indeed, at the time of writing, despite the RVT’s being the first building in
the UK to be listed for its LGBTQ+ heritage – putting it on a par with New
York’s Stonewall Inn being given Landmark status in 2015 – the battle for
its long-term security is still ongoing. What risks being lost, of course, is both
the history and the political significance that spaces like the RVT embody –
a significance which might include their functioning as spaces of support
both before and after the decriminalization of homosexuality, as spaces
of care around moments of crisis and increased homophobia (such as the
onset of AIDS in the 1980s), and as spaces of fundraising and information
dissemination, as well as socializing.59 Certainly, the current situation of
venue loss points to the complex issues surrounding the establishment and
maintenance of queer spaces, subject as they always are to any number of
ideological, political, social, economic and cultural factors.
It is intriguing that the RVT – which might be seen as the most queer
space in London in the widest sense – is now in a physical location where
it could be bookended by two major Establishment buildings: the new
£612 million American Embassy in Nine Elms on the one side and the
British MI6 (SIS) building on the opposite side of the river. In an area which
is rapidly witnessing the effects of gentrification, particularly in the massive
residential building projects along the river from Vauxhall to Putney, the
RVT stands as a resisting embodiment of particular kinds of queer history
and their spatial formations. Yet it might be another feature of Vauxhall
which sums up the spaces of queer London. For at the very heart of the area
is a bus station through which buses are endlessly moving, and a constantly
busy ring road that branches out in all directions. Vauxhall is fundamentally
a place of transition, of flux and change, of constantly becoming. And it
is this image of constant movement and encounter which seems to me to
suggest both the possibilities of, and threats to, London’s queer spaces.

The analyses, reflections and interrogations brought together in this volume

derive from a range of disciplinary origins, including social and political
history, literary studies, art history, sociology, ethnography and the history
of science. This has been key to the project and to the agenda of queer
studies more widely, which has seen much of the most fruitful work being
undertaken and articulated at the intersections and permeable borders
between disciplines, at the levels of multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or
even transdisciplinarity. As Joe Moran has argued in his discussion of the
transformative potential at the heart of such work, the term ‘interdisciplinary’
(with which his study is particularly concerned) ‘can suggest forging
connections across the different disciplines; but it can also mean establishing
a kind of undisciplined space in the interstices between disciplines, or even
attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether’.60 Certainly,
such multi-/inter-/transdisciplinary work has the potential to organize
18 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

knowledge and methodologies into new configurations and alliances, and to

draw attention to the (often very problematic) politics involved in discipline
boundaries. Indeed, as Moran suggests, ‘[i]t can form part of a more general
critique of academic specialisation as a whole, and of the nature of the
university as an institution which cuts itself off from the outside world in
small enclaves of expertise’.61
This collection of essays builds upon and extends existing work in
the field in a number of ways. In their focus on a wider range of subject
positions, and in their consideration of a wider range of sexual practices
and identities, the contributors offer a more diverse sense of the ways in
which the spatial politics of London enable the creation and enactment
of queer subjectivities. And as Katherine M. Graham demonstrates in her
chapter, and as I have suggested in my reading of Vauxhall above, this is
complicated still further by the fruitful overlayering of competing histories
and perspectives. Matt Houlbrook has called for a more fluid methodology
which is alert to changes both spatially and temporally, arguing that ‘if
the experience of being modern and urban is constantly shifting, then so
too is the geographical and cultural organization of sexual practices and
identities’.62 We hope that the chapters in this volume – in their emphasis
on the sheer complexity and diversity of what might be said to constitute
‘Queer London’, and in the exciting pluralism of their approaches – will be
seen to have contributed towards this project.

Notes
1 Heike Bauer and Matt Cook, ‘Introduction’, in H. Bauer and M. Cook
(eds), Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–12, 1. By ‘homonormativity’, I refer, in the
phrasing used by Gavin Brown, Kath Browne and Jason Lim, to ‘the practices
and privileges of those gays and lesbians (in the main) who are prepared
to assimilate on the basis of largely capitalist and heteronormative values’
(‘Introduction’, in Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 1–18, 12).
2 Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. vi.
3 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 161.
4 Sarah Jane Downing notes that Vauxhall was ‘never truly exclusive, allowing
admittance to all those who could afford the entrance fee of a shilling per
evening, except for masquerade nights’ (The English Pleasure Garden,
1680–1860, Oxford: Shire, 2013, p. 22).
5 Bakhtin developed his ideas around the carnivalesque in his work on Rabelais
(translated into English in 1968 as Rabelais and His World). The carnivalesque
is associated with anti-authoritarianism, inversion, the materiality of the body
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 19

and affirmative renewal. See Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought (London:

Routledge, 1995), pp. 65–87.
6 Quoted in Downing, The English Pleasure Garden, p. 14.
7 Miles Ogden, ‘Locating the Macaroni: Luxury, Sexuality and Vision in
Vauxhall Gardens’, Textual Practice 11.3 (1997), pp. 445–61, 452, 457,
455; Michael Chanan, From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the
Public Sphere (London: Verso, 1999), p. 17; Rictor Norton, ‘Princess
Seraphina’, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/seraphin.htm (accessed
25 July 2015).
8 Alison Oram, ‘Cross-Dressing and Transgender’, in H.G. Cocks and Matt
Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 256–85.
9 Penelope J. Corfield, Vauxhall: Sex and Entertainment (London: History and
Social Action Publications, 2012), p. 21.
10 Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘Night and Day: Illusion and Carnivalesque at
Vauxhall’, in Jonathan Conlin (ed.), The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall
to Coney Island (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013),
pp. 177–94, 184, 193.
11 Ibid., p. 178.
12 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder (London: Penguin,
1995), pp. 153–59, 156–57.
13 Ibid., p. 155.
14 Penelope J. Corfield, Vauxhall and the Invention of the Urban Pleasure
Gardens (London: History and Social Action Publications, 2008), p. 5.
15 Downing, The English Pleasure Garden, p. 37.
16 ‘Duckie: About’, http://www.duckie.co.uk/about (accessed 30 October 2015).
17 ‘Bar Wotever’, http://www.vauxhalltavern.com/events/event/bar-wotever/
(accessed 30 October 2015).
18 For a fascinating piece on Duckie’s ‘Gay Shame’ events, see Catherine
Silverstone, ‘Duckie’s Gay Shame: Critiquing Pride and Selling Shame in Club
Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review 22.1 (2012), pp. 62–78.
19 RDK Herman, ‘Playing with Restraints: Space, Citizenship and BDSM’, in
Browne, Lim and Brown (ed.), Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices
and Politics, pp. 89–100, 92. Herman’s piece points to the ways in which
BDSM, and by extension other fetishes, are particularly ‘spatially marginalised’
(p. 94), not least because they are usually viewed as a practice rather than an
identity – a distinction, Herman argues, ‘that reflects the problematic nature of
how sexual identities are discursively constructed and reified within the social
order’ (p. 89).
20 Gavin Brown, Kath Browne and Jason Lim, ‘Introduction’, in Geographies of
Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics, pp. 1–18, 13.
21 David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
20 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

22 See, for example, Matt Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, in Cocks and Houlbrook (eds),
Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, pp. 133–56; and Judith
R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-
Victorian London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
23 Lawrence Knopp, ‘Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis’, in
Bell and Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire, pp. 149–61, 151.
24 Ibid.
25 Bell and Valentine, ‘Introduction: Orientations’, in Mapping Desire,
pp. 1–27, 19.
26 Gill Valentine, ‘(Re)Negotiating the “Heterosexual Street”: Lesbian
Productions of Space’, in Nancy Duncan (ed.), Bodyspace (London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 146–55, 146.
27 Affrica Taylor, ‘A Queer Geography’, in Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Munt
(eds), Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction (London and
Washington: Cassell, 1997), pp. 3–19, 14.
28 Ibid., p. 15.
29 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; revised 1991, 2006).
30 Taylor, ‘A Queer Geography’, p. 10.
31 For an interesting discussion of this, see Jon Binnie, ‘Trading Places:
Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space’, in Bell and
Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire, pp. 182–99.
32 Taylor, ‘A Queer Geography’, pp. 12–14; Bell and Valentine, ‘Introduction:
Orientations’, p. 19. See also Gill Valentine’s insightful reading in ‘(Re)
Negotiating the “Heterosexual Street” ’.
33 Taylor, ‘A Queer Geography’, p. 13.
34 Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, pp. 134–5.
35 Chris Waters, ‘Sexology’, in H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave
Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, pp. 41–63, 44.
36 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge
[1976], trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990). In this context,
Foucault is particularly concerned with the ‘numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’
(p. 140).
37 Simon Ofield, ‘Cruising the Archive’, Journal of Visual Culture 4.3 (2005),
pp. 351–64, 357.
38 Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 5–6.
39 Neil McKenna, Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian
England (London: Faber and Faber, 2013).
40 Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, p. 12.
 STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING QUEER SPACES OF LONDON 21

41 Matt Cook, ‘Law’, in H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave
Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, pp. 64–86, 64–65.
42 Mark Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and
London (London: Reaktion, 2003), p. 7.
43 Ibid.
44 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press,
2005), p. 11.
45 Ibid., p. 4.
46 Ibid., p. 265.
47 Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde
Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Anthony Clayton,
Decadent London (London: Historical Publications, 2005).
48 Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in
Twentieth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 3.
49 Sebastian Groes, ‘Introduction’, in The Making of London: London in
Contemporary Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–16, 1.
50 Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann with Short
Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism (London: The Erotica Biblion Society, 1881),
p. 90. For discussion, see Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality,
pp. 18–22; and Morris B. Kaplan, ‘Who’s Afraid of Jack Saul?: Urban Culture
and the Politics of Desire in Late Victorian London’, GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.3 (1999), pp. 267–314.
51 Houlbrook, Queer London, p. 10.
52 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 2.
53 Laura Gowing, ‘History’, in Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Munt (eds), Lesbian
and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, pp. 53–66, 55, 61.
54 Sally Munt, ‘The Lesbian Flâneur’, in Bell and Valentine (ed.), Mapping Desire,
pp. 114–25, 125.
55 Julie A. Podmore, ‘Lesbians in the Crowd’, Gender, Place and Culture 8.4
(2001), pp. 333–55, 334; Tamar Rothenberg, ‘ “And She Told Two Friends”:
Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space’, in Bell and Valentine (eds), Mapping
Desire, pp. 165–81.
56 Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, p. 146.
57 Quoted in Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news
/the-black-cap-protest-queens-and-lgbt-activists-gather-to-save-iconic-london
-gay-bar-from-10186891.html (accessed 20 July 2015).
58 See the Future of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern website. http://www.rvt
.community/ (accessed 30 September 2015).
22 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

59 The important Pride of Place: LGBTQ Heritage Project, funded by Historic

England, is working to map the UK’s queer locations and ‘uncover the untold
queer histories of buildings and places’. See https://historicengland.org.uk/
research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/ (accessed 30 July 2015).
60 Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2010), p. 14.
61 Ibid., p. 15.
62 Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, p. 148.
 CHAPTER TWO

Queer Temporalities,
Queer Londons
Katherine M. Graham

I cannot claim that many of the ‘Queer Things’ treated of

in these pages are ‘unknown’. It would be very queer
indeed if they were. But most of them are but
little considered and not greatly visited except
by those whose business lies that way.1

I’m from Hounslow. For those who haven’t visited, it’s over in West
London – further out than places like Kensington and Chiswick, but before
places like Feltham and Staines. It’s in zone four and bang underneath
one of the Heathrow flight paths, so everything was covered in what my
parents referred to as ‘airplane poo’. I was born there, bred there and I’ve
‘boomeranged’ back repeatedly. My early queer years were spent in the
Queens Arms, a gay pub that was demolished to make way for Hounslow’s
second bus station. But it turned out Hounslow didn’t need a second bus
station, so the space of the pub remains, an empty space and a reminder of
that past. I worked at the ‘QA’ from the age of 17. I was too young to serve
pints legally so I was in charge of coats, glasses and ashtrays, which meant
I often smelt unpleasant. I learnt to DJ there, I illegally served pints there
and I broke up fights there. My entire understanding of ‘queer London’
is filtered through this very particular, past space and my sociocultural
practices within it. I learnt how to be in a queer community, in a very
material sense, in that pub.
24 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Now this is an anecdote, but this queer past is important in how I

understand my queer present – this past structures how I act in any queer
space in the present. Empty glasses left on a pub table for longer than
necessary make me physically twitchy; I have to stop myself from bursting
into song whenever I hear the opening strains of Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’; and
I’m often disappointed that the diversity (of class and race especially) I found
in the Queens Arms is not repeated in other queer venues. I start with this
anecdote both to put Hounslow on London’s queer map and because in this
chapter I want to highlight understandings of queerness, and of London,
that necessitate and encourage a concurrent understanding of the past. Such
an understanding is crucial, in part, because of the temporal breadth of
this volume. Thus, in this chapter, I consider the possible methodologies
for bringing together such a breadth of material. As Simon Avery gestured
towards at the end of his chapter, Matt Houlbrook importantly argues for
the need to create ‘a form of analysis that can simultaneously account for
differences over time and space’.2 This chapter is meant as a small step in
that direction. Thus, I explore the term ‘queer’ and, in particular, I reflect
on the attention that queer scholars have paid to questions around time
and around history. Here, Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of a ‘touch across
time’ becomes a productive impulse for considering and engaging with
this collection and the organization of material within it.3
Sex, Time and Place covers work from the 1850s to the present. Our
contributors reflect on Soho, Bloomsbury, Brixton, East London and St
Giles, among other areas of London. They deal with art, literature, politics,
journalism, geography, performance, archives, oral histories, technology
and the Internet. They often offer competing and contradictory readings of
particular moments or spaces. They are established and emerging scholars
working in a wide range of disciplines and, as such, they work in challenging
and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary ways – as Avery has discussed in the
previous chapter. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a dizzying array of
material, bodies and moments, and that is the point: to create a scholarly
impression of London that complicates, develops and adds to the work that
has gone before. While there is, obviously and vitally, an important role for
work which focuses singularly on particular subsections of London’s queer
communities – that is, the work which focuses on (mostly white) male–male
experience – there must also be room for work which shows a breadth of
material and which brings into focus communities who are not so readily
recorded in the historical (and especially legal) archive. Towards the end
of this volume, Sam McBean implicitly suggests that the ways in which
photographs (specifically Christa Holka’s) travel on the Internet might
be seen to trouble, even to problematize, any notion of queer London. If
we are to comprehend the implications of such an assertion, we need to
understand fully the breadth of people who might be considered under the
umbrella of ‘queer London’. In thinking about queerness, and in thinking
about touches across time, I am gesturing towards a methodology that
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 25

allows us to think through and across the differing subjects, bodies and
methods at play in this volume. I am aware of the temptation to read the
chapters that speak to one’s own research interests and to skip over the
others, but I would urge the reader to read widely – here, to do so is to
read inclusively.
A huge amount of work has already focused on London and the history
of its sexually marginalized communities. Texts such as Matt Houlbrook’s
Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, Matt Cook’s
London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 or Mark Turner’s
Backwards Glances: Cruising the Queer Street of New York and London4
draw on, complement and produce the work of those scholars investigating
the relationship between sexuality and space that can be found in edited
collections like Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexualities and Queer Cities,
Queer Cultures.5 Historical enquiries, like Seth Koven’s Slumming, Hugh
David’s On Queer Street, H.G. Cocks’ Nameless Offences and Brian Lewis’
edited collection British Queer History, extend and contextualize the field.6
All of this work, and much much more (this list is in no way exhaustive),
informs the analyses within this volume. It is necessary and important
work, but this volume pushes to diversify and extend the kinds of peoples,
bodies and communities that might be considered as part of a discussion
of ‘queer London’.7 Amy Villarejo has recently stated, in a discussion of
‘sexual and spatial practices’, that much existing work offers ‘wonderful
guides to queer cities, but despite declarations to the contrary, [it is] not
particularly interested in gender, much less women, much less transgender’.8
Villarejo is referring explicitly to Houlbrook and George Chauncey Jr. here,9
and while we might want to note the rhetorical force behind her words, it
pays to remain aware of the exclusionary practices of some of this work.
Indeed, Gemma Romain and Caroline Bressey acknowledge this in their
chapter on Claude McKay here, when they remind us that not everyone
was able to access the ‘networks of public and commercial sociability’ that
Houlbrook identifies.10 For Romain and Bressey, it is important to note that
McKay’s race ‘made him feel … conspicuous’ and thus excluded him from
these networks.
Sometimes work which focuses on one subset of queers and excludes
others confronts this exclusion directly, as in Hugh David’s On Queer Street
when he suggests, ‘I have also consciously ignored the lesbian history of the
period, except where it overlaps with my own material.’11 But at other times
the exclusion is more subtle. I am not suggesting here that this collection
addresses all the lacks – it would be difficult to do so – but hopefully it
represents a step towards broader representation of the communities, people
and aesthetic production which might be understood as comprising ‘queer
London’. But firstly though, I want to consider how exactly we might be
using the term ‘queer’ and, in doing so, to consider the importance that
recent queer thinking on questions of history and temporality might have in
undertaking and navigating the work on queer London.
26 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Queer and Queer Things About London

This volume takes the term ‘queer’ as one of its organizing principles but
throughout contributors use the term in various and differing ways, which
is an accurate reflection of a term whose meaning is debated and disputed.
Throughout this volume, it functions as an umbrella term for LGBTQ+
identities and, in a troubling of this usage, it is used to describe people who
disrupt and refuse these identities, as well as to describe people for whom
such a taxonomy simply is not possible, due to their historically contingent
socio-cultural position. In the introduction to Queer Cities, Queer Cultures,
Matt Cook and Jennifer Evans point out that queer ‘might accommodate
individuals who “disturb” categories that have become conventional’,12 and
there is a nice reminder in their phrasing that identity categories, and the
sociocultural positioning of them, shift constantly across time and contexts –
that the conventions that we find in any given moment are the product of a
temporal development and not a static given.
Queer is not just a term associated with identity categories (the inhabiting
or shattering of them) and theoretical discourse. It also functions as a
more colloquial term and throughout the period under consideration, the
colloquial meaning of queer shifts and changes and is not always, or solely,
associated with homosexuality. However, one of the most familiar uses of
the term is when it is used, as a noun, to denote ‘[h]omosexual, esp. a male
homosexual’.13 Such a usage has a difficult and derogatory history, although
the term has also been subject to some form of rehabilitation, as I will discuss
below. The Oxford English Dictionary also suggests that the association
between queer and homosexuality continues in its use as an adverb, where it
might mean ‘[o]f a person: homosexual. Hence: of or relating to homosexuals
or homosexuality’.14 This use of queer to signal homosexuality is dated from
the late 1800s (for its use as a noun) and from the early 1900s (for its use
as an adverb). This usage of the term comes to replace, to some extent,
its other possible older meanings, including its definition of ‘[s]trange, odd,
peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious’,15
along with ‘[o]ut of sorts; unwell; faint, giddy’,16 uses which date from the
early 1500s and the mid-eighteenth century, respectively. However, traces of
these connotations might be thought to remain in the present, especially in
the later theoretical development of the term.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term underwent a political
transformation, stemming in part, but not only, from its re-emergence and
reclamation by groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation.17 Both these groups, and
others, used queer as part of overt and aggressive political campaigns, drawing
on the anger around HIV/AIDS and various governments’ poor responses to
that crisis. During the same period in the academy, we see queer theory growing
as a discourse in response to poststructuralist understandings of subjectivity,
identity and meaning as constructed, contingent, indeterminate and in flux.
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 27

This ‘fluidity’ became an important tool for scholars considering questions of

gender and sexuality. Drawing on this poststructuralist frame, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, in Tendencies, underscores the disruptive potential of the queer
when she argues that ‘queer can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,
overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when
the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made
(or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.18 For Sedgwick, then, queer is
the effect produced when an attempt at monolithic signification fails – or
when stable identity categories fail. Not all of the contributors in this volume
adhere to this theoretical model of queerness, but they do all understand their
subjects as occupying a position (in relation to their sexuality and/or gender
and/or desire) that refuses, or eschews, the ‘normal’. This understanding of
queer as a relational term is an important one because, as David Halperin
suggests, ‘queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the
legitimate, the dominant’.19
Queer theory is a body of work which has developed significantly since its
critical inception in the 1990s, and as it does so its new insights and frames
might be put to use. In particular, in the case of this collection, we have
drawn on and been influenced by the recent investigations into questions
of temporality and history. Critics such as Carolyn Dinshaw, Heather Love,
Elizabeth Freeman, David Halperin, Valerie Rohy, Ann Cvetkovich, Lee
Edleman, Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz have all questioned
the need and desire for queer history;20 they have questioned the role that
archives play in constructing queer identities, communities and histories; they
have considered how ‘queer’ communities might speak to each other across
different historical moments; and they have even questioned the validity of
privileging difference as the dominant mode of understanding the past.21 All
these scholars ask, in very different ways, what does it mean to find a ‘queer’
person (or to find ‘queerness’) in a past when those categories fundamentally
cannot exist? In Queer London, Matt Houlbrook deploys the term ‘queer’
to explore how the urban space of London offered men the opportunity
to engage in sexual practices in ways which destabilized any kind of
monolithic heterosexuality, but which did not contribute to the constitution
of a homosexual identity. In doing so, he effectively troubles the boundaries
of any homo/hetero binary, and the monolithic nature of identity categories.
Thus, Houlbrook is specific in his usage of the term, using ‘the rubric “queer”
to denote all erotic and affective interactions between men and all men
who engaged in such interaction’22 – not to denote solely homosexuality.
The term then functions plurally, both describing male–male erotic contact
(along with those who partake in it) and signalling a refusal of categorization
and categories.
There is, then, a tension found in the term ‘queer’ which is associated with
how its various meanings might function and also in how those meanings
might be tied up with a question of history or associated with the historical.
I would argue that this is also visible in the more colloquial uses of the
28 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

term, and would suggest that we can see this in Charles G. Harper’s 1923
book, Queer Things About London. Harper was a writer and illustrator
who, between 1892 and 1933, produced a huge selection of travel books
exploring England. Several of these focused on London; as well as Queer
Things About London, Harper published a follow-up, More Queer Things
About London (1924), along with A Literary Man’s London (1926), A
Londoner’s Own London (1927) and The City of London Guide (1927).23
Queer Things About London offers a companion guide to the city which,
as the title suggests, aims to highlight the queer ‘things’ that might interest
the reader. Indeed, the book is aimed more at the reader (and that reader’s
imagination) than the actual visitor, because ‘the armchair is comfortable
and sight-seeing is a tiring affair’.24 In 1923, when Harper’s book was
first published, the term ‘queer’ functioned in a multi-vocal way, signalling
‘strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric’, or ‘out of sorts’, but it could also infer
homosexuality.25 When Harper uses the term, he ostensibly uses it to signal
the ‘strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric’ elements of the London landscape.
But for Harper, these strange, odd, peculiar ‘things’ are objects or moments
from the past which irrupt into the present. Thus I want to suggest that
Harper’s use of queer, and the way in which he attaches it to the historic
and the past, might be suggested to anticipate proleptically the attention to,
and desire for, history, which we find in later queer theorists (such as those
mentioned above). Thus, the term ‘queer’ might be read as always already
being engaged with the past.
Harper’s book begins with the quote with which I started this chapter:
‘I cannot claim that many of the “Queer Things” treated of in these pages
are “unknown.” It would be very queer indeed if they were. But most of
them are but little considered and not greatly visited except by those whose
business lies that way.’26 For Harper, these ‘little considered’ things are
irruptions of the past in the present – irruptions we might not note unless
we were looking in the correct fashion. He begins Chapter One with the
following statement: ‘Londoners do not, perhaps, notice their great city
to be full of the oddest survivals, alike of strange buildings, visible relics,
curious nooks and corners and customs.’27 The language of the past abounds
here and the notion of ‘survivals’ seems particularly resonant, but so too is
the range of places where Harper expects to finds this surviving history – the
‘buildings’, ‘relics’, ‘nooks’ and ‘corners’, but also in the embodied ‘customs’.
The majority of the objects that Harper points towards are sites in which
the past appears in, or disrupts, the present. Sometimes these are material
objects – weathervanes or street tablets, for example. Sometimes these are
embodied – such as the procession of Vintners made up of ‘four men in
short white smocks and silk hats, who swept the road with besoms, as they
go’ because of requirements ‘in some far-off time’ which ‘[t]he Vintners, it
seems, have never forgotten’.28 Sometimes the object is Harper himself, such
as when he is discussing ‘lost’ bus stops with a policeman who ‘looked at
me as though I had re-appeared from the loom of ages ago’.29 Each of the
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 29

‘things’ that Harper mentions, though, are felt to somehow disrupt the space
in which they are found, disrupt it through temporal effect.
We might notice in Harper’s recording of history something of the
‘retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past upon the present’, which Elizabeth
Freeman notes when she interrogates the ‘time of queer performativity’.30 But
what we find in Harper is not the same as the queer desire for history that
Freeman, Love or Cvetkovich might note. Harper’s references are not queer,
as Sedgwick might understand the term, and they are not overtly concerned
with gender or sexuality. But Harper repeatedly uses the term throughout
the book, albeit colloquially, and if we read through both uses – that which
signals homosexuality and that which signals peculiar or odd – then queer
might always, whatever the colloquial meaning, be taken as a concern with
the past, or as a trace of the past that somehow demands observation or, for
Harper’s armchair reader, demands imagining.
In Avery’s chapter, he alludes to Sara Ahmed’s entreaty in Queer
Phenomenology that when dealing with the multiple possible meanings of
queer we keep them all present, so as to allow ‘us to move between sexual
and social registers, without flattening them or reducing them to a single
line’.31 Here, reading through the different meanings of the term ‘queer’
creates strange bedfellows; suddenly the contributors of this volume are
performing a similar analytic function to a turn-of-the-twentieth-century
travel writer. At the very least, bringing these ideas together might, in a
small way, shift our notion of the queer, and might firm up its preoccupation
with the past. Certainly, though, bringing together texts and words, across
different moments in time – moments at which meaning is different –
generates ideas and creates productive connections in a fashion which might
prove useful when approaching the material contained within this volume.

Touching across time

In 1999’s Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw introduced the idea of a
‘queer touch across time’,32 a ‘beautiful image’, to use Mark Jordan’s
phrase, which has been highly influential in work on queer historiography
and queer temporality.33 For Dinshaw, these queer touches are moments
at which subjects are brought into (affective and possibly erotic) ‘contact’
across different time periods. The notion of this ‘touch across time’ allowed
Dinshaw to create a historiographical method that accounted for, and
responded to, a queer desire for history. It also allowed her to create queer
‘communities’ which functioned across time as well as allowing her to
‘queer historiography’ itself.34 As Dinshaw states, ‘in my view a history that
reckons in the most expansive way possible with how people exist in time,
with what it feels like to be a body in time, or in multiple times, or out
of time, is a queer history – whatever else it may be’.35 The chapters in
this book open up the possibility of a broader understanding of London’s
30 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

queer histories than has previously been constructed purely through their
juxtaposition in this volume. But it is through the formation of connections
across these chapters that these histories can come together in the way that
Dinshaw suggests.
Throughout Getting Medieval, Dinshaw privileges the affective
connections across and between times rather than the construction of linear
and teleological histories. She creates this queer history of identification
through the construction of a constellation of texts, moments and bodies
across a range of different times and through a consideration of what is
produced, or the impression created, when these connections across times are
formed. Dinshaw focuses on connections between the pre- and postmodern,
but the affective power of possible connections works for the period of
time covered by our book nonetheless – the differences between 2015 and
1872 (for example) might not be as marked as those between the pre- and
postmodern, but ‘queer’ in 2015 is very different to ‘queer’ in the 1870s.
Rather than constructing a linear chronology, Dinshaw is interested in creating
a queer history of identification across different texts and different times.
One of the examples used to substantiate these constellations is that of John
Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, who
received large amounts of fan mail from gay men following the publication
of his book, which radically reinterpreted Christian attitudes towards
homosexuality in the medieval and pre-medieval period. As Dinshaw notes,
these letters ‘reveal the intense, personally enabling effects of Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality … [S]ome of these letters, nominally
concerning the book, provided the occasions of brief, private, supportive
contact with another gay man, creating a tiny and temporary community of
two’.36 But more than this, they chart a relationship between the letter writers
and the historical subjects of Boswell’s book, leading one correspondent to
claim, ‘I had never felt – until I read your book – that I had gay friends
across the centuries’.37
The community gestured towards through Dinshaw’s consideration
of these letters is a complicated one, not simply a ‘feel-good collectivity
of happy homos’, but rather a ‘community of the isolated, the abject, the
shamed’.38 These communities might refuse, as Dinshaw insists, to conform
to the simple dichotomy of ‘mimetic identification with the past or blanket
alteritism’.39 Rather, we might invest in ‘partial connections, queer relations
between incommensurate lives and phenomena – relations that collapse the
critical and theoretical oppositions between transhistorical and alteritist
accounts, between truth and pleasure, between past and present, between
self and other’.40 Or, as Ann Pellegrini productively suggests of Dinshaw’s
ideas,

[t]his is a queer geometry of identification, in which relation and

relatedness do not unfold through mirroring, the assumed resemblances
of identity, but are constituted though ‘a connectedness (even across time)
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 31

of singular lives that unveil and contest normativity’. These connections

between incommensurable lives and phenomena are necessarily partial.41

But despite being partial, these connections are productive.42 They are
evident throughout this edited collection – in the Soho that Marco Venturi
identifies and Anne Witchard makes lesbian; in the queer Brixton that
Emma Spruce finds few people recall and yet Matt Cook remembers; in the
Cannibal Club that Silvia Antosa examines and the traces of it that appear
in Lesley A. Hall’s essay; they are more numerous that I can account for
here and to do so would be proscriptive. They are for the reader to find.
This collection, then, offers an opening out and a deepening – in the name
of community and in the name of discovery – of what we have previously
considered under the auspices of queer London.

Touching Oscar
Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Pére Lachaise is covered in lipstick marks – much
to the chagrin of Wilde’s living family, but much to the delight of those
who visit the graveyard to pay homage. For them, these lipstick marks
are a way to make, or mark, a tangible connection with the man who is
perceived by many to be a queer martyr. For Dana Luciano, these lipstick
marks ‘manifest the “touch across time” that Carolyn Dinshaw locates at
the heart of a queer historiographic practice’.43 As Sam McBean notes in her
contribution, Luciano understands that these lipstick marks work to create
a queer time and she posits this in a number of ways. Noting that the marks
are often ‘dismissed as unreal, transient, ephemeral’,44 Luciano argues that
‘[t]he lipstick kisses don’t trace a timeline, a narrative of descent, between
Wilde and those who made them; rather, they bend time through the
location of partial affinities, pressing up against a present from the past,
the present-ness of this being-otherwise’.45 She goes on to suggest that the
‘[m]ournfulness [of the kisses] conveys the insufficiency of a present marked
by loss and emptiness, maintaining the conviction that the present should
have been otherwise, while the exultation of the outcast brings that otherwise-
present into being, charging in with a mingled sense of consummation and
expectation – just as a kiss can do’.46
What Luciano understands as a moment of queer temporality – and her
application of Dinshaw’s theory is a productive one – is also anchored in
space; it is a concrete geographic location that facilitates this connection
between Wilde and those who leave the marks. But we must read this space
through its history; the connections that Luciano reads through the lipstick
marks are enhanced by our knowledge that Wilde shares the grave with
Robbie Ross, a man with whom he has an erotic history; that the monument
once had genitalia which were removed by vandals in 1961, and briefly
replaced by visual artist Leon Johnson in 2000; and our knowledge that
32 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Wilde’s family have tried to stop these kisses being left behind, through
the erection of a barrier around the monument in 2011. Present in Wilde’s
grave, there is a complicated relationship between time and space, one
that Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, demonstrates an anxiety about –
visible in the erection of the barrier and in his claim that ‘the lipstick is
just the final straw. Unthinking vulgar people may have defaced Wilde’s
tomb forever’.47 Holland’s anxiety about this relationship between time and
space, and the connections facilitated by them, is also evident in another
claim he makes about his son, Wilde’s great-grandson, Lucian. Lucian, like
Wilde, attended Magdalen College, Oxford, and during his time there lived
in accommodation in which Wilde had also resided.48 This spatial alignment
between great-grandfather and great-grandson made Holland feel, rather
ominously, as though ‘the similarities were getting out of hand’.49 Thus
he reports himself as saying to Lucian, ‘I don’t give a damn about your
sexuality, but for goodness sake keep out of the courts’, and added to the
Guardian journalist that ‘[t]he coincidences had gone far enough’.50 This
constellation then, across times and spaces, creates an unwanted community
of ‘unthinking vulgar people’ and unwanted connections within familial
lines – not a happy community of homos, but a community nonetheless.
While Merlin Holland wishes to regulate the ability of ‘vulgar people’ to
form a connection to Wilde, for many a connection to Wilde is something to
make manifest. Accordingly, Hugh David starts his book On Queer Street
by announcing:

I once kissed a man who’d once been kissed by Lord Alfred Douglas. That
a man now in his mid-forties is thus only two pecks away from Oscar
Wilde in a fantastically apostate succession is interesting principally for
the light it throws on the size of what is now commonly referred to as
‘the gay community’.51

David goes on to use this as a way of disparaging the size of the said ‘gay
community’, but he also uses it, I would argue, as a way of inserting himself
into queer history – not just any queer history though, but queer ‘royalty’.
This affective force, this alignment in and across time that Wilde appears to
facilitate is also evident in Jonathan Kemp’s 2010 novel London Triptych,
which reinstates that relationship between time and space (as Luciano,
following Dinshaw, constructs it above) in its very fabric and structure.
In London Triptych, Kemp brings together a constellation of bodies and
creates affective moments of connection across the three different time periods
in which the novel’s three different narrative strands are set – 1894–95,
1954 and 1998. The novel interrogates the relationship between gay identity
and the law; gay identity and history; but also gay identity and space focusing
as it does broadly on London and, more specifically, on the boundaries
between the public and the private within London. The novel’s play with
form is clear, and the three narratives wind through history, creating striking
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 33

resonances – to return to Sedgwick’s language and to invoke Dinshaw’s

ideas – across these times and the city. To conclude this chapter, I want to
focus on a specific moment in the novel which brings together the threads
of my discussion. It is also a moment that uses the figure of Wilde through
which to facilitate the affective potential of Dinshaw’s ‘touch across time’.
Here the idea of Wilde and the bodies and objects that are connected to him
disrupt the present through the evocation of the past and trouble any simple
sense of the ‘now’ as a discrete and contained moment. Before I offer this
analysis though, I want to acknowledge that I am focusing on white gay
men in exactly the fashion I have criticized others for doing. That I do so is
both a symptom of the problem and reproduces the problem. Nevertheless,
I hope though to make claims about methodology which will facilitate an
engagement with the rest of the material in this book – material I hope, in
turn, will facilitate a move away from this subject.
The 1954 thread of Kemp’s book focuses on Colin, a reclusive artist who
is paying the attractive Gore to model for him. This modelling relationship
is framed by certain erotic undertones, with the two men having met at a
public life-drawing class and having then negotiated a private arrangement,
which sees Gore model for Colin in the privacy of Colin’s own home.
The chapter under consideration opens ominously, with Colin informing
the reader that ‘I spent last night in a police cell’.52 The cause of this event
is immediately offered to the reader in the chapter’s second line; ‘Gore had
taken me to my first queer pub’.53 The first two sentences directly tell the
reader the outcome of the chapter, so the tension is not created here by
watching things unfold – we know that Colin’s first trip to a gay pub will
end with him in prison. This play with temporality and narrative is also
a play with space, the text linking, implicitly, the space of the police cell
and the space of the queer pub. But the text further plays with these links
through a figure from the past, when, almost as soon as Colin and Gore are
seated with drinks, they are joined by ‘a grey-haired old man in an extremely
tight burgundy velvet jacket and blue cravat’ who has ‘the fruitiest voice’.54
This figure is Jack Rose who, in the 1894 thread of the novel, is Oscar
Wilde’s favourite rent boy.
The first connection that the text makes between the temporal threads
is through the question of art. Jack’s initial approach to Colin and Gore
is through a desire to cast Gore’s hands and genitals in bronze, a request
Gore shrugs off. Instead he passes attention to Colin, who he describes as
a ‘real artist’,55 eschewing Jack’s overly eroticized ‘art practice’. The notion
of a ‘real artist’ takes Jack instantly to Oscar Wilde and he claims dreamily,
‘I knew a real artist once’.56 Thus, the figure of the artist in the present –
Colin – takes us to the figure of the artist in the past – Wilde – and it is
worth noting that both figures are enmeshed with the law (the chapter has
already told us that Colin will end up in a police cell and the 1894 narrative
is, by this stage, focused on Wilde’s legal troubles). Once the spectre of
Wilde has been raised, Jack is ‘transported’ to the past, a time he narrates
34 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

with both nostalgia – ‘I was a beautiful boy, not ashamed to say it, a shiny
ripe apple in this veritable Eden’ – and anger – ‘[i]t’s a crime what this
country did to that man, a crime!’57 Jack’s nostalgia, or the ‘drag’ that he
feels the past enact on the present, is in part for a lost community, thus he
mourns that after Wilde’s trial ‘the inns were empty, the drag balls wiped
off the face of the city like a tart’s panstick. Most of the well-to-do queens
had sodded off abroad’.58 This loss is tempered with both contempt for the
structures which exile Wilde – ‘Lily Law’,59 as he calls it – and also through
a marking of the re-emergence of a kind of queer scene: ‘ever so gradually,
legions of Oscars started to spring up like flowers all over London, on every
street corner in town from the Dilly to Oxford Street. So many Oscars.
Vivid and proud’.60 Thus the re-emergence of homosexuality in London is
figured as a re-emergence of Oscar Wilde himself – ‘it was as if he had
to die so as to be reincarnated not just as a person, but as a whole new
century. That’s how big he was’, claims Jack later.61 But this positive queer
community is immediately troubled by the text, as Jack’s monologue about
the exciting and invigorating re-emergence of all these ‘Oscars’ is followed
by ‘a sudden burst of noise and half a dozen policemen crash[ing] through
the doors’.62 Jack leaves the scene, ‘slinking off to the back room, gliding like
a phantom’,63 or like a ghost from the past, but he also leaves the spectre of
legal intervention into the lives of gay men in the room behind him – like
a concrete manifestation of Wilde’s past legal troubles. The pub therefore
provides a glimpse into a past structured by law, and then it facilitates a
present also structured by the law.
But this moment in the pub changes Colin, and produces for him some
sense of community – even if it is a community structured in part by danger.
Arrested in the police raid at the pub, Colin is then visited by the police
the next day at his home, his excursion into London’s queer public spaces
having produced the opening and violating of his private spaces. After the
police leave, Colin goes to a cottage, an act he cannot account for: ‘I have
no explanation for what I did next. Perhaps I needed further humiliation;
perhaps I needed some reason to feel so shamed, needed to commit the crime
for which I was being pursued.’64 In the cottage, the promise of an illicit sexual
encounter is negated; instead, Colin experiences a moment of homophobic
violence and, as he attempts to escape from the man threatening him, he
jumps into a cab. Here he finds a sympathetic cabbie who gives Colin a wink
and advises ‘[n]ext time, just give him some money – that usually shuts them
up’.65 This moment of community, or at least connection and understanding,
is slightly undercut by Colin’s immediate (lonely) recollection that it is his
birthday, but nonetheless it offers a glimmer, however depressing, of some
sort of community.
This community, though, is brought into existence by the presence of the
past in the present, through the figure of Jack and through his storytelling.
I want to take a moment here to emphasize the physicality of that presence,
to emphasize that Jack is a firmly corporeal character. He is introduced as a
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 35

‘grey-haired old man in an extremely tight burgundy velvet jacket and blue
cravat, who had been staring and blinking’, and his opening line to Gore
emphasizes a loaded body part: ‘you must let me make a cast of your hands.
They’re divine’.66 Present in the line is a knowing nod to Wilde’s Picture
of Dorian Gray (1890) and the use within the novel of hands as codified
symbol. Jack’s following line, though, explodes any need for the codification
present in Wilde’s novel, when he states, ‘[a]nd your cock too, if you’d let
me’.67 The physicality of Jack’s textual presence continues throughout the
scene with the text taking care to note his ‘limp hand’, and the ‘dropping
[of] the genteel accent and trowelling on the Cockney’.68 Jack’s face is also
‘powdered’ and he steals Gore’s cigarettes and gulps from their drinks.69
Finally, he hands Colin ‘a tatty sepia photograph’ on which Wilde has
written ‘To Jack, my favourite writing desk, O.W.’,70 and which the reader
has already seen Wilde give to Jack.
Thus, this figure, so clearly tied to the past through his angry monologues
about Wilde’s treatment and his theories about Wilde’s resurrection, is a
material one. This touch across time is manifested through this figure,
through his handshake and his cherished photograph. It is also figured
through the comparison between times that Kemp offers in the structure of
the chapter and its inherent parallel between the role of the law in the life of
Oscar Wilde and the role of the law in the 1954 present. It is the space of a
queer London pub that facilitates this kind of community and makes these
touches possible. Then, once this touch across time has occurred, it opens
further queer spaces up for Colin, as evidenced by his visit the next day to
a cottage. But it also challenges his private spaces, leaving his home open
to a police visit that creates for Colin the feeling of having been ‘violated,
exposed, shamed, intimidated’.71
The text here insists that we read across times; it insists that to understand
Colin in the present we must see him as part of a history that includes
Wilde. But the figure of Jack insists – through both his characterization
and function – that the past has not actually gone anywhere, it is not over
and to understand the present requires the past. Thus our knowledge is
strengthened and enhanced through a connection across time.
I have sought to give a brief indication of the potential of creating
networks of connections across different moments in time and gesture
towards how they may speak to the present, or speak to an understanding of
the past. And I want to suggest that our methodology in putting together the
material this volume goes to creating one of these constellations – forming
connections across the 150+ years the book covers. We are not just aiming
here then to ‘find queers’ in the past – although some of the individual
work of the contributors does that very thing. Rather, we are aiming to
create a different looking model of ‘queer London’, one which is wider and
broader and which – through its partial connections – gestures towards the
contradictory and fragmentary world that queers may have inhabited. There
is a politics to this construction of a community, and there is a politics to
36 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

refusing the exclusive and exclusionary tactics of some previous work which
considers queer London. But in part, we hope that this frame of queer time
allows us to consider a little more what’s at stake when we discuss queer
London historically and in its contemporary formations.

Notes
1 Charles G. Harper, Queer Things About London (London: Cecil Palmer,
1923), p. 9.
2 Matt Houlbrook, ‘Cities’, in H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds),
Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), pp. 133–56, 148.
3 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 21.
4 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Matt
Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Mark Turner, Backwards Glances:
Cruising the Queer Street of New York and London (London: Reaktion
Books, 2003).
5 David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Kath Browne,
Jason Lim and Gavin Brown (eds), Geographies of Sexualities: Theory,
Practices and Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Matt Cook and Jennifer
V. Evans (eds), Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe Since 1945 (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014).
6 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Hugh David, On Queer
Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality 1895–1995 (London:
Harper Collins Publishers, 1997); H.G. Cocks, Nameless Offences:
Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York:
I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2003); Brian Lewis (ed.), British Queer History:
New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2013).
7 The Queer London conference took place at the University of Westminster in
March 2013.
8 Amy Villarejo, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014), p. 27.
9 See George Chauncy Jr., Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
10 Houlbrook, Queer London, p. 3.
11 David, On Queer Street, p. xi.
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 37

12 Cook and Evans, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

13 ‘queer, n.2.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2015.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/156235?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey
=RkvabD& (accessed 15 September 2015).
14 Ibid.
15 ‘queer, adj.1.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2015.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/156237?isAdvanced=false&result=3&rskey
=RkvabD& (accessed 15 September 2015).
16 Ibid.
17 Queer Nation formed in March 1990 and ACT UP in March 1987.
18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 8.
19 David Halperin, Saint Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
p. 62. However, the shaping and defining role that an idea of the ‘normal’
might play has been interrogated recently by Robyn Weigman, Elizabeth A.
Wilson and the contributors to their special issue of differences: A Journal
of Feminist Cultural Studies, ‘Queer Theory Without Antinormativity’
(26 January 2015).
20 See, especially, Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman,
Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam,
Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon and Nguyen Tan Hoang, ‘Theorizing
Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ 13.2–3 (2007),
pp. 177–96; Heather Love, Feeling Backwards (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Packing History, Count(er)
ing Generations’, New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000), pp. 727–44;
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Halperin, Saint Foucault; Ann
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer
Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
21 See especially Valerie Rohy, ‘Ahistorical’, GLQ 12.1 (2006), pp. 61–83.
22 Houlbrook, ‘Note on Terminology’, Queer London.
23 Charles G. Harper, More Queer Things About London (London: Cecil Palmer,
1924), A Literary Man’s London (London: Cecil Palmer, 1926), A Londoner’s
Own London (London: Cecil Palmer, 1927) and The City of London Guide
(London: Charles G. Harper, 1927).
24 Harper, Queer Things About London, p. 10.
25 ‘queer, adj.1.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. http://www.
oed.com/view/Entry/156237?isAdvanced=false&result=3&rskey=RkvabD&
(accessed 3 August 2015).
26 Harper, Queer Things About London, p. 9.
27 Ibid., p. 15.
38 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

28 Ibid., p. 226.
29 Ibid., p. 182.
30 Freeman, ‘Packing History’, p. 728.
31 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 161.
32 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 21.
33 Mark D. Jordan, ‘Touching and Acting, or The Closet of Abjection’, Journal of
the History of Sexuality 10.2 (2001), pp. 180–4, 180.
34 Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Got Medieval?’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 10.2
(2001), pp. 202–12, 203. Emphasis in original.
35 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 109.
36 Ibid., pp. 27–6.
37 Quoted in Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 28. Emphasis in original.
38 Dinshaw, ‘Got Medieval?’ p. 204.
39 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 34.
40 Ibid., p. 35.
41 Ann Pellegrini, ‘Touching the Past; or, Hanging Chad’, Journal of the History
of Sexuality 10.2 (2001), pp. 185–94, 191.
42 I would also like to point here towards Laura Doan’s engaging suggestion that
‘we reconsider the value of unknowability and vagueness as a way of knowing
differently’, as a further affirmation that the search for the partial, or here
the ‘vague’, can be important and productive. See Laura Doan, Disturbing
Practices: History, Sexuality and Women’s Experience of Modern War
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 140.
43 Dana Luciano, ‘Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: Velvet Goldmine’s Queer
Archive’, in E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (eds), Queer Times, Queer
Becomings (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 121–
55, 122–3, quoting Dinshaw.
44 Luciano, ‘Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come’, p. 122.
45 Ibid., p. 123.
46 Ibid.
47 Quoted in Stuart Jeffries, ‘Scarlet Kisses of Death for Oscar’s tomb’, Guardian,
29 October 2000. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/oct/29/books.
booksnews (accessed 11 August 2015).
48 Stephen Moss, ‘The Importance of Being Merlin’, Guardian, 24 November
2000. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/nov/24/classics.oscarwilde
(accessed 11 August 2015).
49 Quoted in ibid.
50 Quoted in ibid. Emphasis added.
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER LONDONS 39

51 David, On Queer Street, p. ix.

52 Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2010), p. 159.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., p. 161.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., pp. 161, 162.
58 Ibid., p. 162.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., p. 162, 163.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., p. 185.
65 Ibid., p. 187.
66 Ibid., p. 161.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., p. 162.
70 Ibid., p. 161.
71 Ibid., p. 184.
 CHAPTER THREE

Mapping This Volume

Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham

The contributors’ chapters in the second and major part of this volume are
not structured by theme and they do not follow chronologically. Rather, they
are arranged in order to facilitate dialogue across disciplines, spaces and
times, in ways that create synergies between the chapters and their topics,
both thematically and ideologically. Some of these synergies may be found in
the various chapters’ approaches to race and ethnicity, class, gender, nation
and nationality, technology, cultural production and location. The following
is designed to gesture towards some of these possible synergies, but is not
meant to be exhaustive. As will become clear, the interconnections are many
and varied.
This section opens with Matt Cook charting the ways in which the HIV/
AIDS crisis of the 1980s shaped queer spaces and their usages across London.
Cook draws attention to a wide range of different spaces – both public and
private – in his analysis of ‘the “gaying” of the epidemic in London’,1 and
considers the alternative structures of care that developed across the capital,
both personal and institutional. In particular, Cook notes the creation of a
queer, alternative form of family in response to the disease,2 and highlights
the tensions and anxieties around housing and security. Towards the end of
the chapter, Cook draws on the notion of haunting, a concept which returns
throughout the volume in the work of a number of contributors, including
Paulina Palmer and Bart Eeckhout.
Cook relies, in part, upon practices of oral history, which are also
methodologically central to Emma Spruce’s work. Spruce draws upon
elements of ethnography and queer geography in order to investigate
the problematic deployment of gay progress narratives in Brixton, South
London. Spruce introduces the concept of ‘bigot geography’ which she
42 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

describes as a ‘suturing of homophobia, people and place … an imaginary

mapping that works … to differentially locate, and thus value, bodies in
relation to sexual modernity’.3 In particular, Spruce discusses the ascribing
of homophobic beliefs to Brixton’s black and/or immigrant and/or poor
communities, but she goes on to challenge this ‘bigot geography’ by tracing
Brixton’s history and emphasizing, among other things, both gay squats
located in the area and a wider tolerance. Thus, for Spruce, ‘memory sharing
becomes a possible site of anti-racist resistance’.4 Spruce’s chapter is the first
in a number of chapters that might be read as offering a challenging and at
times uncomfortable picture of how race and ethnicity might play into our
understanding of queer London. In doing so, she shares a focus with the
work of Silvia Antosa, Carolyn Conroy, and Gemma Romain and Caroline
Bressey included here.
While Spruce offers a close consideration of a particular London space,
Paulina Palmer offers a broader engagement with notions of the city. In one
of two chapters to address the literatures of queer London, Palmer examines
the range of strategies deployed by Sarah Waters in order to interrogate the
interaction between queer female identities and the urban matrix. Focusing
on Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002) and The
Night Watch (2006), Palmer’s chapter utilizes important concepts such as
the flâneur and the carnivalesque in order to explore the texts’ politics,
drawing particular attention to the ways in which Waters’ fiction plays
with intertextual references as a means of understanding the city. As such,
Palmer argues that ‘[b]y juxtaposing reference to the dominant culture with
its marginalized counterpart, [Waters] fills in the gaps and absences relating
to gender and sexuality … and fleshes out the feminine and queer areas of
metropolitan life’.5
For Palmer, one of those marginalized counterpoints is the queer
performance that she discusses in relation to Fingersmith. Kayte Stokoe’s
chapter resonates with this through its focus on the Drag King scene in
London, juxtaposing the contemporary King scene with the work of
Vesta Tilly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a period
which a number of contributors return to and reinvestigate. In particular,
Stokoe highlights the ways in which Tilley’s drag sought to move away
from a ‘masculine’ performance, creating instead a more ‘androgynous’ or
‘feminine’ one. Stokoe proceeds to demonstrate the impact this has had
on contemporary King performances and the contemporary perception
of Kinging. Methodologically, the chapter approaches the material from
both historical and experiential positions, using interviews with current
performers alongside the historical documentation of Tilley’s life and
career. Throughout the chapter, Stokoe is in dialogue with the work of
Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier and especially with the notion of pratiques
transgenres, a queer theoretical concept which can ‘facilitate a recognition
of the possibilities for gender expression and gender identification outside
the gender binary’ through its mobilization of theories of performativity.6
 MAPPING THIS VOLUME 43

Building upon Stokoe’s exploration of twentieth-century queer

experiences, as well as returning to the investigation of the tensions between
queerness and race which Spruce raised, Gemma Romain and Caroline
Bressey offer a rare consideration of the life of Claude McKay in London
between 1919 and 1921. Using his journalism, letters and poetry as the
basis for their historical analysis, they chart the racist discrimination and
abuse that McKay received, sometimes in precisely those clubs which
other commentators take as radical and queer spaces (see, for example, the
chapter by Anne Witchard in this volume). Romain and Bressey highlight
the ways in which McKay was excluded from the queer networks which
other critics, such as Matt Houlbrook, have highlighted. In doing so, they
argue forcefully for the ‘need to examine the intersections of class and race
with queer identity and radical activism’, which, as they point out, ‘have
been little explored in the context of black interwar presence in Britain’.7
With the same agenda of rewriting history from a more marginal
position and drawing upon archival research to facilitate this, the
following chapter by Lesley A. Hall returns us to the late nineteenth
century, and in so doing explores the history of the British Society for
the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP) and its role in the changing political
and social attitudes towards homosexuality. The chapter gestures towards
the influence of Bloomsbury’s permissive attitudes and communities
on the group’s work, and decisively demonstrates the effects which the
organization and its members had upon later sociopolitical groups and
institutions, as well as upon legislative change. In tracing the group’s
influence, Hall is able to show that ‘thirty years after the collapse of
the Society nearly all the reforms it had desired had been implemented,
including homosexual law reform’.8
Dealing with a concurrently existing group to the BSSSP, Silvia Antosa’s
chapter examines the all-male Anthropological Society of London, founded
in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and James Hunt, and its inner circle, the
Cannibal Club. Like Spruce, and Romain and Bressey, Antosa is particularly
keen to examine the complex interrelations of the discourses of sexuality and
race, but here particularly in the context of the homophobic and misogynistic
mindset at the heart of both Anthropological Society and the Cannibal
Club. Through a consideration of the Club’s activities and publications
– particularly around pornography and seemingly ‘transgressive’ sexual
practices – Antosa suggests how this thinking about sexuality led to, and
was challenged by, the work of subsequent sexologists like Havelock Ellis
and Arthur Symonds. This is one of a number of chapters which show the
fruitful uncovering of possibilities when reading late nineteenth-century
London through a queer lens and enable us to examine what might be
considered transgressive at different historical junctures.
In the first of two chapters dealing with the relationships between London
and transgressive artistic practice, Dominic Janes explores the twentieth-
century artist Francis Bacon and particularly the connections between his
44 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

production of queer visual culture and his personal life. Janes demonstrates
Bacon’s self-fashioning through practices of gender indeterminacy, such as
his use of make-up, before considering one of his key works, Figure Study
II (1945–46), in relation to contemporary police photography. By reading
across aesthetic practices and lived experiences, Janes highlights Bacon’s
interest in queer domestic spaces and perverse desires, drawing attention
to the ways in which Bacon ‘aestheticized violence and transgression in
association with his sadomasochistic, same sex desires’.9
Considering an earlier artist, Carolyn Conroy examines the nineteenth-
century Anglo-Jewish Simeon Solomon from the time of his conviction for
attempted sodomy until his death in 1905. As Conroy documents, Solomon
insisted upon living in the slum area of St Giles in ways which established
crucial links between poverty, bohemianism and homosexuality. Rejecting
earlier critics’ readings which connect Solomon’s lifestyle with mental illness,
Conroy convincingly argues that St Giles offered Solomon a liberating space
unconstrained by convention and dominant morality, where he could pursue
‘his passion for queer “exotic vice”’.10 As such, Solomon might be read in
terms of the non-repentant homosexual identified by critics such as Richard
Dellamora.
Moving from lived experiences of Queer London back to fictional
representations, Bart Eeckhout re-reads three key fictions by Alan
Hollinghurst – The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Line of Beauty
(2004) and The Stranger’s Child (2011) – in order to map out a trajectory of
increased queerness across Hollinghurst’s work. As Eeckhout demonstrates,
The Swimming Pool Library rewrites the tradition of the urban novel in its
frequent concern with liminal spaces which are semi-public and semi-private.
In Eeckhout’s reading, the protagonist Will functions as an ethnographer
and sexual flâneur, demonstrating how ‘gay’ spaces were constructed
in London in the early 1980s. In subsequent fictional interventions,
however, Hollinghurst has queered these depictions to a greater extent.
Eeckhout demonstrates how, in The Line of Beauty, Nick queers Thatcher’s
heteronormative England from within, while in The Stranger’s Child both
the content and the form emphasize ‘the fundamental uncontainability of
sexual desires’.11
In line with Conroy’s uncovering of aspects of a forgotten queer London,
Anne Witchard’s chapter, ‘Sink Street: The Sapphic World of Pre-Chinatown
Soho’, challenges the often held assumption that there was no lesbian nightlife
in early twentieth-century London. Witchard effectively exposes a lesbian
scene through the ‘lingering textual traces’ of a variety of clubs around the
West End,12 clubs which Hall, and Romain and Bressey also reference in
their chapters. Of particular concern here is the social phenomenon of the
‘modern girl’ and the attendant anxiety about both her sexual orientation
and her challenge to ‘clubland’s standard demarcations of social class and
propriety’.13 Interestingly, Witchard’s queer nightlife also extends to the
growth of the coffee bar as a haunt for queers.
 MAPPING THIS VOLUME 45

In a treatment of more recent Soho, Marco Venturi interrogates questions

of ‘community’ in the age of the location-based app. Drawing on Benedict
Anderson’s idea of imagined community, Venturi traces the history of Soho
as a place of assumed security for many exiled groups, before considering the
implications of shifting patterns of gay male encounter. Venturi juxtaposes
the material community of Soho with the recent emergence of an online
male–male community, specifically on Grindr, which has the potential to
fracture the area’s perceived coherence. In this way, Venturi expands the
notion of community which has been central to many other chapters here.
In the final chapter of the collection, Sam McBean picks up on the idea
of potential community erosion explored by Venturi in her exploration of
Christa Holka’s ‘I WAS THERE’ project. McBean examines how Holka’s
photographs both contribute to, and constitute, an online archive of queer
community, examining the complex relations between queer subjects,
inclusivity and ‘desires for queer historicity’.14 Considering the kinds of
effects created by these new media archival sites, McBean interrogates the
ways in which Facebook and Tumblr might contribute to the erasure of
specificity with regard to both space (London) and time. McBean’s emphasis
on the subject’s desire for history therefore offers an intriguingly different
view on queer historical enquiry, suggesting that it is concerned not solely
with recovery of the past, but also with the shaping of the individual.
Throughout the chapters, then, the contributors have made visible
previously ignored or marginalized historical moments and figures, asking
us to revisit what a notion of queer London might actually mean and what
is at stake when we make that enquiry. Moreover, the chapters demand that
we rethink where this queer London might be situated. While most of the
chapters focus on various aspects of what we might term ‘central’ London,
occasional chapters (such as those by Graham, Eeckhout, Spruce and Cook)
move further out, thereby gesturing towards that greater complexity of
‘queer London’ which the volume as a whole interrogates.

Notes
1 This volume, p. 51.
2 Ibid., p. 55.
3 Ibid., p. 66.
4 Ibid., p. 76.
5 Ibid., p. 83.
6 Ibid., p. 101.
7 Ibid., p. 117.
8 Ibid., p. 143.
46 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

9 Ibid., p. 170.
10 Ibid., p. 186.
11 Ibid., p. 204.
12 Ibid., p. 222.
13 Ibid., p. 224.
14 Ibid., p. 257.
 SECTION TWO

Exploring
Queer London
 CHAPTER FOUR

London, AIDS and the 1980s

Matt Cook

Soon after I moved to London in August 1990, I met my boyfriend of

fourteen years at Bang! (subsequently G-A-Y) on Charing Cross Road.
Bang! was London’s first big US-style gay club. It opened in 1974 and in its
early years drew stars like Rod Stewart and David Bowie at a point when
sexual ambiguity and bisexuality had a certain rock and pop cache.1 By
the time I danced there that night it seemed more niche: the ‘gay plague’
had, some felt, further entrenched the existing homo-/heterosexual dyad.
That divide was also visibly apparent in the new European-style gay bars
which opened in Soho in the early 1990s, cementing the area’s reputation
as the capital’s gay village. Condoms and safer sex advice were available
at each of these and there were often bucket shakers raising funds for the
range of AIDS charities by then operating in the city. These bars, clubs and
charities were represented at Pride in central London each July – an event
I never missed then. As numbers reached over 100,000 for the Euro-pride
event of 1992, Gay Times reported the sense of this being ‘an unstoppable
movement, part of a tribe that had scattered but is now reunited’.2
I became a buddy for Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) in 1991. I made
new friends in my local buddy group in Clapham, and was partnered with
men I would probably never have got to know otherwise. My boyfriend
volunteered for the Immune Development Trust based in Islington, offering
massage therapy to people with AIDS (PWAs as the acronym now had
them). AIDS and HIV was a frequent topic of conversation in our domestic
life. He was seven years older than me – a significant age difference at this
historical juncture. While I had moved to London at twenty equipped with
an (apparently) clear knowledge about risks, he had come out earlier in
London in more uncertain times. It was his friends and former lovers he
50 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

and sometimes I visited at the Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia and at the

brand new Chelsea and Westminster (formerly St Stephen’s Hospital) in
Fulham Road to the west. Much less often than many men I knew, but more
frequently than most people in their early twenties, I went to funerals in
central London churches and the cemeteries which fringed the capital, and
to memorial services at the Lighthouse in Ladbroke Grove and a former
synagogue in Spitalfields. Looking back, we now know that AIDS-related
deaths in the UK were peaking at around 1,000 per year in these early years
of the 1990s. The vast majority of these were in London.3
This personal but also substantially shared geography shaped my
understandings of what it meant to be gay at this time. Looking back, I
realize how new this city was, how fundamentally it had been shaken and
re-inflected by the AIDS epidemic, and how recently hospitals, clinics and
cemeteries had entered the routine lives of gay men, young and old. Gay
men and their urban ‘haunts’ were exposed more clearly to view in the
1980s and battle lines were re-drawn across urban spaces (and between
the metropolis and provinces) as fear and homophobia faced off anger and
grief, pride and shame. New solidarities were forged and fresh enmities and
disaffections emerged. Familiar spaces became strange or uncomfortable,
and others were newly associated with gay life (and death). Ideas of urban
safety, danger and community were reappraised and reconfigured. In barely
eight years, gay lives in the city had been transformed – and so too had the
ways in which others thought about them.
There were a number of intersecting reasons for these shifts – among
them the legacies of gay liberation and the vivid urban counter cultures of
the 1970s; economic crisis and then recession; a growth in intercontinental
travel; housing reform; and the emergence and development of Thatcherism
and the ‘new right’. However, the pace, scale and dimensions of change
simply cannot be understood without taking detailed account of AIDS, its
disproportionate effect on gay men in the UK and the way London became
the clear epicentre of the national epidemic. In what follows I explore first
the ways in which London took on this status and then look more specifically
at some of the overlapping geographies which re-shaped the city for many
gay men during the 1980s – geographies of support, care and treatment; of
activism and socialization; of fear and insecurity; and finally of death. These
ways of experiencing and understanding the city have changed again since
I first engaged with them in 1990 – not least because of new treatments for
HIV and the advent of the Internet. I nevertheless argue that they continue
unevenly to haunt our city.
This piece is specifically about gay men in relation to AIDS and the city.
There are other crucial layers of analysis which I leave for another time and
which relate to intersecting yet distinct networks associated with AIDS and
responses to, and of, positive women, haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users,
BME individuals and communities, and those who did not identify in any
of these ways. The general marginalization of these other experiences was
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 51

germane to the ‘gaying’ of the epidemic in London and so to the dominance

of gay male experience in accounts of AIDS and HIV in the UK. I am working
further on the interface between diverse groups and individuals caught up in
the AIDS crisis. This, though, is not the focus of my study here.

AIDS and London

Late in 1981, a 49-year-old gay man died of pneumocytis carinii pneumonia
(PCP) in Brompton Hospital in west London. When AIDS was coined by
the US Centre of Disease Control the following September, this man was
retrospectively thought to be its first UK casualty. Over the ensuing years
the death toll mounted: 29 by the end of 1983; 106 by the end of 1984;
271 by the close of 1985; 610 by year-end 1986. Initially, diagnosis and
death came hard on the heels of each other, but thereafter alongside the
death toll was a growing number who were becoming ill but surviving for
longer.4 By mid-1989 there were 2,000 people with AIDS in the UK, of
whom 1,000 had died.5 Over 70 per cent of cases to this date were reported
within the four Thames health authority regions, most in the North West
Thames area.6 The latter included Earls Court, Notting Hill and Ladbroke
Grove – all areas which had been associated subculturally and more broadly
with queer life in the city in the preceding years (I use ‘queer’ here and at
other points in this piece to include men and networks predating or not
necessarily organized around or affiliated to a ‘gay’ identification).7 St
Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, St Stephen’s in Fulham and the Middlesex in
Fitzrovia were leading the way in treatment and research. The first dedicated
AIDS hospices in the UK – the Mildmay Mission Hospital in Shoreditch and
the Lighthouse in Ladbroke Grove – opened their doors in 1988. London
was also the centre of government and government action (and inaction) on
AIDS. It was the base of the national media which reported on the crisis; it
was where the first charities began; and it was where protest and activism
was focused. All this underscored, entrenched and ‘dramatized’ London’s
position as Britain’s ‘AIDS capital’.8
London had long been closely associated with queer lives,9 and since
in the Western world AIDS seemed primarily to afflict such lives, the
conjunction between the metropolis and this new syndrome appeared self-
evident. London was moreover well established as Britain’s global city
and AIDS was understood as a ‘disease’ of globalization and international
travel and exchange.10 If music, dance and activist cultures from the USA
had been precedent products of an international gay metropolitan circuit,
AIDS seemed the latest import. In terms of a response to the epidemic, gay
men, doctors and researchers in London frequently looked to New York and
San Francisco for lessons in epidemiology, treatment, and models of both
protest and voluntary care. Others were in turn inspired by innovations in
treatment and the liberal and pragmatic health policy emerging in London.11
52 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Unsurprisingly, then, AIDS was initially seen in the UK as a gay

Londoners’ disease. When the government began thinking harder about
health education from the mid-1980s, the then chief medical officer, Donald
Acheson, purportedly favoured advice to ‘avoid London’.12 Responses to
the National Lesbian and Gay Survey’s (NLGS) directive on ‘Gay Men and
Health’ in 1986 meanwhile suggested that outside the capital many gay men
remained relatively complacent.13 A twenty-year-old from Birmingham, for
example, garnered a sense of safety in his distance from the capital:

I don’t think we need worry ourselves about having an epidemic as large

as in the United States[. W]e don’t have the bath houses and the bawdy
houses like the Americans do. If someone in the USA wants to have sex
with 30 men in one day he can[;] in Britain he’d have to live in London,
and even then he’d be very hard pushed to make 10.14

AIDS was often identified with particular places – in this case with New
York bath houses and in the testimony of another with the Subway Club
in London’s Leicester Square.15 It was sometimes places rather than acts
that could seem infectious. Some of the Mass Observation project’s largely
heterosexual respondents to a directive on AIDS in 1987 positioned dangers
away from their hometowns and districts and firmly in the capital. A 53-year-
old publisher from the south-east noted that ‘we had to visit London, and I
have to admit that in the rush hour we felt very much aware that we might
be in a hazardous zone’.16 A common thread in Mass Observer responses
related to the fate such metropolitan AIDS ‘carriers’ had brought upon
themselves. ‘For most of the country’, reported the Journal for Public Policy
in 1989, ‘AIDS is something alien: a threat radiating out from the metropolis
where, of course, the inhabitants are well known for their wicked ways and
perverse habits’.17
The consequences for London and the ‘scandal’ of supposed preferential
treatment for gay men in terms of health and housing exercised elements
of the press. When Lambeth became the first local council nationally
to designate homeless people with AIDS to be in priority housing need,
there was ‘outrage’ in some quarters. Under a banner headline ‘AIDS
Gays to Get Council Housing’, The Express cited the fears of a local Tory
councillor that the borough would be ‘turn[ed] into a Mecca for these
people[,] with Lambeth being flooded by gay men claiming they have
AIDS and then demanding council housing’.18 Reaction tapped into fears
about the concentration of AIDS cases in London. In 1987, the London
Evening Standard wondered how the city would cope: ‘by the year 1994’,
it proclaimed, ‘there will be more than a million carriers of AIDS in Britain.
Virtually all of these will be living in central or West London, in places
like Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea, Notting Hill and Ealing’.19 Echoing
the concerns of Lambeth Tories about ‘AIDS gays’, this journalist worried
that they would be drawn from outside London because ‘almost all of the
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 53

hospital and out-patient treatments are on offer only in London’.20 Such

accounts fed the fears and hyperbole that circled gay life in general and gay
life in London in particular.
Gay men themselves were meanwhile experiencing the city and certain
spaces within it in radically different ways. Their lives were discussed not
only in the papers but in forums of health, housing and government where
they had previously only received glancing attention. This new entry into
public consciousness, debate and infrastructures of care is significant in
terms of the development of an equalities agenda which underpinned a
growing sense of rights among gay men. This laid the ground for ensuing
campaigns for legislative change, as well as a gradual softening of the kind
of homophobic attitudes voiced in the 1980s in sections of the press and in
opinion polls.21 The reformulation of gay life and consciousness outlined
in the ensuing sections is thus important to that story of subsequent (and
uneven) liberalization.

Geographies of support, care and treatment

If the 49-year-old man who died at Brompton Hospital in 1981 is thought
to have been the first case, it was the death of 37-year-old Terry Higgins on
4 July 1982 at St Thomas’ Hospital opposite Parliament that prompted a
wider consciousness of AIDS on London’s gay scene and beyond. Higgins
had been subjected to double barrier nursing and had died, a nurse
commented, ‘in abject misery’.22 Friends set up a trust in his name and began
fundraising through London’s bars and clubs (and first at the newly opened
Heaven nightclub at Charing Cross). From 1983, the organization began to
professionalize in its fundraising, networking and lobbying from cramped
offices at Mount Pleasant and later in Grays Inn Road – both just south of
Kings Cross station. That same year, THT became the first avowedly gay
charity to be approved by the Charity Commission.
Just next to Kings Cross station itself, London Lesbian and Gay
Switchboard was meanwhile responding to a rising volume of anxious
callers. The telephone advice service was established in 1974 out of the
ashes of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).23 It was now key in sharing
what little was known about the condition and in 1983 co-convened (with
the Health Education Council) the first national conference on AIDS at
London’s Conway Hall near Holborn. Further west, from a flat in Philbeach
Gardens in Earls Court, Body Positive began operating in 1984. It brought
men together who had a shared AIDS or (from 1985) HIV diagnosis in
campaigning, fundraising and support work. Many of these men had
known each other for years on the gay scene.24 The initial response to AIDS
emerged at this grassroots level and it was from here that awareness spread.
The condition, noted Capital Gay in 1983, ‘is the main topic of discussion
in every [gay] pub and club and over dinner tables throughout London’.25
54 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Given the preponderance of AIDS cases in west London, it is no

coincidence that St Mary’s and St Stephen’s were two of the leaders in
research, treatment and care. These hospitals and others began to take their
place in the daily and weekly lives of gay men with AIDS-related conditions
and of those supporting them. For others, there were anxious visits to
attached STI (sexually transmitted infection) clinics. These were already
familiar to many but from an era when visits were inconvenient rather than
life changing. The clinics had to adapt rapidly in order to keep up with
shifting medical knowledge, advice on ‘safer sex’ and conflicting ideas about
whether or not to test for the virus. They drew clients from within and
beyond London as gay men sought out places they felt would know most, be
sympathetic and offer heightened anonymity. ‘I invented a new identity and
went to the special clinic of a major London hospital’, wrote one National
Lesbian and Gay Survey (NLGS) correspondent who lived in Leicester and
was worried his HIV test might prejudice his life insurance.26 If London was
a fearful place of plague and infection to some, to others it promised the
best advice and treatment. In his testimony to the NLGS in the late 1980s,
Tony described spending ‘half his life’ in hospital in the 1980s as well as
his ‘luck’ at having access to London’s hospitals and doctors.27 A survey of
London general practitioners (GPs) in 1989 in the British Medical Journal
indicated a higher level of awareness about the disease than elsewhere in the
country, with two thirds treating at least one PWA.28
Traditional power and knowledge dynamics between patients and
medical professionals shifted in the early years of the epidemic in these
contexts as gay men actively gathered and shared information with each
other and with their doctors and nurses. Journalist Oscar Moore described
this as a ‘fraternity of sickness’.29 It was for him and others a new kind of
London gay scene – a bush telegraph of alternative treatments, conspiracy
theories and rumours from the United States and Europe. London’s specialist
AIDS wards and clinics developed a distinctive, informal atmosphere.30
According to one senior social worker, the Broderip Ward at the Middlesex
Hospital was alive with sex and relationship gossip and a camaraderie he
had not encountered elsewhere.31 This was in part because patients would
often return repeatedly and would get to know each other and the medical
staff. Many of the nurses on the wards were also gay and had experience of
AIDS in both their personal and professional lives.32 ‘The ward [at St Barts
hospital sandwiched between Smithfield Market and St Paul’s Cathedral]
is run with panache, friendly, completely informal … All smiles, laughs,
intimacies’, wrote film-maker Derek Jarman.33 He and Moore found a
sense of safety and respite in some of their hospital stays partly because
of this.
Lighthouse, Mildmay Hospice and Landmark in Brixton (from 1990)
became additional sanctuaries for many men. Aside from residential
palliative care, they ran drop-in support groups and workshops – on
cooking and nutrition, for example, and on camouflage make-up for those
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 55

with Karposi’s sarcoma (KS) lesions. These and other activities were to do
with literal survival strategies in the city. ‘Passing’ as ‘normal’ had long
felt important for many gay men but now passing for ‘well’ might be as
significant. This was especially the case for those who reported stares and
abuse on the streets and in bars because of visible signs of ill-health – a
rather different economy of gazes from the cruising and backward glances
queer Londoners had long been familiar with.
Aside from providing treatment, advice, respite and a sense of safety,
London clinics, wards and hospices saw desperation and heart-breaking
grief. Men described their friends waste and fade – sometimes seeming
to anticipate their own illness and death. In his monochrome film Blue
(1993), Jarman described ‘a young man frail as Belsen’ on his ward. ‘There
is death in the air here’, he said. ‘We are not talking about it. But I know
the silence might be broken by a distraught visitor screaming, “Help, Sister!
Help, Nurse!” followed by the sound of feet rushing along the corridor.
Then silence.’34 Jarman was one of the most prolific, insistent and politicized
chroniclers of the disease in the city – a chronicler crucial given the much
less sympathetic coverage that was emerging through sections of the media.
He and others relate the sense of overload and trauma accompanying daily
hospital visits, serial losses, burgeoning homophobia and intolerance, and
an overall sense of being embattled.35 They also sometimes testified to a
reciprocity and generosity of spirit as family, friends, and voluntary and
professional medical and support workers formed tight networks around
the men they cared for. Sociologist Judith Stacey notes that the AIDS crisis
‘incited gay men to perform Herculean levels of caretaking outside default
family form’.36 One HIV positive resident of the gay enclave of the Brixton
Housing Co-op (BHC) described how moving there ameliorated the isolation
and depression he had experienced in his flat in Limehouse, east London,
where he had lived with no local support.37 Meanwhile, the community of
squatters who lived in the Brixton houses in the 1970s before they were
absorbed into the BHC gathered around those of their number who became
ill in the 1980s. Jamie, for example, was taken in by a former community
member until his death at the age of 35 in 1985.38

‘Coming together’ and coming into view

During and in the wake of GLF activism in the early 1970s, a range of special
interest groups had formed and forged new ways for gay men to ‘come
together’.39 These provided a model and infrastructure for urgent activism
and support networks in the context of AIDS – as we have seen in relation to
Gay Switchboard, Body Positive and THT, as well as squatting communities
(like the one in Brixton). Simon Watney recalls that ‘many of us involved in
the early days of the epidemic had known each other as young gay men on
the gay scene [and from] a political culture that had revolved around the
56 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, and many other organizations and
groups’.40 ACT UP (from 1987) and Outrage! (1990) made their mark with
zaps (direct action protests) in the city. Gay men, lesbians and their allies also
came together in other voluntary capacities – as buddies in groups across
the capital, in kitchens organized by Food Chain (whose first Christmas
meal went out from the Metropolitan Community Church in Camden in
1988), as advisors on welfare and the law, and in fundraising in pubs, bars
and clubs.
These were new configurations, engendering differently focused
friendships, relationships and ways of socializing. There were fresh
solidarities and frictions in these contexts of care and campaigning. There
were tensions, for example, between THTers and other London-based
groups and organizations (the Immune Development Trust, Body Positive
and GMFA in particular). This related not least to the way THT was seen
to be ‘cosying up to government’ and becoming complicit in dominant
treatment models and what was seen by some to be the de-gaying of AIDS.41
Stonewall (from 1989), ACT UP and Outrage clashed over campaign tactics
and goals – even though many within these groups worked together and
recognized the value of a pincer movement of lobbying and direct action.
Despite the tensions, there was nevertheless a growing sense of collectivism
and community in fundraising, care, pride and protest in the city. Political
fractures between some gay men and lesbians in the 1970s and early 1980s
had not all healed, but there was now more joint organizing. One woman
observed that ‘it was AIDS that changed the schism between lesbians and
gay men … particularly with the anti-AIDS backlash … [P]eople started to
come back together again as men and women, lesbians and gay men’.42
The 1980s also saw a burgeoning and defiant lesbian and gay cultural
scene which was very much part of the London I entered into in 1990.
The Lesbian and Gay Film Festival became an annual feature of the National
Film Theatre’s calendar from 1986 (building on earlier one-off events in
1977 and 1981). The Drill Hall (just off Tottenham Court Road) staged
gay-themed plays and hosted tours of companies like Gay Sweatshop and
Bloolips from 1984. The Lesbian and Gay Centre (1985–91) on Cowcross
Street near Kings Cross was a key if short-lived community hub. HIV and
AIDS were writ large in the plays, films and events screened and staged in
these contexts.
New monitoring projects, activist and charity work, and renewed media
interest further exposed the queer dimensions of the city. The Gay Monitoring
and Archive Project (initiated by the campaign for Homosexual Equality
in 1980) tracked media coverage of both AIDS and London (often in the
same pieces). From 1982, GALOP (the gay and lesbian police monitoring
group) recorded and mapped homophobic crime and police response (or
lack thereof). Activists floated helium-filled condoms carrying safer sex
information over the walls of Pentonville Prison in London to highlight
the catastrophe of HIV and AIDS among inmates. The media frequently
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 57

hooked into human interest stories in their reporting of AIDS, reporting

which usually centred on London. Operation Cottage, a BBC documentary
screened in 1988, revealed the dynamics and extent of the rent boy scene
around Victoria Station, for example (apparently resulting in a ‘dramatic
fall off in trade’).43 This and other railway stations emerged more clearly as
part of a queer map of the city in such coverage and also through charity
and sexual health work. CLASH (the Central London Action on Street
Health), for example, worked from 1987 to 1990 to address the gap in
provision existing between London’s drug, homeless and HIV charities –
and highlighted the intersections of these three factors for some involved in
the capital’s queer life. CLASH volunteers distributed condoms and advice
to both male and female sex workers and kept careful records. These reveal
different geographies for men and women. Female prostitutes commonly
worked circuits taking in Kings Cross, Euston, and then north to Finsbury
Park and Stamford Hill. Male prostitutes worked more exclusively in central
London – around Piccadilly, Victoria, Euston and Kings Cross.44 This focus
on central London for rent boys marked a continuation of long existing
trends. But there were now new vulnerabilities. According to CLASH, only
36 per cent of these men were using condoms compared to 74 per cent of the
women.45 An NLGS correspondent who commuted in and out of London
via Victoria Station each day felt that the rent boys there ‘simply refuse to
think about AIDS so long as the money is still coming in’. ‘Is it beyond the
wit of society to devise some method of helping these boys?’ he asked.46
Responses to HIV and AIDS were variable and deeply contingent – a truism
which we need to hold on to alongside the narrative of collective action and
community that is frequently told about the gay reaction to the epidemic in
the 1980s.

City of fear and insecurity

Even a city known intimately and previously navigated confidently could
feel disorientating in the context of ill-health. Jarman’s regular trips across
the Charing Cross Road from his studio flat on one side to the bars and
cafes on the other became taxing as he lost his strength and sight.47 Housing,
rarely easy in London, could become even more problematic in the context
of the epidemic. One report noted that there was a ‘remarkably high
correlation between HIV and housing need’.48 Young men, sometimes new
to London, at a distance from familial support and with limited resources,
could find themselves in accommodation ill-suited to conditions associated
with AIDS.49 One London council reported that even as a priority 40 per
cent of people with AIDS died before being permanently housed.50
‘Home’ in the city was not necessarily the most comfortable or safest
place to be. This had been true for gay men before,51 but there were now
additional dimensions to those feelings of insecurity. Jarman had shit posted
58 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

through his letterbox. Stallholders of the market in Islington shouted ‘AIDS’

at ‘Rupert’ when he passed by to get to and from his flat.52 Proposals for the
Lighthouse, in 1986 were met with ‘angry protests’ from 200 local residents
at a public meeting. There were threats to withdraw children from a local
school and to stage a rent and rates strike at the arrival of what the London
Evening Standard erroneously dubbed an ‘AIDS Hostel’.53 Though this area
had been known for vibrant precedent queer cultures and counter-cultural
crossovers,54 anti-Lighthouse campaigners determinedly reclaimed it for
‘the family’ (narrowly reconceived). It was apparently unsuited to these gay
outsiders in ill-health. For my interviewee Angus, the comfortable and often
erotic connections he experienced in the area in the 1970s ceased in the early
1980s. This rather queer milieu separated out: ‘all my friends were gay from
then on; straight men – perhaps especially those who’d slept with gay men in
the 1970s – were frightened’.55 They quickly stepped away. If the 1980s was
marked for many gay men by support from sometimes unexpected quarters,
these other responses and rejections exacerbated a sense of separation and
feelings of embattled isolation and loneliness. This could engender a felt
need to keep diagnosis secret or to reveal it to strangers at a distance from
everyday life. One gay and HIV positive Mass Observer wrote in 1987:
‘only one or two friends know. I did go along to a disco organised by Body
Positive [in London]. I opened up to a stranger and had a good cry which
was beneficial’.56
In the early years of the epidemic, PWAs encountered prejudice within as
well as beyond hospitals.57 A doctor at the Middlesex remembers that ‘one
night I was sitting in a patient’s room, and this hand came round the door
with a tray with food on it and just dumped it. I laughed with the patient,
who said “it happens all the time”. Within five minutes a bunch of flowers
flew across the room – whoosh! That time I didn’t even see the hand!’58
Thirteen London GPs reported patients complaining that PWAs were being
treated in the same surgery as themselves.59 The Conservatives for the Family
campaign called for the exclusion of PWAs from certain workplaces while
others were unhappy about sharing swimming pools or hairdressers
with them.60 Spurious notions of risk endured despite the availability of
clear information about transmission routes and this affected the daily
lives of people well beyond the gay ‘community’ as well as those who had
gay family, friends and neighbours.61 The lines between gay and straight
and the ways in which these divisions mapped onto the urban landscape
were thus reappraised in the context of the early years of the epidemic. The
homophobic insistence on separation and exclusion by some paradoxically
redoubled an insistence by many gay and lesbian Londoners on a visible
presence. The consequent growth of awareness is apparent in the uneven
attitudinal change which ensued.62 As Denis Altman convincingly argues,
AIDS paradoxically began to legitimize homosexuality despite the
homophobia it also unleashed.63
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 59

Hauntings
An NLGS correspondent wrote in the early 1990s that ‘the friends
and friends of friends that I have lost to AIDS are about to reach three
figures’.64 Ken became ‘a professional funeral goer’: ‘there were three in
one day once’, he said.65 Some of the city’s cemeteries – Abney Park in
Stoke Newington and Brompton near Earls Court most notoriously – had
long been on the queer map of the city as cruising grounds. Now it was
death not sex that as often took gay men to such places – though largely
to the newer sites established on the peripheries of the city in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Mortlake, Isleworth and West
Norwood cemeteries, for example). Ceremonies took place there and were
also performed in other venues – at churches, in favourite pubs, in homes
and community centres across the city. Fear underpinned early exclusions
by some undertakers and funeral venues. Others gained a reputation for
dealing sensitively and professionally with the partners, friends and family
of those who had died and catered flexibly as funereal ritual became more
individualized.66
Many PWAs carefully pre-planned their funerals with particular music,
readings and acts of remembrance, often beyond and in defiance of
tradition. David Ruffell felt that for him it was a way of ‘taking control’
in circumstances in which he felt powerless.67 Other funerals remained
conventional: established ritual could provide a certain familiarity and
comfort. Funeral and memorial services often brought together divergent
aspects of a man’s life. As often, though, they brought a sense of exclusion
as friends felt alienated from events organized by family – and vice versa.
Watney eloquently described the funeral of his friend Bruno in 1986 and the
trauma of his parents who felt ‘condemned to silence, to euphemism … in
this the most devastating moment of their lives as parents’. For Watney
himself, there was a painful tension in crossing from central London into
this other world of a family funeral which did not reflect the life of the man
he had known: ‘The irony of the difference between the suffocating life of
the suburbs where we found ourselves, and our knowledge of the world
in which Bruno had actually lived, as a magnificently affirmative and life-
enhancing gay man, was all but unbearable.’68 Watney’s account underscores
the idea of a reinscription of some classic gay/straight divisions – between
friends and family and between the city and suburbs. It indicates too, though,
how those divisions could be breached at such moments.
For those left behind, the city was haunted by the friends and lovers who
lived and died there. Places of socialization or sex could also be places of
remembrance. Journeys through the city might be punctuated with sudden
reminders or chilling absences. It is striking how geographically specific
Jarman is when he remembered lost friends in his polemic At Your Own
Risk (1992). The book gives a vivid sense of how the city was indelibly
60 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

marked for him. Describing the moment when his friend Howard told him
in 1984 that he had AIDS, Jarman wrote: ‘As we walked along he rolled
up his shirt sleeves to show me his Kaposi; this was the first time I’d seen
symptoms. We said goodbye at Cambridge Circus and never saw each other
again.’ After this, he went on, ‘it rollercoastered’:

The next month I met a film-maker in his early twenties … He pulled

me over and said, ‘Derek, please help me. The doctor told me I have six
months to live. I’ve been walking the streets ever since. I haven’t been
home. I don’t know what to do. Can you help me tell my lover and
parents?’ I spent an anguished night with him making telephone calls.
Eventually, after I had taken him home, I walked back across London in a
cold dawn. Slowly but surely every conversation and every encounter was
stalked by the shadow of the virus; a terrible impotence overwhelmed
us – there was nothing to do.69

Jarman’s writing evokes specific places and also the broader ‘shadow’
spreading across the capital in the early and mid-eighties. These are the
kinds of hauntings philosopher Michel de Certeau describes shaping our
urban lives and the way we navigate, negotiate and experience the city.70
They are highly individualized and they shape shift and also recede. Jarman
took these particular experiences to his own grave in February 1994, leaving
their residues in his published writing and in the memories of his partner
and friends. They are picked up and mobilized differently now (by me
here, by others elsewhere) but many of these ghosts are largely unseen by
a subsequent generation of gay men who now much more frequently live –
or see their friends live – with HIV than die of AIDS-related illnesses. They
inhabit a different gay London again, reinflected by medical advance, the
‘normalization’ of HIV (despite the ongoing health crisis and rising infections
rates), a shifting commercial and cultural scene, growing liberalism (and
neoliberalism), the inception of the Internet and a profoundly changed
politics. Yet in this chapter I have suggested how the changing contours of
gay London in the 1980s set out some of the terrain on which this later city
was understood. Gay men in the 1980s traversed the city in new ways and
took in new places there. Burgeoning activism and Pride marches forcefully
articulated the right to be and the right to be in urban space. The city’s gay
life was exposed afresh to a broader public in salacious and sometimes more
measured reporting. Some of the city’s apparently straighter places were
queered in the process and discussion of gay men entered council chambers
and meetings rooms of a wide range of organizations across the capital. This
all left social, cultural and political legacies for the London I got to know
in the 1990s – in terms especially of visibility, a sense of rights and equality,
feelings of difference, and proliferating intersections, integrations and cross-
overs with the so-called mainstream. These things were identifiable strands
of queer life before the 1980s (and especially in the wake of GLF activism)
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 61

but they gained impetus and substance during that decade because of
responses to the AIDS crisis in London and then beyond.
In terms of those ghosts, meanwhile, the losses of the 1980s and early
1990s are well within the living memory of a generation of men jolted into
engaging with the city in new ways by the health crisis. They experienced
the kind of trauma which, in sociologist Karl Manheim’s words, ‘uniquely
cuts off a generation from its past and separates it from its future’.71 This
intense, isolating, but in some respects unifying experience is inevitably
drawn forward unevenly into the everyday lives of the men who survived
and those they share their lives with. The multiple horrors and pleasures
of 1980s queer London haunt the city’s gay social, cultural and political
life. And they live on in this deeply personal interlacing of past and
present.

Notes
1 Alkarim Jivani, It’s Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the
Twentieth Century (London: Michael O’Mara, 1997), p. 175.
2 Gay Times, August 1992, p. 4.
3 Patricia Day and Rudolf Klein, ‘Interpreting the Unexpected: The Case
of AIDS Policy Making in Britain’, Journal of Public Policy 9.3 (1989),
pp. 337–53, 344.
4 Between 1984 and 1986 the median survival time for people diagnosed with
AIDS in the UK was 9–10 months; from 1987 to 1995 the median survival time
was 20 months. See Eddy Beck, ‘The Cost of Hospital Care for HIV Patients’,
in David Fitzsimons, Vanessa Hardy and Keith Tolley (eds), The Economic and
Social Impact of AIDS in Europe (London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 90–8.
5 Virginia Berridge, AIDS in the UK: The Making of a Policy, 1981–1994
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 1.
6 Day and Klein, ‘Interpreting the Unexpected’, p. 344.
7 See Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in
Twentieth Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chap. 5.
8 Day and Klein, ‘Interpreting the Unexpected’, p. 366.
9 On this point, see Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in
the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005); Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
10 See Dennis Altman, ‘Globalisation, Political Economy and HIV/AIDS’, Theory
and Society 28.4 (1999), pp. 559–84.
11 On this liberal health policy, see Berridge, AIDS in the UK, chap. 1.
12 Ibid., p. 75.
62 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

13 National Lesbian and Gay Survey, Proust, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Marc
Almond and Me: Writings by Gay Men on Their Lives and Lifestyles from the
Archives of the National Lesbian and Gay Survey (London: Routledge, 1993),
pp. 162, 166, 173.
14 Respondent 106, National Lesbian and Gay Survey (NLGS), The Keep East
Sussex Record Office, Brighton, Box 1, Directive B: Gay Men and Health.
15 Clare Summerskill, Gateway to Heaven: Fifty Years of Lesbian and Gay Oral
History (London: Tollington, 2013), p. 201.
16 Mass Observer D1974, Mass Observation project archive (MO), The Keep
East Sussex Record Office, Box: Spring 1987 (2) D-E.
17 Cited in Day and Klein, ‘Interpreting the Unexpected’, p. 344.
18 ‘AIDS Gays to Get Council Housing’, Daily Express, 10 December 1985. See
also ‘Move to House AIDS Victims’, Glasgow Herald, 11 December 1985.
19 ‘Can London Cope’, London Evening Standard, 7 January 1987.
20 Ibid.
21 On opinion polls, see Yvette Rocheron and Olga Linne, ‘Aids, Moral Panic and
Opinion Polls’, European Journal of Communication 4 (1989), pp. 409–34.
22 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, p. 15.
23 Ibid., p. 17; for an account of GLF legacies, see especially Lisa Power, No Bath
but Plenty of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front, 1970–
1973 (London: Cassell, 1995).
24 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, p. 22.
25 Cited in ibid., p. 17.
26 Respondent 114, NLGS, Directive: Gay Men and Health, Box 1.
27 National Lesbian and Gay Survey, Proust, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Marc
Almond and Me, p. 162.
28 Michael B. King, ‘Psychological and Social Problems in HIV Infection:
Interviews with general practitioners in London’, British Medical Journal 299
(16 September 1989), pp. 713–16.
29 Oscar Moore, PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face (London: Picador, 1996),
p. 62.
30 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, pp. 6, 9.
31 Interview with Malcolm Williams, 2008.
32 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, p. 60.
33 Derek Jarman, Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman (London:
Century, 1991), p. 261.
34 Jarman, Blue (1993).
35 Aside from Jarman, see, for example, Adam Mars Jones, Monopolies of Loss
(London: Faber, 1992); Moore, PWA.
 LONDON, AIDS AND THE 1980S 63

36 Judith Stacey, ‘The Families of Man: Gay Male Intimacy and Kinship in a
Global Metropolis’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.3
(2005), pp. 1911–35, 1914.
37 ‘Jonathan’, interview with Matt Cook, 2009.
38 Cook, Queer Domesticities, p. 223.
39 ‘Come Together’ was the GLF newsletter. For an oral history of the GLF, see
Power, No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles.
40 Simon Watney, Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity (New York: Routledge,
2000), p. 6.
41 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, pp. 76–77.
42 Summerskill, Gateway to Heaven, p. 207.
43 Tim Rhodes, Hard to Reach or out of Reach? An Evaluation of an Innovative
Model of HIV Outreach Health Education (London: Tufnell, 1991), p. 107.
44 Ibid., p. 105.
45 Ibid., p. 114.
46 Respondent 183, NLGS, Box 1, Directive B: Gay Men and Health.
47 Jarman, Blue.
48 Chris Yates, Building for Immunity: Housing People with HIV Disease and
AIDS (London: National Federation of Housing Associations, 1991), p. 4.
49 Nick Raynsford, Housing Is an AIDS Issue (London: National AIDS Trust,
1989), p. 7.
50 Ibid., p. 8.
51 Cook, Queer Domesticities, sec. III.
52 Stephen Mayes and Lyndall Stein (eds), Positive Lives: Responses to HIV: A
Photodocumentary (London: Cassell, 1993), p. 76.
53 ‘Protest at AIDS hostel’, London Evening Standard, 14 August 1986.
54 Cook, Queer Domesticities, pp. 160–63; see also Mort, Capital Affairs (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
55 Angus, interview April 2012.
56 Respondent B1106, MOA, Folder: Spring 1987 (2), A–B.
57 Simon Garfield, The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (London:
Faber, 1994), p. 71.
58 Ibid.
59 King, ‘Psychological and Social Problems in HIV Infection’, p. 715.
60 Conservatives for the Family Campaign, HIV Infected Citizens: Charter of
Responsibility (27 September 1990).
61 Simon Watney, Policing Desire (London: Comedia, 1986), p. 46. See also Matt
Cook, ‘AIDS, Mass Observation and the Permissive Turn’ (forthcoming).
64 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

62 Jeffrey Weeks makes this argument in The World We Have Won: The
Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (London: Routledge, 2007).
63 Denis Altman, ‘Legitimisation Through Disaster’, in E. Fee and D.M. Fox (eds),
AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
pp. 301–16.
64 National Lesbian and Gay Survey, Proust, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Marc
Almond and Me, p. 175.
65 Mayes and Stein, Positive Lives, p. 77.
66 Margaret Holloway et al., ‘ “Funerals Aren’t Nice but It Couldn’t Have Been
Nicer”: The Makings of a Good Funeral’, Mortality 18.1 (2013), pp. 30–53.
67 Hall Carpenter Archives. Gay Men’s Oral History Group, Walking After
Midnight, p. 109.
68 Watney, Policing, p. 7.
69 Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testimony (London: Hutchinson,
1992), p. 115.
70 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Oakland: University of
California Press, 1984), pp. 91–110.
71 Karl Mannheum, ‘The Problem of Generations’, Psychoanalytic Review 57.3
(1963), pp. 4–38, 7.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Bigot Geography: Queering

Geopolitics in Brixton
Emma Spruce

Despite the radical egalitarian rhetoric often espoused by gay liberationist

and gay rights movements, many of the strategies adopted in the name of ‘gay
progress’ seem to have rejuvenated and sustained structures of inequality
and exclusion. The twenty-first-century neologism ‘homonormativity’
builds on critiques expressed throughout gay political history to name this
complicity between gay identity and inequality, arguing that, rather than
being inherently deviant, homosexual identities and practices can also
perpetuate normativity.1 As a working definition, ‘gay progress narratives’
group together accounts of positive change for LGBTQ people that are
structured according to chronological and evolutionary logics. These
narratives span from individual coming out stories to national accounts
of increasing social tolerance, and sharing (in) them constitutes a central
feature of gay identity.2 Without negating examples of positive change,
foundational queer theorist Judith Butler has cautioned against an uncritical
endorsement of this rhetoric of gay progress, arguing that ‘certain notions of
relevant geopolitical space – including the spatial boundedness of minority
communities – are circumscribed by this story of a progressive modernity’.3
Progress narratives function as a technique of modernity, therefore, because
they have been used to construct and define the relations between different
places and people according to a set of binaries: modern or backwards; out
or repressed; civilized or barbaric; liberal or prejudiced.
As has been well documented, the dominant narrative of progress for
gay rights has typically been mapped as either emerging from the city,
gradually seeping out into the suburban and finally finding a place in rural
66 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

contexts; or – at the international scale – emerging in ‘the West’, diffusing

into other countries in the Global North and eventually being taken up by
countries in the Global South.4 This positions those places that emerge last
in the narrative as repressed, barbaric and prejudiced, while those that are
represented as the defenders of sexual rights have the capacity and obligation
to bring the stragglers ‘into modernity’. From proposals of aid embargos
to Uganda following anti-gay legislation, to declarations around being a
safe haven for LGBT asylum seekers fleeing persecution, it is clear where
in the gay progress narrative the UK imagines itself to be. The assonance
between the contemporary language that positions the UK as an enforcer
of sexual modernity and the paternalistic defence that underwrote colonial
occupation is stark.5 It is the suturing of homophobia, people and place that
I am identifying here as bigot geography: an imaginary mapping that works
through gay progress narratives to differentially locate, and thus value,
bodies in relation to sexual modernity.
Although troubling traditional understandings of space has occurred in
a broader context of postmodern critiques and is thus not particular to a
queer analytic, Larry Knopp nonetheless argues that deconstructing spatial
ontologies represents a key strategy for queer agendas.6 ‘Queer geography’
or a ‘queer approach to space’ has been proposed to develop anti-essentialist
perspectives on sexuality and space.7 Among other possibilities, this queered
approach allows critiques that are typically constrained to different scales to
be newly read alongside one another. Concretely, by putting homonationalism
and gay gentrification into dialogue in my research, displacement and
stigmatization emerge as central features of sexual modernity from the local
to the (inter)national.8
In this chapter, I follow the critique of the stigmatizing and exclusionary
effects of gay progress narratives to argue that a queer intervention into
the contemporary spatial politics of London might be particularly fruitful.
Drawing on empirical work conducted for a larger research project that
traces the relationship between notions of progress, LGBT narratives
and the inclusions and exclusions generated through the spatio-temporal
delimitations of ‘sexual modernity’, I explore bigot geography in the
context of the rapidly gentrifying South London district of Brixton.9 Bigot
geography’s projection of homophobia is counteracted by evidence of past
and present LGBTQ existences that occur both in parallel to, and within,
those immigrant and/or black and/or poor communities that are presumed
to be inherently homophobic and ‘sexually backwards’. This evidencing
of gay lives constitutes another reason to explore gay progress narratives
through the accounts of some of Brixton’s LGBT residents. The final
section explores how remembering Brixton might represent one strategy for
challenging the violence of bigot geography. Queering, I propose, suggests
researching the practices and products of homonormativity across sites and
between analytic scales, examining the imbrication of time and space in the
techniques of modernity.
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 67

Gay progress and urban change

Generally, city spaces have a complicated but deeply invested relationship
with gay identity politics as they come to represent the most viable place for
people with non-normative sexualities to live ‘freely’.10 This relationship is
evidenced in critiques pointing to the displacement of poor and non-white
communities as a direct result of practices of LGBTQ spatial concentration
(gay gentrification). It is also apparent in the more recently observed link
between visible gay residents and urban reinvestment. This latter correlation
of LGBT presence and the regeneration of urban districts with poor
reputations has been intensified through the wide dissemination of Richard
Florida’s work.11 Beyond these generic links between LGBT-identified
people and the contemporary city, there are some reasons, perhaps, that can
be advanced for approaching London in particular through a queered lens.
In response to the fixing of ‘out’ LGBT sexualities in the capital cities
of the Global North by dominant gay progress narratives, recent sexuality
studies have consciously pushed towards recognizing and researching
sexualities in the less-attended-to spaces of the rural, suburban and Global
South.12 Despite this valuable diversification of research sites within
academia, however, the key cities of Western Europe and North America
remain overwhelmingly storied at the forefront of global gay politics and
sexual liberation.13 London, as ‘progressive’ England’s capital city, must
secure its position at the forefront of sexual modernity in order for the UK
to maintain its geopolitical authority. This conceptualization of London as a
leading example for gay equality was evident in accounts of global flows of
homophobia among the LGBT people living in Brixton that I interviewed.
Kate, for example, suggested that:

In theory, for a metropolitan London gay, everything is pretty much

sorted; but this is one of the five gayest cities in the world. If it is still bad
in parts of London, never mind Uganda or Moscow, it’s not even good in
Hull. (Kate, white, British, journalist)

Although she implicitly troubles London as an LGBT utopia by noting that

particular areas might be less gay friendly, the capital city is nevertheless
represented by Kate as a benchmark against which Hull (in the north-east
of the UK), Uganda and Moscow can be plotted. This is consistent with the
positioning of capital cities as spaces of sexual freedom, and the UK at the
forefront of global gay rights in British political discourse more broadly.
The entrenched association between progressive (Western) sexuality
and the progressive (Western) capital city constitutes, therefore, one of
the reasons that London appears a site of sexual modernity par excellence.
Of course, multiple narratives compete to tell the story of a place and
London is not just figured as a precocious reflection of the rest of the UK’s
68 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

progress narrative, but also serves as a space where anxieties about the
future are voiced. The hysteria that a supposedly ‘migrant-laden’ London
provokes can be seen in the frenzied tenor of responses to the publication
of the 2011 census data revealing that, for the first time, less than half
of London residents identified as white British.14 Extrapolating in part
from this data, a link has been made between increased reports of hate
crimes – with those against LGBTQ peoples frequently highlighted – and
the increased presence of ‘Other’ cultures in London. An example of this
was a blog published by The Spectator which asked, ‘Is London’s “diversity”
to blame for its “unprogressive” views on homosexuality?’15 The framing
of an association between hatecrime and immigration sticks an (imagined)
‘backwards’ temporality to the non-white resident by association with other
places.16
Unlike in the majority of sites in the Global South where, at least in
the media and politics of the Global North, changes to sexual cultures
are attributed to external factors (from colonial legacies to international
gay advocacy), gay progress in London is figured as endogenic. That is to
say, progressive changes are narrated as the naturalized story of London
and any deviation from this plotline is attributed to the ‘foreign’ cultures
and religious beliefs imported by migrants. Given meaning through the
racialized and spatially framed backstory of homophobia, migrant and/or
non-white communities are located as yet to accede to sexual modernity.17
The ubiquitous representation of what demographic change means in terms
of gay experience shores up the essentialization of culture and codifies the
impression of hard boundaries between groups, thus obfuscating more
complex and dynamic situations. One pernicious result of this is that the
black or migrant homosexual is only imagined as an exile.18
While London features as a haven for homosexuals fleeing less tolerant
places in its first figuration, then, the second representation of increasing
homophobia within the city emphasizes the fragility of this positioning.
This purported vulnerability of London’s gay progress narrative to the
imagined ‘sexual backwardness’ of migrants then justifies the hardening
of xenophobic and racist politics. This hardening happens not only in
explicit political projects, but also through the bigot geographies that are
used to attach homophobia to areas within London that are associated
with particular immigrant communities, rendering it difficult to oppose the
‘civilizing’ practices of gentrification that are seen to displace the ‘problem’.

Brixton
As is clear from this brief discussion of the tension between representations
of gay friendliness and homophobia in London, places often contain and
are generated through seemingly incompatible narratives. Brixton is a rich
site in which to explore the boundary work of gay progress narratives,
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 69

then, because of the existent palimpsest of sexual politics, race politics and
the dynamics of immigration. Tracing the temporal and spatial dynamics
of Brixton begins to explain how bigot geography works, through
attachments to sexual modernity, to stigmatize migrant and non-white
populations living in the urban centres of the Global North, as well as
to fix relationships between entire geographic regions. Simply put, the
logic of bigot geography means that Brixton’s dominant representation as
immigrant, black and poor will lead to its positioning within London as an
area of likely homophobia.
In accounts about Brixton in the 1970s to the 2000s, the area is
positioned as spatially outside the normative juridical, cultural and social
space of the metropolis. Representative of the imbricated figurative and
physical separation of Brixton from other districts in London, one of the
most frequently occurring anecdotes of Brixton-past is that of the taxi
that refused to take you home. Pat moved to Brixton in the late 1980s and
remembers:

If you would get in a cab [to go] home, they wouldn’t take you. And the
racism, the things these cab drivers would come out with … they wouldn’t
take you further than Stockwell, and they’d be really, really rude. (Pat,
white, British, artist)

The repetition of this story serves to underline the way that systemic racism
and a reputation as a violent area marked Brixton as off the map in ways
that had material effects on the experience of space. This difference from
other parts of London is frequently attributed to its non-white population.
Brixton has been linked in particular to the English-speaking Caribbean
territories since Caribbean migrants began living in the area in the late 1940s.
Although the diasporas and heritages represented in this district of South
London constitute much more of a tapestry, Brixton does remain related
to the Caribbean through residential concentration, cultural importance,
marketing and memory. This is illustrated from central Brixton’s ‘Windrush
Square’, named after the boat which carried immigrants from the Caribbean
in 1948, to the flags which fly omnipresent on Jamaican Independence Day,
and the plethora of cafes – from ‘Bickles Caribbean Takeaway’ to ‘Fish,
Wings and Tings’ – that make reference to the Caribbean. Although in other
parts of London the commodification of difference has led to ‘ethnoscapes’
being viewed positively as places of consumption that stimulate local
development, in Brixton this has not historically been the case.19 Instead,
combining the racist evolutionary stereotyping that legitimated colonialism
with the recognition of past racism that helps to mark the contemporary
moment as more tolerant, Brixton’s Caribbean-heritage population emerges
as the reason that Brixton lagged behind, or was held back from, the
economic prosperity and property booms experienced in many other parts
of central London during the 1980s.20
70 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Today, this (hi)story of Brixton as a no-go zone stuck in a different

temporality to the rest of London is interrupted by progress narratives of
urban renewal. The estate agent paraphernalia represents Brixton as centrally
located and accessible,21 and – described as ‘smack bang in the centre of
south London’ in 2015 – Time Out now names Brixton ‘a go-to haunt for
foodies, clubbers, artists and rockers alike’.22 Despite this repositioning of
the district to lie within the boundaries of desirable London, many of the
residents I spoke to continue to reference perceptions of Brixton as distant,
disproportionate to its geographical location. In exploring this perception,
it became clear that Brixton’s difference is marked not only negatively (‘not
like’ other parts of London), but also through the active drawing of lines
between Brixton and other places.
This technique of spatialization is apparent if we turn to a fictionalized
account of Brixton in the 1980s. In Richard Dyer’s novel The Colour of
Memory, the protagonist describes walking down a main road in Brixton:

When we turned into Railton Road it was as if we had accidentally

strayed into a paramilitary coup. Suddenly we were surrounded by a
renegade army of guerrillas … ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ said Steranko.
‘It’s the Rats, that big security outfit,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve heard of them
but I’ve never seen them before.’ ‘It’s like we’re in Angola or Guatemala
or something.’23

In its description, this scene seems to reference implicitly the 1981 uprisings/
riots in Brixton.24 Likened to a ‘paramilitary coup’, the reader is directed
towards ‘Angola’ and ‘Guatemala’ to make sense of the scene. Later in the
novel, when the protagonist goes to Lambeth Country Fair (an annual event
held in Brockwell Park just on the borders of Brixton), the reader is again
directed elsewhere on the map:

By the side of the stage a giant video screen the size of a terraced house
showed close-ups of the musicians and dancers … The video looked more
real, more authentic than the people on stage. The dancers and musicians
looked as if they were playing at the Country Fair in Brockwell Park; the
pictures on the video screen looked as if they were being broadcast live
by satellite from Harare or Lagos.25

It is apparent from the references to ‘Harare’ and ‘Lagos’ that the musicians
and dancers are racialized as non-white and the protagonist appears to be
struggling with the juxtaposition of black bodies and the British locale: the
white narrator experiences the live-screened close-ups as more authentic
than the unmediated direct view of the stage. That it is in these two specific
moments – of racialized militarism and the (white) consumption of (black)
entertainment – that Brixton’s blackness is centralized in the novel is not
coincidental, but instead reflects the limited figuration of blackness in
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 71

dominant British discourse. The excerpts exemplify what Sara Ahmed

describes as the ‘stickiness’ which metonymically fixes (imagined) culture to
bodies, writing that ‘we can think of stickiness … as an effect of the histories
of contact between bodies, objects, and signs’.26 Racialized Brixton residents
are made legible by the white narrator (and to a presumably white audience)
through citation of the tropes that have a long history of underwriting racist
divisions: of ungovernable, violent black masculinity, or the framing of
depoliticized blackness as cultural cool.27
One of the reasons for the enduring ambiguity over Brixton’s spatial
relationship to central London is precisely that the narratives of the past
have not dissolved, but instead sediment and constitute the possibilities
of the present. While the representations above emerge in a fictionalized
narrative, it is clear that the racist and racializing logic within them continues
to enforce a stigmatizing boundary around Brixton. What is clear from an
analysis of Brixton is that this works not only at the level of the nation and
the migrant, but also at temporally attenuated and spatially localized levels.
Naledi, for example, recounted that at university in the 2010s:

[People] would ask where my mum lived, and I would say she is an hour
from Brixton, and they went ‘Brixton?! Fucking hell!’ They were petrified.
I think maybe it’s this remembrance of the riots … it happened before we
were even born, so there was no reason, the second lot of riots hadn’t
happened. They were petrified! (Naledi, black, British, dancer)

Naledi’s account emphasizes the flexibility of both time and space in the
sticking of cultures to bodies. Despite both her and her peers being born after
these first ‘riots’, and her family home being an hour away, the white students
that she is speaking to remain petrified by this evocation of Brixton.28 The
characterization of Brixton through racialized progress narratives also has
particular implications for reading homophobia in Brixton. Asked whether
people thought of Brixton as gay friendly, Naledi continued:

No … because it’s black … [and] I don’t think the current media

shit … interacting with people’s internalised racism will allow any black
place to be presumed to be gay friendly, whether it’s Brixton, Uganda,
Peckham … I think if you’ve got a black majority, the presumption is it
will be homophobic. (Naledi, black, British, dancer)

Just like in The Colour of Memory, in this response Naledi foregrounds

Brixton’s ‘blackness’ through references to other places; however, this time
the link being drawn is not one of inherent culture or imperialist divisions,
but of systemic racism and the way that this bigot geography locates
homophobia in ‘Brixton, Uganda [or] Peckham’.
Although perceptions of Brixton’s gay friendliness varied dramatically
according to different research participants, the diminishment of homophobia
72 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

was repeatedly correlated to racialized and classed demographic change.29

For example, when asked if Brixton was gay friendly, Linford responded:

I don’t know that [people] … would say that. As I say, at the moment, it is
still very much not fully gone through the transformation … I don’t know
that [Brixton] will be getting the Pride parade going down the street.
(Linford, black, British, doctor)

In this account, Brixton and its gay friendliness are undergoing a process
of transformation. The terminology of ‘transformation’ and the emphasis
on ‘not fully’ aligns diminishing homophobia to a narrative of progress
and binds together the need for a continuation in the existent direction
in order to secure the space as a friendly one for gay people. Throughout
his interview, Linford reiterated that the potential benefits he saw coming
from gentrification in Brixton for gay friendliness were weighed against the
erasure of black and poor local culture. Reflecting further on change in
Brixton, Linford continued:

the other day I was in Brixton Village and there was ‘Champagne and
Fromage’, and I thought, ‘Why is that there?’ I don’t want those places
to start replacing the Atlantic Bakery and those sorts of things. (Linford,
black, British, doctor)

Atlantic Bakery is an established unit serving low-cost food primarily

to Caribbean and Black clientele, while the arrival of Champagne and
Fromage – a high-end café serving affluent white people – has been the
focus of a lot of anger about the ‘yuppification’ of the market. Linford
narrates the relative positioning of a black presence and a gay presence as
a necessary relationship; gay friendliness can only increase as the blackness
of the space is diluted by middle-class whiteness. This narrative of progress
for gay friendliness in Brixton thus substantiates bigot geography, locating
homophobia in those groups – black and/or migrant and/or poor – who
are understood to be displaced by gentrification, while sexual modernity
(both minority sexualities and the tolerance of them) continues to be
located firmly within the bounds of the privileged and/or white agents of
gentrification.
Brixton’s characterization as a black space, while dominant in local
narratives of place, was not unchallenged. As Maz stressed:

actually the case for everywhere that is seen as black or Asian, or

whatever … because those people are different from what we expect
as the norm, they stand out, but it’s not actually their space. There is
nowhere in all of England and Britain that I would say is a truly black
area. It just doesn’t exist. (Maz, black, British, poet)
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 73

Maz went on to emphasize the white solipsism of describing areas in the UK

as ‘black or asian’, pointing not only to the physical presence of white bodies
in these places but also to the structural whiteness of the UK. Although
it provides only a limited challenge to bigot geography, the emphasis on
whiteness and racism as constitutive of Brixton does potentially puncture
the projection of it as homophobic because it is black.
The potential of these fracturing representations of the homogeneity or
blackness of the space to disturb bigot geography was undermined, however,
by the reiterated trope of discrete and oppositional groups inhabiting
Brixton. Symptomatic of this representation of diversity within Brixton, one
review of Dyer’s novel describes the setting as ‘a slightly seedy, multi-ethnic
district of London populated by immigrants and artistic types who live
uneasily side by side’.30 The implication here is that white bohemians and
non-white immigrants constitute two parallel communities. Indeed, recalling
her experiences of living in Brixton in the 1990s, Sarah’s description of
Brixton was that:

there was a turf war going on; there was definitely a feeling of black
youngsters fronting up, like ‘this is our turf, fuck off queers’. (Sarah,
white, British, journalist)

Although she did suggest that this hostility emerged in part because of
disruptive queer practices, including large Pride celebrations, Sarah’s
description of Brixton presents a divided neighbourhood: black and
straight versus white and queer. The drastically simplified narrative of two
communities ‘liv[ing] uneasily side by side’, combined with Sarah’s memory
of ‘turf war’ and Linford’s mixed feelings about neighbourhood change,
therefore continues to erase more complicated, overlapping accounts of the
histories and presents of working-class LGBT and black LGBT in the area,
as well as more positive recollections of proximate lives.

Troubling bigot geography

In Brixton – unlike London’s Soho or Manchester’s Canal Street – same-sex
sexuality is neither obviously coded through the retail and social spaces nor
clearly represented in public art or regeneration policy. It is nevertheless
possible to construct an alternative sexual history of Brixton and this
historiographic reclamation constitutes an established strategy for sexual
minority movements. When I posited a link between the blackness of the
area and the perception of homophobia, a number of participants who had
resided in the area for longer amounts of time, in particular, were explicitly
resistant. Following their cue, here I weave together individual story-
telling/memory sharing and archival/historicist work to suggest narratives
74 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

around LGBTQ Brixton that might be less easily incorporated into a bigot
geography.
In the late nineteenth century, Brixton was well known as a regional
centre for entertainment, the locus for a number of music halls as well as
boarding houses for the West End. The association between theatricality and
homosexuality is firmly established (whether it stands up to examination or
not) and bleeds into popular interpretations of place. This was reflected by
Sarah, who explained the LGBT presence in Brixton today partly through
reference to a queer history that is:

very old, because it was a dormitory town for the West End palaces of
entertainment. (Sarah, white, British, journalist; my emphasis)

Indicative of the processes of sedimentation that constitute place, this

association between queer lives and theatrical Brixton is referenced in
Sarah Waters’s popular lesbian novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998). Set in the
1890s, the novel depicts Nan moving to London to pursue work as a ‘male
impersonator’ and living, for a period of time, in Brixton. Electric Avenue
(a street in the centre of Brixton) is described to her as ‘a place so full … of
music-hall people and actors that they call it “Grease-Paint Avenue” ’.31
Relating to the same time period, one of the few physical traces of a queer
history to be found in Brixton is a small blue plaque commemorating the
residence of Henry Havelock Ellis. The prominent sexologist is credited as
being a driving force behind the eventual legalization of homosexuality and
popularized the term ‘homosexual’ itself. Further to this, Havelock Ellis was
married to women’s rights activist Edith Lees, and his writings about his
wife’s ‘inversion’ (retrospectively cast as lesbianism) constitute their own
queer archival trace.32
From these glimpses, we might jump a century forwards to what could be
described, in direct contestation to the narrative of new sexual possibilities
brought to Brixton by gentrification, as Brixton’s gay heyday. In 1974,
the South London Gay Community Centre was opened on Railton Road.
The Brixton Faeries, a gay theatre group associated with the Gay Liberation
Front, put on shows in community centres and small theatres.33 Local
properties were squatted during this period and experiments in communal
living emerged, a number of which were organized around sexuality and
sexual politics.34 In 1993 and 1994, London’s Pride celebration – established
in the 1970s – was held in Brockwell Park. As well as the squats and a
number of recreational spaces, there was also a lively cruising culture that
endured into the 1990s.
Although these histories also tended to recreate an image of multiple,
rarely overlapping LGBTQ communities in Brixton, there were also
occasions during my research when distinct racialized boundaries seemed
slightly less impermeable. One physical space that served as the locus for
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 75

a number of memories was a gay ‘shebeen’ (unlicensed bar), run from the
1970s in a basement on Railton Road by a woman called Pearl Alcock. This
space was fondly remembered by Simon as:

always heaving … a space this sort of size [50m2] packed with people
dancing, and there would be a bar at the end selling Heineken or cocktail
type stuff, martinis and so on … there were only one or two women there,
about 80% black men, 20% white I suppose … Of the black guys that
would go to Pearl’s … maybe half of them would be in a relationship with
a white person, and half would be in a relationship with a black person.
(Simon, white, British, unemployed)

Simon himself was in a relationship with a black Guyanese man during

the 1980s and, while he acknowledged racism among the white gay
community towards his partner and black friends, his social and sexual
practices do seem to evidence that there was more interaction than is
often reflected in both ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ histories of Brixton. Many
of the descriptions of Brixton’s lively cruising scene also attest to sexual
encounters across classed and racialized boundaries.35 In an unfinished
film, the photographer Ajamu X, a well-known Brixton resident and co-
founder of ‘rukus Federation’ (a black LGBT initiative that brings together
artists, activists and cultural producers), wanders round Brixton pointing
to places ‘where some of the guys would pick guys up and have sex … get
fucked or whatever’. This, he concludes, ‘is like the secret history of
Brixton, in a strange kind of way’.36
In his research of the 1970s gay squats on Railton/Mayall Road, the
historian Matt Cook found evidence of ‘generally cordial relations between
the squatters and the local Afro-Caribbean community’.37 Although perhaps
undermined by the seemingly limited dialogue between these gay (middle-
class, white and male) squats that occupy the majority of archival space
and existing attention, and the neighbouring women’s and anti-racist squats
and centres, there is also some evidence of attempts at political solidarity.
Sally remembered coming to Brixton for ‘Rock Against Racism’ in 1978 and
being surprised to see:

all these queens on the roofs [of Railton Road] with … wedding dresses
and stuff on … they had … bunting across the street, and it was like … wow,
you know. (Sally, white, British, artist and bus driver)

While for Sally this encounter was affirmative, without gathering more
testimonies it is difficult to know whether this act of civil and gendered
disobedience was experienced by black residents more as an expression of
white spatial privilege at a time when black youth were being harassed by
the police for merely being there.
76 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Conclusion
This chapter has sought to illustrate the argument that ‘queer’ is most usefully
deployed as a catalyst to destabilize orthodox correlations of research
question and analytical site. Simultaneously opening up academic agendas
while also pushing us to recognize knowledge production as inherently
situated and partial, queering thus contributes to important feminist, critical
race and post-colonial critiques that have drawn attention to the sexism,
racism and Occidentalism of epistemological convention. An approach that
brings ‘queer’ and ‘geopolitics’ to an analysis of London thus stresses the
imbrication of the transnational, the national and the local in the study of
the capital. Moreover, although some have called for the extraction of queer
from the field of LGBT studies,38 queering geopolitics specifically emphasizes
LGBT sexualities as a site through which global patterns of inequality are
sustained, with material and localized effects.
The central target of this chapter – bigot geography – is colonialist
shorthand. Through a narrow inscription of progress narratives and
sexual modernity, it sustains global power relations that are expressed
both at the level of the nation and the local. Challenging bigot geography
entails the recognition of our continued political investment in colonialism
and pushing against the desire for condensed taxonomies that quickly fix
people and places into positions according to gay progressive narratives.
As discussed, a number of Brixton’s LGBTQ residents drew on the personal
recollection and retelling of memories to contest dominant stories of
Brixton’s gay (tolerance) progress narrative as chronologically linear, and
so attached to the racialized and classed displacements of gentrification.
In these moments, intergenerational LGBTQ memory sharing becomes a
possible site of anti-racist resistance and it becomes apparent that a queer
geopolitics can work through a queer approach to history. This points
to the imbrication of temporality and spatiality and demonstrates the
need for interdisciplinary research. Although it is clear that there were
extremely racialized, classed and gendered divisions and hierarchies
operating to segregate the spaces of Brixton, it remains crucial to pay
attention to – and theorize from – those moments and practices where these
exclusions break down. Although many of the more recent arrivals had
no knowledge of any LGBTQ Brixton past, the maintenance of archives
means that there are materials that can, and should, be returned to. As part
of a queered geopolitics, this represents a vital avenue for interrogating
the exclusions and violence of both domestic and internationalized gay
progress narratives. If the narrative in gay communities that the classed
and racialized displacements of gentrification are key to feeling safer is
left unchallenged, it feeds racism and classism in the UK. Further, it closes
down the space for coalitional politics between minority groups that might
secure less exclusionary modes of change.
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 77

Notes
1 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and
the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), pp. 43–66.
2 Although each has a more specific set of characteristics, progress narratives,
developmental narratives and evolutionary narratives have all been identified
as significant to the constitution and understanding of gendered and sexual
identities. The more recent uptake of progress narratives as an analytic node is
indebted to earlier works, notably Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) and Ken
Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London:
Routledge, 1995).
3 Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time’, The British Journal of
Sociology 59 (2008), pp. 1–23, 2. Cf. Jasbir Puar, ‘Israel’s Gay Propaganda War’,
The Guardian, 1 July 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010
/jul/01/israels-gay-propaganda-war (accessed 7 July 2010); Jasbir Puar and
Amit Rai, ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production
of Docile Patriots’, Social Text 20 (2002), pp. 117–48; Jasbir Puar, ‘Queer
Times, Queer Assemblages,’ Social Text 23 (2005), pp. 121–39; and Jasbir Puar,
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007). See also the discussion in Amar Wahab, ‘Homophobia
as the State of Reason: The Case of Postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago’, GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18.4 (2012), pp. 481–505.
4 The terms ‘Global South’ and ‘Global North’ are (overly simplistic but
useful) categorizations that reference both position on the development
index (according, primarily, to the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP)) and geographical location. ‘Global South’ is commonly used in
development discourse to describe ‘developing’ countries primarily located in
the Southern Hemisphere.
5 Neville Hoad, ‘Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting
Evolutionary Narratives of Difference’, Postcolonial Studies 3.2 (2000),
pp. 133–158.
6 Larry Knopp, ‘On the Relationship Between Queer and Feminist Geographies’,
The Professional Geographer 59.1 (2007), pp. 47–55, 49. See also Jon Binnie,
‘Coming Out of Geography: Towards a Queer Epistemology?’ Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997), pp. 223–37, 231; and Claudio
Minca, ‘Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography’, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel
Thrift (eds), International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography (Oxford:
Elsevier, 2009), p. 368.
7 Larry Knopp, ‘From Lesbian and Gay to Queer Geographies: Pasts, Prospects
and Possibilities’, in Kath Browne, Jason Lim and Gavin Brown (eds),
Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2007), pp. 21–28; Natalie Oswin, ‘Critical Geographies and the Uses of
Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space’, Progress in Human Geography 32.1
(2008), pp. 89–103.
78 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

8 In an article that returns to the themes elucidated in Terrorist Assemblages

and the ways in which homonationalism has been taken up, Puar describes
homonationalism as a ‘conceptual frame … for understanding the complexities
of how “acceptance” and “tolerance” for gay and lesbian subjects have become
a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is
evaluated’. J. K. Puar, ‘Rethinking Homonationalism’, International Journal
of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2013), pp. 336–9, 336. For a comprehensive
definition of gentrification, see Tom Slater, ‘The Eviction of Critical Perspectives
from Gentrification Research’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 30.4 (2006), pp. 737–57. The role of residential concentration in
community formation, the development of gay identity and the possibility of
gay politics have been explored in the North American context in particular.
See Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of
Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Tami
Rothenberg, ‘ “And She Told Two Friends”: Lesbians Creating Urban Social
Space’, in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Sexualities (London: Routledge 1995), pp. 150–65; and Larry Knopp, ‘Some
Theoretical Implications of Gay Involvement in an Urban Land Market’,
Political Geography Quarterly 9.4 (1990), pp. 337–52.
9 The research on which this chapter draws comprised of three years of
residence and auto-ethnography in Brixton, nineteen semi-structured
interviews with LGBTQ residents, participation in a large number of local
events, archival work, online research and multiple informal dialogues.
The interview material used here was collected, and has been anonymized, in
accordance with research ethics guidelines.
10 This representation happens partly through the figuration of the city in
LGBTQ literature, films and the cultural imagination. As such, these texts
represent an underexplored site of analysis for sexual geographers.
11 Richard Florida, The Rise of The Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming
Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books,
2002), p. 256. See also Florida, The Rise of The Creative Class: Revisited
(New York: Basic Books, 2012). For a critique, see Jamie Peck, ‘Struggling
with Creative Class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
29.4 (2005), pp. 740–70.
12 See Glen Elder, ‘Of Moffies, Kaffirs and Perverts’, in Bell and Valentine
(ed.), Mapping Desire, pp. 50–58; Michael Brown and Larry Knopp, ‘Queer
Diffusions’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (2003),
pp. 409–24; Jerry Lee Kramer, ‘Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and
Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota’, in Bell and
Valentine, Mapping Desire, pp. 182–94; Martin Manalansan, Global Divas:
Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003); and Alison J. Murray, ‘Let Them Take Ecstasy: Class and Jakarta
Lesbians’, Journal of Homosexuality 40 (2001), pp. 165–84.
13 The progress of gay identity politics is often presented as analogous to
sexual liberation. This limits the scope of earlier sexual liberation calls for
de-essentialized gender, anti-racist and anti-capitalist dimensions as necessary
components.
 BIGOT GEOGRAPHY 79

14 Hugo Gye, ‘ “British Whites” are the Minority in London for the First Time
as Census Shows Number of UK Immigrants has Jumped by 3 million in 10
Years’, Daily Mail, 11 December 2012. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news
/article-2246288/Census-2011-UK-immigrant-population-jumps-THREE
-MILLION-10-years.html (accessed 10 April 2014).
15 Douglas Murray, ‘Is London’s “diversity” to Blame for Its “Unprogressive”
Views on Homosexuality?’ The Spectator, 19 March 2015. http://blogs
.spectator.co.uk/douglas-murray/2015/03/is-londons-diversity-to-blame-for-its
-unprogressive-views-on-homosexuality/ (accessed 13 June 2015).
16 ‘Country of origin’ is applied and given significance in ways which invariably
erase more complicated relationships between the individual and their
national heritage. It is even a stretchy enough association to exceed actuality,
with people born in the UK and holding only British citizenship still forcibly
attached to other places on a map.
17 Butler, ‘Sexual Politics’, pp. 3–5.
18 Although there is not space to discuss this at length, the violence that this
enacts is pointed to in David A.B. Murray, ‘The (not so) Straight Story:
Queering Migration Narratives of Sexual Orientation and Gendered Identity
Refugee Claimants’, Sexualities 17.4 (2014), pp. 451–71.
19 Stephen J. Shaw, ‘Marketing Ethnoscapes as Places of Consumption:
“Banglatown – London’s Curry Capital” ’, Journal of Town and City
Management 1.4 (2011), pp. 381–95.
20 See George Mavrommatis, ‘A Racial Archaeology of Space: A Journey Through
the Political Imaginings of Brixton and Brick Lane, London’, Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies 36.4 (2010), pp. 561–79; and Mavrommatis, ‘Stories
from Brixton: Gentrification and Different Differences’, Sociological Research
Online 16.2 (2011), pp. 1–10.
21 For example, an eagle-eye photo of London was included in the initial
advertising for a block of flats developed by Barratt London, with three markers
pointing to the development of ‘Brixton Square’, Westminster and the Shard.
This very clearly implies a knitting together of these locations, both spatially
and, I would suggest, in terms of a shared temporality and significance.
22 ‘Brixton Area Guide’, Time Out, 7 January 2015. http://www.timeout.com
/london/things-to-do/brixton-area-guide (accessed 15 June 2015).
23 G. Dyer, The Colour of Memory (Edinburgh and London: Canongate, 1989),
p. 212.
24 The uprisings/riots are now widely understood to have been catalysed by the
racist policing of black bodies in London.
25 Dyer, The Colour of Memory, p. 239.
26 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004), p. 90.
27 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London: Turnaround,
1992); Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (new edn., London: Pluto
Press, 2008).
80 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

28 Naledi previously described her university as ‘middle England, upper middle

class’ and recounted that she ‘was often the first black person they had met’.
29 Unfortunately there is not space here to discuss fully the operation of class and
gender in Brixton and the gay narratives of progress. This is undertaken in a
forthcoming work.
30 Kirkus Reviews, The Colour of Memory, 16 March 2014, https://www
.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/geoff-dyer/colour-of-memory/ (accessed
13 February 2014).
31 Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (London: Virago, 2012 [1998]), p. 61.
32 Henry Havelock Ellis, My Life (London: Heinemann, 1940).
33 There is an evocative mixture of memory and images at http://www.urban75
.org/blog/the-brixton-fairies-and-the-south-london-gay-community-centre
-brixton-1974-6/comment-page-1/ (accessed 1 January 2014). Cf. http://
www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/brixton-faeries/ (accessed
1 June 2015).
34 Matt Cook, ‘ “Gay Times”: Identity, Locality, Memory, and the Brixton
Squats in 1970s London’, Twentieth Century British History 24.1 (2013),
pp. 84–109; and Taha Hassan’s documentary, Brixton Fairies: Made Possible
by Squatting (2014). Although there is significantly less archival evidence than
that of the gay male squats, during my research I regularly spoke to people
who remembered, and lived in, lesbian and women-only squats in Brixton.
35 The inclusion of cruising in an exploration of LGBTQ histories points to
further reflection that is needed on the relative violence of naming histories as
LGBTQ if the subjects of them do not identify as LGBTQ, and of excluding
working-class and black histories because of the classed and racialized
conditions of gay identity. Cf. Steve Valocchi, ‘The Class-Inflected Nature of
Gay Identity’, Social Problems 46.2 (1999), pp. 207–24.
36 ‘Brixton Recreation with Ajamu’, dir. Danny Solle, filming date unknown,
posted to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dRva4Va0qE on 18th
February 2014 (accessed 4 February 2015). rukus! Federation has also worked
to gather an archive to document black LGBTQ lives, now being held at
London Metropolitan Archives. The website states: ‘The rukus! Archive,
launched in 2005, generates, collects, preserves and makes available to the
public historical, cultural and artistic materials relating to our lived experience
in the UK’: http://rukus.org.uk/introduction/ (accessed 10 July 2015).
37 Cook, ‘Gay Times’, p. 97.
38 Cf. Noreen Giffney, ‘Denormatizing Queer Theory: More Than (Simply)
Lesbian and Gay Studies’, Feminist Theory 5 (2004), pp. 73–78.
 CHAPTER SIX

Representations of Queer
London in the Fiction of
Sarah Waters
Paulina Palmer

I had learned that London was even stranger and more

various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too
that not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye.1

Reference to London locations and the opportunities they furnish for queer
sexual exploration and experimentation serve as a unifying feature in Sarah
Waters’s three neo-Victorian novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity
(1999) and Fingersmith (2002), different though the three texts are in theme
and narrative structure. They also assume prominence in her subsequently
published The Night Watch (2006), set in the later period, 1941–47. As suits
the latter novel’s wartime context, Waters vividly depicts the bomb-damaged
streets of the metropolis and the terror of the air raids while foregrounding
the opportunities for forming unorthodox relationships that the social
changes occurring in the period offered people, both heterosexual and queer.
My aim in this chapter is to explore the roles that the representation of
London locations and topics relating to the city play in Waters’s fiction,
especially in relation to her treatment of queer sexuality. The term ‘queer’
is multifaceted in meaning for, while employed in academia in relation

For the queer community in Cambridge.

82 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

to contemporary queer theory to challenge the concept of a stable sexual

orientation and problematize the binary division homosexual/heterosexual,
it is alternatively used as a shorthand to encompass the categories lesbian, gay
and, on occasion, transgender.2 I employ it in both ways in this chapter, with
the context indicating its significance.
In depicting London as the location of queer sexualities (both lesbian and
male gay), Waters develops in fictional form the writing of sociologists and
historians who have investigated the relation between an urban environment
and queer subcultures. Considering from a sociological viewpoint the
influence of a metropolitan environment on the lives of women who, until
the Industrial Revolution separated the workplace from the home, frequently
spent their lives in a familial environment, Elizabeth Wilson describes the
lesbian as ‘the inhabitant of the great cities’, citing as evidence the growth
of lesbian enclaves in nineteenth-century London and Paris.3 The lesbian’s
relationship with the metropolis, foregrounded by Wilson in 1986, has
received analysis by theorists and critics writing recently in queer contexts.
Gill Valentine examines the lesbian’s role in the sexual politics of the street,4
while Sally Munt, elaborating the ideas of Walter Benjamin, introduces the
concept of ‘the lesbian flâneur’ who, by appropriating the male prerogative
of the gaze, reclaims the urban space for women.5 These approaches, as well
as those of other theorists and critics to whom I refer, furnish a context for
discussing Waters’s representation of London as the setting for her female
characters’ experience of same-sex relationships and cross-dressing, as well
as their interaction with male homosexual characters.
In addition to describing the metropolis as furnishing a site for the
development of lesbian identity and culture, Wilson associates it with the
carnivalesque. The concept of carnivalesque is associated with the writing
of Mikhail Bakhtin who relates the liberation that carnival festivity
offers from socio-sexual conventions to forms of literature that similarly
transgress convention.6 Arguing that a metropolitan existence ‘normalises
the carnivalesque aspects of life’,7 Wilson observes that, despite the
mundane routine of work and travel that it frequently involves, ‘at every turn
the city dweller is also offered the opposite – pleasure, deviation, disruption’.8
These experiences are especially in evidence, she argues, in the lives of the city’s
female residents. Though acknowledging the dangers of poverty, physical
assault and prostitution that an urban context holds, she nonetheless regards
it as potentially signifying ‘a place of liberation for women’9 since it gives
them the opportunity to escape the constraints of family life, achieve a degree
of anonymity and pursue, to a degree, their own ambitions and desires.
Waters likewise explores in her fiction the carnivalesque dimension
of metropolitan life, depicting the elements of misrule, shifts of fortune
and contradictions with which it can confront the city dweller. Whereas
carnivalesque themes are obviously to the fore in Tipping the Velvet, with
its focus on the music hall and the licence for cross-dressing that the theatre
permits the female actor, they also indirectly inform her later novels. This is
apparent in the unorthodox sexualities and gender roles on which she focuses.
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 83

These include, in addition to same-sex desire and male impersonation,

reference to the way in which roles traditionally regarded as the prerogative
of men, such as the flâneur and the pleasures of the gaze he enjoys, can
be appropriated by women. In Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch,
however, in contrast to Tipping the Velvet, these topics frequently carry
connotations of danger and assume, like the labyrinthine London streets
that form their context, uncanny associations. Emphasis is placed less on ‘the
new outlook on the world’ which, as Bakhtin writes, carnival promotes but
on the instability and fragmentation of both the urban environment and the
psyche.10 London, Waters reminds us, in addition to offering opportunities
for pleasure and self-fulfilment, provides a context for loneliness, acts of
violence and the concealing of secrets, both social and sexual.
The narrative strategies Waters employs in her fiction echo her
representation of London as an arena of carnivalesque misrule and sexual
exploration. In exploiting devices of postmodern parody and recasting
in her neo-Victorian novels storylines and scenarios from the works of
nineteenth-century writers such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, she
herself engages in a form of carnivalesque inversion and misrule. Inverting
the perspectives and value-schemes of these male writers, she represents
Victorian London from female and queer viewpoints. By juxtaposing
reference to the dominant culture with its marginalized counterpart, she
fills in the gaps and absences relating to gender and sexuality in their texts
and fleshes out the feminine and queer areas of metropolitan life at which
they merely hint. Her description of London locations contributes to this.
Dickens’s description of Fagin’s den in the neighbourhood of Field Lane in
Oliver Twist (1838) is transformed in Fingersmith into the headquarters
of the gang of thieves in Lant Street controlled by the baby-farmer Mrs
Sucksby, while Walter Hartright’s uncanny meeting with Anne Catherick
on the road to London in Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) is echoed
in Margaret Prior’s eerie meeting with ‘the spooky girl’ Selina Dawes
whom she encounters in Mill Bank Prison.11 In addition, Elizabeth Bowen’s
descriptions of bomb-damaged London in her stories ‘I Hear You Say So’
and ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) are recast in The Night Watch to furnish a
setting for the lovers Julia and Helen when they stroll together through the
war-torn metropolis at night and enjoy their first kiss. Tipping the Velvet
is similarly rich in intertextual reference, alluding to a variety of texts both
comic and serious, including George Leybourne’s music-hall songs and the
works of Eleanor Marx.12 It is the first of Waters’s novels to appear in print
and, as we shall see, is notably rich in references to queer London.

Tipping the Velvet: Music hall and masquerade

The London locations that form the context for the picaresque trajectory
of Nan King, the oyster seller from Whitstable who partners the music-
hall performer Kitty on the music hall stage in Tipping the Velvet, are
84 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

highly relevant to Waters’s interest in queer sexuality and gender since she
associates each with a different form. The narrative, having opened in the
Brixton lodging-house where Nan and Kitty commence their love affair and
the Star theatre where they perform on stage, moves in the central section
to the streets and parks of the metropolis. Here Nan, having given up her
stage career as a result of Kitty jilting her, disguises herself as a boy and
engages in what she expressively terms ‘the curious gaslit career’ of servicing
men seeking homosexual sex.13 The action then moves to the interior of
the affluent residence in St John’s Wood owned by the upper-class sapphist
Diana Lethaby, who employs Nan as her tart, before eventually concluding
romantically in the humble Stratford home of the suffragist Florence, with
whom she falls in love.
In describing Kitty’s and Nan’s performance in the music-hall production
at the Star, Waters focuses attention on their joint act of male impersonation.
Performances of this kind were of especial interest in the 1880s and 1890s
since there occurred at this time an unprecedented influx of women as both
audience and performers into the London musical hall.14 Basing her account
of Nan and Kitty’s theatrical act on the career of Nellie Power and other
Victorian female performers, Waters explores both the thrills and problematic
aspects of male impersonation. In addition to describing Nan’s ‘pleasure
in performance, display and disguise’ and the audience’s enjoyment of her
act,15 she examines the risks it involved for the female actor. By mimicking
the male role, the actor implicitly questions the ‘naturalness’ of masculinity
by exposing it as an artifice that a woman can perform as successfully
as a man.16 Kitty’s theatrical agent, Walter Bliss, it is interesting to note,
takes measures to prevent this. On perceiving that Nan’s performance of
masculinity is too lifelike, that ‘she looks like a real boy’ rather than an
imitation,17 he makes efforts to tone it down. He alters her make-up to
appear more feminine, puts tucks inside her jacket to accentuate her waist
and replaces her masculine-looking boots with dainty shoes. In consequence
she makes her debut on stage, as she ironically remarks, ‘clad not exactly
as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been
more of a girl’.18
A more serious problem that the male impersonator could encounter on
stage was the accusation of deviancy, resulting in her being stigmatized as
sexually perverse.19 This is, of course, especially pertinent to Nan and Kitty
since they are lovers. Kitty makes an effort to protect Nan and herself from
scandal by striving to keep their relationship secret. Her efforts, however,
prove futile. Waters describes how one evening in a shabby theatre in
Islington, a drunken spectator accuses them of being ‘a couple of toms’,20
forcing them to retire from the stage amid jeers.
Waters continues her investigation into the sexual politics of female
cross-dressing in the second half of the novel in which Nan, on learning
to her distress that Kitty has deserted her to marry Bliss, retires from the
stage. Masquerading as a boy in a guardsman’s uniform that she salvaged
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 85

from the theatre, she discovers in Soho and the West End a world of sexual
secrets whose existence she never suspected. Here she survives financially
by servicing men seeking homosexual sex by performing acts of fellatio.
In addition to introducing the reader to the male homosexual dimension
of London and the sex-trade catering for it, Waters foregrounds the
connections between the occupations of actor and sex worker. She portrays
Nan humorously, observing ‘[m]y only contact with the theatre now was
a renter’21 while regretting the absence of an audience to acclaim her
‘marvellous performances’ of masculinity.22 Nan engages in yet another
form of male masquerade when, on catching the eye of the upper-class
Diana Lethaby who sees through her pretence of masculinity, she agrees to
accompany her to her residence in St John’s Wood to service her sexually.
On finding Nan’s preference for drag erotically titillating, Diana purchases
her a sumptuous wardrobe of suits. Theatrical allusions again abound, with
Nan describing the selecting of her costumes as ‘quite like dressing for the
halls again’.23
The theatrical references that litter these episodes, in addition to creating
a link with Nan’s former music-hall life, alert attention to the performative
dimension of gender. According to Judith Butler, gender, rather than being
authentic and the effect of some inner essence, takes the form of ‘a set of
repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time
to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’.24 Nan
in fact comes to regard it in a similar way. On first venturing abroad into
Berwick Street dressed as a boy, she quite expects her disguise to be penetrated
and ‘the cry to be let up: “A girl! There is a girl, here, in boy’s clothing” ’.25
When no such cry occurs, she congratulates herself on ‘the success of that
first performance’26 and soon becomes accustomed to identifying as male.
She even starts to experience confusion about her own sex, confessing that,
like the proprietor of the knocking-shop where she changes her costume
who ‘was never quite sure whether I were a girl come to her house to pull on
a pair of trousers, or a boy arrived to change out of his frock, sometimes, I
was not sure myself’.27
The role of flâneur is also relevant to Nan’s experience of metropolitan
life. Although Walter Benjamin initially envisaged the role as male, Sally
Munt draws attention to its significance as ‘a vessel to be filled by a lesbian
narrative’ and suggests that ‘the flâneur could be a cross-dressed lesbian’.28
Waters inventively develops these ideas. She portrays Nan initially adopting
masculine dress because she is tired of enduring male scrutiny, of being,
as she describes, ‘a solitary girl … in a city where girls walked only to be
gazed at’.29 However, although she pleasurably discovers that, dressed as
a boy, she enjoys the licence to participate in the urban ritual of ‘walking
and watching’,30 she finds, as I suggested above, that she can be as much
the object of the gaze as she was when wearing feminine attire. She also
experiences other problems with the role of flâneur. When she eventually
has the good fortune to encounter the feminist activist Florence, a woman
86 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

to whom she is attracted and who she wishes to impress, she is ironically
wearing the wrong clothes. She sheepishly recalls how ‘I smiled and gave a
little bow. My stays creaked; it felt all wrong being a gallant in a skirt, and
I had a sudden fear that she might take me not for an impertinent voyeur,
but for a fool.’31 Waters’s references to the figure of the flâneur therefore
illustrate the varied nature of London life and the diversity of roles that Nan
performs in the city.

Affinity: Spiritualism and prison cells

Affinity, as suits the novel’s emphasis on frustrated female passion, offers
the reader a notably bleaker image of Victorian London than Tipping the
Velvet. The contrast is reflected visually in the different colours brought to
the fore in the two novels. Instead of the red of the guardsman’s uniform
that Nan wears on stage and the ‘belt of amber beads’ of the lights fringing
the Thames,32 Affinity is pervaded by the dark shape of Millbank prison,
the brown of the female prisoners’ uniforms and the grey of the fog-bound
streets. Interior, rather than exterior, locations also achieve prominence.
Margaret Prior moves to and fro between her claustrophobic upper-class
home in Cheyne Walk and the confining corridors and cells of Millbank
Prison, described by an official as ‘quite a little city’,33 where Selina, the
beautiful spiritualist with whom she falls in love, is entrapped. The narrative
structure of Affinity also differs from that of Tipping the Velvet. Instead of
focusing on the picaresque adventures of a single protagonist, it interweaves
two storylines, the one recounted by the working-class medium Selina
Dawes and the other by the upper-class prison-visitor Margaret Prior.
The spiritualist movement, as Alex Owen describes in The Darkened
Room, flourished in London in the 1860s and 1870s.34 Since séances
frequently took place in the home and the role of medium required emotional
sensitivity, a quality typecast as feminine, it attracted the interest of women.
Though provoking controversy and even scandal, it provided a vehicle for
female members of the working class to achieve upward mobility and, on
occasion, celebrity. However, these prizes came at the price of significant
dangers. The medium was vulnerable to accusations of charlatanism or
hysteria and, as a result, risked confinement in a prison or mental institution.
Historical material of this kind forms the basis of Waters’s fictional account
of the working-class Selina Dawes. Emphasizing Selina’s speedy social
ascent, Waters portrays her moving from a humble abode in Bethnal
Green to operating as a medium in the affluent Clerkenwell residence of
Mrs Brink who, crediting her uncanny powers, invites her to live with her.
Here, with the help of the house-maid Ruth who becomes her lover, Selina
enacts a performance of communicating with the dead and making physical
phenomena materialize. As the reader discovers, it is, in fact, Ruth, acting as
Selina’s spirit-control Peter Quick, who manages this web of deceit, her near
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 87

invisibility in the text parodying the invisibility of the maid in the Victorian
household.35 When Selina’s luck runs out and, as the result of the death of
Mrs Brink, she is confined in Millbank Prison, her skills of dissimulation
continue to assist her. They enable her, again with the help of the quick-
witted Ruth, to deceive the prison visitor Margaret into believing that she
loves her and persuading her to hand over her fortune to promote her flight.
Margaret, on learning from Selina that she works as a medium, refers to
spiritualism – ironically, considering Selina’s sexual relationship with Ruth –
as ‘her queer career’.36 Although Margaret employs the adjective ‘queer’ in
the commonplace sense of ‘strange’ or ‘odd’, Victorian spiritualism did in
fact have a queer sexual dimension since, as Waters’s portrayal of Ruth and
Selina’s partnership illustrates, the séance furnished the medium and spirit
guide with the opportunity to enjoy erotic relations both with one another
and with their clients. As a result, though the séances Ruth and Selina hold
are fraudulent as a means of contacting the dead, their role as a vehicle to
express same-sex erotic desire is authentic. As Tatiana Kontou perceptively
writes, ‘[t]ricks allow desires to be realized … There is a psychical reality in
deceit.’37 Viewed from a sexual perspective, Selina’s role as a medium is not
a form of fakery but, as Kontou describes, ‘a way of expressing or, more
accurately, performing, her passion for Ruth’.38 Spiritualism also gives Ruth,
in the guise of the dashing spirit-control Peter Quick, the opportunity to
flirt with and fondle the female visitors to the séance since, in a spiritualist
context, the sex of the spirit is irrelevant. As Selina explains to the puzzled
Mrs Brink, ‘This spirit was a gentleman on earth & is now obliged to visit
me in that form.’39
Ruth, in addition to acting as Selina’s spirit-control, exploits the freedom
that her office as maid allows her to achieve – that is, to access, under the
pseudonym ‘Vigers’, Margaret’s home in Cheyne Walk. She surreptitiously
conveys there locks of Selina’s hair which Margaret believes to be transported
by supernatural means. Ruth’s trickery, in addition to illustrating the
power that the working-class lesbian or ‘tom’ could wield, sheds light on
the potentially disruptive role that the maid could play in family life. Jane
Gallop depicts the maid as a ‘threshold figure’ who, living physically inside
the family though socially outside it, exemplifies the threat of anarchy that
the Victorian bourgeoisie associated with the working class.40 Waters’s
portrayal of the maid Ruth/Vigers vividly reworks this concept. The maid, as
a figure characterized by her hushed, behind-the-scenes role in the running
of the Victorian household, also assumed metaphorical connotations of
spectrality. Selina, remarking approvingly on how ‘quietly’ Vigers performs
her duties in Mrs Brink’s household, in fact compares her to ‘a ghost’.41 This
connects Vigers with the figures of the prisoner and spinster who, due to
their social invisibility, Waters also describes in spectral imagery.
The motif of the lesbian flâneur, performed by Nan in a carnivalesque
context in Tipping the Velvet, also features unexpectedly in Affinity in the
grim setting of Millbank Prison. The prison was constructed on the model of
88 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

a panopticon, the architectural design that Michel Foucault associates with

state surveillance, with the central tower permitting the spectator a view
of the interior of the building.42 As Margaret watches the female prisoners
returning from the exercise yard, the governor, intuiting her same-sex
desires, pointedly remarks, ‘You like to look at them’.43 Her remark heralds
the role of lesbian flâneur that Margaret subsequently plays. The doors
to the cells housing the female prisoners contain spy-holes, colloquially
known as ‘eyes’.44 They enable her, while walking along the corridor, to
gaze at the inmates and objectify the beautiful Selina aesthetically and
erotically. Rebecca Pohl, in discussing the roles that walking plays in the
novel, describes how ‘Margaret performs her desire [for Selina] through the
practice of walking the corridors of Millbank’, while returning constantly
to Selina’s cell.45 Here Waters problematizes the role of flâneur. Rather than
associating it with the lively outdoor world of the city streets, she situates
it in the claustrophobic location of a prison. In addition, the pleasures that
the gaze permits Margaret, though she enjoys them, do not empower her
but give rise to her sexual entrapment. She becomes sexually obsessed with
Selina and, in assisting her to escape from Millbank Prison, brings about her
own ruin.

Fingersmith: Interplay between

London and provincial locations
In Affinity, as illustrated above, Waters creates a double narrative, utilizing
both Margaret and Selina as narrators and skilfully interweaving their
storylines. She subsequently develops this structure in Fingersmith. However
here, in addition to employing Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly as narrators and
interrelating their stories, she associates each with a different location: Sue
with London and Maud with the provinces. Utilizing this pastoral structure
gives her the opportunity to explore features of the metropolis which she
does not treat elsewhere. Describing London from the contrary viewpoints
of urban and country residents, she reworks the debate about the pros and
cons of metropolitan and rural life which was to the fore in the 1860s and
1870s.46 She also examines, in relation to Maud’s life, the trade in erotic
literature that operated between London and provincial areas.
In constructing Fingersmith on the interrelation between city and
country, Waters appropriately imitates the structure of two famous
Victorian novels by London-based writers that employ a similar design:
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Dickens’s Bleak House (1853).
For example, the journeys that Sue Trinder makes in Fingersmith between
the thieves’ den in London operated by Mrs Sucksby and the country house
of Briar, where Richard Rivers courts Maud Lilley in an attempt to obtain
her inheritance, rework those that the characters in The Woman in White
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 89

make between London and rural Blackwater Park, where Sir Percival
Glyde attempts to coerce his wife Laura into signing away her fortune.
There are also other intertextual connections between the two novels. Sue
Trinder’s imprisonment in an asylum for the insane in Fingersmith echoes
the similar incarceration that Laura suffers in The Women in White, while
the sexual relationship that develops between Sue and Maud in Waters’s
novel recalls the close attachment, with its homoerotic resonances, between
Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie in Collins’s text. However, Sue is not
Maud’s half-sister but, on the contrary, her maid. This, in turn, echoes the
emotionally intense relationship that develops between Lady Dedlock and
her two personal maids, the pretty naïve Rosa and the passionate Hortense,
that Dickens portrays in Bleak House. However, in contrast to Dickens,
Waters foregrounds the sexual nature of Sue’s and Maud’s relationship and
makes it central to her novel.
In the debate about the merits of urban and rural environments that
flourished in Victorian England, some people, influenced by the association
of the city with poverty and vice, championed a rural location, whereas
others, arguing that a metropolitan context promoted social interaction and
access to culture, endorsed the latter. Waters reworks the debate in relation to
the lifestyles of the London-based pickpocket Sue and the provincial Maud
who lives as a lady at the rural estate of Briar. The Londoner Sue prefers
city life. Waters humorously portrays her, on stepping from the train onto
the station in the rural vicinity of Briar, appalled by the absence of ‘coffee-
stalls and milk-stalls and a pastry-cook’s shop’.47 In addition to disliking
the silence of the countryside, relieved, as she despondently describes, only
by the occasional bird song and ‘the very mournful sound’ of a bell,48 she
prefers what she regards as the blatant crime of the metropolis (to which
she herself contributed as a pickpocket) to the penny-pinching dishonesty
typifying life on a country estate. As she scornfully remarks, ‘At Briar, they
were all on the dodge in one way or another, but all over sneaking little
matters that would have put a real thief to the blush’.49 Her passion for
London is vividly illustrated in the episode in which, after escaping from
the provincial asylum in which Richard Rivers had her imprisoned, she
makes the trek home. On glimpsing with relief the interplay of light and
dark on the horizon, she ironically welcomes the signs of pollution since
they indicate that she is nearing the city. She impressionistically describes
how ‘[t]he chimneys grew taller … the threads of smoke more thick; until
at last, at the further point of all, they made a smudge, a stain … a darkness
that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and
golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light’. She
concludes with the rapturous exclamation, ‘London … Oh, London!’50 On
entering the metropolis, she puts her street-wise skills as a city dweller to
good use and quickly locates the route to Lant Street. As she confidently
observes, ‘That part of London was strange to me, but I found I knew my
way alright.’51
90 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Maud, on the contrary, having been raised as a lady in rural isolation, is

described succumbing to panic when, having escaped from Mrs Sucksby’s
control in Lant Street, she finds herself adrift in the maze of London alleys.
Passers-by, intrigued by her upper-class attire, subject her to scrutiny.
The topic of the gaze that features in Waters’s earlier novels with reference
to the figure of the flâneur is again foregrounded, though here emphasis is
placed on its threatening aspect. Maud perceives with alarm that ‘Everybody
stares – men, women, children – even here, where the road is busy again,
they stare.’52 On experiencing male ridicule, she wearily thinks, ‘On, on, I go.
I think boys run beside me, for a time – two boys or three – shrieking to see
me stagger.’53 Men working in a nearby warehouse, on noting her uncovered
head, mistake her for a prostitute and whistle at her. When a gentleman
offers her a lift in his carriage, she misinterprets his invitation as an act of
kindness, recognizing only in the nick of time that it signifies an attempt at
seduction.
In contrast, the metropolitan Sue, instead of being dominated by the gaze
of other people, is portrayed controlling it. When Maud is imprisoned by
Mrs Sucksby, eager to obtain the fortune that she thinks she owns, Sue stares
longingly at her through the window of the house. She describes how ‘Maud
turned her head and seemed to look at me, to hold my gaze across the dusty
street’.54 Here the gaze, signifying the desire that the two women feel for
one another, appears to Sue to be mutual. It metaphorically heralds in this
respect the two women’s eventual reunion.
The interplay between London and the provinces on which Fingersmith is
structured is achieved not only by the journeys that the characters undertake
but also, reflecting Waters’s focus on sexual politics and the sociocultural
interests relating to it, by the trade in erotic literature that flourished in
Victorian London. Maud’s tyrannical guardian, Christopher Lilly, is engaged
in compiling a ‘Universal Bibliography’ of erotica,55 and Waters portrays
him coercing Maud into copying passages and reciting them to gentlemen
visitors. The latter include the bookseller Mr Hawtrey who travels from
London to sell Lilly new texts. Rivers, too, initially gains access to Briar
under the pretext of inspecting Lilly’s collection. The transactions that occur
between Lilly and his visitors signal Maud’s role as sexual commodity.
Obsessed by copying and reading passages from his books, she begins
to envisage herself as one. Referring to the plate pasted on each volume
to indicate his ownership, she thinks, ‘Sometimes I suppose such a plate
must be pasted on my own flesh – that I have been ticketed, and noted and
shelved – so nearly do I resemble one of my uncle’s books.’56 The image of
‘a phallus, wound about with a stem of briar at the root’57 inscribed on the
plate indicates his ownership of her.
Waters bases Lilly’s collection of erotica on that of the London textile
trader Henry Spencer Ashbee, now housed in the British Museum.58 She
describes Lilly’s books, like Ashbee’s, as referring to queer material as well
as heterosexual, including male ‘sodomitical matter’ and descriptions of ‘the
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 91

means a woman may employ to pleasure another’.59 On making love with

Sue, Maud finds her view of the latter topic changing. Lying in Sue’s arms
and comparing life with fiction, she wonders, ‘May a lady taste the fingers of
her maid? She may, in my uncle’s books, – The thought makes me colour.’60
Reference to erotic literature, and to London as the hub of its production
and sale, recurs when, after having escaped from Mrs Sucksby’s house, she
seeks out Mr Hawtrey’s book shop in Holywell Street in the hope that he
will give her refuge. However, shocked by her sudden appearance in the
capital and the unembarrassed interest that she shows in his books, their
content familiar to her from her life at Briar, he insists that she leave the
premises.
A more intimate viewpoint on erotica and its production is represented
in the novel’s concluding episode. It portrays Maud, sitting alone at Briar,
engaged in writing a text of this kind. With her guardian Lilly now deceased
and having discovered that it is Sue, not herself as she had assumed, who
is in fact the heiress, she now gains a living by producing and selling
erotic texts. When Sue – who, impelled by desire, has followed her there –
expresses astonishment at the unladylike nature of her occupation, she
explains that it is the only kind of work she knows. She also confesses that
the passage she is writing has personal import since ‘[i]t is filled with all the
words for how I want you’.61 The episode recalls Waters’s observation in a
radio interview that women living in the Victorian era may possibly have
read and even produced erotic material.62 It also has topical interest since it
reminds readers of the heated debate that the production of publications of
this kind by women who identify as lesbian – such as the magazine Quim –
has provoked in the lesbian feminist community.63 In addition to alerting
the reader to London’s connection with the production of erotica, Waters
draws attention to the topic’s relevance to women and the controversies
relating to it.

The Night Watch: London in war and peace

The strategy of chronologically inverting her characters’ storylines that
Waters employs in The Night Watch – commencing the novel in the context
of the post-war year 1947 and concluding it in 1941 in the period of the
London blitz – has more than merely stylistic interest. It enables the reader, by
travelling back in time, to recognize the changes in the sociopolitical climate
that contribute to the formation of their subjectivities and perspectives.
The experience of living through the London bombing raids, which all the
key characters in the novel share, is of major importance here.
In order to give historical resonance to her representation of the bomb-
damaged metropolis, Waters introduces intertextual reference to works
of fiction produced by writers working in the period of the war, and
Elizabeth Bowen in particular. Her description of the partially demolished
92 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

houses with their ‘phantom staircases’64 echoes Bowen’s reference to ‘the

terraces that were still nailed up, blind, uninhabitable’ in ‘I Hear You Say
So’.65 In ‘Mysterious Kor’, Bowen portrays Londoners, accustomed to the
darkness of the unlit streets and the partial protection from bombing that it
furnished, regarding the way ‘the moonlight drenched the city and searched
it’ as ‘remorseless’ and fearing that ‘the polished roads and streets … sent a
ghostly unbroken reflection up’.66 Waters similarly describes how ‘when the
moon was so bright, surfaces were lit up, white against black. It made you
feel vulnerable, exposed’.67
Leo Mellor describes Bowen’s utilization of spectral imagery as
accentuating the eerie atmosphere of wartime London,68 and Waters
employs imagery of this kind in a similar way. She also imaginatively
develops Bowen’s reference to the city’s ‘unfamiliar queerness’,69 in the
sense of ‘strange’ and ‘uncanny’, to refer to her characters’ queer sexualities.
Like Bowen, who portrays her female protagonist in ‘The Demon Lover’
associating the ghostly appearance of the bomb-damaged buildings with
the ‘spectral’ visage of her deceased lover,70 Waters portrays Helen moving
from contemplating ‘the ghost of a road’, reduced to rubble by the blitz,
to thoughts of her absent partner, Kay, that are haunting her.71 Kay, a
member of an ambulance crew that works at night, is unaware of the fact
that, while she is occupied tending the victims of the bombing raids, Helen
is secretly engaging in a romantic stroll with Julia. When the latter two
eventually surrender to the imperative of desire and kiss, the darkness, as
Julia observes, has the effect of rendering them ‘invisible’, their physical
invisibility evoking their social invisibility as lesbians.72 As Terry Castle,
commenting on the sociocultural effacement of the lesbian, describes, she
‘has been effectively ghosted – or made to seem invisible – by culture itself’
since ‘Western civilization has for centuries been haunted by fear of women
indifferent or resistant to male desire’.73
It is not only the darkness furnished by the unlit streets that renders Helen
and Julia invisible, sheltering them from observation. The partial relaxing
of conventional gender roles and dress codes that the wartime culture
promoted has a similar effect. When Helen expresses fear of discovery, Julia
reassuringly observes that, on account of the heavy coat and cap she herself
is wearing, an onlooker ‘would probably take us for a boy and his girl’.74
With the ending of the war, however, these freedoms diminish. Julia, whose
reputation as a writer of detective fiction is on the ascent, feels compelled,
in order to assume a feminine image, to obey the dictates of fashion and
wear a skirt, stockings and make-up. Kay, on the contrary, despite the fact
that the ambulance unit in which she worked has been disbanded, refuses to
accommodate to feminine fashion. As a result, on visiting the local bakers,
she is greeted by the mocking question, ‘Don’t you know the War’s over?’75
It is provoked, she perceives, by her trousers and ‘masculine’ haircut.
A distinctive feature of The Night Watch is that, in contrast to Waters’s
earlier neo-Victorian novels, it explores the queer sexualities of male
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 93

characters as well as female. Duncan, imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs on

the charge of attempted suicide, finds himself sharing a cell with Fraser who is
there as the result of identifying as a conscientious objector. Though insisting
that he is in no way ‘homosexual’ and fiercely criticizing the behaviour of the
‘effeminate’ homosexuals with their camp behaviour who he encounters in
the gaol, Duncan establishes a warm emotional attachment to his cellmate.
On one occasion, when the noise of the bombing is especially loud, he
succeeds in overcoming his fear of male physical contact and permits Fraser,
who admits to being scared, to share his bunk. He is aware that, according
to heterosexual convention, ‘[i]t ought to have been strange, to be pressed
so close to another [male] person; but it wasn’t strange’. Waters describes
how, when the bombing ceased, ‘[t]he two men moved closer together, not
further apart’.76 In addition to illustrating the lack of bomb-shelter facilities
in prisons during the war, the episode interrogates the binary division
‘heterosexual’/‘homosexual’, signalling the queer mobility of sexuality.
As illustrated above, London features in Waters’s fiction in numerous
different roles and guises. Represented in terms of the contradictions of rich
and poor, genteel and shabby, light and dark, it signifies, on the one hand, a site
of carnivalesque pleasure and masquerade and, on the other, a labyrinthine
world carrying connotations of danger. The role that the metropolis plays
as the site of queer sexualities and subcultures is illustrated in a variety of
ways, with urban locations furnishing the setting for the female characters’
same-sex relationships and their encounters with men with homosexual
lifestyles. Examples of cross-dressing are also in evidence, as illustrated by
Nan’s careers as a music hall artiste and ‘renter’ in Tipping the Velvet and
Ruth’s performance as the spirit-guide Peter Quick in Affinity. The two
novels also introduce inventive variations on the role of the lesbian flâneur,
illustrating both the pleasures and problematic aspects of her appropriation
of the gaze. In Fingersmith, Waters develops the motif of the gaze and its
significance. In addition to employing it to evoke Sue’s and Maud’s romantic
attachment, she describes Maud experiencing the oppressive effect of the
male gaze when subjected to ridicule in the London streets.
Representations of male sexuality in the context of London life, though
by no means central to Waters’s fiction, nonetheless play a contributory part
in it. The importance of London as the hub of the trade in erotica and the
different roles that the bibliographer Christopher Lilly and the bookseller
Hawtrey play in it are described in Fingersmith in relation to both Maud’s
sexual education in the rural location of Briar and her subsequent adventures
in the metropolis when she visits Hawtrey’s bookshop. The Night Watch,
in contrast, movingly explores the homoerotic attachment that develops
between Duncan and his cellmate Fraser while the two men are imprisoned
in Wormwood Scrubs during the war. These episodes contribute, with
the others discussed in this chapter, to the rich array of perspectives on
sexuality and gender that Waters describes in representing London and its
sociocultural significance.
94 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Notes
1 Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (London: Virago, 1998), p. 200.
2 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
1996), pp. 72–74.
3 Elizabeth Wilson, Hidden Agendas: Theory, Politics and Experience in the
Women’s Movement (London: Tavistock, 1986), p. 169.
4 Gill Valentine, ‘(Re)negotiating the “Heterosexual Street”: Lesbian Productions
of Space’, in Nancy Duncan (ed.), Body Space: Destabilizing Geographies of
Gender and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 146–55.
5 Sally Munt, ‘The Lesbian Flâneur’, in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds),
Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 114–25.
6 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 12–20.
7 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder,
and Women (London: Virago, 1991), p. 7.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 34.
11 Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago, 1999), p. 109.
12 Waters, Tipping, pp. 109, 386.
13 Waters, Tipping, p. 218.
14 J.S. Bratton, ‘Jenny Hill: Sex and Sexism in the Victorian Music Hall’, in J.S.
Bratton (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style (New York: Taylor and
Francis, 1997), pp. 92–110, 92, 103–4; and Peter Bailey, Music Hall: The
Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. xvii.
15 Waters, Tipping, p. 126.
16 Kristina Straub, ‘The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing
and the Autobiography of Charlotte Clarke’, in Julia Epstein and Kristina
Straub (eds), Body Guards: Cultural Politics and Gender Ambiguity (London:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 142–66, 146–7.
17 Waters, Tipping, p. 118.
18 Ibid., p. 120.
19 Straub, ‘Guilty Pleasures’, pp. 147–50.
20 Waters, Tipping, p. 140.
21 Ibid., p. 207.
22 Ibid., p. 206.
23 Ibid., p. 264.
 SARAH WATERS’S REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER LONDON 95

24 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 33.
25 Waters, Tipping, p. 194.
26 Ibid., p. 195.
27 Ibid.
28 Munt, ‘Lesbian Flâneur’, p. 117.
29 Waters, Tipping, p. 191.
30 Ibid., p. 201.
31 Ibid., p. 223.
32 Ibid., p. 101.
33 Waters, Affinity, p. 9.
34 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late
Nineteenth Century England (London: Virago, 1989), pp. 1–10.
35 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin-de-Siècle to
the Neo-Victorian (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 190.
36 Waters, Affinity, p. 162.
37 Kontou, Spiritualism, p. 194.
38 Ibid., p. 195.
39 Waters, Affinity, p. 191.
40 Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction
(London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 146.
41 Waters, Affinity, p. 119.
42 Rosa Ainley, ‘Watching the Detectors: Control and the Panopticon’, in Rosa
Ainley (ed.), New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender (London: Routledge:
1998), pp. 88–100, 89.
43 Waters, Affinity, p. 17.
44 Ibid., p. 23.
45 Rebecca Pohl, ‘Sexing the Labyrinth’, in Kaye Mitchell (ed.), Sarah Waters:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 37.
46 Wilson, Sphinx, pp. 27–8.
47 Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2002), p. 53.
48 Ibid., p. 56.
49 Ibid., p. 91.
50 Ibid., p. 467.
51 Ibid., p. 469.
52 Ibid., p. 371.
53 Ibid., p. 370.
96 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

54 Ibid., p. 475.
55 Ibid., p. 201.
56 Ibid., p. 218.
57 Ibid.
58 Lisa Jardine, ‘Sarah Waters: Sex and the Victorian City’. Interview with Sarah
Waters, BBC2, 4 May 2005.
59 Waters, Fingersmith, pp. 201, 279.
60 Ibid., p. 256.
61 Ibid., p. 547.
62 Jardine, ‘Sarah Waters’.
63 Paulina Palmer, ‘ “She began to show me the words she had written one by
one”: Lesbian Reading and Writing Practices in the Fiction of Sarah Waters’,
Women: A Cultural Review 19.1 (2008), pp. 69–86, 78–9.
64 Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006), p. 7.
65 Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Stories (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 752.
66 Ibid., p. 728.
67 Waters, The Night Watch, p. 360.
68 Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 159–63.
69 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Demon Lover’, in Collected Stories, p. 661.
70 Ibid., p. 668.
71 Waters, The Night Watch, p. 337.
72 Ibid., p. 349.
73 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 4–5.
74 Waters, The Night Watch, p. 339.
75 Ibid., p. 94.
76 Ibid., p. 411.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Are Drag Kings Still

Too Queer for London?
From the Nineteenth-Century
Impersonator to the
Drag King of Today
Kayte Stokoe

This chapter examines London as a locus both of male impersonation in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and of Drag King performance
today. I explore the relationship between these performances and the space/s
they occupy, focusing on the male impersonator Vesta Tilley, who performed
between 1870 and 1920 on the Music Hall stage, before concentrating on
the way in which twenty-first-century London creates a thought-provoking,
particularized context for Drag King events and performance. These
discussions enable me to offer some preliminary answers to the question,
‘Are Drag Kings still too queer for London?’1 It is pertinent to clarify my use
of ‘queer’ in this chapter. While I rely primarily on the definition established
by queer theoretical approaches – that is, queer in the sense of troubling
definitions, pushing boundaries and challenging assumptions2 – I equally
employ ‘queer’ to gesture towards stances of fluidity, collectivity and anti-
normativity,3 both within and outside the context of LGBTQIA practices.
Further, I recognize that, perhaps appropriately, the meaning of queer is
subject to temporal and cultural shifts, and does not refer monolithically to
a single identity or practice. I equally believe that it would be reductive to
98 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

suggest that any individual practice is necessarily subversive or challenging,

irrespective of any association with LGBTQIA subcultures and strategies.4
This chapter presents an interdisciplinary investigation of male
impersonation on the Music Hall stage around the turn of the century, and
of London’s Drag King scene, exploring the atmosphere which pervades
Drag King communities and events. In terms of methodology, the chapter
aims to balance historical analysis with a more subjective analysis of
contemporary Drag King spaces. The latter focuses on the material gleaned
during my interviews with Drag King performers, including Jen Powell and
Lenna Cumberbatch,5 and explores material garnered in my experience
of Drag King spaces. I bring these disparate methodologies together in a
comparative analysis, placing the data found in dialogue with Marie-Hélène/
Sam Bourcier’s concept of Drag King performance as within the rubric of
‘pratiques transgenres’ (‘trans* practices’).6

Vesta Tilley, the Music Hall and nineteenth-

and twentieth-century male impersonators
Matilda Powles – henceforth addressed by her stage name, ‘Vesta Tilley’ –
whose celebrity and longevity surpassed that of many other British male
impersonators, began performing masculinity onstage in 1870, at the age
of six.7 While Tilley was developing a career as one of the British Music
Hall’s first male impersonators, Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner were
becoming celebrities in American Vaudeville.8 However, their portrayals of
masculinity were very different to Tilley’s. As Gillian Rodger demonstrates,
the masculinity performed by first-generation male impersonators such as
Hindle, whose peak of popularity was during the 1870s and 1880s, thrived
on theatrical realism, stereotypically ‘masculine’ gestures and attributes, and
the resignification of male-coded behaviours. These impersonators

often had masculine facial features and plump or thickset bodies and could
have passed as male off the stage if dressed in men’s clothing … These
women rarely if ever appeared in women’s clothing: onstage they
embodied masculinity. They did not just play the role of a man, speaking
lines written by somebody else; rather, they used song to transform
themselves into the character about whom they sang.9

Contrariwise, later generations of male impersonators, including Tilley,

incorporated elements of femininity and androgyny into their performances.10
Tilley’s performance of androgyny – the inclusion of elements of femininity,
boyish presentation and ‘refinement’11 – was a central factor in her popularity
as W.R. Titterton’s glowing testimony suggests: ‘all the while, for all her
truth to the masculine type, you get a sense of the feminine, not as with
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 99

FIGURE 7.1 Actress Vesta Tilley and her bicycle pose for a publicity postcard circa
1910 in London, England. (Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images.)

those clumsy imitators of hers who are giggling women in thin disguise, but
just so much that the truth of the male gesture is made the more piquant by
that hint of curving shape’.12
Here, readers perceive the significance of femininity in Tilley’s image:
this affectation of ‘refinement’ and delicacy, combined with a deliberate
replication of childish innocence, makes the image of the male impersonator
distinctly less threatening to stereotypical gender roles.13 Further, Tilley
deliberately frames her decision to perform masculinity as stemming from
a lack of variety in women’s acting roles, thereby suggesting that it was the
pleasures of variety and excitement that she sought in first donning a frock
coat, rather than the privileges allotted to masculinity and maleness.14
Whether stemming from her personal dislike of ‘realistic’ masculinity
or from perceptive marketing, Tilley’s mobilization of androgyny places
her within the realms of heteronormativity. That is, this emphasis allows
audiences to appreciate the performance of masculinity without posing
significant challenges to the assumption of masculinity as naturally adhering
to a cissexual man. The deliberate manipulation of Tilley’s image to cater
to specific mores – the adoption of an image which Rodger describes as
‘astutely managed by [Tilley’s] father’15 – is present throughout her career.
Rather than embrace unconventional masculinity offstage, echoing the
gender presentation of figures such as Annie Hindle, Tilley sought to
emphasize a marked distinction between her ‘proper’, feminine, private life,
and her onstage persona.16 I suggest that Tilley’s performance of (cishet)
normativity is manifested in three distinct ways: through the performance
100 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

of femininity onstage, particularly in terms of the singing voice employed; as

a result of her marriage and subsequent class mobility; and, finally, through
her repudiation of ‘mannishness’ and homosexuality.
Tilley’s vocal femininity seemingly played a significant role in her
androgynous image. Contemporary Drag Kings employ a range of vocal
techniques when they sing: the majority choose songs which underline their
masculinity and subject position, while many employ low contralto singing
voices to accentuate their masculine song choices. Key examples are ‘Heart
Shaped Box’, the dark, velvety Nirvana anthem as performed by Danny
von Sleaze, and Michael Bublé’s ‘Mrs Jones’, crooned softly by Adam All.
Tilley, however, limited her masculinity to her subject position and physical
gestures, singing in a distinctly feminine voice: high, close to soprano and
delicate.17
The second evident layer of conservative propriety lies in Tilley’s marriage
to her one-time manager, Walter de Frece, who would later be knighted.18
I do not suggest that this marriage was entered into solely for reasons
of propriety or media approval. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged
that Tilley’s marriage altered the class sphere in which she moved: from
a relatively modest, working-class, musical background, through the
status of respectable married woman, to the titled status of Lady de Frece.
While respectability and ‘refinement’ had marked Tilley’s career from her
youth, her marriage certainly presented a further step in this regard: the
‘respectable’ status of wife absolved Tilley of any suspicion of impropriety
that might have been allotted to her as an actress at that time.19 Further,
Tilley’s regular appearances in hyper-feminine garments and on the arm of
her highly reputable consort acted to draw a further sharp line between
her onstage masculinity and her ‘proper’ private life.20 The final, and highly
significant, aspect of the heteronormative, upper-middle-class ‘wifeliness’
enacted by Tilley lies in her vehement repudiation of offstage female
masculinity and of homosexual desire. As Rodger explains, Tilley was the
first male impersonator to ‘exhibit any defensiveness about “mannish”
women’: Tilley refused to be associated with impersonators who performed
masculinity in their quotidian gender expression, or those whose identity
included masculinity.21
While Tilley certainly displayed an astute awareness of audience response
and public mores, and while this may render her queer in the sense of
producing her own popularizing narrative, readers can easily discern
her investment in the normative. While many local towns underlined
their connection to Tilley,22 her first performances in London presented
a significant step in her career.23 It is perhaps unsurprising that Tilley’s
image earned her particular favour in London: Tilley positioned herself
as the centre of male impersonation, thereby mirroring London’s status as
capital city. Furthermore, both Tilley and her central locus can be seen as
necessarily constructed, as presenting a particular façade and as presenting
a heterogeneous mix of the ‘refined’ and the working class. The importance
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 101

of pantomime, as well as Music Hall theatre, to London’s population

harmonized with Tilley’s performance style and facilitated her desire for
celebrity status: she could attract customers as the image of the desirable
principal boy, while equally gaining further popularity.
The perception of Drag King performance strategies through the lens of
pratiques transgenres (trans* practices) was pioneered by leading French
queer theorist Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier in ‘Des “Femmes travesties” aux
pratiques transgenres: repenser et queeriser le travestissement’.24 Bourcier
began participating in queer theory in the 1990s, working with Beatriz
Preciado, translating works by Teresa de Lauretis and Monique Wittig, and
acting as the animatrice – facilitator and animating spirit – of the French queer
activist and academic group Le Zoo.25 In addition to playing a significant
role in bringing queer theory to France, Bourcier has focused particularly on
Judith Butler’s theorizations of gender performativity, developing this first in
‘Des “Femmes travesties” ’,26 and critiquing the implications of non-agential
performativity for trans* people in ‘F*** the Politics of Disempowerment
in the Second Butler’.27
Bourcier’s mobilization of performativity is particularly useful here, as
pratiques transgenres employs ‘the valuable resources of performance and
performativity’ to engage with drag while including trans* performers.28 As
Bourcier demonstrates, positioning Drag King performance within ‘trans*
practices’ acts to separate it from terms such as ‘cross dressing’, which lack
a nuanced awareness of the complexity of gender performance and which
rely on a binary model of two fixed genders to cross between.29 Situating
Drag King performance and techniques within pratiques transgenres can
facilitate a recognition of the possibilities for gender expression and gender
identification outside the gender binary.
Although the term ‘pratiques’ (practices) emphasizes performance
and performativity, Bourcier centres identity alongside performance in
his work. That is, pratiques transgenres includes ‘the range of acts and
signs which constitute gender performance (the factors remarked on by
Marjorie Garber: dressing, naming, performance and acting out)’,30 while
also directing attention towards the fact that ‘femmes travesties’ may not
account for the identities of those it purports to describe.31 Focusing on
agency, queer community practices and self-determination,32 Bourcier’s lens
enables readers to perceive that gender presentation is not necessarily a fixed
conclusion, but can instead constitute a continual process of interrogation
and exploration.33 This flexibility allows theorists, readers and activists to
explore drag in a way which may not have been possible previously.
In many ways, Tilley’s prolonged romance with heteronormativity renders
her an unsuitable candidate for an analysis of her performances as pratiques
transgenres: she does not appear to be engaging in identity work or seeking to
expand the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. Nevertheless, ‘pratiques transgenres’
may shed further light on Tilley’s presentation and self-positioning. Tilley’s
androgyny, with touches of ‘boyish’ playfulness and ‘feminine’ innocence,
102 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

arguably echoes the gender expression of some genderfluid and/or

genderqueer people.34 However, Tilley performs, rather than identifies with,
this androgynous image. In keeping with Bourcier’s concept of a self-aware
performance style, including ‘l’habillement, la nomination, la performance et
l’acting out’,35 Tilley seems to have held an awareness of which boundaries
were acceptable to flout, and to have tapped into her childhood performances
of feminine roles to expand her characterization. In addition to capitalizing
on audience desires and fantasies, Tilley skilfully tailored her performances to
suit the country’s mood. Prior to the First World War, Tilley included sketches
of military masculinity among her performances, presenting an image of ‘[t]he
bumptious and swaggering Tommy’.36 During the war, however, Tilley
clearly positioned the soldier as a hero, not a figure of fun. Indeed, in her
autobiography, Tilley proudly emphasizes the plaudits she received from
Horatio Bottomley for boosting recruitment.37 Through its meticulous
emphasis on Drag King performance as a composite form, ‘pratiques
transgenres’ draws further attention to Tilley’s savvy self-positioning, which
operated on- and offstage to create a popular public image. Further, exploring
Tilley’s work through Bourcier’s lens enables one to question the extent to
which ‘pratiques transgenres’ can elucidate performances by conservative or
even homophobic and/or transphobic performers.

What on earth is a Drag King?

Turning to my exploration of the contemporary Drag King scene, I first
outline a central obstacle facing current performers – a lack of mainstream
understanding – which constitutes a sharp contrast to the popularity of
Music Hall impersonators in London in the early twentieth century. Even the
term ‘Drag King’ is not widely understood. Two London Drag Kings whom
I have interviewed – Adam All (Jen Powell) and Leon Da Luvva (Lenna
Cumberbatch) – discussed the bemused reactions of friends on encountering
the idea of Drag King performance.
In my first interview with her, Jen, who started performing in 2008,
discussed the comparative popularity of Drag Kings and Drag Queens
in London and elsewhere: ‘Drag Kings are much less popular; it doesn’t
seem to matter where you go’. As Jen explained, Drag Kings, unlike Drag
Queens, are often hired for women’s nights – rather than LGBTQ+ nights
more generally – which limits them to a specific market. Jen partially
attributes this contingency to the limited mainstream understanding of
Drag King performance. When discussing her performances with friends
or acquaintances, Jen has not only encountered those who are unaware of
Drag King performance, but has equally met with the assumption that a
Drag King must be a form of Drag Queen.
Jen argues that many audience members fail to realize that Drag King
performance is, or can be, a ‘massive exaggeration of a gender stereotype’. Jen
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 103

suggests that audience members may therefore not appreciate the comedic
dimension of Drag King performance, expecting instead that performers
will be ‘very sexy and maybe strip even’. Further, Jen recently emphasized
a perceived expectation that Drag Kings will perform a flawless, ‘passable’
masculinity, potentially presenting a difference in standards applied to Drag
Kings than to Drag Queens.38 Consequently, some audience members are
surprised and unsettled by a Drag King performance which plays with
hyperbole and stereotypical masculinity; ‘comedy … with music … with
costumes and flashing lights and silly things like that which are a massive
exaggeration, cock jokes and everything’.39
This lack of comprehension provokes multiple questions. First, one questions
whether Drag Kings are generally recognized as the counterpart of Drag Queens.
That is, if audiences expect excess and exaggeration from Drag Queens, why is
this not the case for Drag Kings?40 Can one argue that there is a clear image of
what a Drag Queen is and should be, whereas no comparable image exists for
King performance? Second, if audiences expect Drag Kings to be sexy, on what
basis is that expectation drawn? Is it possible that the androgyny and titillating
femininity, performed by male impersonators such as Vesta Tilley, has created
a legacy which twenty-first-century Drag Kings are expected to follow?
Third, to what extent does systemic sexism inform the perception of Drag
King performance? How much does the perception of masculinity as ‘natural’
inform and/or impede the understanding of performances of masculinity?41
This lack of understanding of Drag King performance in London spaces seems
particularly curious in the light of London’s rich history of non-normative
masculinities and male impersonation. While male impersonation was once
common enough to be featured in popular crime fiction42 – albeit as a means
of concealing criminal intentions – London today has only recently begun to
wake up to the concept of King performance.

Kinging in London
This section first turns to a further analysis of contemporary Drag King
performance styles and their resonances with Bourcier’s pratiques transgenres.
As noted above, pratiques transgenres draws attention to performance
style, character development and personal constructions of gender.43 Adam
All has a clear core personality – naïve, awkward and loveable – which is
communicated to the audience through exuberant gestures, facial expressions
and, as in the case of male impersonators such as Hindle, the formation of
character through song choice.44 Further, by appearing in diverse costumes –
with at least one new costume at each ‘Boi Box’ Drag King cabaret night45 –
and by interacting with other performers, Adam presents a character which
constantly develops. Thus, as bell hooks notes of particular drag performances,
Adam’s character and performance is ‘capable of construction, invention,
change’.46
104 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Adam’s core personality builds on elements of celebrated queer

masculinity, as present in Freddy Mercury for example, yet also incorporates,
rewrites and illuminates working-class masculinities – such as those of
young men that Jen encountered while working in construction, who, when
interacting in groups, modified their behaviour to engage in misogynistic
‘banter’. Jen’s performance of Adam allows her to critique normative,
narrow constructions of masculinity: Adam constantly strives for macho-
masculinity and suave self-presentation yet always fails in producing this
archetype as his own fears become visible. The macho mask slips further
during Adam’s endearing encounters with Apple, ‘his first ever girlfriend’,
for whom he evidently feels a mix of pride, desire, lust and fear. Consider
the ‘General Erection’ medley performed by Adam and Apple.47 When
celebrating his growing political popularity, Adam preened and flexed, with
Apple gazing longingly at him before waving graciously to an imagined
electorate, yet later, realizing that his ‘first lady’ is about to hear the news of
his sexual impropriety, Adam’s face falls, he covers his head with his hands,
and cowers, diminished.
Lenna Cumberbatch performs two distinct Drag King personalities:
the sleek, handsome ladies’ man Leon, and the sleazy, dodgy Uncle
Lenny. Both characters can be analysed according to Bourcier’s concept;
the very decision to perform these separate yet interlocking characters is
an immediate invitation to multiplicity and construction. Leon’s suave
masculinity, his open flirting and cheekiness sit comfortably on Lenna’s
own female masculinity. Judith Jack Halberstam praises this capacity
to perform two distinct forms of masculinity, positioning it as a specific
Kinging technique: ‘layering’.48 Equally, Lenna’s performances resonate
with the concept of pratiques transgenres, as these performances engage
critically with stereotypical, cissexist ideas of masculinity. One revealing
aspect of Lenna’s performance of strong black masculinity occurs offstage,
in the response she encounters from strangers while travelling in costume.
Lenna reports that, when strangers code her as male, eyes are immediately
turned away; strangers change their poses, and look behind them. This not
only demonstrates the accuracy of Lenna’s portrayal but also attests to a
common reaction to strong black masculinity.49
Additionally, there is the exuberant, ridiculous hilarity of Juan Kerr, whose
attraction lies partially in his refusal to perform suavity, and his open offer
of exaggerated, masculine autoeroticism; and the cocky, voluble bravado of
LoUis CYfer, who teasingly invites audience participation, making audience
members ready and willing to respond and to interrogate boundaries
between on- and offstage. These masculinities are queered, opened up and
placed squarely in the bracket of pratiques transgenres, while the gazes that
respond are equally complex and layered.50
My emphasis on recent improvements in the Drag King scene may appear
incongruous in the light of the above discussion of a mainstream lack of
understanding of performance techniques. However, I suggest that this lack
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 105

of understanding acts as a backdrop on which these improvements play

out. While the contemporary scene is progressing and while audiences are
beginning to understand Drag King performance, the current and former
lack of mainstream awareness of Drag King performance necessarily affects
the position in which Drag Kings find themselves.51 Further, as I stress in the
final section of this chapter, London’s contemporary climate affects its drag
scene as a whole so that the growing popularity of Drag Kings plays out on
a potentially precarious backdrop.
The current improvements in London’s Drag King scene seem to me to
occur across three categories: the proliferation of Drag King nights and
performances; the growing publicity surrounding Drag Kings; and the
developing links between Drag King performers and other drag performers.
While remaining less celebrated than its Drag Queen counterpart, London’s
Drag King scene continues to develop, including two regular performance
nights in Soho: ‘Boi Box’, the Drag King Cabaret Night hosted by Adam All
and Apple Derrières; and ‘WTF! Wednesdays’ held by LoUis CYfer.52 These
events present valuable queer spaces, adding to London’s rich subcultural
life. In addition to hosting talented established performers, ‘Boi Box’ provides
a platform for burgeoning Drag King performers through their open mic
sessions. For example, both Romeo De La Cruz and Richard Von Wilde
began performing on the ‘Boi Box’ stage and have now undertaken successful
performances elsewhere.53 This supportive atmosphere, fostered by ‘Boi
Box’ and by events such as ‘Bar Wotever’s Female Masculinity Appreciation
Society’, acts to enrich the King scene while equally providing a safe space
for LGBTQIA people to experiment with their gender expression.54
In addition to ‘Boi Box’ and ‘WTF! Wednesdays’, London’s scene includes
workshops, Drag King competitions and performance collectives.55 This
diversity may play a role in the growing attraction of London’s scene for the
mainstream press. Summer 2015 witnessed the BBC Newsbeat documentary
Drag Kings of the UK (featuring Adam All, Richard Von Wilde and Jack
the Lad),56 the publication of ‘8 Drag Kings That Will Leave You Feeling
All A-Quiver’ on news-site Buzzfeed,57 and the inclusion of Drag King
performances and events at London Pride.58 While performers and audience
members are yet to witness the full impact of this publicity, summer 2015
seemed to be an exciting time for the Drag King scene as a whole.
However, as both Lenna and Jen have pointed out, Drag Kings in London
tend to experience peaks and troughs of popularity.59 Committed members
of the scene are frequently unable to push Drag King performance into
the mainstream due to the cost and difficulty of running and maintaining
Drag King events. While it is possible that the current activity may only
be a short-lived peak, I contend that the links forged through and across
contemporary drag scenes may allow King performance to progress further.
The inclusivity offered by nights such as ‘Boi Box’, ‘FMAS’ and ‘King of
the Castle’ – in terms of centring marginalized performers and audience
members through factors such as price scales and accessibility – creates
106 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

a sense of the Drag King scene as a community which represents a form

of queer intersectional politics. Equally, the growing connections between
Drag Kings and Drag Queen, Drag Queer and Burlesque performers augur
well for Drag King popularity while presenting a necessary step towards a
queer performance community. I suggest that such a community is more
necessary now than ever due to the contemporary neoliberal climate and its
effect on performance venues. This sense of community is further evinced in
links across Drag King scenes. From the launch of Drag King bar ‘Kings’ in
Blackpool to the mutual hosting of nights between London and Manchester-
Kings,60 these connections facilitate a sense of community and enable more
people to take part in the Drag King scene.

Cutting the scene

The current climate in the UK, featuring governmental cuts to welfare, the
rise of the neoliberal academy and widespread gentrification, necessarily
affects LGBTQIA Londoners, particularly those who face intersecting forms
of oppression.61 Thus, improvements to the Drag King scene can be seen to
occur in the context of a general sense of precariousness for the drag scene
as a whole. On one level, the Drag Queen scene appears to be encountering
a peak of mainstream popularity; 2014 saw the hit TV show Drag Queens
of London, while May 2015 saw the search for RuPaul’s Drag Race UK
Ambassador with the finals attended by celebrity judges.62 Equally, however,
the rising rents in London have contributed to the loss of multiple drag venues,
including the historic venues Madame Jojo’s, The Joiners’ Arms and The
Black Cap.63 The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a space of particular importance
for queer and trans* patrons, may also be threatened with closure due to a
change in ownership.64 The disparity in popularity between Drag Queens
and Drag Kings may mean that venue losses will have a disproportionate
impact on the Drag King scene; competition for residencies will be fierce,
and managers may hire the performers that they feel are most likely to
provide revenue. Further, as Drag King performance remains connected
to queer women’s scenes, the issue of affordability and rising prices may
also disproportionately affect the Drag King scene. Lenna Cumberbatch
eloquently elucidated this point, emphasizing the costs of running and/or
attending Drag King events and stressing the fact that black and minority
ethnic women – whose job opportunities and pay are frequently less than
those available to white women – are disproportionately likely to suffer as a
result of ‘hidden’ costs. As Lenna argued, these difficulties are also likely to
be exacerbated as a result of intersecting forms of prejudice and oppression
relating to disability, cultural context and trans* status. While disabled
patrons and trans* patrons may incur further expenses in order to ensure
their attendance and safety, these expenses are likely to be disproportionately
greater due to the cost of living and price hikes present in London.
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 107

Conclusion
Beginning this chapter with an exploration of Music Hall impersonation
has enabled me to illustrate elements of the historical legacy of Drag King
performance, while equally demonstrating that male impersonation is not
inherently queer, even as it outlines aspects of masculinity which may be
rendered invisible elsewhere.65 As demonstrated here, Vesta Tilley astutely
balanced apparent challenges to norms with a politics of respectability, and
tailored her performances to popular taste – as in the case of her wartime
performances of soldierly masculinity.66 This chapter has equally emphasized
the correlation between Tilley’s savvy self-positioning and celebrity, and
the popular appreciation of pantomime and Music Hall theatre in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London.
These questions of taste and of correlation permeate the chapter as
a whole, playing a significant role in my analysis of contemporary Drag
King performance. While Tilley could capitalize on the popularity of
‘male impersonation’ during the ‘great age of Music Hall’,67 London’s
contemporary Drag Kings face the two obstacles mapped here: a lack of
mainstream understanding, and the current climate of rising costs and
venue closures. Equally, London’s size may present an obstacle to the
mainstreaming of Drag King performance therein. While some individuals
may continue to feel that their area offers a strong sense of queer community,
they may be unable or unwilling to travel outside their particular area. Such
unwillingness could stem from the cost of public transport, the difficulty of
returning home safely, and/or the cost of outfits and the price of drinks at
a particular night. Moreover, in the current climate, the cost of living may
prevent people from attending nights that they might otherwise enjoy. At
the same time, however, some of the problems faced by LGBTQIA people
in contemporary London – rising rent costs, the loss of established venues,
etc. – have prompted drag performers and queer activists to band together
as a community.68
Overall, I suggest that the contemporary moment includes at least two
interlocking dimensions relating to, or affecting, Drag King popularity
in London. On the one hand, the irruption of drag into the mainstream,
through series such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, the recent BBC Newsbeat
documentary Drag Kings of the UK and the performances of Drag Kings
on the Cabaret Stage at London Pride 2015, seems to suggest that Drag
Kings are steadily gaining in mainstream popularity in London. On the
other hand, however, Drag Kings continue to receive substantially less
pay for their performances than Drag Queens, performance residencies
are difficult to retain, the rising property prices have affected performers,
audiences, and venues alike, and London’s LGBTQIA community has lost
at least three Cabaret venues in the last year.69 These potentially conflicting
circumstances may mean that, while the Drag King scene is developing, it
is unlikely to ascend quickly to the popularity of male impersonation on
108 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

the Music Hall stage. In this way, one might argue that Drag Kings are
indeed too queer for London.
To conclude on a positive note, however, the discussion of contemporary
Drag Kings and of Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier’s pratiques transgenres
has demonstrated that contemporary performances can continue to play
with and (de)construct stereotypical notions of gender, thereby opening
up possibilities for a wider understanding of masculinity and femininity.
Further, the Drag King scene is progressing – if slowly – thereby suggesting
that Drag community spaces will be available to a wider range of people,
que(e)rying gender, one King at a time.

Notes
1 Here, the ‘still’ in my title references two circumstances: first, that despite
its long history, Drag King performance has not yet achieved the success of
Drag Queen performance; and second, to reflect the fact that I first posed this
question in a paper given at the ‘Queer London’ conference at the early stages
of my research.
2 In her introductory piece on queer theory, Annamarie Jagose writes:
While the mobilization of queer in its most recent sense cannot be dated
exactly, it is generally understood to have been popularly adopted in
the early 1990s. Queer is a product of specific cultural and theoretical
pressures which increasingly structured debates (both within and outside
the academy) about questions of lesbian and gay identity. Perhaps
most significant in this regard has been the problematizing by post-
structuralism of gay liberationist and lesbian feminist understandings of
identity and the operations of power.
Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York
University Press, 1996), p. 76.
3 Todd R. Ramlow suggests that to be ‘anti-normative in all regards’ is to be
‘anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-neoliberalism, anti-ableism’ (‘Queering,
Cripping’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory (Farnham:
Ashgate Publishing, 2012), p. 130).
4 Here, ‘individual practice’ refers to performance practices (such as Drag King
performance) or sexual practices.
5 I would like to thank these performers for their kind help and invaluable
insights. My first interviews with Jen Powell and Lenna Cumberbatch, two
London-based Drag Kings, took place in January 2013 and August 2013,
respectively. I have also had the pleasure of several informal discussions with
Jen, whose monthly Drag King night ‘Boi Box’ will be discussed here. While
Lenna performs less frequently now than she did during the early stages of
my research, I have chosen to centre her work alongside that of Jen Powell
in this analysis as both of these performers interrogate hegemonic models
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 109

of masculinity in their performances. Equally, both Lenna and Jen offer

particularly perceptive insights into the complexities and issues at work in
London drag scenes.
6 Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier introduces ‘pratiques transgenres’ in ‘Des
“Femmes travesties”: Repenser et queeriser le travestissement’, in Queer
Zones: Politique des identités sexuelles et des savoirs (Paris: Editions
Amsterdam, 2006), p. 130. This text was published under the name Marie-
Hélène Bourcier.
7 Sarah Maitland, Vesta Tilley (London: Virago, 1986), p. ix. Tilley’s exceptional
success is testified by Maitland’s remarks that Tilley constituted ‘the highest-
earning woman in Britain in the 1880s; the woman who could “fill any Hall
anywhere” ’ (p. 5), as well as by the praise offered by W. R. Titterton in From
Theatre to Music Hall (London: Stephen Swift & Co., 1912). Maitland also
testifies to the longevity of Tilley’s career, remarking on the fortuitous fact that
‘the years of her career’ coincided with the ‘great age of Music Hall’ (p. 11) in
Britain.
8 Gillian Rodger, ‘ “He Isn’t a Marrying Man”: Gender and Sexuality in the
Repertoire of Male Impersonators, 1870–1930’, in Sophie Fuller and Lloyd
Whitesell (eds), Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 109.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Titterton, in Maitland, Vesta Tilley, p. 3.
13 Titterton, in particular, values the image of childish innocence as portrayed by
Tilley: ‘yet her soul is that of a boy – or perhaps, shall I say, of a girl at the age
when girls and boys are very much alike. She is and always will be a naïve child’
(Titterton, From Theatre to Music Hall, p. 145 in Maitland, Vesta Tilley, p. 3).
14 Lady Mattilda de Frece, Recollections of Vesta Tilley (London: Hutchinson
and Co., 1934), p. 25.
15 Rodger, ‘“He Isn’t a Marrying Man”’, p. 119.
16 Gillian Rodger, who stresses the distinct opposition between onstage
masculinity and offstage feminine respectability, notes that, in an article
written by Tilley, ‘[s]he is also careful to distinguish her onstage “business”
from her offstage “private” life, and invokes late nineteenth-century middle-
class constructions in which women properly belong in the home, or private
sphere, while men occupy the public sphere’ (ibid., p. 122).
17 These vocals are clearly audible in recordings of Tilley’s performances.
One example can be found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=pf3LsGQPxSU (accessed 20 May 2015).
18 de Frece, Recollections, p. 248.
19 As Tracy C. Davis writes, ‘the popular association between actresses
and prostitutes and belief in actresses’ inappropriate conduct endured
110 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

throughout the nineteenth century’. ‘Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian

London’, Theatre Research International 13.3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/
S0307883300005794 (accessed 20 May 2015).
20 J.S. Bratton underlines Tilley’s femininity in a somewhat scathing manner:
‘Tilley undercut any challenge she made by a parade of essential womanliness;
she was most definitely not a dissenter in her public and private life off stage,
acting as “The Lady Bountiful of the Music Halls” whose husband became
a Tory MP’ (‘Irrational Dress’, in Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds),
The New Woman and Her Sisters (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1992), p. 79).
21 Rodger, ‘“He Isn’t a Marrying Man”’, p. 121.
22 de Frece, Recollections, p. 19.
23 Ibid., pp. 45–6.
24 Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier, ‘Des “Femmes travesties” aux pratiques
transgenres: repenser et queeriser le travestissement’, in Queer Zones:
Politique des identités sexuelles et des savoirs (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006).
25 Genres Pluriels, ‘Visiblité des personnes aux genres fluides, trans* et intersexe:
Accueil, Publications, AuteurEs’, http://www.genrespluriels.be/Marie-Helene-
Bourcier?lang=fr (accessed 25 May 2015).
26 Bourcier, ‘Des “Femmes travesties” ’, pp. 129–31.
27 Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier, ‘F*** the Politics of Disempowerment in the
Second Butler’, Paragraph 35.2 (2012), pp. 235–40.
28 Ibid., pp. 239–40.
29 Bourcier writes: ‘L’expression même de travestissement, outre qu’elle oblige à
focaliser sur le vêtement, présuppose qu’il existe une vérité du genre: celle-
là même que l’on travestirait. Or, cette affirmation ne peut se comprendre
que d’un point de vue hétérocentré, dans le cadre du système de relation
sexe/genre imposé par le régime hétérosexuel’ (‘Des “Femmes travesties” ’,
p. 128). I translate this as follows: ‘As well as obliging a focus on clothing, the
expression “cross dressing” presupposes that there is a truth of gender; that
which one crosses. That is, this affirmation can only be understood from a
heterocentric point of view, along the lines of an assumed relationship between
sex and gender as imposed by the heterosexual system.’
30 The above is my translation. The original quote runs as follows: ‘l’ensemble
des actes et des signes qui participent de la performance du genre (les
opérations répertoriées par Marjorie Garber: l’habillement, la nomination, la
performance et l’acting-out)’. Ibid., p. 130.
31 Bourcier stresses the fact that some individuals positioned as ‘femmes
travesties’, such as Brandon Teena and Billy Tipton, seemingly identified
outside the category ‘woman’ and could potentially be seen as transgender.
Ibid., p. 127.
32 Ibid., pp. 127–34.
33 Ibid., pp. 131–2.
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 111

34 Significantly, genderfluid and genderqueer people have a range of gender

expressions and are not necessarily ‘androgynous’ in the sense indicated above.
35 Bourcier, ‘Des “Femmes travesties” ’, p. 130.
36 Maitland, Vesta Tilley, p. 117.
37 de Frece, Recollections, p. 143.
38 Jen made this point in a telephone conversation on 25 May 2015, contrasting
this expectation to the acceptance of Drag Queens who do not perform
‘passable’ or ‘realistic’ femininity.
39 As I have seen at Drag King Cabaret night ‘Boi Box’, this surprise can be
followed by delight, excitement and laughter. However, as Jen noted in the
telephone call referenced above, some audience members have questioned why
‘cock jokes’ are necessary in a Drag King performance.
40 The expectation that Drag Queen performance will be excessive and
exaggerated may be linked to the close relationship between drag and camp,
described by Esther Newton in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in
America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 105–7.
41 Judith Jack Halberstam underlines the naturalization of masculinity in Female
Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University, 1999), p. 238–41
and in In a Queer Time and Place (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2005), p. 126. While agreeing with Halberstam’s assertion
that Drag Kings can interrogate this naturalization of masculinity (pp. 126–7),
I equally question how this naturalization affects audience’s understanding of
Drag King performance.
42 Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train (London: Harper Collins,
2001), pp. 340–1, 364–5.
43 Bourcier, ‘Des “Femmes travesties” ’, pp. 128–32. Bourcier emphasizes the idea
of gender as personally constructed through references to queer and trans*
community practices, focusing on the way in which experience and subjectivity
shape gender.
44 In the same way that male impersonators such as Hindle embodied
masculinity onstage through song (Rodger, ‘“He’s Not a Marrying Man”’,
p. 109), Adam All and Apple Derrières perform medleys which tell stories,
taking on the characteristics and emotions expressed by the songs in question.
45 Drag King Cabaret Night ‘Boi Box’ is a monthly event hosted by Adam
All and Apple Derrières at SHE Soho. For more information, see http://
dragkingadamall.wix.com/adam-all#!boi-box/c1ait (accessed 1 May 2015).
46 bell hooks, ‘Is Paris Burning?’ in Reel to Real: Race, Class, and Sex at the
Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 276.
47 This performance occurred at ‘Boi Box’ on 6 May 2015.
48 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1998), pp. 260–1.
49 Following Amy André, who discusses her experiences of hostile reactions to
black masculinity in ‘And Then You Cut Your Hair: Genderfucking on the
112 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Femme Side of the Spectrum’, I suggest that these reactions constitute an

example of institutionalized racism (Amy André and Sandy Chang, ‘And Then
You Cut Your Hair: Genderfucking on the Femme Side of the Spectrum’, in
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Berkeley, CA:
Seal Press, 2006), pp. 254–69, 262–3).
50 Participating in pratiques transgenres can facilitate the development of one’s
own understanding of gender and allow one to challenge cisheterosexist
assumptions about gender (Bourcier, ‘Des “femmes travesties” ’, pp. 130–1).
Significantly, however, I am in no way suggesting that participating in
pratiques transgenres necessarily alters one’s gender status.
51 While some individual Drag Kings continue to encounter a lack of
understanding, the lack of mainstream awareness equally means that, although
the scene is growing, Kings may continue to be perceived as ‘niche’, while
certain Drag Queens are perceived as relatively mainstream in comparison.
52 ‘WTF! Wednesdays’ are held at the Admiral Duncan on Old Compton Street;
http://www.the1440.co.uk/(S(xhd1dhd2zpria4ddccmsf20x))/Venue/Whats-On
/admiral-duncan#T [accessed 31 May 2015].
53 Romeo De La Cruz performed at the sixth and seventh ‘Barelesque’ events
at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 2014 (http://www.barelesque.com/events/
(accessed 31 May 2015)), while Richard Von Wilde appeared at ‘King of the
Fringe’ at Brighton’s Marlborough Theatre on 8 May 2015 (http://boxoffice.
brightonfringe.org/cabaret/9560/king-of-the-fringe (accessed 31 May 2015)).
54 The ‘Wotever Manifesto’ explicitly states its aim to be a ‘safer space for the
LBGTQ community’ and stresses its acceptance of diverse gender identities;
http://wotever.pragmative.net/wotever-manifesto/ (accessed 31 May 2015).
Equally, as discussed in our conversation of 25 May 2015, Jen has received
compliments about the status of ‘Boi Box’ as a safe space for gender
expression and gender play.
55 ‘The Pecs’ are a Drag King collective performing in London and elsewhere:
http://www.pecsdragkings.com/new-page/ (accessed 31 May 2015).
Additionally, East London drag venue The Glory now hosts a vibrant, popular
Drag King competition named ‘Man Up’, which is composed of six heats and
offers a prize of £1,000 to the winning contestant. For more details about this
event, see http://www.theglory.co/man-up/ (accessed 27 May 2016).
56 ‘Drag Kings of the UK’ can be viewed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat
/article/32764145/drag-kings-of-the-uk-the-women-who-perform-as-men
(accessed 31 May 2015).
57 http://www.buzzfeed.com/jamestreacher/8-drag-kings-that-will-send-you-all-a
-quiver-1gacv#.ky80GKWQ9p (accessed 31 May 2015).
58 The official Pride Cabaret stage included a performance by Adam All and
Apple Derrières (http://prideinlondon.org/wardour/ (accessed 31 May 2015)),
while Pride-related events included performances by ‘The Pecs’ (http://www
.pecsdragkings.com/summer-tour (accessed 31 May 2015)).
59 Lenna made this comment in our interview of August 2013.
 ARE DRAG KINGS STILL TOO QUEER FOR LONDON? 113

60 Kings Bar Blackpool held its promotional launch at Blackpool Pride, 13–
14 June 2015; http://www.kingsbarblackpool.co.uk/# (accessed 31 May 2015).
‘The Drag King’ Lydia Bernsmeier-Rullow hosts Manchester’s Drag King
night ‘Boi Zone’ and made her London debut at ‘Boi Box Fools’ in April 2015.
Adam All appeared at ‘Boi Zone’ in July 2014. For more information on ‘Boi
Zone’, see https://www.facebook.com/TheBoiZone (accessed 31 May 2015).
61 Ian Silvera discusses the Conservative government’s proposed welfare cuts in
the following article: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tory-welfare-policy-questioned
-after-no-child-benefit-cuts-promise-1503862 (accessed 1 June 2015). Hugo
Radice offers one account of neoliberalism in the UK university system: H.
Radice, ‘How We Got Here: UK Higher Education Under Neoliberalism’,
ACME: An International E Journal for Critical Geographies 12.3 (2013),
pp. 407–18, http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Radice2013.pdf (accessed
2 June 2015). Writing in The Londonist, Shehzad Raj stresses the impact
of gentrification on the LGBTQIA, cabaret and alternative communities,
noting that the losses of venues have been experienced by some as a loss of
community: http://londonist.com/2015/02/londons-lgbt-and-alternative
-scenes-are-fighting-gentrification.php (accessed 2 June 2015). While separate,
these phenomena act together in terms of their cumulative effect on London’s
population.
62 Drag Queens of London, first broadcast in April 2014, is available to watch
online at London Live: http://www.londonlive.co.uk/programmes/drag-queens
-of-london/e5ad2975 (accessed 2 June 2015). The Londonist’s article on the
search for a UK ambassador for RuPaul’s drag race is as follows: https://
londonist.com/2015/06/rupaul-sashays-into-london-to-handpick-her-uk-
ambassador.php (accessed 2 June 2015).
63 Michael Segalov discusses the closure of these historic venues in Vice:
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/photos-from-this-weekends-protest-to-save
-the-black-cap-in-camden (accessed 2 June 2015).
64 Ibid.
65 This chapter does not aim to provide an overall history of the development
of male impersonation and Drag King performance. Such an account would
be difficult in the space available. Further, there is reason to suggest that Drag
King performance did not develop on a smooth line from male impersonation
on the vaudeville stage. Significantly, some male impersonators, such as
Stormé DeLarverié, who performed between 1955 and 1969, continued to
perform in theatrical contexts after the 1930s (Elizabeth Drorbaugh, ‘Stormé
DeLarverié and The Jewel Box Revue’, in Leslie Ferris (ed.), Crossing the Stage:
Controversies on Cross-Dressing (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 120–43).
Nevertheless, as Drorbaugh suggests, ‘gender impersonation’ generally faded
from the mainstream stage after the decline of vaudeville (ibid., p. 124), while
‘by 1933 … the feared conflation of (homo)sexuality with gender impersonation
caused male impersonation seemingly to evaporate and female impersonation
to go underground’ (ibid., p. 124). Thus, while performers like Stormé and
the theatrical group Split Britches – who began performing in the late 1970s;
https://splitbritches.wordpress.com/about/splitbritches (accessed 3 June 2015) –
continued the tradition of male impersonation, it seemingly continued in a
114 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

fragmented, underground manner rather than operating on a clear, continuous

line which culminates in Drag King performance as practised today.
66 Maitland, Vesta Tilley, pp. 117–18.
67 Ibid., p. 11.
68 Consider, for example, the protests held after the unexpected closure of the
Black Cap (https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/photos-from-this-weekends
-protest-to-save-the-black-cap-in-camden (accessed 3 June 2015)), and the
subsequent creation of the ‘We Are The Black Cap’ group, which is aiming
to ensure that the Black Cap remains an LGBTQIA venue; https://www
.facebook.com/groups/weareblackcap/ (accessed 3 June 2015). Additionally,
the group ‘Camden Queer Punx 4eva’ are now occupying the Black Cap,
protesting against gentrification in Camden; http://www.nottelevision.net
/inside-the-squatted-black-cap/ (accessed 8 June 2015).
69 In terms of the impact of property prices on LGBTQIA venues, Ben
Walters writes: ‘Now the soaring London property market makes many
sites vulnerable to commercial and residential redevelopment when leases
end’; ‘Closing time for gay pubs – a new victim of London’s soaring
property prices’, Guardian, 4 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.
com/society/2015/feb/04/closing-time-gay-pubs-lgbt-venues-property-prices
(accessed 3 June 2015).
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Claude McKay: Queering

Spaces of Black Radicalism
in Interwar London
Gemma Romain and Caroline Bressey

Between the two world wars, London served as a challenging, engaging and
cosmopolitan space for individuals from the African and Asian diasporas,
including students, writers, political activists and artists. For some, as
Maroula Joannou has observed, ‘inter-war London acted as a mecca for a
varied assortment of radical subaltern networks in which the Indian student
might exchange ideas informally with the Jamaican sailor or the Somali
visitor converse with the politician from Kenya, or the exile from the Gold
Coast’.1 Within this cultural space, queer black artists, writers and activists
lived, worked and socialized. This chapter explores the experiences of one
such queer black activist, the Jamaican poet and activist Claude McKay,
who lived in London between 1919 and 1921 as he worked to complete the
publication of a collection of poetry. The chapter concentrates specifically
on the formation and expressions of his cosmopolitan literary, radical, queer
and political identities. Though known primarily for his contributions to
America’s Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay’s sojourn in London
provides a lens through which to examine moments of cultural exchange,
in spaces such as art galleries, the newspaper office and the political club,
and places of cultural exchange, including cafes and jazz clubs. During his
stay in London, McKay spent time in the British Museum reading room
researching Marx’s writings, carrying out research on African sculpture,
and meeting writers including George Bernard Shaw. He also worked with
116 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

FIGURE 8.1 Jamaican writer and poet Claude McKay (1889–1948), 1926. (Photo
by Berenice Abbott/Getty Images.)

the Suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, the painter Frank Budgen, and
Charles Kay Ogden, the polymath who edited McKay’s collection of poems.
McKay identified within himself a ‘mania for wandering’; he had always
wanted to visit Europe, especially England, a desire he recorded in an early
poem ‘Old England’, but McKay’s experiences in London were marred
by racism.2 McKay’s queer identity was a constituent of his life as an
internationalist, a radical and freethinker. As Josh Gosciak argues:

for McKay as a sexual rebel, internationalism crosses over into the

twentieth century not as ideology, but as a vast social network of pacifists
and feminists, renegades and vagabonds, quirky intellectuals and assorted
political rogues, and spills out disruptively onto the modern dance floors
of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cardiff, Liverpool, Marseilles, and Tangier.3

Like characters highlighted in Judith Walkowitz’s Nights Out (though he

was in London during an earlier period), McKay found in Soho an engaging
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 117

and multi-cultural, though complex and at times alienating, social life where
he met activists, writers, artists, sailors and boxers.4 In his personal letters
written during his time in London, as well as his 1937 autobiography A
Long Way From Home, he reported suffering verbal abuse in the Soho-
based 1917 club, violence in East London and racial discrimination when
trying to find accommodation in Bloomsbury. Without access to venues such
as the International Socialist Club (ISC) in the East End or friends he met
at the Drury Lane club for ‘colored’ colonial soldiers, McKay believed he
would not have survived his London residence. However, even at the ISC
he experienced racism from one member. Although McKay experienced
complex and varied intellectual, social and cultural experiences, the city did
not provide the same opportunity to engage or freely enjoy ‘networks of
public and commercial sociability’ as it did for many of the men identified
in Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London, when his ‘colour alone’ made him feel
so conspicuous.5 Exploring McKay’s London life experiences, this chapter
argues that there is a need to examine the intersections of class and race
with queer identity and radical activism, which have been little explored
in the context of the black interwar presence in Britain. As Gary Edward
Holcomb states, McKay’s political activism ‘cannot be disentangled from
his queer resistance’.6 Inspired by Holcomb’s pioneering work on McKay’s
queer identity, this chapter considers the multiplicity of McKay’s London
through a lens of queer black spaces. It does so by focusing on published
and unpublished writings, including his London poems which formed part
of Harlem Shadows (1922), and his 1919–20 publications in the Workers’
Dreadnought.
McKay’s poetry and letters provide us with a first-hand account of some
of his London-based experiences. A Long Way From Home was shaped by
years of oppressive surveillance by the British and US governments for his
political beliefs as well as his eventual move away from communism. His
memoirs, representing his identity seventeen years after his time in London,
served, as Holcomb reflects, to ‘not so much conceal his sexual difference
and black anarchism as wrap up these features of his past in a picturesque,
carefree form of bohemianism’ whereby ‘elements of his personal history do
not infect his present’.7 The texture and diverse experiences of his London
living are somewhat obscured in his 1937 autobiography; as Wayne Cooper
reflects, to write an autobiography that fully detailed his associations with
the Workers’ Socialist Federation and his friendship with Sylvia Pankhurst
and other members of the British Left would have meant structuring his
memoir around an entirely different emphasis.8 From a reading of his
personal correspondence and publications in The Workers’ Dreadnought,
it is clear that, as Cooper has argued, McKay’s personal experiences of
England were more intense than his memoirs revealed. In a 1966 interview,
McKay’s London friends, Frank and Francine Budgen, remembered McKay
was ‘openly homosexual’.9 However, in exploring ‘evidence’ of a queer
black life or history, Holcomb’s work is instructive in suggesting that to
118 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

understand queer identities such as McKay’s, we must not solely seek to

look for ‘evidence’ of queerness in relation to McKay’s sexual relationships;
queer black histories cannot just be examined by declared mentions and
moments of same-sex sexuality. How McKay’s queer identity surfaced
and was performed is more complex. McKay’s writing, which commented
upon his identity or the ‘queer’ way in which he viewed the world and lived
his life, was often implicit and subtle. As Holcomb states,

[i]f we read his writings with a methodology calculated to divulge the

gay or bisexual constituent, to decode closeted signs of the life, then we
pursue an incomplete study. When it comes to considering McKay’s life
and labor in the 1920s and 1930s, queer is the ideal terminology. In the
genealogy of queer, one may trace a subject agency that refuses to submit
itself tractably to questionings of identity.10

In line with Holcomb’s theories, a focus on Nadia Ellis’ important work

in exploring post-war queer black life in Britain is particularly instructive;
Ellis found that ‘visibility could only be an ambivalent political imperative
for the Caribbean queer subject in post-war Britain. To be visible is to be
vulnerable to surveillance. As such, evidence as to a subject’s sexuality,
his or her class, race and national identification is often muted and
complexly coded’.11 In addition, McKay’s documenting of other people’s
radical and nonconformist sexual and social lived experiences appears in
his fictional work and this literary identity is one of the most significant
aspects of his queer life; as Holcomb states, ‘the current language of queer
counterhegemony may be traced to its origins in the 1920s’ and ‘some of
the earliest expressions of queer counterspeech are present in McKay’s
black radical leftist writings’.12

Political, queer and creative beginnings

McKay was born in 1890 in the Clarendon Parish of Jamaica, the youngest
child of a small farming family. In his childhood, McKay lived for several years
with his brother Uriah Theodore, a schoolteacher who became responsible for
his education. McKay developed an interest in reading literature, particularly
English literature, including works by Charles Dickens, Walter Scott and
William Shakespeare, as well as the writings of freethinkers such as Annie
Besant.13 McKay began to write poetry, though initially his career was coupled
to a trade scholarship which was to be spent in Kingston. He was unable to
continue his education when the school was destroyed in the 1907 earthquake
and instead McKay apprenticed himself to a tradesman in Brown’s Town,
where he stayed for two years.14 Particularly inspired by everyday life and
people in Jamaica, his 1909 poem ‘Hard Times’ explored Jamaica’s poverty
and exploitation. This was included in his 1912 book Songs of Jamaica.15
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 119

Throughout his apprenticeship, McKay continued writing poetry and it

was at the tradesman’s shop that he met Walter Jekyll, an English migrant
who helped arrange the publication of Songs of Jamaica.16 Jekyll had a deep
interest in the folk cultures of Jamaica and England. When he met McKay,
Jekyll had just published his edited collection Jamaican Song and Story:
Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes and Dancing Tunes, with the
Folk-lore Society.17 Jekyll and McKay began to correspond about poetry
through which a friendship developed. For a short time McKay moved to
Kingston and joined the police force, a career he disliked but one which
enabled him to live in the city. Here McKay studied in Jekyll’s library,
reading works by Shelley, Keats, Dante, Leopardi and Baudelaire.18 Gosciak
has recently explored how McKay’s admiration for Victorian writers has
been neglected in historical analyses of his work and life. One result of
this absence is that the particularities of McKay’s life in a British colony,
British colonialism, and its intersections with literary ‘Englishness’ have
often been marginalized.19 This is a reminder that writing about ‘queer
London’ includes writing about, and researching beyond, the boundaries
(lived and archival) of London; for London includes those whose lives were
influenced by and lived within empires, diasporas, political communities – at
city, transregional and transnational scales. Londoners were not bounded
in their personal geographies. This transnational identity proved to be one
of the main reasons for the deep disappointment McKay later experienced
when living in London, where he was confronted with the reality of his
racialized existence as a black person in the imperial metropole, as opposed
to the romantic imaginative geographies of England shaped by his reading
of English literature in Jamaica.
Soon after leaving the police, McKay published his first books of poetry,
Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (both 1912).20 Cooper argues that
‘these early poems can be read today as autobiography, as social documents
of historical value, and as linguistic and artistic creations of pioneering
importance in the development of modern West Indian literature’.21 These
works reached an international audience and were celebrated within
Jamaica; in December 1912, the Board of Governors of the Jamaica
Institute awarded ‘the Musgrave Medal to Mr. Claude McKay for his verses
in native dialect’.22 Songs of Jamaica contained fifty poems reflecting the
political and socio-economic experiences of the everyday lives of Jamaicans,
while Constab Ballads reflected on McKay’s experiences as a policeman.23
These books built upon his earlier poems published in Jamaican periodicals,
primarily in the Gleaner. McKay’s use of creole in his early poetry, starting
from the 1909 ‘Hard Times’, was something he decided to pursue more
often after discussions with Jekyll. He recalled Jekyll saying, ‘this is the real
thing. The Jamaica dialect has never been put into literary form except in
my Annancy stories. Now is your chance as a native boy to put the Jamaica
dialect into literary language. I am sure your poems will sell out’. McKay
recalled being initially ‘not very enthusiastic’ about Jekyll’s statement
120 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

because the Colonial education in Jamaica had designated the ‘Jamaican

dialect’ as ‘vulgar’, but then he began seriously thinking about it and ‘as I
knew so many pieces in the dialect, which were based on our local songs
of the draymen, the sugar mills, and the farm lands, I decided to do some
poems in dialect’, and so ‘I had the consolation of having done my share in
helping to preserve the dialect in written form’.24
The relationship between Jekyll and McKay was a complex one, which
can be characterized as a queer friendship. Their relationship, based on
literature and a love of horticulture, surfaced in homosocial affection and
in their participating in non-heteronormative intellectual spaces. Cooper
argues that McKay ‘once indirectly suggest[ed] that Jekyll introduced him
to the reality and to the moral legitimacy of homosexual love’.25 In a 1918
essay in Pearson’s Magazine, McKay reflected upon Jekyll’s influence on his
career and the various authors they read and discussed; as Cooper observes,
‘he significantly grouped together Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and Walt
Whitman’.26 During this time, McKay’s poetry speaks to an imagined or
experienced queer romantic homosocial/homosexual intimacy with Bennie,
a police officer colleague. This intense queer relationship between Bennie
and McKay (or McKay’s fictional narrator) is told within three poems
published in 1912: two in Constab Ballads and one in Songs of Jamaica.
In Songs of Jamaica, the poem ‘To Bennie (In Answer to a Letter)’ promises
his love ‘burns as of old’ and nothing can sever their friendship.27 In Constab
Ballads, ‘Bennie’s Departure’, described by William J. Maxwell as ‘McKay’s
most pointedly homoerotic poem’, tells the story of their meeting, working
together, the narrator’s love for Bennie and his pain at Bennie leaving the
police depot. This poem was then followed with ‘Consolation’ where he
again reflected on the pain of Bennie’s leaving.28
McKay left Jamaica in 1912, aged 21, to study agriculture in the United
States, but instead continued with poetry and carried out a number of short-
term low-paid jobs before moving to New York. McKay initially lived in
the South where he experienced the shocking racism of Jim Crow. While
studying in Kansas, his political ideas, present in his Jamaican poetry,
developed into something more radical, influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois’s The
Souls of Black Folk (1903), which he read at Topeka Public Library. At
the end of his time in Kansas, McKay received a gift of a few thousand
dollars, probably from Jekyll.29 With this McKay moved to New York and
married his Jamaican girlfriend, Eulalie Imelda Lewars, during a time when,
according to Cooper, ‘McKay had yet to come to terms with himself, his
ambitions, and his personal sexual inclinations.’30 He soon separated from
his wife and Lewars moved back to Jamaica where she gave birth to their
child, Rhue Hope McKay.31
New York, in particular Harlem, had a significant effect on McKay.
During this time he joined the black socialist organization, the African Blood
Brotherhood, and explored his queer sexuality, having ‘brief but passionate
affairs’ with men and women.32 He continued writing and though he did not
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 121

want to be defined as a poet who dealt only with race, his poems on race were
a significant articulation of his identity, reflecting on racism, colonialism,
and the experiences of being a person of African heritage living in countries
saturated with racial discrimination.33 By 1917, he was published in Seven
Arts, using the pseudonym Eli Edwards.34 McKay’s poem ‘The Harlem
Dancer’ was, as Gosciak argues, one of the first poems to explore Harlem
‘as a geographic site of cultural performance and oppression.’35 In 1918,
Pearson’s Magazine published five of his poems with an autobiographical
section on McKay’s life and career. In this, McKay expressed his opposition
to the war and in 1920 he reflected ‘perhaps ten years hence the white
peoples will realize what the war has done to their civilization’.36
Throughout 1919, before his arrival in London, McKay worked on
the railroads, living through racialized insecurities and fears heightened
by the racist riots which broke out in the United States (and Britain)
that year.37 Working as a waiter on the railroads and travelling through
different cities, McKay remembered the intense fear he and others felt.
That year, the Liberator published seven poems of McKay’s, which
included the influential ‘If We Must Die’.38 The poem was, and is, cited by
many as articulating the pain and feelings of black people being targeted
by racist violence, and concludes: ‘Like men we’ll face the murderous,
cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!’39 McKay’s
time on the railroads also initiated his personal identifications with a global
geography of black, international working-class men; these homosocial
bonds of black transnational community have been analysed by Michelle
Stephens.40

Politics and the ‘colour bar’ in London

McKay moved to London through a chance opportunity but with a specific
aim to publish a book of poetry.41 His experiences in the city were complex;
he contributed to literary and political radical writing and publishing
in London. He also formed a number of friendships, perhaps the most
significant being with Charles Kay Ogden, a Cambridge academic, linguist,
editor and writer, who was one of the ‘Heretics’. Ogden founded the society
as an undergraduate and it developed into a dynamic intellectual forum.42
Ogden also worked in assisting the publication of McKay’s next book of
poetry.43 They wrote to one another frequently during this time on subjects
including linguistics and art, and they visited the British Museum together
and attended classical concerts and exhibitions including the Chelsea
Book Club Negro Art exhibition of 1920.44 The pair also attended the
1917 Club, located close to Ogden’s Soho flat. McKay’s ideas on England,
however, radically altered after experiencing the realities of British racism,
including the colour bar in many of London’s hotels and social clubs. In his
memoirs, McKay painfully recalled the colour bar preventing him finding
122 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

accommodation near to the British Museum; he had wanted to stay close

to the Museum’s reading room where he spent much of his time reading
and drafting work.
Though eventually exasperated by the paper, much of his London
experience centred on working alongside the radical activist Sylvia
Pankhurst on her socialist newspaper The Workers’ Dreadnought.
He joined the Workers’ Socialist Federation, which produced the
newspaper, and helped edit and run the paper along with contributing
his own articles. His April 1920 article, ‘A Black Man Replies’, was a
refutation of the sexual racism of E.D. Morel’s ‘Horrors on the Rhine’ article
published in George Lansbury’s newspaper the Daily Herald.45 Morel’s
article ‘Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose’, was a racist
polemic on black soldiers being stationed in post-war Germany, filled with
racist ideas of the sexual ‘savagery’ and ‘primitivism’ of Africans. McKay
asked in his reply, ‘why all this obscene, maniacal outburst about the sex
vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?’46 Other articles focused on
subjects including the experiences of dockers – of all ethnicities – as well
as socialism, racism and Garveyism, the movement founded by Jamaican
Marcus Garvey. In a January 1920 Dreadnought article entitled ‘Socialism
and the Negro’, published under his own name, McKay considered racism,
capitalism and black nationalism alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and the
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People),
arguing that ‘[i]f our Negro professionals are not blindly ignorant they
should realise that there will never be any hope – no sound material place
in the economic life of the world for them until the Negro masses are
industrially independent.’47 These articles were based on meeting a wide
range of activists as well as dock workers in East London. One article he
helped to publish, penned by a Royal Navy sailor called Springhall under
the pseudonym S.000 (Gunner) and called ‘Discontent on the Lower
Deck’, prompted a police raid on the Dreadnought’s offices. Pankhurst,
who refused to name McKay as being involved in the publication or reveal
that he was the author of the ‘The Yellow Peril and the Dockers’ (another
piece targeted by the police), was convicted of publishing seditious articles
and sentenced to imprisonment.48
McKay also published poetry in the Dreadnought, the first, published
before he began working there, being reprints from the Liberator, including
‘If We Must Die’.49 Thereafter he published, under various pseudonyms,
fiercely political, radical poems in the Dreadnought on the experiences of
the marginalized, on racism, capitalism, and struggles against oppression.
These included the poem ‘Battle’, published under his pseudonym Hugh
Hope, where he wrote about a dream of his demise and mused on the fight
against imperial power.50 His activities tied to the paper, including the
people he met while working there and those he interviewed for stories,
were a significant constituent of his political and social life during his
time in Britain. His radical poems and articles are generally, with the
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 123

exception of his reply to E.D. Morel and his article on ‘Socialism and the
Negro’, published using pseudonyms. His non-political poems, however,
including the poem ‘Summer Morn in New Hampshire’, were published in
the Dreadnought using his own name.51 This division represents the careful
way in which he negotiated his newly formed career in London-based
radical Communism with his career as a poet. However, his radicalism
and poetry cannot and were not completely divorced from one another
and he did not seek this division. But as he feared, the Dreadnought
was subject to police surveillance and so McKay’s radicalism became
more potentially dangerous and in need of protection during his short
London stay.
Though not a Garveyite, McKay also wrote articles for Garvey’s
publication Negro World while in London. In the early 1920s, he supported
the movement’s radical politics as representing a transitional phase to
Communism, stating in a January 1920 edition of the Workers’ Dreadnought
that ‘although an international Socialist, I am supporting the movement, for
I believe that for subject peoples, at least, Nationalism is the open door to
Communism’.52 In later years, Garvey condemned McKay’s novel Home
to Harlem, in the Negro World, including it within a general criticism
of work arising from the Harlem Renaissance as ‘under the direction of
the white man … show[ing] up the worst traits of our people’.53 Home to
Harlem focused on black proletariat characters and stories of their sexual
activity and sexuality in a manner much opposed by socially conservative
intellectuals such as Du Bois, who wanted to celebrate and promote
‘respectable’ blackness. In a 1928 review of the book in The Crisis, Du Bois
explained that he found the novel nauseating ‘and after the dirtiest parts of
its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath’.54 McKay’s political radicalism
was tied to his affinity with working class life in all its diversity – a long-
standing public commitment which began with his early Jamaican poems
about the lives of Jamaican working people and social, racial and economic
inequality.

Poetry, friendship and the politics of race

On Gerrard Street, Soho, the 1917 Club was the haunt of various
intellectuals, activists and writers.55 Jane Marcus has argued, though ‘the
1917 Club was a political haven for the Woolfs and other socialist members
of Bloomsbury, it was not mixed racially and had none of the international
camaraderie of the colored clubs McKay enjoyed’.56 McKay sought to
respond by organizing an exhibition at the 1917 of the works of his friend,
the artist and anarchist Henry Bernard, but an incident at the club marred
the possibilities for McKay. McKay reflected in a letter to Ogden, ‘I thought
it was rather embarrassing for you & Miss Olivier; for myself I didn’t care –
for I am always coming up against his type and worse – in America & also
124 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

here, so I’m used to it. My colour alone makes me so conspicuous; I must

reconcile myself to such things.’57
McKay’s trip to London was in part supported by McKay’s Dutch friend
J.L.J.F. Ezerman, who financed the publication of Spring in New Hampshire.
McKay met Ezerman in New York, where he had hired McKay to carry out
research at the New York Public Library on ‘the Negro’. The relationship
between McKay and both Ezerman and Ogden, exhibited through their
correspondence, was, as Gosciak argues, ‘clearly homosexual in the coded
patterns of the early twentieth century’.58 Ezerman closely followed
McKay’s poetry and Gosciak maintains that ‘Ezerman, like Walter Jekyll,
was particularly taken with McKay’s “sex-passion” sonnets, modeled on the
earlier Constab Ballads and written in a suggestive style that was popular
among the fin-de-siècle decadents.’59 In a letter to Ogden, McKay recalled
Ezerman’s views on Spring in New Hampshire, writing ‘[m]y first letter
referring to the book came from my friend in Holland and he is very, very
pleased – although he regrets the exclusion of his double 4 sonnets! Being a
powerfully sexed person who is ashamed of his passion he has sentimentalised
ideas about that sort of stuff.’60
McKay’s love poems, while not overtly political, were radical in several
ways. His poetry was published in an environment of sexualized racism
against black men, and McKay was explicitly exploring and sharing
expressions of love to the wider world as a man of African-Caribbean
heritage. McKay commented on the sexualized racism he and others had
to contend with as a result of being a poet of African heritage who wished
to write and talk about love, implicitly referencing Morel’s sexualized
racism. McKay recalled in his autobiography that a review of Spring in New
Hampshire in the Spectator stated that ‘Mr. Claude McKay never offends
our sensibilities. His love poetry is clear of the hint which would put our
racial instinct against him, whether we would or not.’ ‘So there it is again’,
McKay responded. He continued, ‘As it was among the élite of the class-
conscious working class, so it was among the aristocracy of the upper class:
the bugaboo of sex – the African’s sex, whether he is a poet or pugilist. Why
should a Negro’s love poetry be offensive to the white man, who prides
himself on being modern and civilized?’61 McKay’s poems were radical in
their discussions, musings and declarations of love, including queer love
and ‘transgressive’ love. His love poem ‘One Year After’, published in
Harlem Shadows a year after his return to the United States from London,
can be read, as A.B. Christa Schwarz argues, ‘as depicting the consequences
of not only an acceptance but also an espousal of the powerful force that
transgressive sexuality in a racial and/or homosexual context constitutes’.62
In this poem, Howard J. Booth argues that ‘as well as addressing race, [in]
the references to “illicit wine” and life beyond “the bound of laws”, we can
see McKay using a language developed during the Renaissance for male-
female love that fell foul of strong social and legal interdictions to address
illegal homosexual sex’.63
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 125

Politics, friendship and radicalism

McKay’s work with the The Workers’ Dreadnought saw him document the
lives of those affected by global capitalism, particularly sailors and soldiers
from across the globe living and working in London’s East End. These were
the individuals McKay chose to socialize with and his friendships were
built upon not just common kinship but also an internationalist identity
of workers’ struggles. McKay wrote about these friendships in articles he
produced for the Dreadnought. In ‘The Yellow Peril and the Dockers’, which
explores the effects of racism against Chinese dockworkers, he started by
recalling his own experiences of the East End:

A fortnight ago, three friends and I went down to visit a ship that had
just arrived from the Argentine … We were met at the gate by an old pal
who took us down to the hold of his ship, where we had breakfast à la
creole, rice and corn meal and flour dumplings swimming in cocoanut
oil, and thick, coarse, unadulterated cocoa made in native style with the
fat floating on the top. It was a great meal, for years I had not tasted one
like it; but it turned bitter in my mouth when I thought of the despairing
crowd of men outside. Even the wretched life of my swarthy friends in the
ships’ bottoms was better than gnawing starvation ashore.64

McKay’s two main haunts in London were the International Socialist

Club and the Drury Lane Club, the latter a club for ‘colored soldiers’.
Reflecting on his time in London, McKay did not think that he could have
survived his time in the capital without the ‘freedom’ provided by these
two spaces – though having exposed the racist paternalism of the woman
who ran the Drury Lane club in the Negro World, he spent most of his
time at the International Socialist Club. This he described as a space ‘full
of excitement, with its dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas:
Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade
unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets
which flourish in London’.65 The International Socialist club was located
in the East End, a significant space of interwar cosmopolitanism which
was home to Eastern European Jewish and Irish migrants and many of the
interwar London black working class who were employed in seaport trades.
In A Long Way From Home, McKay reflects upon the men (he mentions no
women) who he introduced to the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch:

a mulatto sailor from Limehouse, a West Indian student from Oxford,

a young black minister of the Anglican church, who was ambitious to
have a colored congregation in London, a young West Indian doctor from
Dulwich, three soldiers from the Drury lane club and a couple of boxers.
The minister and the doctor did not make a second visit, but the others
did.66
126 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

These same dockers, sailors and ‘vagabonds’ appear in his novels, though
usually in locales such as France and the United States. Home to Harlem,
however, does include reference to London docking life. In the first part of
the novel, the protagonist, Jake, before travelling back to Harlem, works as
a docker in the East End of London where ‘he found friends. He found a
woman. He was happy in the East End’; but Jake also witnessed the 1919
anti-black riots, where he ‘saw a big battle staged between the colored and
white men of London’s East End. For three days his woman would not let
him out-of-doors.’67 Though women feature less prominently in his novels,
there are several central women characters within them. McKay also
socialized with women and Gosciak mentions his connections with radical
lesbian women.68
McKay and Ogden both spent time at the ICS and McKay mentioned
the club in a number of their letters. Before they arranged their first meeting
to start work on McKay’s book, McKay suggested the ISC as a meeting
place, which was open between 12 pm and 12 am, but it was also ‘quite
a sordid place & there are no conveniences for private talk’.69 Though he
found good friends at the ISC and it became an important space for him,
McKay experienced a painful episode of racism there too. He wrote to his
friend Francine (who would marry his artist friend Frank Budgen) about
the incident and that he would have to meet him ‘in Committee about the
charges I have made against him for trying to stir up race prejudice in the
club’.70 Later, in his autobiography, he reflected on the fear of surveillance
at the club towards the end of his stay, and that ‘the secretary showed me
an anonymous letter he had received, accusing me of being a spy. I declare
that I felt sick and was seized with a crazy craving to get quickly out of that
atmosphere and far away from London.’71
For McKay, the East End of London, though providing a refuge from the
elite bohemian space of the 1917, also had a geography of isolation and fear.
He experienced overt racist violence in East London, both against himself
and against others who worked in the shipping industry, as he documented
in The Workers’ Dreadnought. In a letter to Ogden, explaining why he
missed an invitation to the British Museum, he recalled the direct violence he
experienced, though also the moments of solidarity he experienced through
friendship:

Were it not for some white friends I should have been badly mauled
in Limehouse a fortnight ago & last Monday I was the chief actor in
a near tragedy at the Old St. tube station. I was walking home from
the Socialist Club with a young Serbian & just as we said goodbye a
drunken South African soldier (discharged) came up to me and asked
whether I came from Basutoland or some other place. I answered no
& tried to pass but he held me up, got hold of my tie, & was rather
threatening. Of course I know what the average S.A. white thinks of the
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 127

blacks & what was evidently working in his sodden brain so I thought
quickly & sent him sprawling to the street. Instantly a little mob
gathered round me, but some friends of mine from the club came along
& two policeman who perceived what was happening so drove them
off. Had there been no help they wouldn’t have reached me though as
I would have dived into the tube immediately after hitting out. One
must always be on one’s guard. Since then, until to-night, I have been
sleeping with a friend over West; so the incident is really the cause of
my missing your letter & interesting afternoon with you. So soon as I
can find a suitable place I will move back to the West side for its a little
safer there.72

Black histories of queer London

McKay’s time in London was complex; alongside surveillance, fear, racism
and violence, he established significant and positive friendships and
achieved his aim of publishing a collection of poetry while maintaining and
developing his interest in radical left wing politics. Unpacking how these
experiences intersected with his understanding of his sexualized identity
holds many of the complexities of coded and opaque readings of archival
works with which many of those researching queer London contend.
However, if we are to unpack the ‘freedom’ that bohemian and queer spaces,
such as central London clubs or working-class spaces in the East End, held
for McKay, his sexual identity cannot be uncoupled from his experiences
of racism in the city which had held so much promise for him before he
arrived. However, the geographies of identity of the black men with whom
McKay socialized remain, for now, deeply embedded within the archive.
Were the black soldiers, boxers and colonial soldiers to whom he refers part
of a black queer network ‘of public and commercial sociability’, providing
an opportunity for McKay to tap into sites of ‘vibrant, extensive and
diverse queer urban culture’?73 What might their stories be and how might
geographies of black queer London differ and overlap with those of other
queer communities in inter-war London with sensitivity to how ‘race’ made
queer blackness visible in certain spaces in ways other queer communities
were not? And what of black lesbian women? How are their many and
undoubtedly diverse stories to be uncovered and integrated into the histories
of queer London? It is ironic that McKay’s feeling of conspicuousness in
regards to race and also, perhaps, queerness, is obscured in the archives.
However, as with uncovering many diverse or marginal experiences in the
archives, a reading ‘against the grain’ provides us with an understanding of
the way in which McKay’s queer black life was experienced, formed and
articulated, even if we do not have access to all the biographical details of
this queer black life.
128 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Notes
1 Maroula Joannou, ‘Nancy Cunard’s English Journey’, Feminist Review 78
(2004), pp. 141–63, 151.
2 Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 25 February 1920, The Charles Kay Ogden
Archive, McMaster University. See Winston James’s exploration of the
symbolism and meaning behind McKay’s poem ‘Old England’ in Winston
James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry
of Rebellion (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 95–6.
3 Josh Gosciak, The Shadowed Country: Claude McKay and the Romance
of the Victorians (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006),
p. 14.
4 Judith Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
5 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 3;
Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 2 April 1920, Charles Kay Ogden Archive,
McMaster University. Letter from Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 2 April 1920
is used with the permission of the Literary Estate for the Works of Claude
McKay.
6 Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black
Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2007), p. 12.
7 Ibid., p. 33.
8 Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance:
A Biography (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987;
paperback 1996).
9 Cited in ibid., p. 129.
10 Holcomb, Claude McKay, p. 12, original emphasis.
11 Nadia Ellis, ‘Black Migrants, White Queers and the Archive of Inclusion in
Postwar London’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
17.6 (2015), pp. 893–915.
12 Ibid., p. 12.
13 Biographical information on McKay comes from Cooper, Claude McKay,
p. 15.
14 Ibid., p. 22.
15 Gosciak, The Shadowed Country, pp. 59–60. The first verse of ‘Hard Times’
states ‘De mo-me wuk, de mo’ time hard, I don’t know what fe do; I ben’ me
knee an’ pray to Gahd, Yet t’ings same as befo’. In Claude McKay and William
J. Maxwell, Complete Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004;
paperback 2008), p. 41.
16 Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 24.
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 129

17 Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes and
Dancing Tunes, Collected and Edited by Walter Jekyll (London: Pub. for the
Folk-lore Society by D. Nutt, 1907).
18 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 13.
19 Gosciak, The Shadowed Country, pp. 17–18.
20 Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 35.
21 Ibid., p. 36.
22 The Gleaner, 7 December 1912, p. 13. This medal was named after Sir
Anthony Musgrave, a former governor of Jamaica and the founder of the
Institute of Jamaica for the Encouragement of Literature, Science and Art in
Jamaica.
23 Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 36.
24 Claude McKay, ‘Boyhood in Jamaica’, Phylon 14.2 (1953), pp.134–45, 142;
and Claude McKay to C. K. Ogden, 12 March 1920, Charles Kay Ogden
Archive, McMaster University.
25 Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 30.
26 Ibid., p. 30.
27 McKay and Maxwell, Complete Poems, p. 82.
28 Ibid., p. 296.
29 Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 70.
30 Ibid., p. 70–1.
31 Ibid., p. 73.
32 Ibid., p. 75.
33 Ibid., p. 78.
34 This pseudonym was based on his mother’s name. See Cooper, Claude McKay,
pp. 81–2.
35 Gosciak, The Shadowed Country, p. 11.
36 McKay to Ogden, 25 February 1920, The Charles Kay Ogden Archive,
McMaster University.
37 On the 1919 race riots in Britain, see Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots,
Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2009).
38 Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 99.
39 McKay and Maxwell, Complete Poems, pp. 177–8.
40 Michelle Stephens cited in Nadia Ellis, ‘The Eclectic Generation: Caribbean
Literary Criticism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century’, in Michael
Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone
Caribbean Literature (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), p. 140. See
Michelle A. Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of
130 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2005).
41 Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 18 February 1920, Charles Kay Ogden
Archive, McMaster University.
42 John Forrester explains that ‘The Heretics Society was founded in Cambridge
by undergraduate C. K. Ogden in 1909 and soon developed into the most
adventurous forum for intellectual debate in Cambridge until its demise
in 1930. The Cambridge Magazine was started in 1912 by Ogden as an
extension of the Heretics.’ John Forrester, ‘The English Freud: W.H.R. Rivers,
Dreaming, and the Making of the Early Twentieth-Century Human Sciences’,
in Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (eds), History and Psyche: Culture,
Psychoanalysis, and the Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 78.
43 Claude McKay, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (London: Grant
Richards, 1920).
44 Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 54.
45 Winston James, ‘A Race Outcast from an Outcast Class: Claude McKay’s
experience and analysis of Britain’, in Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals
in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 71–92.
46 Claude McKay, ‘A Black Man Replies’, The Workers’ Dreadnought,
24 April 1920. On this see Letter from George Lansbury to Maude Royden,
16 April 1920, papers of Agnes Maude Royden Women’s Library Collection
and Wayne Cooper and Robert C. Reinders. ‘A Black Briton Comes “Home”:
Claude McKay in England, 1920’, Race & Class 9.1 (1967): 67–83.
47 Claude McKay, ‘Socialism and the Negro’, The Workers’ Dreadnought,
31 January 1920.
48 Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism
(London: Routledge, 2004; first published 1996), pp. 128–30.
49 Gosciak, The Shadowed Country, pp. 105–6.
50 Hugh Hope (pseudonym for Claude McKay), ‘Battle’, The Workers’
Dreadnought, 9 October 1920, p. 5.
51 Claude McKay, ‘Summer Morn in New Hampshire’, The Workers’
Dreadnought, 21 July 1920.
52 McKay, ‘Socialism and the Negro’.
53 Cited in Robert A. Hill (ed.), General Introduction to The Marcus Garvey and
UNIA papers, Volume 1, p. iv.
54 Cited in William J. Maxwell, ‘Banjo Meets the Dark Princess: Claude McKay,
W.E.B. Du Bois, and the transnational novel of the Harlem Renaissance’,
in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 170–83, 170.
55 Jean Mills, ‘The Writer, the Prince and the Scholar: Virginia Woolf, D. S.
Mirsky, and Jane Harrison’s Translation from Russian of The Life of the
Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself – a Revaluation of the Radical Politics of
 QUEERING SPACES OF BLACK RADICALISM IN INTERWAR LONDON 131

the Hogarth Press’, in Helen Southworth (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf,
the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), p. 160.
56 Marcus, Hearts of Darkness, pp. 54–5.
57 Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 2 April 1920, Charles Kay Ogden Archive,
McMasterUniversity.
58 Gosciak, The Shadowed Country, p. 118.
59 Ibid., pp. 117–18. Gosciak states that these sonnets, termed ‘sex-passion’ by
Ezerman in a letter from him to McKay on 18 June 1920, ‘might have been
poems written about Exerman or homoerotic pieces in Constab Ballads’. Ibid.,
p. 178, n. 92.
60 Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 9 October 1920, The Charles Kay Ogden
Archive, McMaster University.
61 McKay, A Long Way From Home, pp. 88–9.
62 A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 95.
63 Howard J. Booth, ‘Claude McKay in Britain: Race, Sexuality and Poetry’, in
Len Platt (ed.), Modernism and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), pp. 137–55, 147.
64 Leon Lopez (pseudonym for Claude McKay), ‘The Yellow Peril and the
Dockers’, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 16 October 1920.
65 McKay, A Long Way From Home, p. 68.
66 Ibid., p. 70.
67 Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1987; first published 1927), pp. 6–7.
68 Gosciak, The Shadowed Country, p. 106. Presently, we do not know the
names of these women.
69 Claude McKay to C. K. Ogden, 25 February 1920, Charles Kay Ogden
Archive, McMaster University.
70 Cooper, Claude McKay, pp. 130–1.
71 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 86–7.
72 Claude McKay to C.K. Ogden, 2 April 1920, Charles Kay Ogden Archive,
McMaster University.
73 Houlbrook, Queer London, p. 3. Research for this chapter was undertaken as
part of ‘Drawing over the Colour Line: Geographies of art and cosmopolitan
politics in London 1919 – 1939’ funded by the AHRC AH/I027371/1.
 CHAPTER NINE

The British Society of the Study

of Sex Psychology: ‘Advocating
the Culture of Unnatural
and Criminal Practices’?
Lesley A. Hall

A meeting at the Hotel Cecil in the Strand in Central London on

12 August 1913, chaired by the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld,
brought together an all-male group interested in homosexual law reform,
and informally inaugurated what became the British Society for the Study
of Sex Psychology (BSSSP). This set out to advance an agenda based on the
writings of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, and the inspiration of
continental writers and activists such as Hirschfeld. Several historians have
explored London as a metropolitan site facilitating the development of a
covert subculture of illicit male sexual interactions, but it was also a place,
one of the few, where the claims for changes in the law and social attitudes
being discussed at this meeting could be openly articulated. It is highly
improbable that such a group could have come together anywhere else than
London, or an equivalently large and metropolitan, even cosmopolitan, city.
A conurbation needs to reach a certain critical mass for there to be enough
people who are interested in a marginalized subject regarded as morally
dubious to form a viable group, and to have the kinds of spaces available
to provide a meeting place for such groups. The anonymity of a large city
also more readily enables the establishment of associations with interests
which the majority may regard with some suspicion: there is less chance of
134 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

being identified by one’s next-door neighbour going to and from meetings

if those meetings are a good bus, tram or tube ride away from home. There
were provincial members of the BSSSP, but the correspondence it received
from them, and the endeavours to set up local groups, suggest that, however
supportive of its aims, they felt a little short-changed.1
This chapter considers the role of the BSSSP in changing attitudes
towards homosexuality in the UK before the Second World War, a period
during which homosexuality was illegal and the laws against it, which
paid no regard to mitigating circumstances of privacy, consent or legal
adulthood, were considered a ‘blackmailer’s charter’. Being homosexual
was widely stigmatized and alluded to in derogatory terms. In this
pervasively hostile ambience it was eccentric, to say the least, to suggest
that the homosexual was not an evil degenerate and sinner. It was a
considerable risk even to suggest that he might be deserving of humane
treatment. However, as John Stuart Mill famously observed, ‘the crotchet
of to-day, the crotchet of one generation, becomes the truth of the next
and the truism of the one after’.2
The Society itself may appear peripheral and obscure, and its members
were perceived, and may even have perceived themselves, as weirdo eccentrics.
Lytton Strachey, after attending a meeting of the Society, described them
to Virginia Woolf as having the appearance of ‘a third variety of human
being’. ‘Hairless perverts with twitching lips’, fumed American educational
psychologist Homer Lane, an invited speaker.3 Gilbert Murray was alleged
to have ‘gibed that sex reform seems to be “a sort of disinterested enthusiasm
for sexual misconduct in all its forms, from obscene language to unnatural
vice” ’.4 Nonetheless, more than a few of the Society’s members made a mark
in various fields, and several feature in standard works of reference such as
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – see, for example, the entry
on George Ives.5 Cranky eccentrics they may have been, but they cannot be
dismissed as a bunch of seedy losers.
It can be considered a ‘queer’ organization in more than just its homophile
agenda. The Society itself and the kind of person who belonged to it were
also perceived as ‘queer’ in the contemporary colloquial meaning of peculiar,
eccentric, failing to conform to current standards of conventionality. It was
a (relatively) open organization for both sexes, enabling frank debates
that the public might attend. This engendered a ‘queering’ approach to the
discussion of sexuality by destabilizing existing assumptions about who
might talk about sexual questions, in what context, and how they might do
it. Possibly its juxtaposition of topics apparently dissimilar but sharing in
perceptions of being ‘unnatural’ and controversial also served this purpose.
The attitude was very much one of enquiry and investigation rather than
authority and certainty: the Australian doctor Norman Haire, who joined in
1920, was disappointed to discover that ‘most of the people were enquirers
on the same plane as myself’, not figures ‘at whose feet I might sit and drink
in wisdom’.6
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 135

Group discussion of sexual matters taking a scientific approach was not

entirely new but had previously been part of a male homosocial culture
emphasizing discretion beyond the cohesive in-group. A body such as the
Cannibal Club, the inner circle of the Anthropological Society, a dining
club founded by Sir Richard Burton, was a members-only purlieu of elite
males. Lisa Sigel has characterized the members’ interests as combining
‘imperialism, sadism, and sexism’. While using the rhetoric of science to
legitimize their interests, they constituted a closed coterie within which
it was possible to explore the liminal space between scientific study and
pornography, in particular pruriently observing the racialized Other.
They had no commitment to openness or generating wider debate: their
publications appeared under pseudonyms (for fear of prosecution under the
obscenity laws) or in limited editions, and the club kept no records.7
Tentative discussions of homosexuality took place among British
psychiatrists in the later nineteenth century. However, these occurred within
clearly demarcated professional environments and were regarded as unsuited
for a general audience. In fact, Ivan Crozier, in his analysis of these discussions,
characterizes the general approach as ‘cautious, conservative and internalist’.
Even though British psychiatrists might be reading the works of Continental
sexologists, unlike them they were not, it seems, intersecting with the work of
reformers or engaging with self-aware homosexuals who did not necessarily
define themselves within terms of pathologization.8 Their deliberations seem
remote from the activities of the rather marginalized group of medical men
(and others) who were trying more generally during the later nineteenth
century to investigate the mysteries of sex and elucidate its problems.9 The
more general attitude within the British medical profession was delineated by
Dr Ethilda Meakin Herford (who would go on to have significant connections
with the BSSSP). She had discovered during her early years as a doctor that
‘subjects and conditions causing the profoundest misery in married life’ were
absent from the medical curriculum and never discussed. However, when
attending the social events associated with medical congresses, at which
women were still rare, she was astounded by ‘the prominent place given to
these matters as a subject of laughter and jest’.10
Countering this mindset was indeed subversive, and during the early
decades of the twentieth century there arose certain spaces within which
productive interactions between homophile reformers and members of the
medical profession, mainly in the area of psychiatry, could occur. These,
unlike the closeted case-presentations of elite psychiatrists, the smutty
homosociality of the Cannibal Club, or the bawdy jesting of unbuttoned
doctors, had a significant and growing influence on increasing societal
toleration towards homosexuality, and even some impact on ameliorating
the rigours of legal policy prior to actual law reform.
A number of individual writers had set the ball of reform rolling
during the later decades of the nineteenth century. As early as 1883, John
Addington Symonds had produced a limited edition pamphlet for private
136 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

circulation on A Problem in Greek Ethics (invoking the cultural respect

for classical antiquity), followed in 1890 by A Problem in Modern Ethics.
In 1892, Havelock Ellis wrote to his friend Edward Carpenter concerning
his projected work on Sexual Inversion in collaboration with Symonds,
stating that ‘We want to obtain sympathetic recognition for sexual inversion
as a psychic abnormality which may be regarded as the highest ideal, and to
clear away many vulgar errors – preparing the way, if possible, for a change
in the law.’11 Carpenter was engaged in a similar project with his own essay
on homogenic love in a free society, his inclusion of a chapter on same-
sex relationships in the later editions of his influential book Love’s Coming
of Age (1896), his study The Intermediate Sex (1909), and the anthology
Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902).
These pioneering steps took place at a time when the problem had
burst upon public knowledge through the medium of the Cleveland Street
Scandal of 1889–90, and the media circus of the successive trials of Oscar
Wilde in 1895. Of the latter, a despairing correspondent wrote to Edward
Carpenter that ‘the late miserable trial resulted in an expression of most
horrible opinion all over London … it seems as if the whole affair had set
the world back fifty years’.12 Carpenter himself wrote to Havelock Ellis in
more optimistic vein, claiming that ‘I find all this stir has roused up the
Urning community and pulled it tog[ethe]r. a good deal.’13 However, later
the same year Carpenter’s publisher, after a period of vacillation, refused
to publish Carpenter’s volume on sex: ‘I think there is no doubt that the
H.L. [Homogenic Love] pamphlet upset his applecart – and I daresay he has
heard talk going on at the clubs wh[ich] alarmed him.’14
These works provided great inspiration and encouragement to those
who identified themselves as among the group being described, as well as
providing more general enlightenment.15 Ellis wrote to Carpenter in 1918,
commenting on the effects of their writings over a period of some twenty
years:

The process of evangelising intermediate folk seems to go on regularly

and steadily. At almost regular intervals they write or call mysteriously
and unexpectedly. Either they read your book and want mine, or they
read mine and of course I put them on to yours … I heard from a man of
nearly 40 who has only just now found the clue to his mystery by reading
your book.16

Besides these virtual relationships mediated through texts and

correspondence, George Ives founded the homophile Order of Chaeronea
during the 1890s, but this was a secretive organization specifically for
homosexuals, about which little information survives even among Ives’s
own papers.
A perhaps overlooked precursor for the British Society for the Study
of Sex Psychology was the radical and shocking feminist journal The
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 137

Freewoman, published during 1912 before it mutated into the literary

periodical The Egoist, to which a number of the eventual founders and early
members of the BSSSP had contributed. As contributor and eventual editor
Rebecca West remarked, ‘the greatest service’ it performed was ‘through
its unblushingness’, mentioning ‘sex loudly and clearly and repeatedly, and
in the worst possible taste’, and ‘shatter[ing] the romantic conception of
woman’. It ‘even mentioned the existence of abnormalities of instinct’.17 A
Freewoman Discussion Circle began to meet in London to take the debates
that had begun in the pages of the journal, especially in the vigorous
exchanges in its correspondence columns, into a more immediate form.
Besides the general meetings, which were controversial enough, on topics
such as divorce and birth control, a smaller group came together for the
more informal exchange of ideas on ‘Sex Oppression and the Way Out’
(in an artist’s studio in Chelsea, another area associated with bohemian
artists and intellectuals).18 It was probably as a result of the impact of The
Freewoman that Laurence Housman was able to claim to his friend Janet
Ashbee in 1913 that ‘[i]t is wonderful how open to a free discussion of
everything I now find women – suffragist women I mean … even in the last
two years the advance has been immense; and between now and six years
ago it is as if a century had intervened’.19

Situating a space for queer conversations

There was something particularly significant about the specific urban
spaces within the wider context of the metropolis with which the BSSSP was
identified. As with most large cities, specific areas had distinctive characters
of their own. Many of the Society’s meetings were held in Bloomsbury
and its office and library were finally established in Bloomsbury Square,
which seems peculiarly appropriate to the organization’s aims and self-
positioning. The Society intended to facilitate discussion and interrogation
rather than engage in lobbying. Its activities were envisaged as ‘the
reading of papers in agreement with the general objects’ and the issue of
occasional pamphlets, while collecting data ‘on matters within the scope
of the Society’. The image aimed for, according to Carpenter’s good friend
E.B. Lloyd, was ‘serious stodgy [and] scientific’:20 a base in bohemian
Soho or Fitzrovia would have had quite unsuitably raffish connotations.
Although the 1917 Club, the politically radical club named for the advent
of revolution in Russia with ‘all [its] little girls … who used to run about
talking about libidos and orgasm’, found its home in Gerrard Street in
the heart of Soho, this would not have done for the BSSSP.21 Bloomsbury,
home to numerous academic institutions and societies, struck the right
note of seriousness, while also being central and accessible. At the period
in question, it had probably not yet acquired the associations generated
by the network of intricately connected friends and lovers who became
138 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

known as ‘the Bloomsbury Group’, but it is significant that the individuals

who became part of this coterie were based there and already breaking
down their inherited Victorian taboos on what might be discussed between
the sexes and how in conversation with one another. A subsidiary base
of operations for the Society was Hampstead, an area already strongly
associated with a liberal-minded intelligentsia, as well as the pioneering
experiment in urban development for class diversity, Hampstead Garden
Suburb. It was a frequent location for committee meetings in members’
homes.
The Society’s stated aims were to promote ‘the consideration of problems
and questions connected with sexual psychology from their medical,
juridical and sociological aspects’, especially ‘(1) The Evils of Prostitution
(2) Inversion (3) Sexual Ignorance (4) Disease (5) Aberrations of various
kinds’. Men and women members and officers would work ‘together for
a common understanding’ upon ‘matters which vitally concern both
sexes’.22 The inaugural general meeting of the Society on 8 July 1914 had
the ‘distinguished magistrate’ Cecil Chapman in the chair, and an audience
of sixty members and guests beside the ten committee members. George
Ives recorded his ‘joy [at] hearing a stipendiary magistrate … denounce
the senselessness and cruelty of the sentences passed on inverts … Taboos,
though the most terrible things to question, once really attacked must go
down in the end. The difficulty is to begin the assault’.23
The Society produced an occasional series of pamphlets between 1914
and 1934, a fairly significant number of which dealt with topics relating
to homosexuality: The Social Problem of Sexual Inversion, an abridged
translation (by Cicely Hamilton) of a German treatise; The Relation of
Fellow-Feeling to Sex by Laurence Housman; The Morbid, the Abnormal
and the Personal by Harold Picton; Psychological Causes of Homoerotism
and Inversion by H.D. Jennings White; Edward Carpenter’s study of Some
Friends of Walt Whitman; and Cecil Reddie’s obituary tribute to Carpenter
himself. These sold well and had considerable circulation, disseminating the
Society’s ideas well beyond its membership and bringing its very existence
to the notice of interested individuals.24 However, the project of founding a
journal never got off the ground.25
Although homosexual rights were clearly of significant interest to the
original founding members, from the outset the Society positioned the issue
within a much broader reconceptualization of sexuality. On one hand, this
could be taken as a strategic device and a means by which to construct
potentially valuable alliances. Alternatively, it suggests a holistic perception
that the stigma against homosexuality in contemporary society was
profoundly imbricated within a range of other negative attitudes towards
sexuality and gender prejudices, given that a man could admit that he shrank
from the use of artificial contraception ‘as from sodomy’.26
This vision was adumbrated in particular by the poet, novelist, dramatist,
pacifist and male supporter of female suffrage, Laurence Housman.27 He
gently chided his friend and colleague George Ives in 1920 for being
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 139

sometimes reluctant to see your friends striking against social injustice

when it does not seem immediately to affect the Cause [i.e the cause of
homosexual law reform]. But, as I see it, all injustice affects the cause:
because where there is injustice there is not love: and love through all the
community is the remedy, and would put an end to our wrong.28

This was clearly a continuing debate: a few years later, Housman wrote
again to Ives about the problems of a single-issue approach, arguing that the
difficulty with Ives’ Order of Chaeronea, composed mainly, if not entirely,
‘of those who are H.S.’, was that it was ‘necessarily secretive’. There was
a danger that membership would tend to ‘the curious and the specially
affected’, while the secretive and ritualistic nature of the Society would tend
to deter ‘many who are serving the cause’.29
It has been suggested that ‘the concerns of male homosexuals’ always
dominated the Society, and among contemporaries there was a persistent
impression that it ‘concerned itself almost exclusively with the homosexual
question’.30 In fact, there was recurrent anxiety over too close an identification
with homosexuality: a 1921 ‘publication’ including the BSSSP among
‘addresses … used as “rendezvous” by homosexuals’ caused the committee
distress. For example, an offer to include an account of the Society’s work
in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen in 1923 appeared to
the committee ‘to be in a list of societies interested in homosexuality’. They
did not desire this, ‘but would be pleased to be included in a list of those
interested in Sex Psychology’.31
Members were aware that their enterprise could be regarded as dubious,
leading to anxieties about becoming a ‘happy hunting ground for Mayfair
in search of “thrills” ’ (‘Mayfair’ here represented another aspect of London,
that of sensation-loving ‘high society’), or the prey of gutter journalists
(‘Fleet Street’, yet another specific London site). There was worry about how
to safeguard the Society from undesirables, and some committee members
were even averse to the publication of their own names. ‘[G]roundless fears
concerning “spies” and similar obsessions’, and the subjection of candidates
for membership to ‘vexatious inquisition’ persisted well up to the 1930s,
irritating E. Lonsdale Deighton, the then Secretary, to the point of threatened
resignation.32 He wrote a long letter to fellow committee member Harold
Clare Booth expressing his views:

[I]t is legitimate to press for modifications in the laws which at present

bear unfairly on the invert. Such a course, however, need not be secret
and unavowed – on the contrary, I think it most necessary that it should
be entirely above board … I think you would be in agreement with me
that the law needs amendment to bring it into conformity with present
day knowledge of the innate condition of inversion.
… I decline to be a party to the Society being used in a subversive
way to advance this matter otherwise than scientifically, impersonally
and honestly.33
140 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

George Ives continued to fear that ‘sensational journalist[s]’ could damage

the Society, when ‘lectures of Dr X and old Dr G’ had even ‘surprised
the committee’.34 Other members, however, claimed to the contrary that
‘[t]wenty years ago the subject was much more tabu [sic]’ and that this
situation had eased.35
After the Society had been going for a decade or so, there was a
perception that attitudes were changing, though even dedicated members
were cautious in attributing this to the Society’s own activities. Laurence
Housman could not

decide, in my own mind, how far the B.S.S.P. [sic] has itself been
instrumental in helping to form a new public opinion … or whether it
only started at the psychological moment. Anyway, it is quite certain that,
since it started, the attitude toward sex-problems has greatly changed
and improved: that what the B.S.S.P. set itself to do, as a ventilator, has
actually been done: words and things are no longer taboo.36

Even the rather less sanguine Ives considered that things were improving: in
1928, he confided to his diary, ‘But we have moved: Radclyffe Hall’s book
cd not have been even published 40 years back … Now a magistrate has
called the book … obscene but it has many defenders.’37
Housman also perceived that ‘freedom of discussion among the young,
and the growing freedom from prejudice, are very marked’. While he
doubted that the laws on homosexuality would be reformed in his lifetime
(although he did survive, possibly the only founder member of the Society
to do so, to see the publication of the Wolfenden Report, he died before
the 1967 Act), he envisaged them becoming a dead letter except in cases
of overt indiscretion:38 ‘on all sides … [there are] signs that the shackles are
loosening’. He was also ‘by correspondence and in other ways, peacefully
penetrating certain minds – men of influence – in the matter of individual
sex-freedom’.39 Ives gained some cheer from the appearance of the word
‘homosexual’ in the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, writing
to Havelock Ellis that ‘[t]his shows some progress in the popular attitude
to the question. Formerly … we had only indecent words and associations
for it.’40
The BSSSP seldom engaged in activism, consistent with its agenda
of combining ‘insistent investigation’ with ‘suspension of judgement’.
However, in 1931, along with a great number of other individuals and
groups, it protested against the severe sentence passed on Augustine Hull,
the ‘Liverpool man-woman’. Hull, a young working-class man who had
been living as a woman since early adolescence and who would probably
now be identified as trans rather than homosexual, had been sentenced
to eighteen months hard labour under the laws relating to indecency
between males, largely on evidence from another young man who had
lived with Hull for six months but had not, he claimed, realized Hull’s
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 141

biological sex. The initial agitation against the ‘iniquitous state of the
law’ this revealed originated with the barrister John Stevenson writing in
The Weekend Review but the Society, and individuals within it, strongly
supported protests to the Home Secretary and held a large meeting on the
issue. The Home Secretary, however, seems to have been unmoved.41 Ives
was unsurprised: ‘It will be a long road to obtain justice and freedom;
strong and obvious as the case is. But we must keep on educating, and
breaking the Taboo’. He was cynical about the petition, ‘except that it calls
attention to the problem’.42

Moving towards the mainstream

Another much more mainstream initiative occurred in the wake of the
Hull case: the establishment of an Institute for the Scientific Treatment of
Delinquency by a group of doctors, psychologists and psychoanalysts who
believed that there were many instances (including homosexuality) in which
existing punitive methods were ineffective, inhumane and counterproductive.
This body was initially based within the West End Hospital for Nervous
Diseases in Welbeck Street in Marylebone: if not actually in Harley Street,
within its penumbra of medical respectability. In 1937, the Institute moved
to independent premises in nearby Manchester Street and established its
‘Psychopathic Clinic’ in Portman Square.43 This was therefore geographically
a very different proposition to a talking shop in Bloomsbury. Unlike the
BSSSP with its fears of ‘Mayfair’, the Institute undertook significant efforts
to acquire aristocratic, distinguished and all-round respectable patrons.
A Ladies Committee was established to undertake appeal work and organize
charitable events. So reputable was the Institute that it even managed to get
a radio appeal for support broadcast by the BBC, at that date under the
puritanical rule of Director-General Lord Reith.44
While this body may at first simply appear to be a manifestation of the
replacement of criminalization of homosexuality by its medicalization, and
certainly the Institute was anxious to appear a reputable and medically
sound organization, we may note that Havelock Ellis was a signatory of
the initial letters to the press proposing its establishment, and Laurence
Housman featured among its vice presidents.45 Many of the doctors,
psychoanalysts and others involved with it had had at least some connection
with the BSSSP, and the attitude of the Institute towards the older, smaller
and possibly rather less reputable organization does not suggest that they
were anxious to repudiate this connection. Although in 1939 the Institute
agreed ‘not to cooperate’ with the Society’s desire for a speaker at a planned
meeting in Caxton Hall, Westminster (another site strongly associated with
progressive causes), this was specifically ‘on this occasion’ rather than as an
issue of general principle:46 Dr E.T. Jensen, the Chairman of the Institute,
had chaired at least one of the Society’s lectures, in 1932.47
142 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

It is arguable that the Society, by providing a space for discussion and

meeting between committed reformers and those in the medical professions,
had enabled productive interactions with a significant influence on the
development of moves in the direction of more humane attitudes towards
the homosexual, and strategies to ameliorate his situation, even if they fell
short of actual legal reform. Several names which appear in the Scientific
Committee minutes of the Institute listed below had varying degrees of
association with the Society,48 and additionally suggest other possible
networks through which its influence may have been disseminated.
A number of figures who were active in psychoanalytical circles were
represented in this cross-over group (British psychoanalysis was itself heavily
London-based, with its headquarters also in the Harley Street area). Barbara
Low, one of the founders of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, had joined
the BSSSP in 1917 (having formerly been a participant in The Freewoman
and its circle) and became active in the Sex Education Study Group.49 She
addressed the April 1920 Quarterly Meeting on ‘Some considerations of sex
from the psycho-analytic viewpoint’,50 and served briefly as a member of the
Executive Committee.51 Adrian and Karin Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother
and sister-in-law, early British disciples of Freud) had briefly been members
of the Society from 1919 to 1920.52 The psychoanalyst Harold D. Jennings
White had a long-standing history of involvement in the BSSSP, having
joined the Society in 1919,53 and actively participated in the discussions of
the ‘Heterosexuality’ Study Group.54 He was the secretary of the literature
subcommittee,55 and was elected to the Executive Committee in 1922,56
on which he served until around 1931. Although he appears to have left
the committee around the middle of that year, he remained involved to the
point of offering to lead the proposed revived ‘Inversion’ Study Group.57
He lectured to the Society on ‘The Incest Problem’ in June 1923,58 and on
‘Some Psychological Causes of Sexual Inversion’ in October 1925.59 The
latter presumably turned into his pamphlet published under the Society’s
auspices, Psychological Causes of Homoeroticism and Inversion (1925). Dr
Sybille Yates joined the British Sexology Society, as it had been renamed,
in 1932,60 and was suggested as a possible speaker in 1933.61 Although
James Glover had been more active in the BSSSP before his early death in
1926,62 his brother Edward Glover knew of it and had been invited to be
a speaker.63 Dr Grace Pailthorpe and John Rickman were not members,
but had attended the occasional meeting,64 and Pailthorpe had also had
some personal contacts with George Ives.65 The Jungian analyst Godwin
Baynes had addressed the Society and also solicited copies of such of their
publications as were available to non-members.66
Other medical individuals were similarly associated with both bodies.
The woman doctor Mrs Meakin Herford, who had been a member of
the Society since 1918,67 and spoken to it on at least one occasion,68 was
mentioned as being involved with one of the Institute’s provincial facilities
in Reading in 1939.69 The psychiatrist Dr Emmanuel Miller does not appear
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 143

to have been a member, but he had attended meetings and addressed the
Society.70 Dr Morris Robb, another psychiatrist, wrote to the Society asking
for a batch of tickets for himself, friends and pupils to the lecture by Georg
Groddeck which it was organizing, and expressed interest in joining.71
Norwood East, of the Prison Medical Service, although he does not seem
to have interacted with the Society as such, in 1938 at the time of his
retirement wrote to Havelock Ellis thanking him for ‘the help and insight
into sex deviations which I have obtained from your writings and which
have assisted me in dealing with sex offenders’.72 Others involved with the
Institute at least had some knowledge of the Society’s existence and passing
contacts. George Ives reported in 1944 that the Institute ‘contains several
members of the old Sexological’.73
The Institute apparently repudiated the suggestion that it should
‘concern itself with questions of penal reform’ when contacted in 1938 by
the psychologist and psychoanalyst Professor J.C. Flugel – who had joined
the BSSSP as early as 1915 and was still an active member in the early
1930s74 – about his concerns over sentences imposed in homosexual cases
during the previous year.75 Nonetheless, it did work closely with the judicial
system, providing medical reports, organizing seminars for probation officers,
and circularizing magistrates. In spite of denying its interest in reforming
the law, the Institute was invited to be represented on Home Office
committees and had discussions with MPs about relevant clauses in penal
reform bills.76 This rather suggests it was well-embedded in metropolitan
circles of influence, if not the actual corridors of power.

Queerly subtle influence?

In 1944, George Ives noted that the Institute ‘seems very much alive’,
whereas the BSSSP was ‘hibernating’.77 By the end of the war, the latter
body appears to have been defunct, whereas the Institute continued to
thrive and its successors are still in existence. The contemporary impact
of the BSSSP in terms of reform of laws, or even moderating more than
a small corner of public opinion, was apparently minimal. Nonetheless,
thirty years after the collapse of the Society nearly all the reforms it had
desired had been implemented, including homosexual law reform. This
apparent posthumous success may have resulted from wider changes in
society as a whole, proceeding irrespective of its activities, in reaction to
broader social and economic factors. The Society may simply have been
ahead of changing public opinion, as implied by its ‘General Aims’ of 1914:
to support ‘the direction pointed by science’ by a ‘greater weight of public
opinion’.78
However, it might be claimed that the Society did have a subtle and hard-
to-trace influence on the development of changes in attitude. It has been
demonstrated that there was a considerable degree of overlap with the much
144 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

more mainstream and respectable Institute for the Scientific Treatment of

Delinquency, with its greater impact on medico-legal attitudes and policies,
and that its connection with a number of other networks could be traced.
The Society also arguably influenced in their youth individuals who by the
1960s had risen to positions of power, most prominently Gerald Gardiner,
Lord Chancellor of the reforming Labour government of the 1960s.79
We can compare this with many other social reforms which began with
small groups regarded as dubious radical eccentrics, whose views gradually
gained wider degrees of acceptance until the point when they became, if not
universal, the majority opinion within society. But as with other campaigns,
for example anti-slavery and women’s suffrage, reforms do not just happen:
they require the original derided pioneers who begin the long process of
changing hearts and minds which eventually changes actual laws. The queer
space in Bloomsbury created by the BSSSP during its brief queer moment
of shaking up established ideas and generating unexpected contacts was
certainly one contribution to that process.

Notes
1 BSS ‘Misc: Minutes’, Vol. [1], 3rd AGM, 7 July 1917; Minutes Vol. 2,
110th Meeting, 12 April 1923; Vol. 3, 127–128th Meetings, 6 November,
4 December 1924; ‘Letters Received’, R. C. Klaheven, 17 May 1936; ‘Misc’
Letters of Enquiry, W. Young, n.d.
2 John Stuart Mill, ‘The Westminster Election of 1865’, in John M. Robson
and Bruce L. Kinzer (eds), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume
XXVIII: Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part I November 1850–
November 1868 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); http://oll
.libertyfund.org/titles/262 (accessed 30 April 2015).
3 The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 1: 1915–19 (London: Penguin, 1979),
p. 110, 21 January 1918 (I am indebted to Hermione Lee for this reference);
British Sexological Society archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center, University of Texas at Austin (BSS): ‘Misc’, Minutes Vol. [1], Quarterly
Meeting, 18 January 1918; W.D. Wills, Homer Lane: A Biography (London:
Allen and Unwin 1964), pp. 200–201. Lane’s lecture, ‘The Suppression of
Children as it Affects the Sexual Instincts’, took place on 30 April 1919.
4 BSS ‘Misc’: Lecture lists; (Reginald Wellbye) ‘A Constructive View of Sex
Psychology as a Humanistic Study’ (given 27 March 1930).
5 Matt Cook, ‘Ives, George Cecil (1867–1950)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2006), online edn,
October 2007. http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org
/view/article/57683 (accessed 19 March 2014).
6 Norman Haire to Havelock Ellis, 20 August 1923, Havelock Ellis papers in
the British Library Department of Manuscripts, Additional Manuscript 70540.
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 145

7 Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in

England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002),
pp. 50–55.
8 Ivan Crozier, ‘Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatric Writing About
Homosexuality Before Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story’, Journal of the
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63 (2008), pp. 65–102.
9 Lesley A. Hall, ‘ “The English have hot-water bottles”: The Morganatic
Marriage between the British Medical Profession and Sexology Since William
Acton’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual
Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), pp. 350–66.
10 E.B. Meakin Herford to the Secretary, Medical Women’s Federation,
23 March 1928, in ‘Co-Education’ File, Medical Women’s Federation Archives
in the Wellcome Library, SA/MWF/D.9/2.
11 Havelock Ellis to Edward Carpenter, 17 December 1892, Carpenter papers in
Sheffield City Archives Ms 357/5.
12 R. Thurman to Carpenter, 15 September 1895, Carpenter papers, Sheffield, Ms
386/58.
13 Carpenter to Ellis, 28 June 1895, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin (HRC).
14 Carpenter to Ellis, 14 October 1895, HRC.
15 See, for example, C. Langdon Everard to Carpenter, 29 April 1908; S.
Cruwys Sharland to Carpenter, 4 July 1910, Carpenter papers, Sheffield, Mss
386/156, 384/9.
16 Ellis to Carpenter, 17 February 1918, Carpenter papers, Sheffield, Ms 357/32.
17 Rebecca West, ‘The Freewoman’, first published in Time and Tide,
16 July 1926, reprinted in Time and Tide Wait for No Man, ed. Dale Spender
(London: Pandora, 1984), p. 66; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism,
Sex, and Morality (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 265–87.
18 ‘A Discussion Circle’, The Freewoman, 28 March 1912, p. 373; ‘The Discussion
Circle’, The Freewoman, 2 May 1912, p. 464; F. W. S. Browne, ‘ “The
Freewoman” Discussion Circle’, The Freewoman, 12 September 1912, p. 327;
‘ “The Freewoman” Discussion Circle’, The Freewoman, 26 September 1912,
p. 371; ‘Notes on Two Meetings of the Discussion Circle by B. Low’ (1912),
Dora Marsden papers, Princeton University Library, C0283, Box 2/10.
19 Laurence Housman to Janet Ashbee, 7 December 1913, Ashbee Journals Vol.
25, King’s College Cambridge Library.
20 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes Vol. [1], Preliminary Meeting, 12 August 1913; 2nd
Meeting, 12 October 1913; 3rd Meeting, 3 November 1913, 5th Meeting,
10 January 1914; 10th Meeting, 19 May 1914; E. B. Lloyd to Edward
Carpenter, 4 March 1914. Carpenter papers, Sheffield, Ms 368/5.
21 Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties: A General Survey and Some
Personal Memories (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945), pp. 183–51;
146 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Goldring to Jane Burr, 12 July 1949, Jane Burr papers in the Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College, Northampton MA.
22 British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology Publication no. 1: Policy
and Principles: General Aims (London, 1914) – ‘General Aims’ Based on
Laurence Housman’s Address at the Inaugural Meeting; F.W.S. Browne, ‘A
New Psychological Society’, International Journal of Ethics 28 (1917–1918),
pp. 266–9; BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 10th and 12th Meetings, 19 May,
1 July 1914.
23 George Ives, diary entry for 9 July 1914, ‘Notebooks and Various Writings’
LVI, HRC.
24 Constant discussions on printing, reprinting, distribution, etc. in BSS Minutes:
5th Meeting of Executive Committee, 10 January 1914 mentions Hamilton’s
translation, BSS Misc.
25 E.B. Lloyd to Carpenter, 17 December 1920, Sheffield Ms 368/38; Minutes
1920–1921 sporadic mentions, BSS Misc.
26 Mr A to Marie Stopes, 1918, ‘ML [Married Love]-Gen[eral]’, correspondence
in the Wellcome Library, PP/MCS/A.15.
27 Katharine Cockin, ‘Housman, Laurence (1865–1959)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) http://0-www
.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/view/article/34014 (accessed
19 March 2014).
28 BSS ‘Misc’: Housman to Ives, 6 August 2258/1920.
29 BSS ‘Misc’: Housman to Ives, 22 July 2262/1924.
30 Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality,
1880–1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 156; BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes Vol.
[5], 198th Meeting, 9 April 1931.
31 BSS Minutes Vol. 2, 93rd Meeting, 17 November 1921; Vol. [3], 129th
Meeting, 8 January 1925; Vol. [5], 204th Meeting, 2 December 1931;
correspondence between H.C. Booth and Deighton, November 1931; George
Ives: ‘Notes and Various Writings Vol. XCVI 1931’, 24 November 1931.
32 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 204th Meeting of Executive Committee,
2 December 1931; BSS Letters received: Harold Clare Booth (National
Physical Laboratory, Molesey) to E. Lonsdale Deighton, 10 November 1931.
33 BSS ‘Misc’: Deighton to Booth, 30 November 1931.
34 BSS ‘Misc’: Stella Browne to Janet Carson, 27 March 1919, 28 April 1920;
Minutes Vol. 2, 71st Meeting, 16 April 1920; Minutes, Vol. [5], 204th
Meeting, 2 December 1931; Harold Clare Booth (National Physical
Laboratory, Molesey) to E. Lonsdale Deighton, 10 November 1931.
35 BSS ‘Misc’: Booth to Deighton, 10 November 1921.
36 BSS ‘Misc’: Housman to Ives, 6 November 2265/1927.
37 George Ives, diary entry, 18 November 1928, ‘Notes and Various Writings’ no
XCIII 1928. O of C 2266.
 THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF THE STUDY OF SEX PSYCHOLOGY 147

38 BSS ‘Misc’: Housman to Ives, 10 January 2268/1930.

39 BSS ‘Misc’: Housman to Ives, 22 August 2268/1930.
40 George Ives to Havelock Ellis, c.1934/35, Ellis papers, British Library
Additional Manuscripts 70566.
41 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes Vol. [5], 204–206th Meetings, December 1931–
February 1932, 209th Meeting, 3 May 1932; Hull, Augustine Joseph, papers
concerning his conviction and imprisonment 1931–1932; ‘Letters Received’:
Margaret Lowenfeld, 8 December 1931, Charles Ross (a prison chaplain),
7 January 1913; ‘Letters Out’: Deighton to Lowenfeld, 8 December 1932,
Deighton to Ives, 11 January 1932; ‘Misc’: J.A.C. Braun to Ives,
11 October 1932.
42 BSS ‘Misc’: George Ives, letters to E. Lonsdale Deighton 1930–1932;
24 November 1930, 12 January 1932.
43 Edward Glover, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Delinquency: Being a
Clinical Report on the Work of the Institute During the Five Years 1937 to
1941 (London: Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency, 1944).
44 Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD) Development
Subcommittee Minutes, November 1936–March 1939. I am grateful to the
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Kings College London, for allowing me
to consult their predecessor’s archives, which they retain.
45 ISTD, volume of newspaper cuttings.
46 ISTD, Director’s Minutes, 25 February 1939.
47 BSS ‘Misc’: Lectures to the BSS.
48 Names of individuals were extracted from ISTD, Scientific Committee minutes,
October 1936–March 1939, passim, and other records of the Institute.
49 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 3rd AGM, 7 July 1917.
50 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of Quarterly Meeting, 16 April 1920.
51 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 6th AGM, 14 July 1920; Minutes of 94th Meeting of
Executive Committee, 12 December 1921.
52 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 61st Meeting of Executive Committee, 14 June 1919;
Minutes of 78th Meeting of Executive Committee, 27 October 1920.
53 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 63rd Meeting of Executive Committee, 5 August 1919.
54 BSS ‘Misc’: BSSSP Study Group III (Heterosexuality) Minutes.
55 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 99th Meeting of Executive Committee, 11 May 1922.
56 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 8th AGM, 17 July 1922.
57 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 202nd Meeting of Executive Committee,
8 October 1931.
58 BSS ‘Misc’: Lectures to the BSS.
59 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 11th Annual Meeting, 15 October 1925.
60 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 208th Meeting of Executive Committee, 6 April 1932.
148 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

61 BSS ‘Misc’: Rough Notes for Minutes of 221st Meeting of Executive

Committee, 9 November 1933.
62 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 38th, 74th, 148th Meetings of Executive Committee,
25 April 1917, 3 June 1920, 2 September 1926, George Ives (Essay on the
BSS) 1928.
63 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 188th Meeting of the Executive Committee,
1 May 1930.
64 BSS ‘Misc’: BSSSP Attendance Books: Members and Visitors Attending
Meetings, 1925–1940.
65 BSS ‘Misc’: G.W. Pailthorpe to Ives, 27 October 1924.
66 BSS ‘Letters Received’: H.G. Baynes to the BSSSP, 14 December 1926;
BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 152nd Meeting of the Executive Committee,
6 January 1927.
67 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 46th Meeting of the Executive Committee,
13 February 1918.
68 BSS ‘Letters Received’: Mrs Meakin Herford to BSSSP, 25 January 1927.
69 ISTD, Director’s Minutes, 27 November 1939.
70 BSS ‘Misc’: BSSSP Attendance Books: Members and Visitors Attending
Meetings, 1925–1931; Rough Notes for Minutes of 221st Meeting of
Executive Committee, 9 November 1933.
71 BSS ‘Misc’: BSS Letters Received: Morris Robb to BSS, 14 March 1932.
72 Norwood East to Ellis, 1938, British Library Department of Manuscripts,
Additional Manuscript 70556.
73 George Ives, ‘Notes and Various Writings’ CXII, 2 May 1944.
74 BSS ‘Misc’: Minutes of 18th Meeting of Executive Committee,
21 January 1915; Minutes of 217th Meeting of the Executive Committee,
(4 April) 1933.
75 ISTD, Scientific Committee Minutes, 17 March 1938, responding to a letter
from J.C. Flugel concerning recent sentencing in homosexual cases.
76 ISTD, Scientific Committee Minutes October 1936–March 1939, Director’s
Minutes October 1936–March 1948, passim.
77 George Ives, ‘Notes and Various Writings’, CXII, 2 May 1944.
78 ‘General Aims’; Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties, p. 152.
79 BSS ‘Letters out’: to G. Gardiner; BSS ‘Misc’: Gardiner’s comments on whether
Rockstro’s A Plain Talk on Sex Difficulties would be liable to prosecution;
transcript of Gardiner’s chairman’s introduction to paper by Margaret
Lowenfeld and comments on it, 16 February 1933. Muriel Box (his second
wife), Rebel Advocate: A Biography of Gerald Gardiner (London: David
and Charles, 1983), details his achievements in social reform but omits his
connection with the BSSSP.
 CHAPTER TEN

Cannibal London: Racial

Discourses, Pornography
and Male–Male Desire in
Late-Victorian Britain
Silvia Antosa

In late-Victorian Britain, the boundaries between homosexuality,

homosociality, close friendship and intergenerational bonds were porous
and unstable.1 It would therefore be more accurate to speak of a relational
and undefined sexual spectrum that ranged from hetero- to homosexuality.
As critics have noted, it would be anachronistic to apply the modern
category of ‘homosexual’ to mid- and late nineteenth-century subjects.
Male homosexual identities came into discourse after 1869 and were
shaped largely after the Wilde Trials in 1895.2 Assuming a post-Foucaultian
perspective, I take the view that sex is formed through interaction, and can
only be understood in its sociocultural and historical contexts. I nonetheless
use the word ‘homosexual’ for convenience, with an awareness that the
temporal span dealt with in this article covers decades which saw significant
changes in the definition of this term. In the second half of the nineteenth
century, discourses around same-sex desire were in flux. Between the
1880s and the 1890s, there was an important shift from the notion of the
sodomite, whose acts were perceived as a ‘temporary aberration’, to quote
Michel Foucault,3 to the ‘homosexual’, who was constructed as belonging
to a separate species.4 Therefore, sexual acts and desires became constitutive
elements of individual identity. Still, this shift was neither instantaneous nor
150 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

all-pervasive; harbingers of change had been in the air for decades. Indeed,
as Eve Sedgwick has argued, ‘issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition
are structured not by the supersession of one model and the consequent
withering away of another, but instead by the relations enabled by
the … coexistence of different models during the times they do exist’.5
Two related nineteenth-century contexts which were particularly
animated by tensions between competing models of sexuality were the
Anthropological Society of London, founded by Richard Francis Burton and
James Hunt in 1863, and the influential Cannibal Club, which constituted
its inner circle and was established around the same time. In this chapter,
I analyse debates and activities fostered by these two associations in the
light of Sedgwick’s theories on queer. According to the American scholar,
queer is an ‘open mesh of possibilities’6 which are enabled by non-normative
and multiple understandings and practices of gender and sexuality, and is
something which goes ‘outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed
under gender and sexuality…: the ways that race, ethnicity … nationality
criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing
discourses’.7 I discuss the influence exercised by the two associations in
shaping and establishing coexisting discourses around male homosocial
bonding, male–male desire and male homosexuality in mid- and late-
Victorian London. Moreover, I argue that the queer, competing models of
sexuality discussed within them were profoundly influenced by nineteenth-
century discourses of race and by late-Victorian society’s interest in the
pornographic, especially in the informal gatherings of the ‘Cannibals’. So
far, only a few works have emphasized the mutual construction of race and
homosexuality.8 Even fewer works have outlined the connection between
pornography and the development of new understandings of sexuality.9 I
show how the mutual construction of race and gender carried out in the
official space of the Society paved the way for more transgressive (homo)
sexual readings of pornography in the Club.
Male bonding did not have a clear subversive social role in that period.
Rather, drawing on Sedgwick’s study of male homosocial bonds in England,
I understand it as central to the maintenance of heterosexual culture
through its stigmatization of male same-sex relationships. In Sedgwick’s
words, ‘ “obligatory heterosexuality” is built into male-dominated kinship
systems, [and] homophobia is a necessary consequence of such patriarchal
institutions as heterosexual marriage’.10 Male homosocial bonds permeated
a whole range of relationships between men, which were characterized by
varying degrees of fear and hatred of male same-sex desire.11 They were
thus central to the maintenance of masculine sociocultural privileges in
the patriarchal heterosexual system. Sedgwick has pointed out that such
a system was also founded on a triangulation of desire between men and
women, as male relational dynamics hinge on relationships that exclude
women. My contention is that the homophobic and misogynistic nature
of the Victorian patriarchal heterosexual structure is at the heart of both
 CANNIBAL LONDON 151

the Anthropological Society and the Cannibal Club, which were two male-
dominated institutions. In addition, as most of their members were Tories
from well-established backgrounds who travelled in the countries of the
British Empire, they were influenced by what Robert Aldrich has called
‘the ethos of the colonial world’,12 which was intrinsically masculine and
misogynistic.
As Aldrich has convincingly demonstrated, in the nineteenth century ‘[t]he
colonies provided many possibilities of homoeroticism, homosociality and
homosexuality – a variety of perspectives and experiences by which men
expressed attraction to other men (or male youths) … The gendered nature
of expansion … created situations congenial to intimate male bonding.’13 In a
similar vein, other scholars have emphasized the crucial role played by same-
sex sexuality in British colonial politics. For Edward Said, the appeal of the
Orient was tied to the possibility of having ‘a sexual experience unobtainable
in Europe’;14 Joseph A. Boone has explicitly linked this possibility with the
fact that ‘sexual contact with and between men underwrites and at times
even explains the historical appeal of orientalism as an occidental mode of
male perception, appropriation, and control’.15 The fantasy – or alternatively
the spectre – of the encounter with the colonized did not call into question
the British belief in dominion and control. Rather, it consolidated the British
sense of entitlement, as long as it was kept in a secret and private sphere.
I argue that Sedgwick’s definition of male homosociality as both emphasizing
masculine privileges and stigmatizing women and male homosexual relations
is pertinent to the activities of the Anthropological Society and the Cannibal
Club. These organizations fostered debates that opened up a discursive
space about male (homo)sexuality, even if in ambiguous and contradictory
ways, as they distanced themselves from this topic by assuming objective,
‘scientific’ viewpoints and by projecting same-sex practices onto the ‘other’,
exotic cultures of the colonized countries.

The ‘Anthropologicals’
Richard Burton and James Hunt founded the Anthropological Society to
provide a space for intellectual exchange on topics which, in their view,
were forbidden in other official contexts. Burton was an explorer, a member
of the Royal Geographical Society, and British consul abroad; Hunt was
an anthropologist and a scientific reformer. They formed an institution
where they could present their own theories on race and sexuality without
censorship or fear of repudiation. In addition to its declared intent of
opposing any form of social ignorance, the Society raised questions about
the difficulty of generalizing about ‘man’ in a scientific or a sociocultural
context. As one member put it, ‘[h]uman nature is, or appears to be, very
different in China or America … Would not a Londoner be quite as good a
subject for study as twenty different races, for the purpose of knowing what
152 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

is and what is not human nature?’16 Quite significantly, the self-reflexive

tone of the discussion on different races and sexualities required on the
anthropologists’ part an active participation in contemporary political
and economic debates, especially when they concerned British imperial
politics.17 Such varied interests are reflected in the disciplinary specialisms
of the London-based Society’s members: historians, geographers, explorers
and writers.18
The Anthropological Society emerged from a schism from the more liberal
and middle-class Ethnological Society, founded by James Cowles Prichard
in the 1840s.19 Unlike the latter, which advanced the theory of the organic
mutability and the biological unity of the human species,20 Burton and Hunt’s
Society supported the largely discredited theory of polygenesis, arguing that
different races descended from separate biological sources and are physically
and anthropomorphically different. Moreover, they opposed Pritchard’s
philological view of race, which relied on a model of racial difference
which presumed common origins. Instead, they supported a physiological
approach informed by the measurements of physical differences called
anthropometry and comparative anatomy. Burton and Hunt believed in the
inherent inequality between races and in the impossibility of adaptation to
different environmental and sociocultural circumstances. Such racist views
were used to justify the ‘necessity’ of colonialism and slavery. Moreover,
unlike the Ethnological Society, the anthropologists excluded women from
participating in their meetings: indeed, this seems to be the reason why Hunt
decided to leave the Ethnological Society, where he had been a secretary
from 1859 to 1862.21 The exclusion of women and the urgency of creating
a male-only environment seem to confirm Sedgwick’s view that male
homosocial bonds hinge on relationships between men that isolate women.
The scientific methods of comparative anatomy were adopted by the
members of the Society to articulate discourses on gender and sexuality.22
Their research was premised on the conviction that there was a biological
and irreducible sexual difference between peoples. The categories of race
and sexuality became mutually dependent in their work. According to Lisa
Z. Sigel, ‘[their] writings insisted that truths about nature – inherent and
unchanging – could be found in the body through the study of sexuality and
sexual organs.’23 The main target of the anthropologists’ research was to
find evidence of prevailing theories about the supremacy of the British race,
gender dissymmetry and sexual ‘abnormalities’, mostly sought in ‘other’,
exotic cultures. The technique of comparative anatomy they employed
in their research anticipated and intersected with the emerging medical
and sexological literature, which was embedded within contemporary
racial and gender ideologies and held a substantial definitional power in the
field of sexuality.
During the eight years in which the Society was active,24 its members
produced numerous works and papers on the subject of sexuality. Their
research entered public debate in 1860s and 1870s London. Most of the
 CANNIBAL LONDON 153

papers delivered at the Society’s meeting rooms at 4 St Martin’s Place,

Trafalgar Square, dealt with the study of gender roles and sexual practices
in the colonized countries. Among them, it is worth mentioning Charles
Staniland Wake’s ‘Social Condition of Woman as Affected by Civilisation’,
‘Sacred Prostitution’ and ‘Cannibalism’; Dr Charnock’s ‘Facts Relating to
Polyandry’; A.L. Lewis’s ‘Notes on Polygamy’; Burton’s ‘Notes on Scalping’
and ‘Notes on an Hermaphrodite’; and Edward Sellon’s ‘On Phallic Worship
in India’ and ‘Some Remarks on Indian Gnosticism, or the Worship of
Female Powers’.25 As these indicative titles make clear, the members of
the Anthropological Society devoted themselves to cataloguing various
‘exotic’ sexual practices, from human copulation with animals to incest,
clitoridectomy, polyandry, polygamy, hermaphroditism, prostitution and
phallic worship, which constituted one of the most debated subjects.
The work of classification undertaken by the anthropologists responded
to a widespread labelling zeal which was taking hold in the second half of the
century. In addition, their taxonomical approach to sexual matters reflected
a distancing strategy that tried to separate scientific interest from mere
prurience and to conceal any form of personal involvement. As Sigel notes,
‘to make the case that their works were not obscene or pornographic … these
authors stressed the scientific nature of their bibliographic, physiological
and folkloric studies of sexuality’.26 In so doing, they also anticipated some
of the problems inherent in early sexology, including attitudes towards
same-sex behaviours.27 According to Jeffrey Weeks, ‘[t]he nascent science
of sexology … was centrally implicated in all the debates about gender and
sexuality, weaving a web of meaning around the body and its desires through
its descriptions, categorisations, definitions, neologisms, and theoretical
speculations.’28 Such speculations were founded on racial paradigms and
models of gender, according to which sexual practices were located and
analysed. Bodies began to be scrutinized for proof of innate constitutional
deficiency as well as for physical evidence of ‘abnormal’ proclivities that
could determine unusual sexual practices and link perverse desires to innate
biological conditions.

Cannibal London
In the Cannibal Club, things were different. It was a radical dining
club founded by Burton in 1863, and constituted the inner circle of the
Anthropological Society. Burton dubbed the Club as ‘Cannibal’ to emphasize
its subversive role. Its members could freely and informally discuss some of
the issues that were presented in the Society. Meetings usually took place
at Bertolini’s, an Italian and French restaurant on St Martin’s Lane, just
off Leicester Square. Like the Anthropological Society, the Cannibal Club
was an all-male group whose focus on male–male desire largely centred on
the overlapping issues of homoeroticism, homosociality and homosexuality.
154 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

It provided an excellent opportunity for its members to investigate several

forms of homosocial relational bonds, falling along a sexual spectrum that
ranged from hetero- to homosexuality, including flagellation and masochism.
The Cannibal Club had closed membership and members called each
other ‘brother’. The idea of the brotherhood underlines the homosocial
nature of the club, its elitist self-representation and its emphasis on the
symbolic importance of blood relationships. Moreover, it marks an evolution
in the very notion of brotherhood, which in the early-Victorian phase was
shaped on the anachronistic model of celibate, ‘desexualized’ monastic
communities, to respond to the need to articulate male anxieties about the
process of construction of bourgeois masculinity in a world dominated by
industrial and social change.29 The idealization of celibate life within an
enclosed all-male world raised a number of tensions, especially between
the homosocial and the heterosexual. According to Herbert Sussman, ‘the
monastery as a sacralised, celibate all-male society safely distanced in time
provide[d] a figure through which they could express in covert form, or
as an open secret, their attraction to a world of chaste masculine bonding
from which the female has been magically eliminated’.30 However, even
if women were excluded from the male social and symbolic spaces of the
Cannibal Club, the tensions between homosexual and heterosexual were
transposed to a different level. Rather than sublimating celibacy as a form
of regulation of male sexual energy, the Cannibals celebrated the powers
of sexual drives – by ‘safely’ projecting them, to paraphrase Sussman, not
into a distant time but into a remote, exotic space. Therefore, the ideal of
celibate monks symbolizing a disciplined masculinity gave way to a new
model, which was influenced by late-Victorian pseudoscientific discourses
on race: the cannibal. Consequently, the troubled boundary between the
heterosexual, the homosocial and the homosexual could no longer be
negotiated within the safe space of the monastery: the new arena in which
British masculinity needed to prove itself was imperial space.31
The Cannibal Club was populated by several somewhat eccentric
personalities of the time: along with Richard Burton, vice president of the
Anthropological Society, founder of the Club and one of the most famous
translators of pornographic Oriental literature of his time,32 members
included Edward Sellon, captain in the Indian army, pornographic writer
and translator of (homo)erotic books;33 James Campbell Reddie, an officer,
consul and author of pornographic works, including homosexual narratives
such as Adventures of a Schoolboy or the Freaks of Youthful Passion (1866),
with illustrations by Edward Sellon; Richard Monckton Milnes, owner of the
Fryston Library, nicknamed Aphrodisiopolis because it contained the largest
collection of erotic and illegal works in Britain;34 J. Frederick Collingwood,
the assistant secretary of the Anthropological Society; Thomas Bendyshe,
vice president of the Society and Senior Fellow of King’s College, London;
Frederick Hankey, a sadist and illegal trader of erotica; and Henry Spencer
Ashbee, one of the greatest bibliographers of British pornography in the
 CANNIBAL LONDON 155

nineteenth century.35 Ashbee was also a member of Philobiblon, a society

of collectors established by Milnes, and was himself author of several
pornographic works under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi. Other members
included Charles Duncan Cameron, an officer and consul; the poet Charles
Algernon Swinburne; General Studholme John Hodgson; and Simeon
Solomon, a homosexual painter involved in the Pre-Raphaelite movement,
who was condemned for sodomy in 1873. These men were drawn together
by their shared interests in homoerotic bonding, pornographic writing, and
the collecting and illegal trading of erotic works, together with debates
on extreme sexual practices such as masochism and flagellation. In their
pornographic production, they explored the possibilities of sex. As Sigel has
remarked, ‘[p]ornography is not tied to the tangible … but to the imaginable.’
Yet, even though it is connected to the realm of possibilities, pornography
‘is caught in an intimate relationship with the broader society’.36 The
pornographic work produced by the Cannibals – mostly anonymously
or using pseudonyms – was inspired by and, in turn influenced, their
ethnographic work and their elitist social background.37 It is no accident
that most of their titles were translations or had to do with Oriental sexual
practices and were addressed to a small powerful elite. The exploration of
masculine sexuality became a privileged activity written by men for men.
The symbol of the Club was a mace in the shape of an African head
gnawing on a human thighbone.38 The name of the Club and its symbol are
clear references to the imperial construction of the monstrous and barbarian
non-European black savage, which constituted the anthropologists’ main
field of interest. As H.L. Malchow has emphasized, ‘cannibalism as a racial
image conveniently served to invert reality by encoding as appetite those
whom the European sought to incorporate … [I]ts rhetorical manipulation
as an alien racial characteristic is a rich source of information about the
social fears and cultural obsessions of Europeans’.39 And sodomy was one
of its fears. Cannibalism became part of a ‘stockpile of representations’
available for Europeans to draw upon in their own struggles – in particular
those concerning their sexual identity.40 In the late-Victorian period, cannibal
depravity became analogous with sexual depravity: the ‘unnatural’ appetite
of the cannibals was equated with ‘deviant’ homosexual intercourse, as
the domination of the cannibal over his victim merged with that of the
aggressive sodomite over his passive object. Cannibalism, then, joined
together two cultural taboos – miscegenation and homosexuality – because
of their ‘abnormal’ sexual object choice. As J.H. Malchow writes, ‘[b]oth
cannibalism and homosexuality were often represented in the nineteenth
century as acts, like masturbation, that became addictive’.41 Racial and sexual
discourses converged in a set of representations that codified ‘unnatural’
desire as physical perversion. On this point, C.J. Rawson has written that
‘[t]here is a recurrent close connection in literary texts between the normally
prohibited form of eating and the “forbidden” or “abnormal” forms of
sexual activity.’42 Such a connection is made clear, for example, by Burton
156 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

himself, who, on several occasions, made explicit the link between same-sex
desire and cannibalism. For example, in discussing the religious significance
of eunuchry, he writes: ‘hence too we have an explanation of sotadic love
[love between men] in its second stage, when it became, like cannibalism, a
matter of superstition’.43 In a section on the diffusion of what he calls ‘the
vice’ in America, he reflects: ‘In many parts of the New World this perversion
was accompanied by another depravity of taste – confirmed cannibalism.’44
This connection projected the threatening homosexual outside the
confines of the home country and turned homosexuality into an exotic
phenomenon. Once again, this involved a process of distancing and dis-
identification: like the cannibal, the sodomite had to be projected into an
exotic and unfamiliar space. The term ‘cannibalism’ eventually came to
function as a shorthand for male–male desire within the group. On this
point, Deborah Lutz has emphasized that:

among cannibals, love and sex between men existed on a secret

plane … Perhaps Burton set [cannibalism and male-male desire] side
by side because they were practises seriously tabooed in his world. Or
possibly the idea of like consuming like, of taking another’s flesh into
oneself, seemed to give them a certain kinship. To name his group the
Cannibal Club was a way to point to radical ‘tastes’, to refer … to men
loving and sharing their kind. These men came together for mutual
consumption.45

In ambiguously joining together the taboo of cannibalism and the illegal

practice of male–male sex, Burton created a coded discursive space charged
with semantic layers and evocative meanings. In the Club, cannibals could
experience free interaction and ‘mutual consumption’, with ostensible sexual
implications. In particular, the idea of ‘like consuming like’ and ‘taking
another’s flesh into oneself’ evoked by cannibalism was a clear reference to
anal sex. It also pointed to the reciprocal interaction of Eros and Thanatos,
love and death, life instinct and death drive.
This connection is strengthened by the choice of the topics of discussion
among the Cannibals, which included Walt Whitman’s collection of poems,
Leaves of Grass, and phallic worship. Both subjects inspired general reflection
on the sociocultural and literary significance of male–male desire. In 1860,
Whitman published a third edition of his collection and added a group of
poems, Calamus, which explicitly referred to manly love between comrades.
The work of the American poet focused on the physical concreteness of male
comradeship; alongside ‘amativeness’, or heterosexual love, he proposed
‘adhesiveness’, or love between men.46 Discussions of Leaves of Grass led
to considerations of the literary inspiration provided by manly love and
homosocial bonds. Talking about Whitman became a linguistic code to deal
with homosexuality without openly articulating it, and his poetry inspired
debates about the possibility of expressing a ‘pure’ form of love through
 CANNIBAL LONDON 157

art and lyricism.47 Algernon Swinburne was particularly enthusiastic about

Whitman’s poetry and celebrated it both during informal gatherings and in
more official contexts.48
The Cannibals also wrote extensively about phallic worship. The debate
was stimulated by the publication of several works, such as the 1865
reprinted version of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of
the Priapus (1786) and John Davenport’s long section on phallic worship
in his Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Power of
Reproduction (1869). Edward Sellon produced a paper on the topic, ‘On
the Linga Puja, or Phallic Worship in India’,49 which caused controversial
responses in the Society and a more open debate among the Cannibals.50
The latter pondered the symbolic and artistic fecundity of intimacy between
men which, from the Greek and Roman tradition, had extended to the
East and many other countries. Significantly, Sellon concluded his essay by
remarking that ‘the Culte de Phallus prevailed not only amongst the Hindus,
Assyrians, Babylonians, Mexicans, Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans in ancient
times, but … it still forms an integral part of the worship of India, Thibet,
China, Siam, Japan, and Southern Africa, and possibly further researches will
prove, in numerous other countries also’.51 Similarly, in his account of the
expedition to the reign of Dahome, Burton provides a detailed description
of the Priapus and its diffusion in the world:

The Dahoman Priapus is a clay figure of any size between a giant and the
pigmy, crouched upon the ground as if contemplating its own Attributes.
The head is sometimes a wooden block rudely carved, more often dried
mud, and the eyes and teeth are supplied by cowries. A huge penis, like
the section of a broom-stick, rudely carved as the Japanese articles which
I have lately been permitted to inspect, projects horizontally from the
middle. I could have carried off a donkey’s load had I been aware of
the rapidly rising value of Phallic specimens amongst the collectors of
Europe. The Tree of Life is anointed with palm-oil, which drips into a pot
or a shard placed below it … There is another Phallic god named ‘Bo’, the
guardian of warriors and the protector of markets.52

The motif of phallicism and its ‘rapidly rising value among the collectors of
Europe’ confirms the rapid expansion of interest in Western countries, to
which Burton openly refers. Such an interest seemed to reflect the world of
late-Victorian construction of masculinity and male sexuality, by celebrating
the model of British male activity through history, art and religion. Moreover,
it implies that the British projection of male–male desire to the colonies is a
cover strategy that aims at concealing its diffusion in Europe and England.
Burton made explicit the connection between priapism and male–male
desire in other works, too, as in his 1890 translation of Priapeia which is
still considered the most explicit book about sodomy published in fin-de-
siècle Britain.53
158 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Parodic references to Priapus abounded in the private correspondence

among the Cannibals with explicit references to male–male desire. For
example, Swinburne began a letter to Monckton Milnes with the salutation:
‘Salus in X Priapo et Ecclesia / Sub invocatione Beatissimi Donatiani De
Sade (Salvation in Christ, Priapus and His Church / by the Intercession of the
most blessed De Sade).’54 Other recurring expressions in the letters written
between the Cannibals were ‘swishing’, which was used as a slang word
for effeminate and a disparaging term for homosexual. It was also used
with double reference to flagellation and homosexuality.55 The irreverent
inversion of religious symbols like the Holy Trinity and the mocking
devotional references to De Sade were frequent. For example, in a letter to
Swinburne, E. Villine wrote ‘Un petit mot par charité s’il vous plait my dear
brother and we shall bless you in the name of Voltaire, Sade – and the Devil
into the bargain.’56 Voltaire, Sade and the Devil made up the blasphemous
and irreverent Cannibal Holy Trinity.57

Cannibal sexology
The connections between male same-sex desire, Orientalism and pornography
fostered by both Society and Club had an impact on the development
of contemporary scientific, literary and social queer life in mid- and late
nineteenth-century London. Research produced by the anthropologists
and artistic work written by the Cannibals were influential in creating a
subterranean network between scholars and thinkers on sexuality. This, in
turn, paved the way for the creation of a scientific community of sexologists
such as Havelock Ellis who, thanks to their work on a number of cases
based in London, developed ground-breaking theories on male–male desire
and helped to subvert late-Victorian prudish orthodoxy.
As mentioned earlier, Whitman’s ‘masculine’ and regenerative poetic
language inspired the formation of a coded counter-culture among the
Cannibals and facilitated links between influential figures such as John
Addington Symonds, a fellow of the Anthropological Society since 1865
and a peripheral member of the Cannibal Club, the sexologist Havelock
Ellis, and Edward Carpenter, a poet and social reformer. Symonds had a
twenty-year correspondence with Whitman, and Ellis devoted an article to
the poet in his The New Spirit (1889). Jeffrey Weeks has pointed out that
‘Whitman’s work was the catalyst which brought all these strands together
and facilitated collaboration between Symonds and Havelock Ellis’.58 The
two thinkers co-authored the first edition of the ground-breaking second
volume of Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion. Earlier
in the 1880s, Whitman’s work also provided the occasion for collaboration
between Ellis and Edward Carpenter, who wrote a long poem inspired by
Whitman, Towards Democracy (1885).
 CANNIBAL LONDON 159

In addition, the Anthropologicals’ scientific discourses on race and fears

of miscegenation influenced early sexologists by giving them a theoretical
template on which they could articulate emerging models of homosexuality.
As Siobhan Somerville has emphasized, ‘[t]he beginnings of sexology, then,
were related to and perhaps even dependent on a pervasive climate of
eugenicist and anti-miscegenation sentiment and legislation. Even at the
level of nomenclature, anxieties about miscegenation shaped sexologists’
attempts to find an appropriate and scientific name for the newly visible
object of their study.’59 Cultural anxieties about racial and etymological
origins reflect most of the issues explored by key Cannibal figures such as
Burton, who published a ‘Terminal Essay’ appended to his translation of The
Arabian Nights in 1885. In his essay, he tackled the issue of homosexuality,
which he called ‘pederasty’, ‘vice’ and ‘inversion’, even though he probably
knew the word ‘homosexual’ had been coined in 1869 by German sexologist
Karl Maria Kertbeny.60 Burton’s essay was one of the pioneering works
which openly dealt with the subject and, as I suggest, was to influence
Ellis’s investigation. It also reflected the contradictions that permeated the
debates of the Anthropological Society and the Cannibal Club and their
imperialistic view of the world. In his sexual colonial map, he identified an
area in the East in which, he argued, pederasty was widespread. In this way,
he divided the zones where pederasty and other forms of sexual perversion
were thought to be common practice from those ‘civilized’ countries, such
as England, where it was considered an immoral perversion. But his map
was geographically and sexually incoherent. Burton described pederasty
as something exotic and distant in space and time. In order to explain its
diffusion, he tried to invoke climatic theories which, however, often led to
contradictory arguments. He also engaged in a critical confrontation with
other scholars, such as Paolo Mantegazza, Meier and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.
Burton’s contradictory hypotheses on the causes of pederasty as first
physiological, and then historical and cultural, questioned some of the main
points which were being pursued by contemporary early sexologists such
as Ellis, Symonds and Carpenter. In A Problem of Modern Ethics (1891),
Symonds discussed Burton’s climatic theory and argued that the phenomenon
of sexual inversion could not be regarded as geographical and climatic,
because it was spread across the globe. In his opinion, the ‘problem’ was
social. He also observed that Burton’s knowledge of pederasty was limited
because it was confined to the Orient.61 He nonetheless acknowledged
the innovative aspect of Burton’s theories, which considered the ‘vice’ of
pederasty as a natural phenomenon rather than being ‘against nature’.62
Symonds and Ellis’s 1897 edition of Sexual Inversion cited Burton’s theory
of the Sotadic Zone as an important contribution to the debate on same-sex
desire. According to Lutz, ‘Sexual Inversion keeps up a steady stream of
dialogue – and some refutation – with Burton and the writers and artists
associated with Cannibal and Aesthetic Circles.’63 They thought that
Burton’s theories were ‘interesting’,64 but they also criticized his ignorance
160 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

of emerging ideas about sexology. Moreover, while they acknowledged

the importance of Burton’s investigations, they contested his projection of
sodomy onto an Oriental space as it failed to account for homosexual desire
in the West and particularly Britain.
Burton’s work shows that the Cannibals had been trying to project
homosexual desire onto a distant, Oriental Other, by using a coded
language full of racist references. Ellis’ and Symonds’ work brought same-
sex desire back into Britain by demystifying the kind of language that the
Cannibals – and Burton – were using. However, in their attempt to build
a London-based discourse, Ellis and Symonds adopted the very method of
comparative anatomy that had been developed by the Cannibals, applying
biological determinism to the study of sexual characteristics. Coming back
to my initial point, ‘cannibalism’ was something of a coded difference. It
testified to the porousness of male homosexual/homoerotic/homosocial
identities, and bespoke a complex process of queer identification and
dis-identification which ran across elitism, racism, exoticism and homo-
eroticism. The activities of the Anthropological Society and the meetings
of the Cannibal brotherhood confirm the co-existence of different sexual
models in the same period, and crucially – even if ambiguously – underline
how their queer intersection with race, ethnicity and gender as suggested
by Sedgwick contributed to creating a discursive context which formed a
backdrop for the evolving sexological and sociocultural discourses that
developed in late-Victorian London.

Notes
1 Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London and New
York: Routledge, 2003). See also Matt Cook, London and the Culture
of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008) and Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality, 1861–1913
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).
2 Havelock Ellis wrote that the Wilde trials seemed ‘to have generally
contributed to give definitiveness and self-consciousness to the manifestations
of homosexuality, and to have aroused inverts to take up a definitive stand’
(Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. 2: Sexual Inversion, New York:
Random House, 1936, p. 253). See also Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side:
Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 91–3.
3 The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978), p. 43.
4 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘Introduction: Axiomatic’, in Epistemology of the
Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1–63.
5 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 47.
 CANNIBAL LONDON 161

6 Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 7.

7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 David Halperin has remarked that ‘all scientific inquiries into the aetiology
of sexual orientation, after all, spring from a more or less implicit theory of
sexual races’ (‘Homosexuality: A Cultural Construct’, in One Hundred Years
of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love, New York: Routledge,
1990, p. 50). Other works that investigate this connection include Abdul R.
JanMohamed, ‘Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the
Articulation of “Racialised Sexuality” ’, in Domna C. Stanton (ed.), Discourses
of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1992), pp. 94–116; Jennifer Terry, ‘Anxious Slippages between “Us” and
“Them”: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies’, in
Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives
on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), pp. 129–69; Siobhan B. Somerville, ‘Scientific Racism
and the Invention of the Homosexual Body’, in Laura Doan and Lucy Bland
(eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998), pp. 60–76.
9 See, for example, Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social
Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2002).
10 Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 3; emphasis in the text.
11 See Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the
Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1990 [1977]),
pp. 1–137; Ed Cohen, ‘Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to Gross
Indecency’, South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Winter 1989), pp. 181–215; and
Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century
England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
12 Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, p. 10.
13 Ibid., p. 3.
14 Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 190.
15 Joseph A. Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism’,
PMLA (Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition) 110.1
(January 1995), pp. 89–107, 90, my italics.
16 E. Villin, ‘Discussion’ (of ‘On Phallic Worship’), Anthropological Review 8
(1870), p. cxliii, my italics.
17 On this point, see James Hunt, ‘Anniversary Address to the Anthropological
Society of London’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of London
5 (1867), pp. lxi–lxii; and ‘President’s Address’ (1864), p. xciii; Richard
Lee, ‘The Extinction of Races’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of
London 2 (1864), p. xcviii; ‘The Chairman [Lord Stanley] at Farewell Dinner
for Captain [R.F.] Burton’, Anthropological Review 3.9 (1865), p. 169;
John Beddoe, ‘Discussion’ (of ‘The Manchester Anthropological Society’),
162 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Anthropological Review 5 (1867), p. 20; Joseph Kaines, ‘The Ultimate Object

of Anthropological Study’ and ‘Western Anthropologists and Extra Western
Communities’, Anthropologia 1 (1873), pp. 34, 226, 229.
18 The founding members included Rajah Sir James Brooke of Sarawak; the
Governor Eyre of Jamaica; George Selwyn; the prehistorian William Pengelly;
the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; Alfred Wallace; and F. W. Farrar. See J.
W. Burrow, ‘Evolution and Anthropology in the 1860s: The Anthropological
Society of London, 1863–71’, Victorian Studies 7.2 (December 1963),
pp. 137–54, 146.
19 Burrow notes that the society was ‘founded in 1843, [but] it did not begin to
publish its proceedings regularly until 1848’; ibid., p. 144.
20 James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 3rd
edn, 5 vols. (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper), pp. 1836–47.
21 On the controversies between the Ethnological Society and the
Anthropological Society, see J. W. Burrow, ‘Evolution and Anthropology in
the 1860s’, pp. 137–54; Ronald Rainger, ‘Race, Politics and Science: The
Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies 22.1
(Autumn 1978), pp. 51–70; and George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology
(New York: Macmillan, 1987).
22 See Somerville, ‘Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body’,
pp. 60–76.
23 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 60.
24 After years of controversies, The Anthropological Society merged with the
Ethnological Society into the Anthropological Institute in 1871.
25 Anthropologia: In Which Are Included the Proceedings of the London
Anthropological Society: 1873–1875, vol. 1 (London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox,
1875), pp. 78–88, 157–64, 571–8, 165–72.
26 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 62.
27 Significantly, they undertook their research in the decades following the
1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which removed the death penalty for
buggery. In this way, they seemed to respond to a widespread attempt which
was taking place in the medical field to classify different forms of male same-
sex practices.
28 Jeffrey Weeks, Making Sexual History (London: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 236–
7.
29 Male communities shaped on the ‘monastic’ model included the Tractarians,
who started a religious fraternity in the 1840s, and the Pre-Raphaelites, who
formed a secular Brotherhood devoted to the celebration of art.
30 Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in
Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 5, my italics.
31 Elaine Showalter acknowledges that the drive towards masculinization was
also constructed in response to perceived threats to stable masculine identity;
 CANNIBAL LONDON 163

among them, the effects of ‘British imperialism and fears of manly decline’
(Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, New York: Viking,
1990, p. 83).
32 Burton translated several Indian and Arabic erotic works in unabridged form,
such as The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883), The Perfumed Garden of the
Cheikh Nefzaoui (1884), and the Ananga Ranga (Stage of the Bodiless One);
or, The Hindu Art of Love (1885). See Silvia Antosa, Richard Francis Burton:
Victorian Explorer and Translator (Bern, Oxford and New York: Peter Lang,
2012), pp. 155–90.
33 His works include New Ladies Tickler, or the Adventures of Lady Lovesport
and the Audacious Harry (1866), The New Epicurean (1865), The Merry
Order of St. Bridget, Personal Recollections of the Use of the Rod (1868), and
his erotic autobiography The Ups and Downs of Life (1867).
34 See James Pope-Hennessey, Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth 1851–1885
(London: Constable, 1951), pp. 108–26.
35 Ashbee wrote a three-volume encyclopaedia which aimed at cataloguing all
existing pornographic work in England: Index Librorum Prohibitorum: Being
Notes Bio-Biblio Icono-Graphical and Critical in Curious and Uncommon
Books (1877); Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879); and Catena
Librorum Tacendorum (1885).
36 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, pp. 2–3.
37 Their works range from exoticism to phallicism, flagellation and
hermaphroditism. See, for example, John Davenport’s Aphrodisiacs and Anti-
aphrodisiacs (1869), Curiositates Eroticae Physiologie (1875) and Esoteric
Physiology Sexagima (1888); Ashbee’s Bibliotheca Arcana (1884), The
Library Illustrative of Social Progress (1860–1873) and Fashionable Lectures:
Composed and Delivered with Birch Discipline (1873).
38 Deborah Lutz, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism
(New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), p. 75; and
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 252.
39 H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 42.
40 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 6.
41 Malchow, Gothic Images of Race, p. 100.
42 ‘Cannibalism and Fiction II: The Sexual Metaphor’, Genre 11.2 (1978),
pp. 227–34.
43 The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. A Plain and Literal
Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, vol. 10 (London and
Benares: Kama Shastra Society, 1885), p. 227. The adjective ‘Sotadic’ came
from Sotades, a Greek poet who dealt with homosexual themes (ibid.,
pp. 206–7).
44 Ibid., p. 240, my italics.
164 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

45 Lutz, Pleasure Bound, p. 153, my italics.

46 In a note in the 1892 edition, Whitman acknowledged that ‘comradeship’
refers to male homosexuality, or ‘adhesive love’. The use of the term ‘comrade’
is a clear political reference that joins together adhesive love to a masculine
and militaristic idea (see Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, New York:
Norton, 2002, p. 771).
47 On Whitman’s influence in England see Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 201–17;
M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman
U.K. (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2005); and Michael Robertson,
Worshipping Whitman: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010).
48 Arthur Munby wrote that Swinburne usually ‘kept up a long and earnest talk,
or rather declamation, about the merits of Walt Whitman’ (Arthur Munby,
diary entry, 2 December 1867, in Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds.
The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828–1910, London: John Murray,
1972, p. 246). Swinburne wrote that Whitman was the ‘passionate preacher
of sexual or political freedom’ (Swinburne, William Blake (1868), reprinted
in Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (eds), The Complete Works of
Swinburne, vol. VI, London: William Heinemann, 1926, p. 342).
49 Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London (London:
Trübner, 1865), pp. 327–34.
50 See the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 3 (1865),
pp. cxiv–cxxi.
51 ‘On the Linga Puja, or Phallic Worship in India’, p. 334, my italics.
52 Burton, ‘Notes Connected with the Dahoman’, in Memoirs Read Before the
Anthropological Society of London, vol. 1, pp. 308–21, 320, my italics.
53 Burton translated other works on homosexuality, such as Il Pentamerone
(1893) and The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus (1894). Before his death,
he was revising one of his previous translations, The Perfumed Garden, which
was entitled The Scented Garden. In his new version, he wanted to explore
the issue of male homosexuality in the twenty-first chapter. His wife’s burning
of his annotations after his death prevented the circulation of his work. See
Antosa, Richard Francis Burton, pp. 24–37.
54 Frank Fane (Swinburne) to Richard Monckton Milnes, 27 December 1862
(The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1959–62, vol. 1, p. 41).
55 See Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 53.
56 Letter to Swinburne from Villine, 1871, found in The Cannibal Catechism
(London: printed for private circulation, 1913), copy held at Northwestern
University.
57 Anti-religious and anti-missionary ideas fervently animated the Cannibals.
During their meetings, they displayed in their front window a skeleton of
a savage in order to provoke the reaction of the Christian Union, whose
 CANNIBAL LONDON 165

headquarters were just across the street (see ‘Farewell Dinner to Captain R.F.
Burton’, Anthropological Review 3.9, May 1865, p. 175).
58 Weeks, Coming Out, p. 59.
59 Somerville, ‘Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body’,
p. 68. In acknowledging that the word ‘homosexual’ had entered common use,
Symonds and Ellis criticized its impure origins by stating that ‘ “homosexual”
is a barbarously hybrid word’ (1897, p. 1). In another edition, Ellis further
explained that ‘it has, philologically, the awkward disadvantage of being a
bastard term compounded of Greek and Latin elements’ (Sexual Inversion,
1915, p. 2, my italics).
60 It was introduced into English through the 1892 English translation of
Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopatia Sexualis.
61 Ibid., p. 78.
62 A Problem in Modern Ethics (London: Charles R. Dawes Ex Libris, 1896),
p. 183.
63 Lutz, Pleasure Bound, p. 251.
64 Ellis wrote: ‘The theory of the Sotadic Zone is interesting, but … Burton was
wholly unacquainted with the recent psychological investigations into sexual
inversion which had, indeed, scarcely begun in his day’ (Sexual Inversion,
1906, p. 28, n. 5).
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘Famous for the paint she put

on her face’: London’s Painted
Poofs and the Self-Fashioning
of Francis Bacon
Dominic Janes

The landscape inhabited by lesbians and gay men in contemporary London

is haunted by past traumas from the pillory to AIDS. The term ‘gay’ explicitly
attempts to assert the possibilities of pleasure and happiness, whereas the
term ‘queer’ represents an appropriation of a word that originally was
disdainfully employed with reference to those whom society found peculiar
and perverse. This chapter will be looking at a time when ‘gay’ was not widely
used to mean homosexual and lives of sexual deviance were extensively
criminalized. Francis Bacon (1909–92) worked for most of his career in
London and came to be closely associated with drinking and gambling scenes
in the city’s West End. He openly embraced the pleasures and experiences of
London’s high life and low life and his work created queerly transgressive
blendings of the two. The word ‘queer’ is a powerful descriptor for Bacon’s
art because it is often used in ‘queer theory’ to apply to circumstances in
which normativity is put under pressure and transgressed in relation not
only to sexuality but also to other aspects of cultural life, including gender.1
In this chapter I will be looking at Bacon’s work as queer visual culture
and reading it in its geographical and sexual context.2 In particular, I will
be seeking to contribute to recent trends in scholarship that contest earlier
narratives that Bacon’s art should be studied separately from what used to
be seen, and in some quarters still are seen, as sordid aspects of his personal
168 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

life. Bacon’s sadomasochism, let alone his homosexuality, was little discussed
in his lifetime in the critical literature. It was often treated as sensational
biographical material in the years after his death.3 But queer desire has begun
to be read in certain quarters as central to his artistic practices such that the
energy with which he painted the male nude has increasingly been seen as
indicative of libidinal engagement rather than being evocative of nihilism
and existential despair. Appreciating Bacon as a masochist similarly allows
his fascination with brutality to be reinterpreted as a product of desire rather
than of fear.4 However, such work has not placed his art in the context of
homosexual urban subcultures that were invested in transgressions of both
normative sexuality and gender performance.
I will argue that it is through engagement with practices of gender
indeterminacy that we can reach enhanced understandings of the self-
fashioning of Francis Bacon seen in the context of his metropolitan milieu.
This is not the same thing as reclaiming him for gay pride. It has recently
been suggested, for instance, that a photograph dated to c.1945 by Bacon’s
friend John Deakin is not an ‘unknown woman’ but the artist cross-dressed
(Figure 11.1).5 The caption provided at the time of writing by Getty Images

FIGURE 11.1 Caption provided by Getty Images: ‘Portrait of an unidentified

transvestite, possibly the artist Francis Bacon in drag, England pre-1945. The cleavage
raises questions, but may be the result of photo manipulation.’ (Photo by The John
Deakin Archive/Getty Images.)
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 169

is fascinating in itself: ‘portrait of an unidentified transvestite, possibly the

artist Francis Bacon in drag, England pre-1945. The cleavage raises questions,
but may be the result of photo manipulation’. The key question raised by
that cleavage is not so much whether it was ‘real’ or not but, more broadly,
what role gender transgression played both in Bacon’s self-fashioning and
in our reception of those practices after his death. It is notable, whether this
attribution is correct or not, that what seems to connect the style of this
image to that of Bacon is its unhappy tawdriness rather than any obvious
beauty or glamour. For Bacon’s extraordinary talent enabled him to explore
the deeper significance of what the conventional world viewed as ugly and
shameful.
Rather than framing my argument around an extensive selection
of paintings, I will juxtapose an example of his artistic work with a
photograph taken in an interwar police raid. The aim of this is to disrupt
expectations that studies of Bacon must be art historical. My aim here
is not to present a new reading of his paintings, although I believe that
attention paid to gender performance might be productive of just that, but
to see them as artefacts of queer visual culture. Few of Bacon’s works from
the 1930s survive and therefore the painting from 1945 to 1946, Figure
Study II (Figure 11.2), around which I will be framing my argument, can
be identified as coming from the first period of his artistic fame. This was a
time when many of London’s homes were literally open to the skies because
of bomb damage and this opening of private space to the public gaze can
be seen as emblematic of the many ways in which the war had disrupted
the boundaries of privacy with which bourgeois family life had been
sustained. Bacon’s work of this period has most often been understood as a
response to violent trauma. Thus, to take one example, it has been pointed
out that Bacon was inspired both by Roman Catholic imagery and by Nazi
photography to create images of contemporary agony.6 So powerful indeed
was the impact of one particular work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base
of a Crucifixion (c.1944), that it led to other work of this time, including
Figure Study II, being read using the same interpretative reference to the
profanation of the sacred. Thus this latter work, which has been described
as a ‘strange figure of indeterminate sex’, came frequently and erroneously
to be referred to as The Magdalene.7 I will be arguing that in these works
Bacon enacted queer transgressions through targeting the public gaze onto
perverse, private desires that were sexual rather than spiritual.
This strategy can be compared with the disciplinary gaze of the police
as they sought to enforce public standards of morality in London’s bodily
and domestic interiors. Notably, Bacon’s interest in the inner city’s domestic
interiors as places of moral transgression echoed the well-entrenched
understandings of English legal practice. Thus one of the key pieces of
legislation employed against brothels and queer clubs alike during the
first decades of the twentieth century by the Metropolitan Police was the
Disorderly Houses Act (1751).8 Disorderly houses were, in the words
170 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

FIGURE 11.2 Francis Bacon, Figure Study II (1945–46), oil on canvas, 145 × 128.5
cm. Huddersfield Art Gallery, reproduced courtesy of the estate of Francis Bacon,
all rights reserved, DACS 201x, photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

of the judge presiding over the trial of those arrested at a private party
in Fitzroy Square, London, in 1927, places that were ‘not regulated by the
restraints of morality’.9 From the point of view of the ‘respectable’ opinion
of the time, sodomy was a disgusting act of bodily violation. Therefore, when
comparing the views of the police and those of homosexual men on scenes
of perceived immorality, it is important to remember the potential for the
eroticization of abject acts and spaces on the part of the latter. Crucially, it
is important to stress that Bacon aestheticized violence and transgression in
association with his sadomasochistic, same-sex desires. He was, if anything,
erotically thrilled that men during the Second World War were often meat for
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 171

the grinder.10 Bacon’s disorderly houses, therefore, were not isolated locales
within a city of decency, but expressions of what he felt, ultimately, to be
universal human drives. However, the manner in which Bacon approached
his artistic challenge needs to be situated within the specific conditions of
London in the mid-twentieth century and the subculture of the painted poof.

London’s painted poofs

Gender transgression was one of the ways in which homosexuals made
themselves visible to each other and the use of effeminate gestures, dress
and make-up was, therefore, scrutinized by the police in their efforts to
control sex between men. It has been widely noted that Francis Bacon
did not only paint pictures; he also painted his own face with cosmetics.
Moreover, he told the art historian Michael Peppiatt that the connection
was forcibly brought home to him one day when he walked into a bar when
he was starting to become well-known, probably in the immediate post-war
years, and he heard a camp man say loudly, ‘as for her, when we knew her,
she was more famous for the paint she put on her face than for the paint
she put on canvas’.11 Bacon was hugely amused thereby to be compared
to a vulgar, female street-walker. Make-up was used by a minority of men
in mid-twentieth-century London and among its functions was not only
to improve appearance but to send the signal that one was open to same-
sex advances, or even that one was a male prostitute.12 Some of those men
simply added make-up to otherwise masculine self-presentation, while
others, of whom Quentin Crisp (1908–99) was to become the most famous
example, projected a more overtly androgynous self-image. Crisp similarly
identified the post-war period – 1948 to be precise – as a time when art met
artifice since it was in that year that he changed his hair dye from henna to
blue and entered, evoking Picasso, his ‘blue period’.13
At a time of rising public and police concern over the ‘problem’
of homosexuality, such behaviours became of intense interest to the
authorities.14 As Matt Houlbrook has revealed, the ‘man with the powder
puff’ became an object of both erotic and phobic fascination in interwar
London.15 As he explains, such men ‘were an integral and startling part
of metropolitan modernity, embodying the nagging fear that the city
offered queer men an affirmative space, where their desires were no longer
abhorrent and depraved’.16 In the nineteenth century cosmetics had been
widely associated with the arts of ageing prostitutes and were seen as
unfit for respectable women let alone men. Yet at least the first of these
beliefs was starting to come to seem old-fashioned during the Edwardian
period. And when cheap powder puffs and other items of the cosmetic arts
appeared after the end of the First World War, they were seized on with
enthusiasm by a new generation of women.17 Houlbrook has emphasized
the role of the spread of consumerism in working-class urban culture and
172 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

the guarded degree of toleration that some in these communities might

accord to men who presented themselves as feminine.18 While the behaviour
of such ‘quaens’ made some men careful to weed out indications of personal
effeminacy, their example encouraged certain middle-class boys such as the
young Crisp (then Dennis Pratt) to flee the conformist suburbs in search of
opportunities for self-expression in the inner city.19 Francis Bacon came from
a wealthy, upper-middle class family which had been part of the Anglo-Irish
ascendency. However, certain members of the British upper classes had been
interested since the later nineteenth century in ‘slumming’ among the lower
classes.20 So when Bacon’s father sent his seemingly effeminate son away to
encounter some manly influences in metropolitan England and Germany,
the results were not at all what he had intended.
Bacon entered with enthusiasm into the opportunities offered by the
nightlife of the 1920s and became a ‘man with a powder-puff’ in Berlin,
Paris and London, during which time he not only used his appearance to
attract sexual partners but, probably, also to generate an income. Bacon’s
use of make-up predated his practices of painting on canvas and it seems
the former influenced the latter, bearing in mind that he did not receive a
formal training as an artist. Moreover, he not merely applied paint onto the
rough side of the canvas but he also practised swirling make-up onto his
own stubbled visage.21 The implication of this is that the faces in Bacon’s
paintings need to be considered in relation to his own. His anonymous
men, in particular, even when they seem muscular and lacking in the signs
of androgyny, are queered by their being ‘made-up’ in this way from the
viewpoint and discipline of a man with a powder-puff who self-consciously
played games with the presentation of gender. Bacon’s bodily performances,
therefore, like those of many other self-consciously anti-bourgeois ‘modern’
artists, were part of a continuum between his art and his life.22
Christian morality before the twentieth century took the subject of
cosmetics seriously. For instance, as Patricia Phillippy has pointed out in
Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (2006),
the way in which women used make-up during the Renaissance was held to
be an important moral subject for the (male) artist to explore. Furthermore,
the concern that make-up was an art of deception had a tendency to reflect
back on the authority of the artist’s supposed mission toward the revelation
of moral truths.23 Since Bacon was characteristically emphatic that his work
was not concerned with constructing elaborate codes of meaning that had
to be decoded but was aimed at evoking intense emotional reactions to
shared human truths (such as the universality of pain and desire), it would
seem that he subscribed to the notion of what might be termed the truth of
cosmetics; that is to say, the decadent position espoused by Oscar Wilde,
among others, that masks reveal who we really are.
In his introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Francis Bacon:
Paintings from the 1950s’ (University of East Anglia, Norwich 2006;
Milwaukee Art Museum 2007; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 173

2007), Michael Peppiatt begins by talking about Bacon’s eyes. In his youth,
says Peppiatt, the painter’s eyes were wide with curiosity, but they slowly
became wary and hardened: ‘Later they will grow old in a young face.
The smooth cheeks, the carefully tousled hair will continue to proclaim
Bacon’s uncanny youth, defying a lifetime of every excess. But like the portrait
of Dorian Gray, the eyes will continue to absorb and record.’24 I am engaged
in a practice of reading back and forth between Bacon’s perceptions and his
self-projections and thinking about the way in which these processes can
be understood in relation to the evolution of wider cultural practices over
time. On the one hand, the painter should be carefully positioned in relation
to historical contexts as being, or having been, a ‘west end [of London]
poof’, as described by the lawyer Travers Humphreys in 1927.25 Yet, just
as Bacon and Crisp continued to embody aspects of this phenomenon late
into the twentieth century, so the man with the powder puff did not jump
ready formed from his powder compact. As can be seen from the historical
definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary, a sodomitical meaning
for the word ‘poof’ can be traced back in London to the first half of the
nineteenth century when, on 11 April 1833, it was attested during a trial
at the Old Bailey that ‘there was a gentleman who gave a great deal of
money for boys … [and] there was a [another] gentleman in the City, too,
that was one of these poofs, as he called them … I never heard the word
poofs before’. By around 1855, the Yokel’s Perceptor was pointing out to
those who were, at least supposedly, innocent of the ways of the big city
the existence of ‘these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated
Margeries, Pooffs, &c’.26
In order to appreciate the cultural landscape inhabited by Bacon, it
is important to appreciate that it had long, and complex, antecedents.
Sodomitical subcultures of London, as far back as they can be identified,
were implicated in transgressions of gender performance. Ever since the
publication of Rictor Norton’s Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay
Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (1992), the precursors of modern
patterns of gender-bending have come to wider attention in Britain.27
It is perhaps the only gay history book that has been made into a play
(by Mark Ravenhill), which debuted in September 2001 at the National
Theatre in London. The play was directed by Nicholas Hytner at the
very time when it was announced that he was to be appointed as director
of the National Theatre itself. But like many another study of same-sex
desire in history, Norton’s work needs to be considered as a product of its
own times, notably in relation to the progress of gay liberation and the
contemporary AIDS crisis. In particular, Norton’s naming of the subculture
that he had researched as being ‘gay’ has been seen as highly problematic
in so far as that term was not to come into widespread use in Britain
with a sexual signification until the 1970s. However, part of Norton’s
argument was that similarities of desire could be found between those
very different historical periods and with them certain similar problems,
174 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

such as how to tell who was interested in a same-sex advance and who
not; who was merely staring and who was doing so with sexual intent.
Thus it is important to stress that the culture of London’s mollies of the
eighteenth century was not the same as that of its poofs in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries but there were, nevertheless, significant elements
of continuity and similarity.
Female attributes such as items of dress or nicknames were employed
by small networks of men in early eighteenth-century London who shared
interests that at the time would have been referred to as sodomitical.28
The very use of a woman’s name, ‘Molly’, indicated interests in attributes
of femininity which were by no means implicit in the word ‘sodomite’.
In fact, eighteenth-century London saw the coining of dozens of words
for groups of men thought to be characterized as effeminate, such as
‘fops’, ‘fribbles’ and ‘macaronis’.29 Whatever understandings such men
themselves may have had of their own behaviour and sexual tastes, there
was clearly considerable public confusion over whether, and if so in what
way, transgressions of gendered behaviour were coterminous with sexual
deviance. While the word ‘molly’ did survive into the nineteenth century,
along with descriptions of behaviours similar to those practised in molly
houses of the previous century (such as sham marriages and births), such
accounts may represent little more than the survival of satirical tropes.30
Newspaper reports of Victorian sodomy trials make it quite clear, however,
that the issue of effeminacy in men, and associated elements of gender
transgression, continued to be seen as important throughout the nineteenth
century. Indeed, one of the most important of such trials, that of Ernest
Boulton and Frederick William Park in 1871, centred on exactly this issue
of whether transgressions of gendered appearance (including both clothing
and make-up) were directly to be understood as evidences of sodomitical
desire.31 In the course of the trial, the Beadle of the Burlington Arcade,
George Smith, attested that he regularly saw these two men powdered and
rouged, sometimes cross-dressed and sometimes not. He testified that the
accused ‘caused much commotion’, that ‘everybody was looking at them’
and that this behaviour was, in effect, understood to be related to male
prostitution.32
In the ensuing years, it came to public notice that young men of various
classes were thought to be displaying the visual evidences of effeminacy
more extensively than hitherto. Thus, in 1893 the periodical Hearth and
Home denounced ‘young men who are got up’. It was not simply a matter
of bangles, high-pitched voices and waving lily-white hands; it was reported
that ‘it is an absolute fact that a large number of young men get themselves
up. The rouge-pot and the powder-puff find a place on their toilet table. Their
eyebrows are darkened; their hair is often crimped or curled, and sometimes
even dyed; and their figures are trained and artificially improved’.33 That
there was a sexual significance to such fears is indicated by the enthusiasm
on the part of artistic and decadent circles associated with Oscar Wilde for
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 175

colourful and artificial transgressions of natural appearances. Thus Max

Beerbohm’s essay, ‘A Defense of Cosmetics’ (reprinted as ‘The Pervasion
of Rouge’), which appeared in The Yellow Book in April 1894, may have
been written tongue-in-cheek but it engendered a remarkable public outcry
among those who took seriously his claims for the delights of artifice and
of face-paint as the original form of art.34 Beerbohm was writing about
the use of cosmetics by women but, twenty years later, cosmetics could be
employed, not simply by the queer urban subculture, but also by middle-
class young men in a spirit of rebellion and individualism. This appears
to have been how they were employed by Cecil Beaton when he attended
Harrow School from 1918. On 25 January 1926, after he had come down
from Cambridge without a degree, Beaton wrote that:

I wondered why I had painted my face [at Harrow]. I always used to

powder and put red stuff on my lips. It’s so idiotic to think that people
don’t notice it … Now I squirm to see a man powdered. I must have been
rather awful at Harrow and I used to think I was so marvelous, so witty
and bright and subtle and interesting.35

What is fascinating about this comment is that it was only in the mid-1920s,
when he was emerging into the homosexual party-circuit of London’s West
End, that Beaton felt revulsion against the use of cosmetics. Perhaps it was
because it was at this time that, finally, make-up on men became fixed
in terms of public opinion, as opposed to sub-cultural practice, as clear
evidence of same-sex desire.36
Because of criminalization the police were keen to ask the question
‘what does a homosexual look and behave like?’ The desire to bracket
off such people from everyone else who was ‘normal’ has inspired all
manner of answers. Thus one recent academic writer, E. Patrick Johnson,
recounted on visiting his grandmother who lived in North Carolina that
she was concerned that there was a homosexual in her care home: ‘ “Well
how do you know the man’s a homosexual, Grandmama?” She paused,
rubbed her leg, narrowed her eyes and responded, “Well, he gardens,
bakes pies, and keeps a clean house.” ’37 She would, on those grounds,
presumably never have identified the notoriously dust-ignoring Quentin
Crisp.38 He first came to widespread notice as a result of the TV film
of his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant (1968).39 Andy Medhurst
recalled that, as a sixteen-year-old, ‘its celebration of Quentin Crisp’s
unrepentant queenliness filled me with an elated, vertiginous sense of
identification, belonging and defiant pride … I had seen the future – and
it minced’.40 Yet Crisp’s life and beliefs were not the product of the gay
liberation movement of the 1970s and he was not proud in the way that
came to be expected by men of Medhurst’s generation. Crisp felt ashamed
of his effeminacy which, he felt, was a form of disfigurement that he could
never conceal.41 His autobiography provides eloquent testimony to the
176 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

years of verbal and physical abuse that he suffered as the price not only
for sexual opportunities but also for being himself.42 Bacon, by contrast,
enthusiastically pursued abusive sexual encounters, and created works
in which blurred figures are deliberately denied their individuality. The
issue of ‘gay shame’ has received considerable scholarly attention.43 I will
now go on to explore some of the ways in which the abject shame of the
painted sodomite provided part of the erotic impetus for his processes of
artistic creation.

The visual culture of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon’s Figure Study II (1945–46) (Figure 11.2) shows a room in
which there is a half-draped, bloated form, the face of which is ruptured
into a scream. This image evokes a powerful sense of embodied shame
centred on bodily concealment and revelation which I would argue was
related to Bacon’s queer sexuality. Since sexual acts between men of any
age were illegal in England and Wales until the passing of the Sexual
Offences Act (1967), this meant that a room in which two or more men had
sex together was the scene of a crime. This was something that seems to
have fascinated Bacon since he made several references to crime scenes or
even to the concept of a ‘bed of crime’.44 He would have been well aware,
moving in the circles he did, of the constant threats of police raids and
blackmail. In the eyes of the police, the basement flat at 25 Fitzroy Square
that they testified to raiding in the case of Rex v. Britt and Others (1927)
was a disorderly house which was the resort of what Chief Inspector Robert
Sygrove described as ‘ “Nancy Boys” ’.45 Cross-dressing was observed as
part of the police surveillance prior to the raid and several items of female
attire were duly presented as evidence in court.46 In a photograph taken
by the police photographer during the raid, a certain Mrs Carré, who said
she was Britt’s wife, stares at the camera in resigned amusement. The men,
however, look away. Britt himself sits bare-chested and wearing what the
police claimed to have been a transparent skirt (Figure 11.3).47 The red-
painted room behind housed a bed with rumpled covers and was dimly
lit by a lamp concealed behind an umbrella.48 Red lamps, it should be
noted, were associated with prostitution and one of these was placed over
the entrance to the flat. This scene, when juxtaposed with Britt’s exposed
person, evoked, for the police, a narrative of sodomitical shame. In Figure
Study II, a pale figure bellows its shame (a detail which Peppiatt connects
to the state of orgasm) against a red-orange background, conjuring the
thought of bending over and being buggered.49 Bacon’s own sexual tastes
were for violent, working-class, masculine men. The figure in Bacon’s
painting, executed when the artist himself was reaching middle age, may
also be channelling enhanced self-disgust at the thought that he would
soon become a flabby, aged poof.50
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 177

FIGURE 11.3 Fitzroy Square group. Evidence presented at the Central Criminal
Court, Rex v. Britt and Others, 1927, CRIM 1/387, reproduced courtesy of the
National Archives, London.

The above example shows that private parties were by no means places
of safety for homosexuals while those who put on make-up and went out
onto the streets faced a potential barrage of verbal and physical abuse.
While Crisp, as I have indicated, seems to have faced this with defiance,
Bacon appears to have revelled in it and actively sought physical abuse
both from strangers and from long-term sexual partners. Such behaviour,
and indeed the very terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’, was first classified
as forms of sexual perversion in the late-nineteenth century by the same
cadre of doctors and psychologists who were busy identifying and naming
homosexuality.51 Sexuality theorists have hotly debated whether sadism
and masochism should be seen as separate phenomena from BDSM or S/M
and whether they can operate as liberatory practices. Thus Leo Bersani
has argued that S/M is ‘profoundly conservative in that its imagination
of pleasure is almost entirely defined by the dominant culture to which it
thinks of itself as giving “a stinging slap in the face” ’.52 This is so because,
he would argue, it involves the worship of conventional masculinity.53 John
178 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Noyes, however, among many others, has argued against this by advancing
his view of masochism as a radical practice:

masochism is not the love of submissiveness. It is not the pursuit of

unpleasure or humiliation. It is a complex set of practices for transforming
submissiveness, pain, and unpleasure, into sexual pleasure. But over and
above this, it is the appropriation of the technologies that our culture uses
in order to perpetuate submissiveness.54

Another way to look at this situation is to argue that masochistic desires

are indeed based on a fatalistic capitulation to existing power structures but
one which optimizes the benefits to the self from that state of subjection.55
Seen from this point of view, queer, masochistic effeminacy acquiesced in
the misogynistic abjection of femininity as the inevitable corollary of being
a self-identified homosexual. The same reading back and forth between
body and art that can be made in relation to Bacon’s uses of make-up and
paint can also be deployed in relation to his violent sexual practices and
the canvases at which he slashed and gouged.56 The reward for Bacon as
masochist was both erotic satisfaction and a sense of superiority over those
closeted men who were in denial about the effeminacy that was believed to
be an inherent aspect of the homosexual condition.
It is interesting to compare such practices of painful self-expression with
those highlighted in one of the first openly gay plays to run in New York,
Robert Patrick’s The Haunted Host (1964). Its mood of gloomy camp appears
to put it in the same category as Mart Crowley’s (in)famously maudlin The
Boys in the Band (opened 1968, film directed by William Friedkin, 1970).
In Patrick’s play, the lead character, Jay, is an overtly feminine man whose
lover has just committed suicide. Yet by using his self-assured wit, Jay is
able to dominate and master a straight-acting man and thereby, in Darren
Patrick Blaney’s view, through ‘envisioning an alternative ending for the
tragic queen archetype, the play enacts a critique of homosexual identities
by offering a vision in which the stereotypical power dynamic between the
gay man and the straight man is inverted’.57 In a similar manner, Bacon
used his wit, and his wealth, to enable himself to survive events such as the
suicide of his lover, George Dyer. And just as Patrick’s play should be seen
against the backdrop of an interwar heritage of queer theatre (the previous
age of openly flagrant theatrics in New York was in the 1920s with the plays
of Mae West), so Bacon honed his strategies of effeminate survival, and
gained his foundational artistic inspirations, in the same interwar period.58
Interest in such strategies of self-construction from positions of weakness
has risen in recent years with the appearance of a new level of appreciation
for the queerness of states of failure; witness Judith Halberstam’s
acknowledgement of Quentin Crisp’s comment that ‘if at first you don’t
succeed, failure may be your style’ as a key inspiration for her own study
of the ‘queer art of failure’.59 Yet if Bacon had failed to be a real man, the
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 179

effect of his art was to establish swirls of make-up – incomplete swirls that
deliberately evoke interior emptiness – as the visual form for both femmes
and butches. This implies that painted poofs should be seen not simply as a
sub-category of ‘effeminate’ homosexual men, but as a partially empowered
group of people able to make a variety of radical statements about the
human condition, including on the advantages of eroticizing its own abject
failure to live up to contemporary ideals of gender. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the Metropolitan Police spent so much energy scrutinizing
London’s painted poofs since the latter not only embodied a state of
queer transgression but also took its spirit out of their disorderly houses
and onto the streets of Britain’s capital city. This case study has focused
on a single painting by Francis Bacon but it is intended to contribute to a
process of wider engagement with re-viewing his work as having emerged
from queer subcultures of London in the mid-twentieth century that were
engaged in transgressions not only of sexual but also of gender norms. This
means re-evaluating the world of the painted poof as containing within it
counter-cultural bravery and the potential for remarkable acts of artistic
self-expression.

Notes
1 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 71.
2 This discussion develops key aspects of material that I have previously
explored with a different focus in Dominic Janes, Picturing the Closet: Male
Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), pp. 139–61. Two important examples of the visual culture
approach that I am advancing here are Simon Ofield, ‘Wrestling with Francis
Bacon’, Oxford Art Journal 24.1 (2001), pp. 115–30, and Richard Hornsey,
‘Francis Bacon at the Photobooth: Facing the Homosexual in Post-War
Britain’, Visual Culture in Britain 8.2 (2007), pp. 83–103. (For a different
version of this, see Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly
Life in Postwar London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010,
pp. 117–62.)
3 Emmanuel Cooper, ‘Queer Spectacles’, in Peter Horne and Reina Lewis
(eds), Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (London:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 13–27, 22–26.
4 Compare Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London:
Century, 1993) and more recent scholarship such as Rina Arya, ‘Constructions
of Homosexuality in the Art of Francis Bacon’, Journal for Cultural Research
16.1 (2012), pp. 43–61; Nicholas Chare, After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia
and Sex in Paint (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); and John H. Hatch, ‘Seeing and
Seen: Acts of the Voyeur in the Works of Francis Bacon’, in Rina Arya (ed.),
Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012),
pp. 35–48.
180 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

5 Gordon Comstock, ‘CIA Facial Software Uncovers the Artist Francis

Bacon – In Drag’, Guardian, 16 June 2014. http://www.theguardian.com
/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/cia-software-unveils-francis-bacon-in-drag
(accessed 1 May 2015).
6 Martin Hammer and Chris Stephens, ‘ “Seeing the story of one’s time”:
Appropriations from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Visual
Culture in Britain 10.3 (2009), pp. 315–51.
7 Jean H. Duffy, Reading Between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 130; Ronald Alley, Francis
Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), p. 11; and Kent Brintnall, Ecce
Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 150, n. 70.
8 Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 300; and Jane Rendell,
‘ “Serpentine allurements”: Disorderly Bodies/Disorderly Spaces’, in Iain
Borden and Jane Rendell (eds), Intersections: Architectural Histories and
Critical Theories (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 247–68, 257.
9 Transcript Rex v. Britt and Others, Central Criminal Court, 18 February 1927
(CRIM 1/387), National Archives, London.
10 Quoted in Alistair O’Neill, London: After a Fashion (London: Reaktion,
2007), p. 114.
11 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Constable
and Robinson, 2008), p. 69.
12 Ibid., p. 60. See also Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Inverts, Perverts and Mary-Annes:
Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Journal of Homosexuality 6.1–2
(1980–1), pp. 113–34; and Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform
in England, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 25, 30, 157.
13 Nigel Kelly, Quentin Crisp: The Profession of Being (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2011), p. 60.
14 Leslie J. Moran and Derek McGhee, ‘Perverting London: The Cartographic
Practices of Law’, in Carl F. Stychin and Didi Herman (eds), Sexuality in the
Legal Arena (London: Athlone Press, 2000), pp. 104–6.
15 Matt Houlbrook, ‘The Man with the Powder Puff in Interwar London’,
Historical Journal 50.1 (2007), pp. 145–71, 170.
16 Matt Houlbrook, ‘ “Lady Austin’s camp boys”: Constituting the Queer Subject
in 1930s London’, Gender and History 14.1 (2002), pp. 31–61, 39.
17 Houlbrook, ‘The Man with the Powder Puff’, p. 157.
18 Justin Bengry, ‘Courting the Pink Pound: Men Only and the Queer Consumer,
1935–39’, History Workshop Journal 68.1 (2009), pp. 122–48, 131.
19 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–57 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
p. 149.
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 181

20 Angus McLaren, ‘Smoke and Mirrors: Willy Clarkson and the Role of
Disguises in Inter-War England’, Journal of Social History 40.3 (2007),
pp. 597–618, 597. See also Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics
in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004),
pp. 25–87; and Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming,
Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press, 2007).
21 Farson, The Gilded Gutter, p. 84; and O’Neill, London, p. 113.
22 Amelia Jones, ‘ “Clothes make the man”: The Male Artist as a Performative
Function’, Oxford Art Journal 18.2 (1995), pp. 18–32.
23 Patricia Phillippy, Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern
Culture (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
24 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for
the Visual Arts, 2006), p. 3.
25 Quoted in Houlbrook, Queer London, p. 139.
26 ‘Poof, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn. (2006). http://www.oed.com
(accessed 20 May 2014).
27 Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House (London: GMP, 1992).
28 Tanya Cassidy, ‘People, Place, and Performance: Theoretically Revisiting
Mother Clap’s Molly House’, in Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (eds),
Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 99–113; and Thomas
A. King, The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 2: Queer Articulations
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p. 87.
29 King, Gendering of Men, p. 11.
30 Ibid., p. 199.
31 There is an extensive literature on Fanny and Stella: Charles Upchurch,
‘Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case
of the Queen vs. Boulton and Others’, Gender and History 12.1 (2000),
pp. 127–57; Maurice B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love and
Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Michelle Liu
Carriger, ‘The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park:
A Victorian Sex Scandal and the Theatre Defense’, TDR 57.4 (2013),
pp. 135–56; and Neil McKenna, Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who
Shocked Victorian England (London: Faber and Faber, 2013).
32 Anon., ‘Charge of Personating Women’, Morning Post, 14 May 1870, p. 6.
33 Anon., ‘Young Men Who Are Got Up’, Huddersfield Daily Chronicle,
4 April 1893, p. 4 (this article was widely syndicated in the provincial press).
34 Max Beerbohm, ‘A Defense of Cosmetics’, Yellow Book 1 (April 1894),
pp. 65–82.
35 Quoted in Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton: A Biography (New York: Primus,
1985), p. 23.
182 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

36 Houlbrook, ‘Man with the Powder Puff’, p. 154.

37 E. Patrick Johnson, ‘ “Quare studies”, or (Almost) Everything I Know about
Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother’, Callaloo 23.1 (2000),
pp. 1–25, 20.
38 Mark Armstrong, ‘A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home’, Visual
Culture in Britain 12.2 (2011), pp. 155–69.
39 Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (London: Fontana, 1977) (first
published 1968), p. 61.
40 Andy Medhurst, ‘One Queen and His Screen: Lesbian and Gay Television’, in
Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (eds), Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics
(London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 79–97, 82. On Crisp in general, see Kelly,
Quentin Crisp.
41 Crisp, Naked, p. 7.
42 Ibid., p. 156.
43 See, for instance, David J. Allen and Terry Oleson, ‘Shame and Internalised
Homophobia’, Journal of Homosexuality 37.3 (1999), pp. 33–43; Sally Munt,
Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008); and David Halperin (ed.), Gay Shame (Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press, 2009).
44 Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio (London: Merrell, 2005), pp. 7–8,
explains that Bacon made four references in notes and annotations to pictures
in his studio to a ‘bed of crime’, and p. 188 gives further references to scenes
of crime.
45 Statement, Chief Inspector Robert Sygrove, Met. Police D Division,
8 January 1927 (CRIM 1/387, National Archives, London).
46 List of exhibits in Rex v. Britt and Others (CRIM 1/387) and Houlbrook
(2005), pp. 131–3.
47 Statement, Superintendent George Collings, 17 January 1927 (CRIM 1/387).
48 Statement, Chief Inspector Sygrove, 2 February 1927 (CRIM 1/387).
49 Peppiat, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, p. 35.
50 Julie Jones and Stephen Pugh, ‘Ageing Gay Men: Lessons from the Sociology
of Embodiment’, Men and Masculinities 7.3 (2005), pp. 248–60, 258.
51 John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 6.
52 Bersani, Homos, pp. 48, 87.
53 Ibid., p. 85.
54 Noyes, Mastery of Submission, p. 12.
55 Peter Cosgrove, ‘Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive
Masochism of the Image’, ELH 66.2 (1999), pp. 405–37, 434. See also
Dominic Janes, ‘ “Eternal master”: Masochism and the Sublime at the National
 FRANCIS BACON AND LONDON’S PAINTED POOFS 183

Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, DC’, Theology and

Sexuality 15.2 (2009), pp. 161–75.
56 Chare, After Francis Bacon, 96.
57 Darren Patrick Blaney, ‘1964: The Birth of Gay Theater’, Gay and Lesbian
Review (worldwide edition) (January–February 2014), pp. 17–21, 19.
58 Ariel Nereson, ‘Queens “campin’” Onstage: Performing Queerness in Mae
West’s “gay plays” ’, Theatre Journal 64.4 (2012), pp. 513–32. George
Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the
Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), indicates that
interwar New York was richer in queer culture than its counterpart in the
post-war age.
59 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011), p. 96.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

Mingling with the Ungodly:

Simeon Solomon in Queer
Victorian London
Carolyn Conroy

Our hitherto dear Servant SS hath most grossly

sinned against our Majesty.

He hath mingled with the Ungodly.

He hath done those things which he

ought not to have done
Simeon Solomon to Herbert Horne, c. 1890

Following his arrest and conviction for attempted sodomy in 1873, the
homosexual Anglo-Jewish artist Simeon Solomon spent the remaining
thirty-two years of his life living in varying degrees of poverty and hardship
in and around the Holborn and Bloomsbury areas of central London.
Records indicate that during this time, Solomon’s residences alternated
between lowly common lodging houses, rooms in cheap private rentals, the
workhouse and the workhouse’s casual wards for vagrants – a life which
was in direct contrast to his former prosperous and comfortable existence
among London’s artistic elite. This chapter charts the second half of
Solomon’s life, focusing particularly on the artist’s lived experience in queer
186 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Victorian London from the early 1870s until his death in 1905, and from
his fascination with the notorious transvestites ‘Fanny and Stella’ to his
relationship with the outrageous Aesthete and friend of Oscar Wilde, Count
Eric Stanislaus Stenbock.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Solomon corresponded with one of his
most important patrons, art collector and founder of the Century Guild
publishing company, Herbert Horne, through notes and letters written
and sent by way of the City News Room at Ludgate Circus.1 Among these
documents is an intriguing letter composed by Solomon which takes the
form of a parody and is addressed to himself from ‘the Angel Gabriel, Upper
Circle, Heaven’.2 In the letter the celestial messenger describes in a mocking
tone how Solomon ‘hath most grossly sinned against our Majesty … hath
done those things which he ought not to have done’ and ‘mingled with
the Ungodly’.3 These lines by Solomon reference his conviction in 1873
and the words echo those found on the artist’s arrest documents which
state that Solomon had ‘wickedly’ and ‘against the order of nature’
committed the ‘detestable and abominable crime of buggery against the
peace of our Lady the Queen, her Crown and Dignity’.4 Solomon’s allusion
to his ‘mingling’ with the Biblical idea of the ungodly certainly refers to
the city’s other impious and wicked sodomites whom he had consorted
with, and his use of the Angel Gabriel as the deliverer of this condemnation
is apt since Gabriel was sent by God to destroy the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah.5
However, Solomon’s use of the term ‘ungodly’ could also have been a
reference to the destitute, impoverished and outcast peoples that he made
his home among in the notorious slum areas of London’s St Giles. Writing
in 1937, tabloid news journalist Bernard Falk reasoned that Solomon was
both ‘tainted with perverse inclinations’, preferred ‘to be a vagabond’ and
‘consort with the ne’er-do-wells of London’.6 Likewise, Oscar Wilde’s former
lover, Robert Ross, had earlier subscribed to the same doctrine as Falk,
suggesting that Solomon had chosen a sordid life and that in respectable
London he became ‘impossible’ and had ‘no place’.7 While it is apparent that
Solomon was shunned by the city’s artistic bourgeoisie after his arrest, it is
also reasonable to argue that ultimately he found a place in the city in which
he could exist, unconstrained and unhindered by middle-class convention
and morality, to pursue his passion for queer ‘exotic vice’.8
As Matt Cook explains, the definition of ‘queer’ can be slippery, variable
and unfixed, but in the context of this chapter, queer is used to describe both
the possibilities of male same-sex desire in the city and Solomon’s encounters
and engagement with this space not only as a convicted sodomite but
also as a working artist pursuing themes of homosexual love and desire.9
Queer is also used in this chapter to designate what Cook describes as a
‘sense of oddity or eccentricity’ and the imprecise way that that sense of
incongruity might have signalled sexual difference to others.10 With that in
mind, this chapter also studies the early published responses to Solomon’s
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 187

seemingly inexplicable self-exile from middle-class respectability which

early commentators such as Falk and Ross found incomprehensible and
therefore attributed to the artist’s bohemian ‘insanity’, as evidenced by his
arrest, a refusal to conform and an apparent desire to continue to have sex
with other men.11 A comparison was also made by these and other writers
between Solomon and other ‘failed’ decadents and Aesthetes of the fin de
siècle such as Paul Verlaine whose destructive Bohemianism was blamed
as the main contributing factor in their ‘downfall’. It is worth noting that
contemporary assertions that Solomon’s ‘persistent lack of self-control’
described as ‘indistinguishable from madness’ was also a notion held and
subsequently acted upon by Solomon’s family directly after his arrest in 1873,
when he was admitted twice to private asylums for ‘insane gentlemen’.12
Since Falk and Ross’s contributions to the myth of the tragic, reckless
and hopeless Solomon have been so powerful and influential to successive
scholars, this chapter also examines the language used by both men in
their writing. In Falk’s case, it suggests a possible relationship between the
journalist’s persistent reference to Solomon as a vagabond and the new late
nineteenth-century medicalized theories which linked London’s homeless
men, tramps and vagrants with same-sex desire.

Solomon’s early life is fairly well documented. He was born in 1840 and
brought up in a prosperous Anglo-Jewish merchant family living on the
eastern borders of the old City of London in Sandy’s Street, Bishopsgate
Without. By the age of eighteen, Solomon was seen as something of an
artistic prodigy among his peers and had met and befriended his hero Pre-
Raphaelite artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Solomon’s early paintings reflected
his familiarity with Jewish Old Testament themes which were influenced
by Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite style, but these were gradually replaced by
the Classical subjects preferred by his new friend, Algernon Swinburne,
and ultimately with the poet’s encouragement these would manifest into
Solomon’s choice of sexually charged homoerotic and sado-masochistic
imagery. These ideas were often subtly and implicitly implied and therefore
the actual intent was often missed by contemporary newspapers of the time.
Early reviews of Solomon’s work recorded the real genius and wonderful
merit of the paintings: however, amidst all of the accolades, and at the height
of his artistic fame, Solomon was arrested in a public urinal with sixty-year-
old stableman George Roberts and charged with attempting to commit the
‘abominable crime of buggery’.13 He was thirty-two years old.
The incident took place on the evening of 11 February 1873. Solomon
was arrested by police constable William Mitchell around the corner from
Marylebone Police Station, in a public urinal situated in Stratford Place
Mews off Oxford Street. Solomon and Roberts were held overnight in
the police station on Marylebone Lane, intimately examined by a police
188 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

surgeon for signs of ‘sodomitical behaviour’ and subsequently tried before

a jury at the Middlesex Sessions House in Clerkenwell where both men
were found guilty of the charge.14 Fortunately Solomon was able to avoid
a custodial sentence probably because of his social status and close family
connections with one of the wealthiest Jewish families in London; however,
the unfortunate Roberts was sentenced to a punishing eighteen months hard
labour in the House of Detention at Cold Bath Fields.15
Despite regaining his liberty, the impact of Solomon’s arrest and conviction
was sudden and immediate. Former friends and colleagues from London’s
artistic elite, including members of Rossetti’s circle of painters and poets,
instantly distanced themselves from him. With his patrons disappearing,
commissions drying up and a reliance on alcohol becoming increasingly
more evident, Solomon was in desperate straits by the end of the 1870s. By
February 1879, during one of the coldest winters on record, the artist’s need
had become so great that he was forced to approach the City of London
Guardians and request admission to the workhouse.16 He was sent directly
to the Homerton Workhouse in Hackney where he spent the next ten days
as an inmate.
Workhouse records indicate that by the time of his admission Solomon
was resident in the St Giles area, and living in a mean common lodging
house at 27 Castle Street (now called Shelton Street), housing 160 mostly
single men.17 The majority of his workhouse admissions over the following
twenty-five years were to the St Giles workhouse on Endell Street.
The records of the St Giles workhouse chart many of the locations where
Solomon lived during this period and list addresses which include Dyott
Street, Fullwood’s Rents (now called Fulwood Place), Wakefield Street, off
Regent’s Square, Betterton Street, Newton Street and Macklin Street, which
were all located within a mile of the St Giles workhouse.18 According to his
family, Solomon expressed a preference for living in and around the Endell
Street workhouse in the St Giles area because it was ‘so central’.19 While this
is a typical example among many of the artist’s mischievous humour, it is of
course also an accurate statement in terms of the city’s geography. But there
was almost certainly more to Solomon’s decision to remain in this area than
mere convenience. In order to better understand why, it is important to ask
the question, what for Solomon was the area so ‘central’ for?
According to Harry Cocks, by the mid-nineteenth century, areas around
Holborn, Drury Lane, the Strand and the lower end of Regent Street were
all said to be habitual haunts of ‘Margeries’ and ‘Pooffs’.20 As Matt Cook
explains, the Yokel’s Preceptor, or More Sprees in London, published in 1855,
offered an underworld guidebook to the activities of these men with their
‘effeminate air and fashionable dress’.21 It is possible that Solomon was drawn
to the Drury Lane area and to its theatricality, especially in relation to the
activity of male cross-dressing. In 1870, the artist had attended the trial of the
infamous transvestites ‘Fanny and Stella’, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park,
who had been arrested one evening at the Strand Theatre for ‘personating
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 189

women’.22 Writing to his close friend and illicit lover, Cambridge don Oscar
Browning in May 1870, Solomon revealed that he had been intrigued by the
newspaper coverage of the arrest and, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, supposed
that they were probably ‘a most disreputable set of young men’.23
After both men were acquitted in March 1871, Solomon became friends
with Boulton, a budding actor, and attended the Prince’s Theatre in Manchester
with him later that year, with Boulton cross-dressed as his alter-ego Stella.
Solomon wrote that he went to see the pantomime Bluebeard with Boulton
on his arm, describing him as ‘a charming young lady’.24 Documentation
also links Solomon with many other male actors such as Johnston Forbes-
Robertson who, as a young man, posed for one of the figures in Solomon’s
drawing Until the Day Break and the Shadows Flee Away (1869). Another
actor, active in the Drury Lane Theatres during the 1880s and 1890s, was
Cecil Frederick Crofton, an avid collector of Solomon’s homoerotic art
which he subsequently bequeathed to the Birmingham Museums and Art
Gallery in 1908.25 Crofton – who remained a bachelor all his life, lived with
various young men and left much of his outstanding estate to two young
male friends – was likely personally acquainted with Solomon during this
period, given his large collection of Solomon’s work and the artist’s affinity
with the area.26
Whatever Solomon’s personal reasons for remaining in this locality,
Falk was clear in his opinion that the artist’s decision was fuelled by some
kind of ‘perverse’ gratification. The journalist wrote in 1937 that Solomon
was ‘happy in his degradation … dragging himself from one hovel to
another’ and similarly Ross commented that Solomon ‘rejected fiercely’
all attempts at rescue and reform because he ‘thoroughly enjoyed, in his
own particular way … drifting from the stream of social existence into a
Bohemian backwater’.27 The many obituaries to Solomon published in
various national and international newspapers and journals also offered a
similar perspective. The Manchester Guardian argued that despite the offer
of commissions and agreements of work, Solomon always ‘went back into
the wilds’, living the life of ‘squalid Bohemianism among the dregs of the
town’.28 The Daily Mirror wrote that the artist was ‘dead to redemption’
and the Adelaide Advertiser felt that there was a parallel between the artist’s
life and that of the late eighteenth-century poverty-stricken painter of
animals and rustic scenes, George Morland, who had died in a ‘sponging
house’ not far from ‘Solomon’s last shelter in the slums of Drury-lane’.29
Other newspapers placed Solomon firmly in the same company as other
artists experiencing what Ross described as ‘appalling Bohemianism’.30 The
Dundee Evening Telegraph suggested that Solomon was the ‘Paul Verlaine
of the brush’, content in ‘his vagabondage’, seeking the hospitality of the
workhouse when he had ‘made an end of his money in drink’.31
The comparison between Solomon and Verlaine is clear. The French
poet was a contemporary of Solomon’s, and the connection made by
the newspapers between the two men was predominantly based on their
190 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

poverty, sexuality and criminal status. In Havelock Ellis and John Addington
Symonds’s study, Sexual Inversion (1897), Verlaine was described as
a ‘psychosexual hermaphrodite’ who oscillated between ‘normal and
homosexual love’.32 In the same year that Solomon was convicted for
attempted sodomy in London, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in jail
in Paris for shooting his lover, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, in the wrist after a
violent row.33 It is also possible that the connection between Solomon and
Verlaine is closer still since they are likely to have met through Herbert Horne
and Arthur Symons when both men organized Verlaine’s visit to London to
give a series of lectures in November 1893. In addition, Verlaine’s signature
appears on the frame of one of Solomon’s chalk drawings, The Winged and
Poppied Sleep (1889), currently in the Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums
collection.34 The androgynous sleeping figure in this drawing has been seen
as an example of the influence that French and Belgian Symbolist artists
had on Solomon’s work particularly during this period.35 It seems probable,
then, that this drawing, with its closed-eye introspection and identification
with French Symbolism, would have appealed to Verlaine, although its
reference to the drug-induced sleep of poppies seems incongruous with the
poet’s noted addictions since Verlaine deemed opium a poison and refrained
from using it.36 Verlaine died prematurely in 1896 at the age of 51. He had
become an alcoholic with a particular dependency on absinthe and the last
ten years of his life were lived in poverty among Paris’s prostitutes and
pimps in the notorious Latin Quarter. The poet’s obituaries bear a striking
resemblance to Solomon’s, with writers closely identifying Verlaine with a
life of Bohemia and poverty and, as Jerrold Seigel has suggested, ‘deeply
tangling the two identities of poet/artist and Bohemian’.37
The term ‘Bohemian’ (originally a word meaning ‘gypsy’ in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries) was only associated with the idea of the
middle-class artist, poet or writer who chose to reject the established way of
life of the Bourgeoisie around 1851 by writer Henri Murger. Murger’s hugely
successful autobiographical book, Scènes de la vie de bohème, describes a
reckless hand-to-mouth, living-for-the-moment, artistic existence in Paris’s
Latin Quarter.38 This Romantic artistic ideal was intensely powerful but, to
the world beyond Paris, artists were perceived to be set on an unthinkable
course towards self-destruction. However, in contrast to Solomon, many
of Verlaine’s peers appear to have demonstrated a more sympathetic
view of this life of self-imposed destitution. Verlaine’s biographer, Joanna
Richardson, proposed that Marguerite Moreno, French actress and wife of
writer Marcel Schwob, was fascinated by Verlaine’s legend and suggested
that Verlaine ‘loved poverty’ and the ‘sin and the fear of hell’.39 Richardson
also advocated that the unorthodox allure that poverty had on Verlaine
was part of his growing legend, that he identified himself with the saintly
beggar and that he was not unaware of the ‘nobility of poverty’.40 This
benevolent attitude to Verlaine’s life of hardship was also upheld by those
among the Parisian authorities. According to Seigel, Verlaine was sheltered
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 191

and protected by the Parisian police force and the commissioner of police
went as far as to give orders that Verlaine was never to be arrested, no
matter what he did.41 The Parisian toleration of the city’s Bohemians was
identified by German writer Max Nordau in 1878 as having historical
origins.42 Nordau, who would subsequently attack the idea of ‘degenerates’
and ‘degenerate art’, suggested that this acceptance stemmed from the role
that it had played in early nineteenth-century French culture and the lessons
learned by the Parisian authorities when they had, as Seigel puts it, denied
recognition to some of the great talents later hailed as national heroes.43
In stark contrast, the British attitude to Solomon’s life in poverty in London
was one of derision, and a direct link was made with this condition and the
evils of decadence and fin-de-siècle Aestheticism. As a convicted sodomite,
the memory of Solomon’s life was also tainted with the memory of Oscar
Wilde and Wilde’s three very public trials and ultimate conviction for gross
indecency in 1895. As an example of this contempt, writing in 1945, British
art historian William Gaunt claimed that Solomon was the first casualty of
art for art’s sake and that his life was ‘a warning to others’ who might take
aestheticism too seriously.44 Gaunt scorned the Aesthetic movement for its
‘gutter-crazy’ participants, of whom Solomon was particularly singled out as
one of the worst, unable to take part in a middle-class world because of their
‘craving for abjection’ and ‘romanticization of sin’.45 A link is also inferred
by Gaunt between poverty, Bohemianism and homosexuality in London,
which he described as being full of flourishing Verlaines all eager to seek
out their ‘sordid destiny’.46 It seems clear then that much of this recorded
distaste for Solomon’s decision not to be redeemed originates from the idea
of the later nineteenth-century Aesthetic sensibility and the comparison with
the self-exiled Bohemianism of artists such as Verlaine.
There are few surviving documents that might give us clues to Solomon’s
life and his thinking during this period, but from various contemporary
accounts we get the strong impression that Solomon had indeed resisted
the consistent efforts of his family and friends to return him to the
conventions of Victorian middle-class society. Solomon’s nephew, Redcliffe
Nathan Salaman, recalled a conversation between his father Myer and
mother Sarah around 1890 which appears to reinforce the idea of the
Bohemian Solomon. According to Salaman, his father had seen Simeon
that day and had given him a couple of shirts. Simeon had accepted one
and refused the second, saying, ‘You know my dear Myer, I cannot be
burdened with property.’47 In support of this idea, Ross described how the
artist ‘rejected fiercely’ all attempts at rescue or reform and ‘thoroughly
enjoyed in his own particular way’ the ‘main sewer’.48 Indeed, when
Ross met with Solomon in 1893, he found the artist ‘extremely cheerful’
and not ‘aggressively alcoholic’.49 To Ross, Solomon appeared to have
no grievances and no bitter stories about former friends, no scandalous
tales about contemporaries and no indignant feelings towards those who
assisted him. Ross reported that Solomon was full of ‘delightful and racy
192 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

stories’ about poets and painters, policemen and prisons and ‘enjoyed his
drink, his overpowering dirt, and his vicious life’ in St Giles.50
It is possible, then, that the parish of St Giles and its surrounding
areas of poverty provided the kind of ‘vicious life’ which, according to
Ross, Solomon enjoyed. From accounts of St Giles in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the area historically held a fascination which both
attracted and repulsed. Both St Giles and its neighbour, the Seven Dials area,
were renowned for their overcrowding, poverty and deplorable conditions.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Henry Fielding reported the alarming rise in
gin consumption at St Giles, which William Hogarth famously illustrated
in his engraving from 1751, Gin Lane.51 In 1837, Charles Dickens wrote a
vivid description of the Seven Dials area in Bell’s Life in London.52 Dickens
deliberated over the complicated maze of streets, courts, lanes and alleys
which provided a mixture of Englishmen and Irishmen accommodated in
dirty, straggling houses.53 In 1861, he revisited the St Giles area in a short
story entitled ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, and described ‘tumbling
houses amidst a compound of sickening smells, and heaps of filth with their
vile contents, animate, and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black
road’.54 The novelist’s early fascination with the area is recorded in John
Forster’s 1872 Life of Charles Dickens.55 Forster noted that, as a young boy,
Dickens had a ‘profound attraction of repulsion’ to St Giles and frequently
persuaded a guardian to walk him through the Seven Dials area. Dickens
later recalled to Forster ‘what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want,
and beggary arose in my mind out of that place!’56 Dickens employed his
early childhood memories of this area later in his fiction. F.S. Schwarzbach
suggests that the attraction of repulsion to the St Giles area that Dickens
experienced was a culmination of the suffering he had endured as a child
and the suffering of others he witnessed in these areas of poverty, both of
which contained elements that were genuinely attractive to the writer.57
However, in his work on the late-Victorian middle-class fascination with
slumming, Seth Koven suggests that the slums of London were not only seen
as sites of physical and social disorder but as ‘spaces hospitable to queer
lives and queer sexual desires’.58 As Koven remarks, in the mid-nineteenth
century the term ‘queer’ was originally associated with the idea of something
out of the ordinary but that later, from the 1880s, it was used in specific
contexts to imply oddness and the possibility of irregular sexuality.59 Falk
did not use the term ‘queer’ to define either Solomon or his life in the slums
of St Giles in his forceful writing about the artist; instead, the journalist
used the word ‘vagabond’ to describe what Falk called Solomon’s ‘perverse
inclinations’.60 Falk believed that Solomon preferred to be a vagabond and
had been incapable of being reclaimed from a vagabond life.61 The term
literally means itinerant beggar, loafer or tramp, and was used repeatedly by
Falk in his writing to describe Solomon’s status. To Falk, Solomon was not
just another one of the desperate outcast poor; he was different because he
was ‘happy in his degradation’, living among ‘the very dregs’ of humanity.62
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 193

It seems conceivable, then, that Falk understood the connection that had
been made in the nineteenth century between homosexuality and tramps
or homeless men, and perhaps chose to use the term ‘vagabond’ as a coded
alternative with which to subtly imply Solomon’s sexuality. As Koven
suggests, it is likely that the connection between tramps and male same-
sex desire took place as early as the 1860s with the publication of A Night
in a Workhouse, written by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Frederick
Greenwood.63
A Night in a Workhouse was published as a series of reports by Frederick
Greenwood’s brother, James, who disguised himself as a homeless tramp
in order that he could experience what it was like to spend a night in the
casual ward of Lambeth Workhouse. Koven suggests that James, dubbed the
‘Amateur Casual’, believed that he had witnessed ‘an orgiastic scene of sex
between men and youths’.64 As a journalist working for London newspapers,
Falk would have undoubtedly been aware of the Greenwood brothers’ A
Night, for as Koven has suggested, it ‘routed the literal and imaginative
footsteps’ of London’s journalists after it was published.65
Koven also believes that the Greenwoods’ publication had a direct
influence on Ellis and Symonds’s 1897 work on the ‘sexual invert’ since
this study suggests that sexual inversion was prevalent among tramps.66
The study also included an important contribution to the idea of tramps
and male same-sex desire in an essay by Josiah Flint. Flint’s essay, entitled
‘Homosexuality Amongst Tramps’, described how the general impression
made on him by the ‘sexually perverted men’ he had met in vagabondage
was that they were ‘abnormally masculine’.67 Indeed, Flint revealed how he
had spent eight consecutive months living among tramps and was clear that
a number of male tramps in England had no hesitation in declaring their
preference for their own sex.68 Koven remarks that A Night had a ‘volcanic
effect’ on Symonds, who wrote in his autobiography that, ‘overwhelmed by
same-sex urges’, he would ‘wander through the sordid streets’ between his
home and Regent’s Park looking for ‘sensual pleasure’.69
In addition to the area’s apparent power to seduce homosexual men such
as Symonds, the artistic middle-class Bohemian writers and decadents of
this era were similarly allured. In 1897, the caricaturist and writer Max
Beerbohm chose to site his satirical decadent character, Enoch Soames,
at Solomon’s former residence at Dyott Street, close to Endell Street and
the workhouse.70 In the late 1890s, the decadent poet and Rhymers’ Club
member, Ernest Dowson, in the company of author Robert Thurston
Hopkins, played a regular game of ‘Blind Chivvy’ through the by-ways,
alleys and courts of central London.71 Hopkins described this game with
Dowson in his essay ‘A London Phantom’.72 The two men sometimes rove
forlornly about the foggy London streets, ‘initiated bohemians, tasting each
other’s enthusiasms, sharing money and confessions’.73 The route that they
took from the Bun House at 417 The Strand to Dowson’s lodgings at 152
Euston Street would have taken them straight through the St Giles area,
194 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

passing through Solomon’s former residence at Dyott Street.74 Hopkins

described these streets as the ‘slinking alleys and byways which then were
not well known to the average London man’.75 There is, perhaps, a sense
of excitement and titillation in Hopkins’s telling of this tale as the story
culminates in the two men being dramatically chased through the streets by
a derelict hawker with a Gladstone bag who aroused an ‘essence of terror
and repulsion’ in them.76
It is apparent that members of the Rhymers’ poetry group, in addition
to their noted repulsion of attraction to these areas of poverty and vice,
were for similar reasons also seductively drawn towards Solomon. Poets
W.B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys and Lionel Johnson appear to have held a certain
curiosity and veneration not only for the artist’s homoerotic imagery but for
the artist himself. Certainly, many of the Rhymers’ poets, including Oscar
Wilde, had been introduced to Solomon’s artwork as undergraduates at
Oxford during the late 1870s and 1880s, a period some years after the
artist’s arrest and during a time when Solomon’s name had been somewhat
lost to obscurity and myth. Wilde described Solomon as that ‘strange genius’
and Yeats recalled that Johnson’s rooms at Fitzroy Street were walled with
‘overpowering pictures’ by Solomon, many of them collected during his time
at Oxford.77 Yeats also described how one might meet the ‘ragged figure’ of
Solomon as of some ‘fallen dynasty’ in the rooms of one of the Rhymers’
Club members. To the Rhymers, Solomon was an enigma, a Bohemian artist
like Verlaine, who had appeared to cast aside all the trappings of wealth and
all attempts at respectability and was willingly living in poverty in the area
of St Giles that so attracted other Decadents such as Ernest Dowson.
The Baltic-German aristocrat, Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock, a close
associate of Dowson, Johnson and Wilde, was also fascinated by Solomon
and his homoerotic art and would become one of Solomon’s most fervent
supporters during the 1880s. Despite his wealthy aristocratic background,
like the Rhymers, Stenbock was attracted to Solomon’s unfettered
Bohemianism and was undeterred by the artist’s life of poverty in St Giles
and reputation as a convicted sodomite. On the contrary, the flamboyant,
eccentric, Aesthetic and decadent Count became infatuated with the artist.
Stenbock was a poet and short-story writer who had lived on his family’s
vast estates in Estonia before going up to Oxford and arriving in London in
the mid-1880s. Here he established friendships with Decadent writers and
artists Aubrey Beardsley, Wilde’s friend More Adey, Arthur Symons, publisher
Herbert Horne, Yeats, Johnson and others.78 Yeats portrayed Stenbock as a
‘scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert’ and the ‘most charming of
men’, while Symons described him as ‘bizarre, fantastic, feverish, eccentric,
extravagant, morbid and perverse’.79 Stenbock’s fervour for Solomon is
discernible, according to John Adlard, in some of the poet’s work during
1881 written when he was only twenty-one. Adlard suggests that in a
manuscript book of Stenbock’s, discovered in Sweden, the aristocratic poet
transcribed a poem that was based on a picture by Solomon, which in
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 195

turn was very much influenced by Solomon’s homoerotic prose poem, A

Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.80 Stenbock’s passion for Solomon is also
revealed in the poet’s first privately published book of poetry, Myrtle, Rue
and Cypress, in which he dedicates ‘the myrtle thereof’ to Solomon.81 The
symbolic significance of the myrtle is apt, since in the Renaissance myrtle
symbolized everlasting love and conjugal fidelity. By dedicating the myrtle
to Solomon, Stenbock appeared to be revealing the intensity of feeling that
he had for Solomon and his artwork. In addition, Stenbock’s fascination
with Solomon is also evident in the similarity between the poet’s staff-and-
serpent monogram and Solomon’s own monogram, which appears on the
dedication page of Myrtle, Rue and Cypress. Solomon acknowledged this
likeness himself in a letter of 1885 when he suggested that he had designed
a new monogram for Stenbock after the poet had adopted his old one.82
It is probable from the extant evidence that Stenbock met Solomon
around the mid-1880s while the artist was resident in the St Giles area.
Stenbock had written to Solomon (probably care of the photographer
Frederick Hollyer, who had been producing and selling platinotype copies
of Solomon’s artworks), asking for Solomon to go to him ‘as soon as
possible’.83 Solomon described in a letter to Hollyer how he had had a
‘delightful day’ with Stenbock, whose kindness was ‘most singular’.84 He
suggested that Stenbock had met him with a ‘low and truly Oriental salute
while swinging a silver censer before an altar covered with lilies, myrtles,
lighted candles and a sanctuary lamp burning with scented oil’.85 The artist
depicted Stenbock as ‘a tall, graceful intellectual looking girl’ who was ‘not
exactly good-looking’ but whose eyes and expression were ‘very beautiful’.86
The artist described a truly Aesthetic and decadent scene with Stenbock
appearing to Solomon in a ‘magnificent blood red silk robe embroidered in
gold and silver’, engaging with the artist ‘about everything’ while playing
beautiful religious music on the piano and harmonium.87 Stenbock would
subsequently offer Solomon the use of his room to work in and inundate the
artist with gifts of money and clothes. Solomon also describes in his letters
various trips with the Count to the Grosvenor Gallery, the then unofficial
home of the Aesthetic movement, which was cleverly satirized in Gilbert
and Sullivan’s opera Patience as ‘the greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery’.88
It is unclear from the extant correspondence where Stenbock was lodging
in London during this time, although by 1891 he is recorded as living at
11 Sloane Terrace in Knightsbridge. There is a suggestion that Stenbock
had wished Solomon to take a room near him; however, the artist declined,
which perhaps reinforces the notion that Solomon preferred to remain in the
St Giles area rather than take lodgings in a more affluent area of London.89
Simon Reynolds remarked in his 1985 monograph on Solomon that by
1888 the artist was entertaining hopes of being commissioned to decorate
Stenbock’s home, but that their initial flurry of friendship was waning with
the Count tiring of Solomon’s continued importunities.90 There may be some
legitimacy to Reynolds’s suggestion, given that Stenbock had recorded in a
196 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

letter to his family in Estonia that the artist was in the worst condition and
‘the bane’ of his life.91 Certainly this was a difficult time for Solomon. Both
his mother and beloved sister Rebecca had died within three weeks of each
other in November and December 1886. Rebecca had died tragically under
the wheels of a hansom cab on the Euston Road with Solomon’s mother
dying only weeks after. Despite this, Solomon had continued to produce
artwork during this year, and there are at least seventeen works in existence,
many of which were apparently commissioned by Stenbock who recorded
that he had acquired ‘lots more Sims’.92
In 1895, Stenbock died tragically at his mother’s home in Brighton.
Adlard describes how the poet, now heavily dependent on alcohol and
opium, had toppled into the grate while trying to strike his step-father with
a poker – he was thirty-five years old.93 Despite spending nearly half his
life living in poverty, Solomon would outlive Stenbock, Johnson, Dowson,
Verlaine and a host of other decadents and aesthetes including Wilde, who
would bemoan the loss of his Solomon pictures in his long letter to Lord
Alfred Douglas, published as De Profundis, in 1897.94 Instead, Solomon
continued to live in the St Giles area for another ten years after Stenbock’s
death, in continuing conditions of hardship, poverty and illness until, on
the morning of 14 August 1905, he died in the dining area of the Endell
Street Workhouse. He would leave behind a legacy of some five-hundred-
plus paintings and drawings, all executed after his arrest in 1873.
Solomon’s withdrawal from respectable society, his alcoholism and his
apparent unwillingness to cooperate with any kind of rehabilitation, either
physical or psychological, is still seen as a sign of his vulnerability caused
by a reaction to the similar situation that was presented to the very different
Wilde twenty years later. By examining the period of Solomon’s life after his
arrest, it is possible to suggest that the way in which Solomon conducted
his life after 1873 epitomizes the potential non-repentant homosexual,
as identified by more recent scholars including Richard Dellamora.95
Dellamora believes that homosexual men at this time responded to
their situations not simply in panic, self-ignorance or confusion, but in
resourceful and creative ways that were at times inevitably circumscribed
and painful.96 Harry Cocks also suggests that Oscar Wilde has too long been
seen as the originator of the homosexual identity and that his encounter
with Victorian justice has provided historians with the paradigm of the
persecuted homosexual.97 While not seeking to downplay the persecution
that Solomon suffered, this chapter has examined the unconventionality
of Solomon’s response as the convicted sodomite, his decision to remain
living among London’s ‘ungodly’ and, by his determination, to pursue his
personal iconography of same-sex love within his artwork – a decision
which, as shown, has previously been seen by early critics as a sign of mental
illness and Bohemian ‘insanity’. Indeed, despite Ross and Falk’s suggestions
that Solomon ‘rejected fiercely all attempts at rescue and reform’, it is now
evident from recently discovered correspondence that Solomon believed
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 197

that he still had many ‘sterling friends’ who had come forward when he
was in great need.98 In a letter to Oscar Browning, written around 1884,
it is also apparent that Solomon had felt some sense of contrition over
his perceived ‘bad behaviour’ and his decision to remain withdrawn from
respectable society. He remarks in the letter that he hoped that Browning
would ‘pardon what he had done’.99

Notes
1 There are fifty or so letters and notes addressed to Horne from Solomon in the
collection of the Museo Horne, via dei Benci, Florence, Italy.
2 Simeon Solomon, ‘Written on Memorandum Sheets’, in Herbert Horne Letters
(Museo Horne, Florence, Italy, c.1880s).
3 Ibid.
4 ‘Indictment – Middlesex Sessions Roll’, in London Metropolitan Archive
(London, 1883).
5 Genesis, 18.
6 Bernard Falk, Five Years Dead: A Postscript to ‘He Laughed in Fleet Street’
(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1937), p. 16.
7 Robert Ross, ‘Simeon Solomon (a Biography)’, The Bibelot 17 (1911),
pp. 150–51.
8 Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, ‘Boyhood and the Family Background:
Unpublished Memoirs’. The idea that Solomon enjoyed ‘exotic vice’ is taken
from these family memoirs. My thanks go to Peter Hamburger for providing
me with a copy of this text.
9 Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in
Twentieth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 8.
10 Ibid.
11 Solomon was arrested in a public urinal in Paris a year after his original arrest
in London and spent three months in a Parisian jail.
12 Falk, Five Years Dead, pp. 311–12. Solomon was admitted to Sussex House
and Munster House insane asylums in March and April of 1873: ‘Lunacy
Patients Admission Registers, Series MH 94’. The National Archives, Kew.
13 ‘Indictment – Middlesex Sessions Roll’.
14 ‘Calendar of Prisoners’, in London Metropolitan Archive (London, 1873);
‘Middlesex Sessions Roll: Adjourned Sessions’, in London Metropolitan
Archive (London, 1873).
15 ‘Calendar of Prisoners’. Solomon’s first cousin, Myer Salaman, paid a
substantial surety to the court which allowed Solomon to be freed.
16 ‘City of London Union Workhouse: Admissions and Discharge Register
1877–1879’ (London Metropolitan Archive, 1879).
198 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

17 Ibid.
18 Relieving Officer, ‘Parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields & St George, Bloomsbury
Workhouse Examinations: Folio No. 65320’, in London Metropolitan Archive
(London, 1884).
19 Quoted in G.M. Seymour, The Life and Work of Simeon Solomon (1840–1905)
(PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1986), p. 222. The source
of this quote is ascribed to Raphael Salaman, grandson of Myer Salaman.
20 Harry G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth
Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p. 58.
21 Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 13.
22 ‘The Charge of Personating Women’, The Times, 7 May 1870.
23 Simeon Solomon, ‘Letter to Oscar Browning from Simeon Solomon, 1870’,
Oscar Browning Collection (Cambridge: King’s College Library and Archive).
24 Simeon Solomon, ‘Letter from Simeon Solomon to George Powell, 1871’,
George Powell Collection (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, c.1871).
25 Crofton owned, and subsequently bequeathed to Birmingham Museum and
Art Gallery, eight of Solomon’s works.
26 Information taken from the 1901 England Census, the England and Wales
National Probate Calendar 1858–1966, and Crofton’s obituary in The Times:
‘Mr Cecil Crofton’, The Times, 26 November 1935.
27 Falk, Five Years Dead, p. 146.
28 ‘Miscellany’, The Manchester Guardian, 29 August 1905.
29 ‘Tragedy of Blighted Genius’, Daily Mirror, 19 August 1905; ‘A Wasted
Genius. A Tragedy of Art’, Advertiser, 27 September 1905.
30 ‘A Note on Simeon Solomon’, Westminster Gazette, 24 August 1905.
31 ‘End of a Genius’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 19 August 1905.
32 Henry Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 6 vols,
Vol. 1: Studies in the Psychology of Sex (London: Wilson and Macmillan,
1897; reprinted 1975, 1994), p. 21.
33 Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (London:
W.W. Norton, 2003).
34 Jennifer Melville, A Scottish Collection: Treasures from Aberdeen Art Gallery
(The Yomiuri Shimbun/Japan Association of Art Museums, 2000). Ann Steed
makes the suggestion that Verlaine may have met Solomon in 1893: see
pp. 92–93.
35 Colin Cruise, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites
(London: Merrell Publishers, 2005), p. 168, fig. 134.
36 Joanna Richardson, Verlaine (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 246.
37 Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of
Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins
University Press, 1999), p. 243.
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 199

38 Henri Murger, Scènes De La Vie De Bohème (Paris: Michel Levy, 1851).

39 Richardson, Verlaine, p. 283.
40 Ibid., p. 282.
41 Seigel, Bohemian Paris, pp. 242–43.
42 Max Nordau, Aus Dem Wahren Milliardenlande: Pariser Studien Und Bilder
(Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1878), pp. 225–36.
43 Seigel, Bohemian Paris, p. 242. See also Max Nordau, Degeneration, 2nd edn.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
44 William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (Oxford: Alden Press, 1945),
pp. 48, 128.
45 Ibid., p. 128.
46 Ibid.
47 Salaman, ‘Boyhood and the Family Background: Unpublished Memoirs’.
48 Ross, ‘Simeon Solomon (a Biography)’, p. 146.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
and Related Writings (Dublin: G. Faulkner, 1751), p. 140.
52 Bell’s Life in London, 27 September 1837 (‘Scenes and Characters No. 15’).
Reprinted in Michael Slater (ed.), Dickens’ Journalism: Sketches by Boz and
Other Early Papers, 1833–39 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press,
1994), pp. 70–75.
53 Slater, Dickens’ Journalism, pp. 70–75.
54 Charles Dickens, The Works of Charles Dickens in Thirty-Four Volumes, 34
vols, Vol. 34 (London: Gadshill, 1868), p. 176.
55 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman
and Hall, 1872), p. 19.
56 Ibid.
57 F.S. Schwarzback, Dickens and the City (London: The Athlone Press, 1979),
p. 25.
58 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 183.
59 Ibid., p. 303, n. 15.
60 Falk, Five Years Dead, p. 312.
61 Ibid., pp. 16, 311.
62 Ibid., p. 316.
63 Koven, Slumming, p. 25.
64 Ibid., p. 47.
200 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

65 Ibid., p. 74.
66 Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion, Vol. 1, p. 13.
67 Ibid., p. 257.
68 Ibid., p. 256.
69 Koven, Slumming, p. 70.
70 Max Beerbohm, Seven Men (London: William Heinemann, 1919), p. 14.
71 Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (eds), The Letters of Ernest Dowson
(London and Melbourne: Cassell, 1967), p. 440.
72 Ibid., pp. 440–3.
73 Ibid., p. 440.
74 ‘The Bun Shop’ was a Yates’s Wine Lodge, frequented, according to Thurston,
by Dowson.
75 Flower and Maas, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, p. 440.
76 Ibid., pp. 442–3.
77 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, Dublin University Magazine 90 (1877),
pp. 118–26; John Sloan (ed.), Selected Poems and Prose of John Davidson
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 175.
78 For more on Stenbock, see John Adlard, Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties
(London: Cecil & Amelia Woolf, 1969).
79 W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1955).
80 Adlard, Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties, p. 21.
81 Eric Stanilaus Stenbock, Myrtle, Rue and Cypress (London: Hermitage
Books, 1992).
82 Ibid., Dedication Page.
83 Brian Reade (ed.), Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature
from 1850–1900 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970), p. 37.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Also called Bunthorne’s Bride, the opera premiered on 23 April 1881 at the
Opéra Comique.
89 Reade, Sexual Heretics, p. 37.
90 Simon Reynolds, The Vision of Simeon Solomon (Stroud: Catalpa Press,
1985), p. 89.
91 Adlard, Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties, p. 48.
92 Ibid., p. 75.
 SIMEON SOLOMON IN QUEER VICTORIAN LONDON 201

93 Ibid., p. 85.
94 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London: Methuen & Co., 1905).
95 Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian
Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
1990), p. 22.
96 Ibid., p. 22.
97 Cocks, Nameless Offences, p. 159.
98 Ross, ‘Simeon Solomon (a Biography)’, p. 146.
99 Simeon Solomon, ‘Letter to Oscar Browning from Simeon Solomon’, in Oscar
Browning Collection, King’s College Library and Archive, University of
Cambridge.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Alan Hollinghurst’s Fictional

Ways of Queering London
Bart Eeckhout

The internationally acclaimed novelist Alan Hollinghurst is usually regarded

as a gay rather than a queer writer. This is understandable when we recall
the splash he made with his debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, in 1988.
One of Hollinghurst’s main ambitions in writing this novel was to present
its principal characters unapologetically as gay men who were not inclined
to reflect upon – let alone question – their sexual identities, and who
showed little interest in extending their sexual activities into a politically
radical, norm-breaking social project.1 This premise remained at the heart of
Hollinghurst’s next two novels, The Folding Star (1994) and The Spell (1998).
From the start, this writer’s characters were quite simply and resolutely gay.
In all three novels, non-normative sexualities and sexual identities were not
being presented as social realities whose epistemic conditions needed to be
queried along the lines of the then-emerging field of queer theory.
The context in which the present collection of essays is developed, with
its emphasis on queer histories of London, offers an excellent opportunity
for reconsidering Hollinghurst’s reputation and submitting his work to an
interpretation which might stimulate interest in it from a more critically
queer perspective as well. As I hope to demonstrate, such a reconsideration
is also prompted by a number of shifts in emphasis and approach in the
writer’s more recent novels, The Line of Beauty (2004) and The Stranger’s
Child (2011). To be able to make this point, I will start with a reconsideration
of The Swimming-Pool Library. In my reading of it, Hollinghurst’s first novel
offers a richly documented, quasi-anthropological exploration of the various
ways in which ‘gay’ spaces were constructed in London during the early
204 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

1980s – an exploration also undertaken with a historical eye for such spaces’
twentieth-century genealogies. Thus what The Swimming-Pool Library
presents may be understood as a fictional version of what we have come to
call the ‘queering’ of spaces, though the term is to be used only loosely in this
case, without its typical association of a querying or questioning attitude.
While The Line of Beauty displays a similar interest in the sexual politics
of spatial environments, its later backward glance at the Thatcher era resists
the temptation to return also to a documentary mode. The home of the Tory
family in Kensington Park Gardens, around which this novel is organized,
is quite different from any of the spaces documented in the writer’s debut. It
serves as a bulwark rather of what in queer theory has come to be labelled
‘heteronormativity’. Thus the attention in Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize–
winning novel comes to lie on the many ways in which the heteronormative
core of Thatcher’s England is constantly queered by the presence of the book’s
gay protagonist, Nick, and of other characters observed through his eyes.
Finally, I argue that The Stranger’s Child is Hollinghurst’s first novel to
take such constant delight in playing around with the epistemic instabilities
associated with queer theory. Simultaneously mimicking and undercutting
genre conventions of the family saga and the country house novel,
Hollinghurst dramatizes how biographical narratives that seek to include
people’s sexual lives are inevitably riddled by empirical gaps and irreducible
forms of alterity. The ironic historical revisionism of The Stranger’s Child
squares well with queer theory’s insistence not just on non-normative
sexualities but on the fundamental uncontainability of sexual desires, and
on the impossibility of translating such desires into identities that may be
fixed and categorized. To demonstrate this, I look more closely at the Sawles’
family estate on the outskirts of London in Stanmore. Early on, we observe
how the idyllic chronotope which it figures is queered both by what George
Sawle describes as ‘priapic figures in the trees and bushes’ and by the novel’s
opening episode being situated on the verge of the Great War.2 The demise
of this little bit of Georgian pastoral is completed later in the novel when the
would-be biographer Paul Bryant hunts for the house and is unable to evoke
it in words when he finds it. Through this later scene, Hollinghurst provides
the reader with a felt sense of the material and mental limits encountered by
any historiographer wishing to revive the sexual lives of Londoners. More
than in any of his previous novels, The Stranger’s Child shows Hollinghurst
actively queering the history of the city in which he lives.

The Swimming-Pool Library:

Exploring the city’s sex-sharp circuits
In the opening pages of Hollinghurst’s first novel, the protagonist and
narrator, William Beckwith, describes himself as continuously roaming
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 205

through ‘the sex-sharp little circuits of discos and pubs and cottages’ in
the London of 1983.3 He talks of ‘the sexed immediacy of London life’,4
whose experience he is bent on recording. Offering an account of gay life
in London on the cusp of the AIDS crisis was one of the main purposes of
this ambitious novel. To achieve the desired effect, Hollinghurst invented
a usefully privileged protagonist: a 25-year-old aristocrat with all the
money, leisure time, good looks and sex drive to devote his energies to
sexual cruising, and all the class privileges to have access to a wide range
of spaces in the city. As a strategy for heightening the reader’s attention
to such spaces, the writer gave his narrator the additional feature of a
strong architectural interest. Will briefly works on the staff of the Cubitt
Dictionary of Architecture and constantly has an eye out for the aesthetic
features and cultural history of built environments. He presents himself as
‘a perfect Gemini … tugged between two versions of myself, one of them
the hedonist and the other … an almost scholarly figure’.5 The intelligent,
Oxford-educated scholar in Will serves as our architectural and quasi-
anthropological guide during the novel’s explorations of gay London.
In hindsight, The Swimming-Pool Library should clearly be understood
in its 1980s context of gay liberation, the dynamics of which it embodies
in literary terms. The work was a conscious attempt at opening up the
realm of belles lettres to subject matter previously evoked only in erotica.
The literary reader’s attention was deliberately shifted away from the
prevalent psychodrama of coming-out narratives, with their habitual focus
on family conflicts and the inner turmoil of characters painstakingly and
melodramatically coming to terms with their sexual identities. Instead,
Hollinghurst sought to queer the great tradition of the urban novel, offering
the reader a new set of metropolitan experiences whose social range,
complexity and wealth of locations proved just as encompassing as that
of any previous urban novel. We may call this project – retroactively and
anachronistically – a moderate form of ‘queering’ because the verb reminds
us of the subversive quality of the writer’s literary gambit back in the 1980s.
Hollinghurst forced his reader to listen to the self-complacent voice of a
sexually promiscuous gay narrator who has all the stylistic talent and wit
to let his adventures come to life, and who proves eager to tell them not
just to a gay niche but to a mainstream audience. This required a certain
amount of compromise: under these circumstances, Will Beckwith could not
be made simultaneously into a queer character in the later sense of a socially
marginal, oppositional figure who questions the limits of a sexual identity
politics. Yet one of the unmistakable advantages of Hollinghurst’s aesthetic
choices was that they invited the reader to reflect on what it might mean to
‘queer’ London’s spaces.
Since material spaces do not have a sexual orientation or identity, there
is only what the urban theorist Henri Lefebvre called the social production
of space.6 When we join Will on his guided tour as a sexual flâneur,7 we
develop a palpable sense of how this social production works for a wide
206 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

array of the city’s spaces, whose different forms of availability to erotic

appropriation are being explored in the course of the novel. Spaces in the
book appear to be queered in one of two principal ways: either by being
appropriated collectively as gay institutions or by being sexualized through
gay individuals who inhabit or pass through them. Most interestingly, the
novel introduces us to a variety of spaces situated somewhere along the axis
between these two poles. Frequently located in an ambiguous, liminal realm
that is semi-public and semi-private, the latter kind of space contributes
significantly to the complexity of situations and the drama of encounters
which are crucial to the book’s plot development.
Hollinghurst’s interest in ambiguities and complexities explains why the
most obvious examples of collective gay appropriation get relatively short
shrift in the narrative.8 These are the bars and clubs specifically designed to
cater to a gay clientele. Will briefly meets up with his only Platonic friend,
James, at the Volunteer, which he describes as an uninspiring ‘second-
division gay pub’.9 And we find him reminiscing just once about his habitual
pattern of visits to the Shaft, an ‘airless, electrifying cellar in the West End’
to which he used to be ‘addict[ed]’ and which he ‘hardly ever left alone’.10
By contrast, we spend considerably more time at the other end of the
spectrum, in those domestic spaces that gay individuals turn into emblems
of their private subjectivities. On several occasions, Will’s luxurious flat near
Holland Park becomes the locus of sexual dramas and comic scenes which
serve as forms of metonymical characterization. We are given a similar
opportunity to understand the overworked and sexually unsuccessful James
through the description of his flat in Notting Hill: the space is notable for its
‘featurelessness’, ‘fatalistic disdain of possessions’ and enormous collection
of Shostakovich records expressing their owner’s self-indulgent gloom.11 But
it is the house of Charles Nantwich, the octogenarian lord befriended by
Will early on in the story, which exerts the greatest fascination and invites
the most lavish description. That house – the possession of an aging man
through whose biography we are gradually given insight into the gay life
of a pre-emancipatory British elite – is tellingly located in the margins of
London: it is to be found ‘in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had
been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London A-Z’.12 Upon
first seeing it, Will finds himself ‘surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy
and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world
where people never went out’.13 This is a house whose interior, in accordance
with the camp aesthetic of older generations, combines the accoutrements of
old money with blatantly phallic figures, and whose cellar – possibly the site
of sometime orgies14 – contains the remains of a homoerotic Roman mosaic
along with a more recently fabricated frieze of ‘homosexual parodies’.15
Nantwich’s house gets such elaborate attention because Will is fascinated
by the old man, so much so that through him he begins to excavate the city’s
invisible gay histories. But it is only one of many spaces in London through
which the narrator roams in his capacity as an urban explorer. Outside of
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 207

Nantwich’s private domain, Will proves notably eager to enjoy the freedom
of his sexual autonomy. Following his adventures, we come to understand
that this autonomy is dynamically defined and constrained by a variety of
heteronomous forces, and that it entails what urban theorists call a spatial
politics.16
Thus on several occasions we find Will alone in public space. His travels
on the Underground build a recurrent motif in this regard. ‘I made the best
of the Tube’, he notes, ‘and found it often sexy and strange, like a gigantic
game of chance, in which one got jammed up against many queer kinds of
person’.17 Will enjoys ‘the drama of the pick-up’ whenever he uses public
transportation, propelled as he is by ‘the erection which even the shortest
journey on tube or bus always gives me’.18 Nantwich’s diary, through one
of the historically refracted revelations it repeatedly affords, comments
indirectly on Will’s habits when it talks of ‘the daring “chic” of slumming
it’.19 This aspect of daring becomes increasingly clear when Will is made to
encounter the limits of his sexual autonomy in the course of the narrative.
The first incident occurs when he travels east on the Central Line, gets off at
Mile End and finds himself in alien territory. Cruising through a churchyard,
he is predictably attracted to a youth seemingly waiting to be picked up.
Before he makes his move, Will ponders:

There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct,

of what to do about strangers. Leading my life the way I did, it was
strangers who by their very strangeness quickened my pulse and made
me feel I was alive – that and the irrational sense of absolute security
that came from the conspiracy of sex with men I had never seen before
and might never see again. Yet those daring instincts were by no means
infallible: their exhilaration was sharpened by the courted risk of
rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.20

Even if in the scene that follows the rejection is slight (the boy expects to
see money), it rankles the narcissistic and domineering Will: ‘I resented his
ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young.’21 Yet
a later scene ends less comically: when Will strikes out into impoverished
dockland territory and tries to find his way around a cluster of depressing
housing blocks, he is mugged by a gang of skinheads who taunt him as a
‘poof’ and a ‘nigger-fucker’.22
In the mugging scene, Will faces up to the limits of his urban freedom
whenever he goes cruising by himself through public space. Indirectly,
the sensational limit-case augments our sense of the more subtle spatial
politics dramatized elsewhere in the novel. Most of the scenes present us
with situations in which Will makes use of semi-public/semi-private spaces
with variously restricted access. Often in these spaces there is a better
possibility for gay collectivities to blossom, no matter how ephemerally.
The first example is that of the transient meeting-place in which Will and
208 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Nantwich are brought together in the opening pages: the public lavatories
(cottages) to which gay men gravitate for a quick sexual fix. This quasi-
abject place, fit for representing both the city’s underbelly and its dreams
of sexual egalitarianism, is set off against a number of conspicuously elitist
places which are markers of the protagonists’ upper-class privileges. Will
is invited into Nantwich’s gentlemen’s club, where ‘some residual public-
school thing, quintessential to Clubs, infected the atmosphere’.23 Despite the
club’s mustiness, however, this all-male environment proves to be a hotbed
for gay sex: some of the clubs’ patrons and carefully picked staff appear to
be involved, later in the story, in the making of a gay porn film. In addition,
the kitchen of Nantwich’s exclusive club becomes the scene for a quick fuck
in which Will is taken ‘with a thrilling leisured vehemence’ by the black cook
Abdul, who summarily disposes of him afterwards.24 A sexually sublimated
but symbolically no less aggressive scene occurs at another elitist venue.
When Will and James attend a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera
Billy Budd at Covent Garden in the company of Will’s grandfather (whose
career will turn out to have been founded on his virulent homophobia back
in the 1950s), a dramatic configuration unfolds: ‘The three of us in our hot
little box were trapped with this intensely British problem: the opera that
was, but wasn’t, gay, the two young gay friends on good behaviour, the
mandarin patriarch giving nothing of his feelings away.’25
Less exclusive than either Nantwich’s club or the Royal Opera House
are the two semi-public/semi-private spaces which Will uses most regularly
in the course of the novel and which thus come to be his most defining
urban habitats: the Corinthian Club (aka the Corry) in Great Russell Street
and the nearby Queensberry Hotel at Russell Square, both imaginatively
grafted upon real-life venues (today known as the Central YMCA and Hotel
Russell, respectively). The Corry’s downstairs gym, swimming pool and
showers, and the complex circuits for staff and clientele in the hotel, offer
the perfect spaces – bustling, transient and cosmopolitan, yet sufficiently
secure and available for appropriation as a ‘sexual commonwealth’26 – for a
young gay man of privilege such as Will. As a result, he is quite unabashed
in declaring his affection for the Corry: ‘It was a place I loved, a gloomy and
functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality.’27 And the grand
Victorian Queensberry, ironically named after the peer who brought about
Oscar Wilde’s downfall, comes to be filled in due course with Will’s desire,
all the way up to the attic room to which he retreats with his lover Phil, and
even the roof on which the two go sunbathing naked.
Hollinghurst sends his fictive pioneer on London’s gay frontier through
all these spaces like an ethnographer, returning for the reader with elaborate
and vivid description. The novel’s near-didactic impetus in this respect is
best illustrated by my final example of a semi-public/semi-private space
collectively appropriated by gay men as a sexual hunting ground. When Will
visits the Brutus Cinema in Frith Street, he explains that ‘[i]t wasn’t so much
to see a film as to sit in a dark, anonymous place and do dark, anonymous
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 209

things’.28 Starting on his architectural and ethnographic evocation of the

Brutus, which runs on for several pages, he tells us how the little cinema

occupied the basement of one of those Soho houses which, above ground-
floor level, maintain their beautiful Caroline fenestration, and seemed a
kind of emblem of gay life (the piano nobile elegant above the squalid,
jolly sous-sol) in the far-off spring of 1983. One entered from the street
by pushing back the dirty red curtain in the doorway beside an unlettered
shop window, painted over white but with a stencil of Michelangelo’s
David stuck in the middle. This tussle with the curtain – one never knew
whether to shoulder it aside to the right or the left, and often tangled with
another punter coming out – seemed a symbolic act, done in the sight of
passers-by, and always gave me a little jab of pride.29

This passage sums up various key strategies used by Hollinghurst to queer

London in his sexually liberating first novel: spaces are investigated for
how they present ‘emblem[s] of gay life’, and they are navigated with a
modicum of ‘pride’ by the narrator, who simultaneously betrays his class
background in the ostensibly self-mocking way in which he not only uses
the impersonal pronoun ‘one’ to cast himself as the ethnographic observer
but also goes on to ironize the unintentionally funny protocol of trying to
move in and out of the city’s fleeting gay scenes. It is this multi-layered and
dynamic quality of spatial evocations in The Swimming-Pool Library, with
its deft combination of the scholarly and the erotic, that continues to lend
complexity and vividness to Hollinghurst’s representations of gay men’s
appropriations of London back in the early 1980s.

The Line of Beauty: Queering

heteronormative space from within
When Hollinghurst worked on The Line of Beauty almost a decade and a
half after writing The Swimming-Pool Library, he consciously returned to
unfinished business: whereas his first novel ended in the summer of 1983, the
backward view he took in the later book started out at the same moment in
history but proceeded to take the narrative four more years into the decade.
This made possible a focus on two contextual elements which were merely
hinted at in his debut: the impact of the Thatcher years and the AIDS crisis
on gay life in the city.
In several ways, The Line of Beauty follows through on the spatial
descriptions in its predecessor, though it clearly resists the temptation to
make use again of a conspicuously documentary mode. Its evocations of
buildings are integrated more subtly into the larger social canvas which
is the novel’s main focus. This is not to say that a queer exploration of
210 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

London’s spatial politics is only of secondary interest to the later novel.

On the contrary, it emerges almost automatically as soon as we notice how
individual chapters are organized around particular locations rather than
around the temporal development more typical of plot-oriented narratives.
Drawing its satirical inspiration partly from the eighteenth-century painter
William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1732–33), The Line of Beauty is set
up as a series of spatially organized tableaux.
The radial centre in this novel is occupied by a self-important house in
Kensington Park Gardens. It is inhabited by the aristocratic Tory MP Gerald
Fedden and his family as well as, for an unusually long time, the novel’s
allegorically named middle-class protagonist, Nick Guest, through whom the
entire third-person narration is focalized. The reader is being warned from
the beginning, through a striking witticism, about Nick’s eager assimilation
into this lush environment: ‘Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he
could “stand a great deal of gilt”.’30 From the Fedden house the novel’s radii
extend in various directions: to both straight and gay pubs, the contrasting
figure of a black lover’s working-class home in Willesden (where the logic of
the closet is equally at work, if differently), a Men Only swimming pond on
Hampstead Heath, a number of pompous and tacky homes for the newly
rich, a handful of fashionable 1980s restaurants, as well as a few places
outside London, such as a wealthy banker’s late-Victorian country house.
What is most crucial to my argument here is that the home of the Feddens
is different in kind from the spaces in the writer’s picaresque first novel. It
is a figurative cornerstone of Thatcherite England and by the same token
resolutely heteronormative – a bulwark for traditional family values.
While in the first of the novel’s three parts the Fedden house is still able
to embody ‘Nick’s romance of London’31 and his sense of being on ‘the
brink of some new promise’,32 a central point of attention becomes how
the heteronormative façade that the house projects to the outside world
and the gay appropriation it half-allows on the inside become intertwined
and set on a collision course. Thus we are able to watch up close how the
heteronormative core of Thatcher’s England is increasingly queered by Nick’s
roaming presence and peripheral participation. As a seemingly permanent
guest on which the Fedden family has come to depend for their own
functioning, Nick turns into a narrative device for analysing not only how
political power is constantly performed, negotiated and materialized, but
also how it tends to be destabilized from within through the uncontainable
forces of same-sex desire. In line with Hollinghurst’s previous protagonists,
Nick is presented as unambiguously gay, assuming his identity rather than
questioning it, but his narrative function in the constellation in which he
is inserted is not so simple: in many ways he serves the role of the queer
Other that is always already lodged, as a structural necessity, within the
heteronormative system or matrix.
Having been taken to task over the limiting aestheticism of his previous
novel, The Spell (1998), Hollinghurst clearly intended The Line of Beauty
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 211

as a multifaceted interrogation of the ways in which his aesthetic penchant

at once sharpens and constrains the social canvases he is so adept at
drawing. In Julie Rivkin’s words, the ‘narrative line’ in this ambitious and
capacious novel is one that ‘links aesthetic experience to all that enables it’
and that gradually comes to display the ‘subordination of the line of beauty
to the laws of property’.33 Hollinghurst places his protagonist in a series
of carefully selected, predominantly heteronormative spaces, allowing the
reader to study how each of these environments responds to the presence
of a gay assimilationist middle-class aesthete whose observations are
simultaneously privileged, astute and blinkered.
Once we begin to understand that the study of different social spaces and
their underlying power dynamics is a major compositional strategy in The
Line of Beauty, we start to see recurrent patterns of subverting and queering
the locales in which chapters are placed. Thus in the opening part, set in
1983, we witness Nick’s first sexual experience with a black council worker,
Leo. The two men meet in a local straight pub (apparently modelled after
the Windsor Castle on Campden Hill Road34) where they must signal their
sexual attraction to each other while hiding it from public view. When they
finally get ready to have sex, the limits of their sexual autonomy are brought
home to them when – unlike the insouciantly rich Will Beckwith – neither
proves to have a private space of their own: as a shy lodger at the Feddens’,
Nick cannot bring himself to smuggle Leo into his temporary home, while
as an unmarried son with a modest income, Leo is still living with his
deeply religious mother, who is unaware of her son’s sexual orientation. As
a result, the couple are forced into outdoor sex. Nick takes Leo into a very
particular type of space which bears the imprint of London’s history at the
centre of England’s capitalist class society: the semi-privatized ‘communal
gardens’, accessible to key-holders only, at the back of Kensington Park
Gardens. In the dark shrubs behind the Feddens’ home, half privileged by
its hospitality but also half trespassing upon it, Nick has his first sex ever
with another man. Hollinghurst makes sure to underscore the conditionality
of the couple’s embryonic relationship in this semi-secure space by staging
two reactions from passers-by upon Nick and Leo’s leaving the gardens, one
implicitly racist, the other blatantly homophobic.
What is so intelligent and complex about this scene of would-be sexual
intimacy is how Hollinghurst sets up an unstable triangle between the upper-
class Fedden house in the background, the white middle-class Nick and the
black working-class Leo – one of those configurations that supports Rivkin’s
reading of the novel in terms of the ‘inseparability of business and aesthetic
(and sexual) pleasure’.35 It is a kind of unstable triangle, at once propelling
and constraining the flow of sexual desire, that will recur in various guises
throughout the novel – for instance, when the opening chapter of Part Two,
set three years later, culminates in a threesome between the nouveau-riche
Lebanese immigrant Wani Ouradi, Nick and an unemployed man (with
no small thanks to Thatcher’s economic policies) whom Wani and Nick
212 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

have picked up at a swimming pond. Although this sexual tryst still takes
place in the privacy of Wani’s postmodern flat in Abingdon Road, with
its architectural ‘system of minimized stress, of guaranteed flattery’,36 it is
mirrored by a similar threesome at the end of the closing chapter of Part Two,
this time upstairs in the Feddens’ home while the prime minister is paying
her only visit to the house. In this chapter, which brings the novel’s large
central part to a climax, the coke-induced sex takes place between Wani,
Nick and the Madeiran waiter Tristão. To enhance its decentring effect, it
follows immediately upon Nick’s moment de gloire in the novel as a result
of yet another coke-induced dare: his stepping up to Margaret Thatcher to
invite her to dance. While dancing with the prime minister inside a bastion
of heteronormative Tory ideology, Nick is fleetingly seen to occupy the
centre of power on whose uncomprehending margins he has been living all
along like ‘an eye-catching unnamed attendant in a history painting’.37 Thus
he might be said, from an allegorical perspective, to have finally infiltrated
and even penetrated the Fedden house down to its deepest ideological core,
only to mess with it instantly through his secret consumption of illicit drugs
and the anti-normative sex he engages in upstairs.
To complicate matters further, the seeds of Nick’s ultimate disturbance of
the house appear to have been planted in the family’s holiday manoir in the
south of France, far away from London in space and time: Nick and Wani’s
secret sex there eventually returns at the centre of the mediatized scandal that
comes crashing down, in the novel’s final part, on the Feddens’ home more
than a year later. In other words, there appears to be no uncompromised
space outside of politics and sexual desire for any of the characters in
the story. In The Line of Beauty, the very bulwarks and cornerstones of
Thatcher’s heteronormative England are always already queered from
within. The belated attempt by the Feddens, in the final pages of the novel,
to expel this queer element and treat it as an alien parasite merely serves to
enhance the reader’s sense of the hypocritical and violent premises on which
the heteronormative matrix historically rests.

The Stranger’s Child: Tracing the

irretrievability of queer lives
Although I have identified a shift from the quasi-anthropological and
documentary depiction of gay-appropriated spaces in The Swimming-Pool
Library to a more complex narrative in The Line of Beauty which allows
heteronormative spaces and their political ideology to be destabilized and
queered from within, these two novels admittedly still share their reliance
on a single protagonist-observer who is unambiguously gay-identified.
Hollinghurst’s most recent novel, by contrast, presents us with neither a single
protagonist nor sexualities that are quite so transparent. Here, for the first
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 213

time, the epistemic instabilities which we tend to associate with queer theory
become relevant to the many secrets and ambiguities characterizing both
the life stories and material spaces evoked in the novel. The Stranger’s Child
subverts the drive for closure. As Richard Canning has noted, architectural
spaces in this novel ‘perpetually act and interact dynamically with individual
lives’.38 The dynamism is such that it proves to be uncontainable, keeping
the interaction forever on a temporal axis.
At first sight, the novel may perhaps strike readers as too conventional
to be deemed queer. It looks suspiciously like a combination of familiar
genres: the socially sweeping ‘grand narrative’ in the tradition of Victorian
and Edwardian realism that joins elements of the family saga and the
country house novel. But to stick such labels on the book is to overlook
how it undercuts these traditions. While Hollinghurst takes visible delight
in exploiting genre conventions, he puts them at the service of a work that
is out to achieve a very different effect. If, for instance, he appears to restore
the grand narrative of realism, he does so by punching enormous holes in
it, rendering it fundamentally elliptical and open-ended. Between the five
episodes which he elaborates and which are set respectively in 1913, 1926,
1967, 1979–80 and 2008, there is no traditional narrative continuity: the
world in which we find ourselves thrown at any moment is an altogether
different one, with new characters and circumstances and greatly changed
contexts. Moreover, the secondary continuities that gradually surface need
to be decoded painstakingly for an extended portrait to emerge. And this
portrait is constrained by time, which invariably takes the upper hand over
any attempt at rounding off the narrative. The novel’s underlying world
view is less nineteenth century than Proustian: it invariably insists on the
flow and losses of time.
What Hollinghurst poignantly dramatizes in The Stranger’s Child are
the empirical gaps and irreducible alterities that threaten all biographical
narratives seeking to include people’s sexual lives. In interviews following
the book’s appearance, he emphasized the fundamental unknowability and
ambiguous evidence about people’s private lives. Along the same lines, his
idea was ‘to write a multi-generational family saga where all the multi-
generational family saga was left out, or sometimes summed up in a kind
of bewildering formula like Daphne saying that her second husband’s half-
sister was married to her father’s elder brother’.39 There is an aspect of
ironic historical revisionism to this approach that squares well with queer
theory’s insistence not just on non-heteronormative sexualities but on the
basic uncertainties which riddle the social and discursive construction of
sexualities. It even fits those branches of queer theory which have sought
to subvert the cultural norm of the biological family – what Lee Edelman,
in a much more polemical manner, has critiqued as the hegemonic logic of
‘reproductive futurism’.40 After all, the disconnections between the novel’s
episodes were directly inspired, in Hollinghurst’s own admission, by the
‘question of what the shape of one’s life is if one doesn’t settle down and
214 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

have children. Some people do have those clear markers of the passage of
time and generations, which a lot of gay people are less bound by’.41
The book’s alternative organization of a kinship history affects the
novel in multiple ways: far from offering a straightforward family saga,
the narrative presents us with a series of uncertain biological connections,
new alliances through serial marriages and secret love relationships (both
gay and straight, in and out of wedlock). By the same token, the usual
identifying link between houses and families is ruptured: the two main
houses whose partial histories we read display no continuity of possession
and inhabitation. The continuity which is supposed to lend an identity and
unified history to such spaces is repeatedly questioned by the narrative and
shown to be an illusion on the part of those who temporarily inhabit them
and try to impose their logic of possession and self-possession upon them.
In this sense, the novel’s approach towards history accords well with Mark
Turner’s Benjaminian attempt ‘to think about the fragments, rather than the
unifying, overarching narratives of urban modernity’.42
To anchor this reading of Hollinghurst’s queering of space and time
in the context of London, I propose to look at the house with which
we become acquainted early in the novel, which is to say in the early
twentieth century. This is an ‘estate’ for the upper middle class called Two
Acres. Over time, it undergoes a number of changes until, by the beginning
of the twenty-first century, we hear it has been demolished. A number
of characters whose experiences illustrate the book’s concern with the
disappearing secrets of (sexual) history are situated in and around Two
Acres. The picture which the reader is able to cobble together in the course
of the fragmented narrative is that of a house originally built in the 1880s
and owned by the Sawle family between 1890 and 1920. It is in Stanmore,
then still a little village to the northwest of London. In 1913, this means
that it is reachable by train if one gets off at Harrow and Wealdstone;
the Harrow station, built in 1880, was one of the early extensions of the
Metropolitan Railway corridor established to the northwest of London into
Middlesex – a corridor which became synonymous with early twentieth-
century suburbanization.43 We are, in other words, in the pastoral area
which, soon after we meet the Sawles in 1913, will come to be known as
‘Metroland’.
The Arts and Crafts style of the house is explicitly so named, and one
of the Sawle children who grew up in it deplores how it ‘had a way of
“resolving itself into nooks” ’44 – the ideal receptacle for little privacies and
secrecies. Yet Two Acres does not just function as a marker of historical
realism but also as a larger cultural synecdoche: it figures a late-Victorian –
or by the time we meet it, Georgian – idyllic pastoral on the cusp of the
Great War that is about to change the face of the century. The opening
scene shows us Daphne Sawle as a young girl lying in a hammock, reading
Tennyson and waiting for the arrival of her brother George with his awe-
inspiring new friend from Cambridge, the aristocratic young poet Cecil
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 215

Valance. Idyllically, but also wittily, ‘the sunset sky turned pink above the
rockery’ while she waits.45
The usage of idyllic settings in early twentieth-century fiction
stereotypically depended on the staging of a safe inside world that would
protect the inhabitants from an unruly world outside. Yet Hollinghurst
immediately ruptures this illusion by smuggling fluid desires and hard-to-
resolve secrets into the cosy inside of Two Acres. When George’s mother and
her German friend agree that George is ‘blooming’,46 the pastoral metaphor
covers up – to themselves more than to the reader – the secret cause of
George’s recent transformation. Likewise, when Daphne later the same
evening ventures out into the dark garden in a romantic pastoral mood –
‘There were privet smells and earth smells and rose smells that she took in
without naming them in her heady swoop across the lawn’47 – her openness
to sensuality segues into her first sexual frisson when she finds Cecil and
George in the hammock together.
This part of Hollinghurst’s narrative culminates in George’s backward
glance from the 1920s, when he acknowledges to himself that ‘[t]he English
idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes’.48 From
the beginning, in other words, when the suburban Arts and Crafts house
and pastoral surroundings still seemed to promise an idyllic immunity from
corrupting urban forces, Two Acres was already being queered from within
through the uncontainable energies of the libido. At the same time, it was
also being queered from without by the forces of history, for the banality of
the weekend’s anecdotal events relayed in Part One are placed on the verge
of one of the twentieth century’s worst global carnages. Thus Hollinghurst
also ruptures the structure of eternal repetition which constitutes the
temporal logic of the idyllic illusion and its supposed protection against the
future – which, through the dramatic irony he so deftly exploits, we already
know to be calamitous.
Throughout the novel’s first episode, Hollinghurst plants the seeds for his
Georgian pastoral’s demise, which is figured most clearly by the comically
queer hunt for the house almost seventy years later by the biographer Paul
Bryant. The lower-middle-class Paul, whose identity politics are resolutely
gay, lives in a very different social and mental world from that of the
Sawles and Valances we encountered earlier on. Yet it is only through his
dubious eyes that we can revisit the house in 1980. Stanmore is now part
of North London and the final stop on the Jubilee Line. Paul arrives full
of misconceptions about his destination. Walking up and around Stanmore
Hill, he has trouble finding the remains of Two Acres; he soon ‘wished he
was more expert at looking at houses, and knowing how old they were’.49
Eventually he does come upon the house, or rather its shell, hidden behind a
chained and padlocked fence, occupying a much smaller plot than it used to
do. In the allegory that imposes itself, it critically resists being visited or even
looked at. Paul is forced to trespass on the neighbour’s property and crawl
under a wall of old firs to reach the overgrown garden, emerging scratched.
216 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

In line with what I regard as Hollinghurst’s queer approach in much of

the book, the expected sense of apotheosis fails to follow: ‘Somehow he
couldn’t take the house in; but he would take photographs, so as to see it all
later.’50 Paul finds the Sawles’ former home ‘empty, and therefore in a way
his’,51 yet the way is not that of epistemic control or of a magical flashback
to private lives nearly seventy years ago. It is not even the way of literal
penetration: English history guards its secrets well in this case as an alarm
by the name of Albion Security keeps Paul from breaking in. The only thing
Paul detects is evidence suggesting that ‘at some stage, before this latest
degradation, “Two Acres” had been divided up, three flats, probably – like
almost every house in London’.52 Hollinghurst concludes his evocation in a
marvel of stylized ruminations full of rhythmic and acoustical echoes of the
days of Edwardian poetry writing:

He’d had the idea that he would find things more or less as they had been in
1913 – more deeply settled in, of course, discreetly modernized, tastefully
adapted, but the rockery still there, the ‘glinting spinney’ a beautiful
wood, and the trees where the hammock had been slung still bearing the
ridges of the ropes in their bark. He thought other resourceful people
would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would
wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness
of being admired … But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs
windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.53

This scene, I would like to suggest, offers a telling instance of the short-
circuit between present and past when a ‘stranger’s child’ without a rich
imagination, who nevertheless wants to be a biographer, faces up to a queer
house in London that has been scarred and silenced by history. The encounter
with the house forces upon him the irreducibility of material change and the
irretrievability of people’s subjective (including sexual) lives – those same lives
into which, as readers of The Stranger’s Child, we are given exclusive access
through the novelist’s more capacious and polyphonic imagination. In this
sense, Hollinghurst’s scene of disconnection between present and past, which
is also a scene of disconnection between generations of same-sex-loving men
and women in London, is of a piece with Lee Edelman’s resistance to

the ideological conflation of historical development and genetic narrative,

what Paul de Man calls ‘the pre-assumed concept of history as a generative
process[,] … of history as a temporal hierarchy that resembles a parental
structure in which the past is like an ancestor begetting, in a moment of
unmediated presence, a future capable of repeating in its turn the same
generative process’.54

Viewed through this theoretical lens, Paul Bryant’s inability to grasp

the past experiences of those individuals whose lives he nevertheless
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 217

believes capable of recording in a published biography is a very queer

way of reminding us, on the part of Hollinghurst, of how ephemeral and
uncontainable all those queer lives lived in and around London really
are – and how much of their sexual histories is bound to remain forever
unwritten.

Notes
1 As one recent overview contends,
[c]haracters in novels by Alan Hollinghurst … enjoy adventurous
sex lives but are in most respects conservative rather than radical;
cruising and sex in these novels are forms of entertainment, pleasurable
diversions rather than acts of resistance. The gay man of Hollinghurst’s
fiction does not confine his sex life to monogamous couplehood, but in
other ways he is an establishment figure, wanting to resist the status quo
only when the status quo is hostile to homosexuality.
Hugh Stevens, ‘Normality and Queerness in Gay Fiction’, in Hugh Stevens
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 86.
2 Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (London: Picador, 2011), p. 159.
3 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (London: Penguin, 1988),
p. 5.
4 Ibid., p. 5.
5 Ibid., p. 4.
6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).
7 Julie Cleminson develops the connection between Will and the figure of the
flâneur in her PhD dissertation, ‘Walking in London: The Fiction of Neil
Bartlett, Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst’ (Brunel University, 2009),
p. 239. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/4356/1/FulltextThesis.pdf
(accessed 14 April 2014). The connection also underlies the generic definition
of Hollinghurst’s novel as ‘loiterature’ in Ross Chambers, ‘Messing Around:
Gayness and Loiterature in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library’,
in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading
Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993),
pp. 207–17.
8 For a reading of the novel in which ‘the growth of an urban and largely
commercial scene’ for gay men is regarded as a form of cultural ‘deterioration’
by Hollinghurst, see David Alderson, ‘Desire as Nostalgia: The Novels of Alan
Hollinghurst’, in David Alderson and Linda Anderson (eds), Territories of
Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 36.
9 Hollinghurst, Swimming-Pool Library, p. 17.
218 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

10 Ibid., p. 192.
11 Ibid., pp. 213–14.
12 Ibid., p. 70.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 265.
15 Ibid., p. 80.
16 Examples of the use of this terminology are to be found in David Featherstone
and Joe Painter (eds), Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); and Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art and Spatial
Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
17 Hollinghurst, Swimming-Pool Library, p. 47.
18 Ibid., p. 93.
19 Ibid., p. 152.
20 Ibid., p. 132.
21 Ibid., p. 134.
22 Ibid., pp. 172, 173.
23 Ibid., p. 37.
24 Ibid., p. 262.
25 Ibid., p. 120.
26 Alderson, ‘Desire as Nostalgia’, p. 32.
27 Hollinghurst, Swimming-Pool Library, p. 9.
28 Ibid., p. 47.
29 Ibid., p. 48.
30 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004), p. 6.
31 Ibid., p. 15.
32 Ibid., p. 19.
33 Julie Rivkin, ‘Writing the Gay 80s with Henry James: David Leavitt’s A Place
I’ve Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty’, Henry James
Review 26.3 (Fall 2005), pp. 289, 290.
34 See ‘Locations Manager Patrick Schweitzer on Where The Line of Beauty Was
Filmed’. http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/lineofbeauty/backstage.shtml (accessed
14 June 2006).
35 Rivkin, ‘Writing the Gay 80s’, p. 290.
36 Hollinghurst, Line of Beauty, p. 199.
37 Ibid., p. 375.
38 Richard Canning, ‘The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst’, The
Independent, 17 June 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment
 ALAN HOLLINGHURST ’S FICTIONAL WAYS OF QUEERING LONDON 219

/books/reviews/the-strangers-child-by-alan-hollinghurst-2298468.html
(accessed 5 April 2014).
39 Alan Hollinghurst, interview with author, 19 November 2011.
40 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
41 Emily Stokes, ‘Lunch with the FT: Alan Hollinghurst’, The Financial Times,
24 June 2011. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a9229750-9cbe-11e0-bf57-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz1mpy0Le2J (accessed 5 April 2014).
42 Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York
and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 36.
43 See the Wikipedia entries for ‘Harrow-on-the-Hill Station’ and ‘Metropolitan
Railway’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrow-on-the-Hill_station and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroplitan_Railway (accessed 5 April 2014).
44 Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child, p. 8.
45 Ibid., p. 3.
46 Ibid., p. 10.
47 Ibid., p. 32.
48 Ibid., p. 159.
49 Ibid., p. 382.
50 Ibid., p. 385.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 386.
53 Ibid., p. 387.
54 Lee Edelman, ‘Ever After’, in Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (eds), After Sex?
On Writing since Queer Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),
p. 117.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sink Street: The Sapphic World

of Pre-Chinatown Soho
Anne Witchard

In her poem ‘Caves of Harmony’ (c.1925), lesbian writer Sylvia Townsend

Warner captures a quintessential moment of queer modernity – a jammed
dance-floor after midnight, the plaintive strains of a black saxophonist, the
poignant complicity of outsiders: ‘Play, dark musician, play –/…/ Music’s his
paramour;/ And yours, and mine, since we dance here tonight’ (ll.1; 15–16).
The poem takes its title from Elsa Lanchester’s avant-garde nightclub, The
Cave of Harmony, the club’s name, in fact, coming from Townsend Warner’s
own suggestion.1
It is generally accepted that there was no lesbian nightlife in early
twentieth-century London, certainly nothing comparable to what we know
of interwar Paris from Brassaï’s images of Le Monocle, the celebrated boîte
de nuit hosted by the flagrantly cross-dressed Lulu de Montparnasse, or
the intriguingly discreet accounts of Berlin’s ‘damenklubs’ – Harmonie,
Tatjana’s, Violetta or Sappho.2 Relative to the entertainments of its
continental counterparts, London’s after-dark lesbian establishments, such
as they were, have gone unconsidered. This chapter attempts to discover a
lesbian scene, oscillating as it did among the bewildering variety of West
End nightclubs and underground bars that mushroomed during the years
surrounding the Great War. These places were uncommercialized, unlicensed
and generally located in hidden premises in back streets, so by their nature
historically evanescent.
Ironically, it was thanks to the narcotics and alcohol restrictions of the
wartime Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) that Soho’s pre-war promise
of a new kind of nightlife heralded by Frida Strindberg’s Cave of the
222 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Golden Calf came good in an ever-growing number of shifting speakeasies.3

A loophole in the law meant that registering as a ‘private members club’
avoided the requirement for a license to provide alcoholic drinks, dancing
or gambling. The questionable legality of such places proved a fertile ground
for other illicit practices: ‘the cocainer and opium smoker and the dopeist’,
it was wryly observed, ‘have followed swiftly on the restrictions that made
it impossible for a man to get a glass of beer or a tot of whisky after ten o’
clock at night’.4 The police files and depositions of their prosecutors, and the
memoirs, anecdotes and fictional evocations of their patrons, leave lingering
textual traces of these places, where, in an unprecedented egalitarianism,
elites mixed with low-life types, dope peddlers with debutantes, while the
influx of ‘coloured musicians’ allowed opportunities for mixed-race as well
as same-sex erotic encounters.
This chapter takes its title from one such fiction. ‘Sink Street’ is Evelyn
Waugh’s dysphemistic designation of Soho’s Gerrard Street in A Handful
of Dust (1934), a location that he returns to a decade later in Brideshead
Revisited (1945).5 These two novels span the period of inter-war modernity
and indict the existential emptiness, as Waugh saw it, evidenced by the Bright
Young People of his set in their quest for novel sensation. In A Handful of
Dust, a taxi ride to a certain ‘lousy joint’ at No. 100 Sink Street, known as
‘the Old Hundredth’, must make towards Regent Street, turn ‘into Golden
Square and then down Sink Street’.6 In the US edition of the novel, textual
alterations have the cab heading ‘towards Shaftesbury Avenue’, turning
‘down Wardour Street and then into Sink Street’ to ‘the old Sixty-four’
(at No. 64).7 Brideshead Revisited has ‘Ma Mayfield’s Old Hundreth’ at
‘A hundred Sink Street … [j]ust off Leicester Square’.8 Waugh’s disreputable
Sink Street nightclub is unmistakably Mrs Kate Meyrick’s legendary ‘43
Club’, named for its address at No. 43 Gerrard Street. The different textual
versions describe, between them, the periphery of Soho’s ‘Black Mile’,
bounded by Regent Street and Leicester Square, intersected by Shaftesbury
Avenue with Wardour Street and Golden Square lying within. Nestled at
the centre is the street Waugh chose to designate with a fictional name and
which provides my queer orientation for mapping an emergent lesbian
nightlife in London.9

Gerrard Street: ‘The centre of life’

(Virginia Woolf, 1918)
In A Handful of Dust, Sink Street is ‘a dingy little place inhabited for the most
part by Asiatics’.10 In those days, any connection between Gerrard Street
and London’s Chinese was on account of a widely publicized case in 1922
involving ‘Snow King’ Billy ‘Brilliant’ Chang and the unfortunate demise
of a cocaine-sniffing dance hostess Freda Kempton.11 Kempton frequented
 SINK STREET 223

Mrs Kate Meyrick’s ‘43’ and Chang had interests in the Palm Court Club
opposite, both relatively upmarket establishments that flourished among the
neighbourhood’s many dive bars, ‘coloured clubs’ and other disreputable
places peopled largely, according to police files, by ‘sexual perverts, lesbians
and sodomites’.12 Gerrard Street’s chief renown back then was as a red light
district, the ‘rather melancholy haunt of prostitutes’, as Leonard Woolf
recalled, who patrolled its length ‘daily from 2.30pm onwards’.13 Waugh’s
reference to ‘Asiatics’ would have been recognized at the time as designating
the types who gathered just across the street from No. 43 at No. 4. This
shabby Georgian townhouse was the premises of the 1917 Club founded
by Woolf with Oliver Strachey, its name commemorating the Bolshevik
revolution of that year in Russia.14
In January 1918, shortly after its opening, Virginia Woolf wrote to her
sister that ‘[t]he centre of life I should say is now undoubtedly the 17 club’.15
Here, according to writer and member Douglas Goldring, were to be found:

Hindus, Parsees, puritans, free lovers, Quakers, teetotallers, heavy

drinkers, Morris Dancers and Folk Song experts … members of the
London School of Economics, Trades Union officials, journalists, poets,
actors and actresses, Communists, theosophists. In short every colour
and creed, every ‘ism’ and ‘ist’ was represented.16

The general atmosphere was one of benevolent bohemianism: ‘darkies,

actresses, cranks … that’s the sort of creature one meets there’, noted
Virginia in 1922, adding with uncharacteristic circumspection, ‘well I don’t
boast. I’m only one of them myself’.17 Afternoons were given over to talks
on culture and science, encouraging the frank discussion of controversial
sexual subjects. The club established a reputation as – according to one’s
standpoint – fashionably or ‘unfashionably bisexual’.18 It became a regular
venue for ‘Bloomsberries’, members of the British Society for the Study of
Sex Psychology, and attracted students of Freudian analysis from the nearby
Tavistock Square Clinic (founded in 1920).19 The novelist Stella Benson
was nervously disparaging in her description of the club’s younger patrons.
Dining there in 1927 with her girlhood friend, Laura Hutton, she discovered
‘Laura’s Bolshevik Club’ to be ‘a dirty little place, pimpled with dusty-haired
earnest or olympically sneering young men and women’.20 Hutton was now
a qualified clinician in psychiatry at the Tavistock Square Clinic and Benson
the reluctant recipient of her passionate devotion. Unequivocal about her
own lesbianism, their relationship would form a case study for Hutton’s
book The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems (1935).21
From the early 1920s, popular interest in Freudianism created ‘an
apparent boom in lesbianism’.22 Whether female homosexuality was actually
growing more prevalent, its representation and scrutiny were certainly more
overt. The hoydenish new freedoms and androgynous appearance of the
post-war flapper were linked with an uneasy confusion as to her sexual
224 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

orientation. Psychologist Phyllis Blanchard’s widely read studies of female

adolescence warned of the ‘increasing role which homosexuality is coming
to play in the life of the modern girl’.23 Foremost among the 1917 Club’s
eclectically ‘queer crowd of avant-gardists’ memorialized by Goldring, or
the ‘Asiatics’ of Waugh’s summative Othering, was that disturbing creature,
the ‘modern girl’.24
This free-spirited new breed offered an unprecedented challenge to
clubland’s standard demarcations of social class and propriety. Elsa
Lanchester, the daughter of defiantly unmarried Marxist-Suffragette
parents, prided herself on being, at 16, one of the youngest members of the
1917 Club and something of a mascot there (her bust by Jacob Epstein was
installed above the door).25 Her antics inspired a satirical verse which gives
an idea of the diversions the ‘modern girl’ brought to the 1917 Club in the
years following the war:

In nineteen seventeen they founded a club

Partly as brothel and partly as pub,
The members were all of them horrible bores
Except for the Girl in Giotto-pink drawers.26

From its earliest days, Virginia Woolf had been drawn to the ‘shabby, loose,
crop-haired, small faced bright young women’ who attended the club.27
Overhearing one of them declaring that she intended to be England’s first
woman printer, the Woolfs promptly hired Marjorie Thompson, a student
at the nearby London School of Economics, to work at their new Hogarth
Press, despite Virginia’s misgivings that she wore ‘too much powder and
scent’.28 The brassiness of the modern girl, ‘putting on too much make-up,
drinking too many cocktails’, was something much commented upon.29
While sartorial breaches of gender etiquette – an Eton crop, flattened
breasts and boyish garb – intrigued Woolf, certain class sensibilities
remained entrenched. She regretted Marjorie Thompson’s ‘common’
accent, in short that she was not ‘a lady’, while her fascination with
Katherine Mansfield’s self-styled bohemian ways, her use of scent as much
as her sexual recklessness, provoked Woolf’s often-quoted observation
that she stunk ‘like a civet cat that had taken to street walking’.30 When
Leonard Woolf rather proudly referred to the 1917 Club as the ‘zenith
of disreputability’, he was describing its radical socio-sexual hybridity as
much as its squalid Soho situation ‘opposite Ma Meyrick’s “43” in a street
infested by tarts’.31
In the early 1920s, whenever he could escape from Oxford, Evelyn Waugh
would head for Gerrard Street. He might have supper in the 1917 Club’s
‘dingy basement dining-room’ that smelled of cats.32 Afterwards, along with
other of the club’s ‘less high-minded’ members, he would cross the road for
illicit drinks and dancing at the ‘43’.33 Sometimes they would go on to the
50–50 Club in nearby Wardour Street.34 The 50–50 was run by gay matinee
 SINK STREET 225

idol Ivor Novello with his best friend, actress Constance Collier, ‘catering
exclusively to “Us” ’, which ostensibly meant ‘theatre people’, but given their
prevalence, clearly indicated the club’s preferred homosexual clientele.35
The perambulations of Waugh and his circle illustrate the overlappings
of London’s haute bohème and artistic intelligentsia with the West End’s
flamboyant theatre crowd. In 1924, Elsa Lanchester launched a club that
catered quite specifically to the intersection of these worlds: The Cave of
Harmony.36
As a child, Lanchester had been taken to see Maud Allan perform and
had ‘never been quite the same after that’.37 Her passion for modern dance
led her to train at Isadora Duncan’s school in Paris. Duncan’s innovative
barefoot technique took inspiration from classical Grecian dance and
its roots as a sacred art. Her teaching abhorred patriarchal convention
and sexual prudery, celebrating women’s natural, uncorseted form. This
liberating craze for ‘Greek’ dancing was seen by many as ‘wild, disruptive
and lesbian’.38
When the war forced Duncan’s school to disband, Lanchester joined the
movement’s chief proponent in London, Margaret Morris, who employed
her to give lessons in modern movement and eurhythmics at her School
of Dance in the Kings Road. Here Morris held a tri-monthly event, the
Margaret Morris Club, which became a regular Chelsea outpost for many
of those painters, writers and musicians who met at the 1917 Club.39 Most
importantly for Morris, her club answered the pressing need for a place
where women might come and go freely and respectably, as women did to
bars in Paris.40
In wartime London, unaccompanied women were decidedly suspect.
Compton Mackenzie’s ‘Café d’Orange’ in the novel Sinister Street (1914) is
typical of such West End venues where, between the large painted mirrors
and advertisements for drinks that decorated the walls:

at intervals hung notices warning ladies that they must not stay longer
than twenty minutes unless accompanied by a gentleman, and with a final
stroke of ironic propriety that they must not smoke unless accompanied
by a gentleman. The tawdry beer hall with its reek of alcohol and fog of
tobacco-smoke, with its harbourage of all the flotsam of the underworld,
must preserve a fiction of polite manners.41

Morris understood that female liberation entailed the creation of a new

physical and social order in the revolt against hierarchy and tradition, and,
most importantly for women like Radclyffe Hall, her dance lessons were
refreshingly ‘far from a system for introducing the rules of the game of
flirtation, courtship and marriage’.42 In a lesser-known novel, A Saturday
Life (1925), Hall acknowledges Morris’s pioneering zeal.43 Rumour of the
naked cavorting in the school cloakroom of unblushing young protagonist,
Sidonia, draws masculine condemnation that, in its allusion to Sapphic
226 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

pollution, was to prove ominously prescient of the kind of attention The

Well of Loneliness (1928) would receive:

He pointed out that although England was an island, it was, thank God,
a very different island from one that he might mention. (An allusion
completely lost on Miss Valery) … He even went so far as to condemn the
Valery School, comparing it to a cesspool of ancient iniquity … and that he
wished to withdraw his niece immediately from further contamination.44

‘Tu t’habilles en garçon.

Tu le comportes en garçon’45
While the post-war craze for dancing of all kinds was so inclusive that ‘even
the most learned members’ of the 1917 Club were ‘caught’ by it, for some
it was inevitably inhibiting.46 Fox-trots and tangos, just like the outmoded
waltzes, were activities that conformed to heterosexual norms and, as
Rishona Zimring’s attention to Woolf’s debutante days shows, ‘conformity
to these norms’ might be ‘experienced anxiously’ by some women.47 Morris’s
work, as Zimring recognizes, ‘exemplified the most liberating possibilities
for social dance to promote a newly hybrid, cosmopolitan social fabric’.48
Radclyffe Hall, with her partner Una Troubridge and friend the painter
Romaine Brooks, practised the newest steps in congenial company at the
Margaret Morris Club.49 The artist’s model Viva King recalled that the
club’s band:

was under the direction of a female pianist called Dicky, who, with
her short hair, conventional dinner jacket, white shirt and black tie, I
naturally took to be a man, if a small one. I was much astonished to see
a skirt rather than trousers when she stood up. We had not seen the like
until then.50

Indeed, it was partly because of what Morris was doing at her Chelsea
club nights that Lanchester started The Cave of Harmony. Lanchester’s
programmes interspersed radical short plays by the likes of Luigi Pirandello,
Anton Chekhov and, closer to home, Aldous Huxley, with her own camp
repertoire of Cockney coster songs and the suggestive hanky panky of cross-
dressed acts inspired by Vesta Tilley.51 When, after the midnight cabaret,
the audience took to the diminutive dance floor, women might dance with
other women. The place features in Huxley’s novel, Antic Hay (1923): it
is ‘a gala night at the cabaret’ and young women are provocatively cross-
dressed ‘as callipygous Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondoliers, black-
breeched Toreadors’.52 Jane Marcus has suggested that the title of Hall’s
novel of lesbian angst, The Well of Loneliness, was a deliberate inversion of
 SINK STREET 227

The Cave of Harmony, a poignant reference to a place where women felt

comfortable expressing their sexuality, both in the way they might dress and
by dancing with each other.53
The pervasive post-war penchant for male attire is dismissed by the
narrator of Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women (1928) as ‘a purely
decorative expression of the instinct that led other young women to drive
lorries in France’.54 This is an acerbic nod to the largely lesbian composition
of Barbara ‘Toupie’ Lowther’s all-women ambulance unit which would find
its representation in The Well of Loneliness as the milieu in which Stephen
(modelled on Lowther) finally meets kindred types and finds her great
love, Mary. At the same time, it perhaps infers that lesbianism itself, in the
aftermath of the war, had become a performative affectation.
Toupie Lowther and Radclyffe Hall were frequent visitors to The Cave of
Harmony. Together ‘they roared through London’ on their motorbikes ‘to
night-clubs, and bars’ and after-hours bottle parties.55 In the immediate post-
war years, their mannish clothing appeared rather less odd than hitherto.
Many women had learned to drive – if not through shell fire at the front,
then buses and trucks through air raids at home. They had done men’s work
during the war and wanted clothes that accommodated their new pursuits.
To call yourself Billie, Pat or Jo, crop your hair, and wear tailored jackets
with Oxford bags were now things that chic heterosexual women did, too.
There were ‘straight’ clubs like Soho’s Ham Bone Club where the post-war
shortage of men made the sight of women dancing together familiar and
unthreatening and therefore attractive to the upper echelons of lesbian
bohemia.56
Modern girls expressed an open-minded bravura about female
homosexuality. Aimee Stuart was co-author with her husband of an all-
female play, Nine Till Six (1930), about women’s work in the fashion
industry, and Love of Women (1934) which would be banned by the Lord
Chamberlain for its lesbian intimations. Stuart was pivotal to a gay salon
culture, holding frequent gatherings at her flat in Carlton House Terrace, St
James’s: ‘we talked endlessly about free love and homosexuality’, recalled
her young protégé, the writer Nerina Shute, who was then diffident about
her own preference for women and ongoing affair with ‘Josephine’, a
Roman Catholic who assured her that ‘[t]here is nothing in the Bible against
lesbians’.57 Shute sported a man’s broad-brimmed black hat in an era of
tiny cloches and was passionate about sexual politics. In 1927, aged 19,
she was hired on the strength of her outspoken opinion as gossip columnist
for Film Weekly and, in 1931, published Another Man’s Poison, notorious
for its frank depiction of female homosexuality: ‘Paula was what we
then called ambi-sextrous’.58 This was a term coined by Aimee Stuart to
describe their circle and famously adopted by actress, Tallulah Bankhead,
to describe herself. Rebecca West’s review of Another Man’s Poison in the
Daily Telegraph established Shute, however backhandedly, as the definitive
‘modern girl’: ‘Miss Shute writes, not so much badly as barbarously, as if she
228 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

had never read anything but a magazine, never seen a picture but a moving
one, never heard any music except at restaurants. Yet she is full of talent.’59
The review secured Shute a contract with the Sunday Graphic for a series
of articles giving the opinion of ‘an ultra-modern girl’ under the byline ‘The
Girl with the Barbarous Touch’.
A favourite rendezvous of that period for Shute, Tallulah Bankhead,
Aimee Stuart and others of their theatrical set was The Little Club, another
Kate Meyrick venture, located in Soho’s Golden Square. Not for nothing is
Waugh’s Sink Street approached via Golden Square. In 1924, The People
professed concern in a pruriently titled article, ‘The Smear Across London’
(23 November). Journalist Frederick Hannen Swaffer discovered ‘a “definite
cult” of “decadent” people (of both sexes), addicted to “perversion” and
“the unnatural” who congregated around the theatre and literary world’.60
It was followed the Sunday after by ‘Another Phase of the Smear: Women
Friendships that People Talk About’ (30 November). London’s lesbian
nightlife culture was emerging with increasing visibility as part of this
theatrical scene operating on the fringes of the criminal underworld:

Socially they [homosexual women and men] seem to seek each other … It
is, perhaps, because they have in common the fact of their outcast or
chosen – according to the way they look at it – state. But it is also because
the society of degenerates and semi-degenerates in London exists as a
society and claims for its own the vicious of whatever stamp … [T]hey are
of all types – drug-takers, uteromaniacs, perverts, alcoholists.61

By the time of the trial of The Well of Loneliness in 1928, the prevalence of
‘decadent’ – that is, lesbian – women ‘among artists, theatrical and society
people’ had become an established occasion of moral outrage, provoking
James Douglas’s editorial tirade against the novel in The Sunday Express:
‘They flaunt themselves in public places with increasing effrontery and more
insolently provocative bravado’.62

The Sink of Solitude

In London streets the groves of Lesbos bloom –
Man-hatted girls, tweed-coated, light the gloom.
Women in love now only love themselves
And men are left (like duller books) on shelves.63

Beresford Egan turned to the defunct mode of the illustrated lampoon to

excoriate the trial and fuss around The Well of Loneliness. The Yellow
Book graphics and pastiched Victorian melodrama of its telling title The
Sink of Solitude (1928) were hallmarks of Bright Young People style, of
which Egan was an exemplar. No one gets off lightly in maverick publisher
 SINK STREET 229

P.R. Stephensen’s preface. Putting to one side ‘the feebleness of The Well
of Loneliness either as a work of art or as a moral argument’, he berates
not just ‘the pathetic post-war lesbians with their “mannish” modes and
poses’ and the ‘sentimental scientificality of psychopaths like Havelock Ellis
who ponderously “explain” them’, but equally the morbid journalists who
beset these women. He calls for James Douglas to be repressed as a public
nuisance and lambastes the loathly leprosy of newspaper sensationalism for
doping England into imbecility.64
Meanwhile, Nerina Shute’s sharp-tongued media profile earned her
a summons from Lord Beaverbrook, curious about ‘the modern girl’.
She accordingly clued him up, informing him that ‘those young women with
closely cropped hair who strutted down the Kings Road, Chelsea dressed as
men’ cited such historical luminaries as ‘Sappho and Christina of Sweden’
in justification:

To be a lesbian, I told him, was not illegal, not condemned in the Bible, and
since the Great War, as Lord Beaverbrook agreed, there were not enough
Englishmen to go round. ‘What was wrong’, I said, ‘with being a lesbian?’
Again he nodded. He had read The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.
So had I. At that time everyone I knew in London was reading it, or
discussing it … Well, said Lord Beaverbrook, at last, I suppose you think
you’re a typical modern girl?65

Beaverbrook evidently thought so. In something of a volte face given his

publication’s stance against Hall’s novel, he offered her a column in the
Daily Express. In another account of this interview, Shute credits The Well
of Loneliness for having made ‘the whole proceeding [lesbianism] appear
interesting’.66 For many girls, to be ‘ambi-sextrous’ was to be ultra-modern,
an aspect of the hedonistic license of the post-Armistice world: ‘we were
giving birth to the permissive age’, Shute would later recall with pride.67
Throughout the 1920s, in popular newspapers and middlebrow fiction, drug-
taking, alcoholism and ‘unnatural’ sexualities had been presented as ‘almost
exclusively diversions of the well-born’.68 The Well of Loneliness offered
lesbian women of all classes of society a new interpretive framework for
their experience and, as Shute with some satisfaction observed, ‘encouraged
everyone concerned’.69

Gateways to the underworld

wealthy women of abnormal tastes do not often seek recreation from
chance encounters in the street, or other public places. It is at the gateways
to the underworld, fascinating little café bars, dance clubs, feverish centres
of excitement and emotional stimuli that you will find them.70
230 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Every time Tallulah Bankhead performed in the West End, the theatre was
mobbed by ‘Gallery Girls’. The young women who thronged the cheap seats
whenever Bankhead was on stage were mostly working-class Londoners –
shop-girls, tailoresses, typists, domestic servants – who adored her and
revelled in her every move.71 Arnold Bennett described the ‘terrific, wild,
passionate, hysterical roar and shriek’ of the girls’ applause.72 Their hysteria
grew such that extra policemen were assigned on opening nights and West
End traffic redirected. Her London Gallery Girls, comments biographer Lee
Israel, ‘if not outright lesbian, were undeniably homoemotional and strongly
so in their vociferous reactions to Tallulah. But there was an innocence about
these girls in terms of what they didn’t know about themselves’.73
Dennis Archer in his exhaustive delvings into the capital’s underworld in
The Cloven Hoof: A Study of Contemporary London Vices (1932), without
suggesting the reason for it, notes the social shift effected since The Well
of Loneliness. In a chapter concerning ‘manifestations of Lesbianism as
they affect the life of London’, he makes the observation that ‘until quite
recently’:

the ‘aware’ type of lesbian seemed only to exist among two classes, the
well-to-do and sophisticated, and the highly educated and philosophical.
It is only of recent years that servant girls and shop assistants, fully
conscious of the peculiarities of their own natures, have begun openly
to discuss it, and to imitate in manner, and even occasionally in dress,
the more prosperous. But the cult is certainly beginning to spread among
them, and a number of such girls, under the impression, perhaps, that it
is chic and modern, at any rate to know about it, have grown intensely
curious in the matter.74

How to identify devotees of ‘the cult’ as it diffused downwards into the

lower classes, in an era when off-the-peg clothing was only just beginning
to become available, clearly presented a problem. Archer claims that there
were ‘only about five modistes in London’ that specialized in the type of
clothing that ‘Lesbians’ preferred: ‘One sees frequently among them the
tailored coat and skirt, high collar, and man’s tie … very often a man’s wristlet
watch … and a signet ring.’ However, bespoke tailoring was expensive:

costing as much as twenty-two guineas for a coat and skirt, and three
guineas for a shirt. The result is that the few conscious Lesbians among
the poorer classes rarely indulge in a specialized form of dress, since such
costumes are the one style of clothing most difficult to imitate successfully
at a low figure.75

The lesbian of the ‘well-to-do and sophisticated’ class was inevitably

presented as predatory.76 Archer suggests her malign influence operating
through networks that included certain ‘Beauty Salons existing for the
 SINK STREET 231

purpose of procuring fresh girls for older women’ and the salons of ‘certain
of the modistes’ which did business as rendezvous for clients to engage with
mannequins. Actual networks of lesbian sociability seem to have eluded
Archer. He suggests they might be spotted by the company they kept:

In teashops and cafes Lesbians may be seen with groups of urnings

[homosexual men], and also at their parties. There are very few exclusively
Lesbian rendezvous in London, only one tea-place being famous for it.77

Archer is most likely referring to the first-floor restaurant of the Lyons

Corner House in Coventry Street, off Leicester Square. It was known as the
Lily Pond, so named, recalls Ellen, a West End chorus girl, because:

all the ‘boys’ used to go there for afternoon tea on a Sunday, and the
‘girls’ started to get in – it was well known. It was a sight to come and see
in London, the ‘Lily Pond’… The girls were very butch.78

Archer evidently never visited the Coffee Ann ‘around the backstreets of
Tottenham Court Road … a very arty sort of place’ where lesbians felt
comfortable.79 Ellen was taken there by a girlfriend in the early 1930s:

It was most famous and from there I met loads of people. I went to a club
in Gerrard St, and it was 42 Gerrard St, and called the 42nd … And all the
girls used to gather there night after night. This is where I met Marion –
‘Billy’ – She lived in Croydon, and was a secretary in quite a well-known
furniture company.80

Ellen misremembers the number of Kate Meyrick’s 43. In Madness After

Midnight, the memoir of Kate Meyrick’s sometime trombonist Jack Glicco,
the Coffee Ann is described as:

without doubt the worst joint in London’s West End. If Sandy’s Bar was
bad, this was ten times worse. Here congregated a cosmopolitan and
degraded crowd. Every nationality in the world was represented and every
person was either thief, drug-taker, prostitute, pervert or blackmailer.81

Despite getting into a brawl with a Spanish pimp, Glicco goes back there,
conceding that ‘[t]here was one curious feature of the Coffee Ann – bad
though it was – and that was the amount of genuine artistic talent that
congregated there’.82
By the mid-1930s, Soho’s nightlife was no longer confined to nightclubs.
As Glicco explains, a post-night club crowd, including those night owls who
could not afford the price of admission to a club, were attracted by the
West End’s new coffee bars. Sandy’s Bar was at No. 25 Oxenden Street,
by the Prince of Wales Theatre in the Haymarket. Here in the small hours,
232 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Glicco tells us, ‘congregated Lesbians, queers, homosexuals, bi-sexuals’.83

He details a close call with a convincing transvestite and bears witness to
‘two lesbians fighting one minute and kissing and crying on each other’s
shoulders the next’.84 Sandy’s had seen better days. It was the West End’s
very first sandwich bar, set up in 1925 by the actor Kenelm Foss, inspired
by a trip to New York City where coffee and sandwich bars had become
popular during prohibition. Initially Sandy’s attracted fashionable bohemia
with its fast food and celebrity customers, the actresses and revue girls whose
autographed photos were pinned to the walls: ‘Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice
Lillie, Sybil Thorndike and Fay Compton’.85 The Weekly Dispatch described
the post-theatre crowd as follows: ‘Women in gorgeous lamé cloaks sit on
high stools and rest their feathered fans upon the bar counter, while their
escorts sit holding their silk hats, waiting for the sandwich of their choice.’86
While some ladies were accompanied by escorts in silk hats, not all were. In a
further touch of modernity, a note inside the menu assured female customers
that ‘Ladies may enter alone with the utmost assurance of courtesy and
consideration in every way and from all who may be present’.87 A cartoon,
which was captioned ‘Two Ducks, One Honey – and a Large Seasonable –
Waiting’, shows four unaccompanied women waiting at the bar, their orders
being a play on their physical ‘types’ (see Figure 14.1).88 There is the familiar
blowzy, be-feathered Cockney tart, and three ‘modern girls’, one of whom,
‘the Honey’, is clearly Sapphic.

FIGURE 14.1 Sandy’s Bar.

 SINK STREET 233

Sandy’s employed bohemian types, among them the future historical

novelist Marguerite Steen, then eking a rackety existence between backstage
theatre jobs and taking Greek dance classes with Margaret Morris: ‘ “You
know such queer people,” said my aunt Williama … I could have retorted
that all her friends were equally “queer” to me. They were all huntin’ and
fishin’ and shootin’.’89 Her family’s disapproval was couched in the terms
that, in the early 1920s clearly spelled out what they disapproved of: ‘ “I
don’t like my girl being mixed up in unhealthy friendships. With – with –”
she groped for the word – “depravity. And you know dam’ well what I
mean”.’90
Police accounts corroborate a widening in the location of a lesbian
presence from the wealthy nightclub scene to coffee bars and all-night
cafés: ‘I had not been at West End Central Police Station long’, writes WPC
Condor, ‘before I had pointed out to me certain notorious lesbians who
were in the habit of frequenting snack-bars in the hope of finding a “pick-
up” ’.91 Maxies Café in Gerrard Street was remembered by Zoe Progl as
‘the rendezvous of every type of villain and thug, including ponces, pimps,
prostitutes, drug addicts, lesbians and homosexuals’.92
It is in Gerrard Street that we find the earliest mention of what seems to
have been a predominantly lesbian nightclub. Smokey Joe’s was a basement
members’ club or ‘bottle club’, ‘a very bad place indeed’, according to
Glicco.93 It crops up in a number of memoirs of the period. Violet Powell
(née Pakenham), one of Waugh’s circle, gives us a brief glimpse: ‘Descending
the spiral of pleasure by the way of the Bag ‘O Nails … the bottom might be
said to have been reached at a club in Gerrard Street called Smokey Joe’s.’94
At Smokey Joe’s there were drag acts, a blues pianist played all night and
the lavatories were unspeakable: ‘Vice can seldom have worn a dirtier face
than it did in this squalid cellar where ladies in check coats and skirts did
not hesitate to dance aggressively together’.95 Pakenham was then a student
at the London School of Economics. She may have been acquainted with
a young man named Gerwyn Elidor Lewis, also a student at the LSE, who
records that ‘Smoky Joe’ [sic] was his favourite nightspot. Although dubbed
the Club King by his fellow students (out on the town two nights a week!),
Lewis was in fact a rather naive young man. He particularly liked Smokey
Joe’s because the place was always full of women though the reason did not
dawn on him for quite some months: ‘I discovered why it was always full of
girls – it was a lesbian club!’96
Despite regular police raids, Smokey Joe’s survived into the mid-1930s.
Jan Gabrial, an American actress newly arrived in London (who would later
marry the writer Malcolm Lowry), describes going out one evening with the
artist’s model, Betty May, and poet Edgell Rickword, to the Fitzroy Tavern
in Charlotte Street and finally, ‘Betty insisting, to Smokey Joe’s, a speakeasy-
cum-lesbian pub’.97 Less fortunate was the Oriental-styled Caravan Club
in nearby Endell Street. It advertised itself as ‘London’s Greatest Bohemian
Rendezvous said to be the most unconventional spot in town.’ In this ‘sink
234 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

of iniquity’, a police raid discovered ‘men dancing with men and women
with women’ and arrested them.98 The club was shut down.
The moral hypocrisy of the popular press discovering ‘sinks of iniquity’
at every turn is part of the cultural malaise indicted in Brideshead Revisited.
But despite Waugh’s gloom, some of the indignities encompassed in his albeit
ambiguous notion of Sink Street disappeared with the Second World War.
Gerrard Street’s club scene was enlivened by a boom in new jazz styles,
the area’s racial mix celebrated in the bebop song ‘Gerrard Street’ by the
Trinidadian saxophonist, Al ‘King’ Timothy. Among the crazy and comical
uproar of the dance club is the sight of ‘an old Chinaman upon the floor’.99
Gerrard Street’s cheap rents had encouraged the Chinese to open restaurants
serving the area’s late-night clientele and a colourful Chinatown had begun to
develop. A more forgiving age saw the gradual transition of a serendipitously
named club, Gateways, in Chelsea’s Kings Road, from a bohemian arts
venue into its establishment as a women-only nightclub. Not least of the
achievements of the ‘modern girl’ was that if she wanted to meet other girls
she no longer had to seek them out at ‘the gateways to the underworld’.

Notes
1 See Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 169.
2 Florence Tamagne, History of Homosexuality in Europe, Berlin, London,
Paris, 1919–1939, Vol. I (New York: Algora, 2004), pp. 55, 57, 69.
3 For an account of The Cave of the Golden Calf, see Lisa Tickner, Modern Life
and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
4 Charles Sheridan Jones, London in War-Time (London: Grafton, 1917), p. 5.
5 Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (London: Penguin Books, 2000 [1934]),
p. 73; Brideshead Revisited (London: Penguin, 1983 [1945]), p. 110.
6 Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p. 73.
7 Ibid; see appendix, p. 253.
8 Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 110.
9 The Black Mile was a name given to Soho by the police and thriller writers.
10 Waugh, A Handful of Dust, p. 73.
11 For an account of this, see Kohn, Dope Girls (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1922), chapter 8, and Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual
Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2013), chapter 2.
12 Cited in Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of
Post-War Britain, 1945–7 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007),
p. 110.
 SINK STREET 235

13 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to

1918 (London: The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1964), p. 216.
14 Douglas Goldring, Odd Man Out: The Autobiography of a ‘Propaganda’
Novelist (London: Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1935), p. 267.
15 Cited in Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The
Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
p. 81.
16 Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen-Twenties: A General Survey and Some
Personal Memories (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945), p. 147.
17 Virginia Woolf, The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia
Wool, Vol. II (London: The Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 554.
18 Belinda Humphrey, Recollections of the Powys Brothers: Llewelyn, Theodore,
and John Cowper (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1980), p. 81.
19 Lesley Hall, ‘ “Disinterested Enthusiasm for Sexual Misconduct”: The British
Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, 1913–47’, Journal of Contemporary
History 30.4 (October 1995), pp. 665–86.
20 Cited in Joy Grant, Stella Benson: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1987),
p. 238.
21 Laura Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems (London:
Balliere, Tindell & Cox, 1935).
22 Sherrie A. Innes, The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation
of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 18.
23 Ibid., p. 19.
24 Goldring, The Nineteen-Twenties, p. 138.
25 John Houseman, Front and Center (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979),
p. 229.
26 Goldring, The Nineteen-Twenties, p. 146.
27 Cited in Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 221.
28 Virginia Woolf’s concern is discussed in Sean Latham, ‘Am I A Snob?’:
Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 65.
29 Alec Waugh, ‘The Modern Girl’, 1927, cited in John Howard Wilson, Evelyn
Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1924–1966 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2001), p. 40.
30 Jeffrey Meyer, Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002), p. 138.
31 Woolf is cited in Winston James, ‘A Race Outcast from an Outcast Class:
Claude McKay’s Experience and Analysis of Britain’, in Bill Schwarz (ed.),
West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003), p. 79. The description of Gerrard Street is from Goldring, The
Nineteen-Twenties, p. 151.
236 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

32 Goldring, Odd Man Out, p. 267.

33 Goldring, The Nineteen-Twenties, p. 145.
34 Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, p. 22. On one occasion an evening at the 1917 was
followed by the 50–50. Another evening he records taking in the ‘ “43” before
the “50–50” ’.
35 Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), p. 138.
36 In Charlotte Street, then later in Chenies Mews, Bloomsbury. See Rohan
McWilliam, ‘Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth
Century’, Women’s History Review 23.2 (2014), pp. 171–87.
37 Elsa Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself (New York: St Martins, 1983), p. 19.
Maud Allen inspired legions of adoring schoolgirl fans.
38 Grace Ledbetter, Review of Fiona Macintosh, The Ancient Dancer in
the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012). http://cj.camws.org/sites/default/files/
reviews/2014.12.11%20Ledbetter%20on%20Macintosh.pdf (accessed
12 June 2015). In 1918, Maud Allan had brought libel proceedings against the
Independent MP, Noel Pemberton Billing, for his accusation that she was at
the centre of a Cult of the Clitoris, ‘the filthy words’ explained by her counsel
in ‘less gross language as lesbianism’. See Bland, Modern Women on Trial,
chapter 1.
39 Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography (London:
Blackie, 1974), p. 97; and Margaret Morris, Life in Movement (London: Peter
Owen, 1969), p. 25.
40 Morris, My Life in Movement, p. 25.
41 Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Co,
1914), p. 895.
42 Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar
Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 177.
43 Radclyffe Hall, A Saturday Life (London: Virago, 1927), p. 37.
44 Ibid., p. 23.
45 Compton Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women (New York: Macy-Masius,
1928), p. 39.
46 Goldring, The Nineteen-Twenties, p. 147.
47 Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain,
p. 177.
48 Ibid., p. 176.
49 Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (New York: The Overlook
Press, 1997), p. 187.
50 Viva King, The Weeping and the Laughter (London: Macdonald and Jane’s,
1976), p. 75.
 SINK STREET 237

51 Huxley’s play was called ‘Happy Families’, inspired by Russian symbolist

theatre and published in Limbo (1919). See Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley:
An English Intellectual (London: Abacus, 2002), p. 145.
52 Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (London: Random House, 2008), p. 192.
53 Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, p. 167.
54 Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women, p. 41.
55 Cline, Radclyffe Hall, p. 153.
56 Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without
Men After the First World War (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 204.
57 Nerina Shute, Passionate Friendships: Memoirs and Confessions of a Rebel
(London: Robert Hale, 1992), pp. 38, 46.
58 Nerina Shute, Another Man’s Poison (London: Grant Richards, 1931), p. 24.
59 Nerina Shute, We Mixed Our Drinks: The Story of a Generation (London:
Jarrolds Ltd, 1945), p. 26.
60 Cited in Alison Oram, ‘ “A Sudden Orgy of Decadence”: Writing about Sex
between Women in the Interwar Popular Press’, in L. Doan and J. Garrity
(eds), Sapphic Modernities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 165–
80, 165.
61 Dennis Archer, The Cloven Hoof: A Study of Contemporary London Vices
(London: Taylor Croft, 1932), p. 83.
62 ‘A Book That Must Be Suppressed’, Sunday Express, 9 August 1928, p. 10.
63 Beresford Egan, The Sink of Solitude: Being a Series of Satirical Drawings
Occasioned By Some Recent Events (London: Hermes Press, 1928).
64 Ibid., preface.
65 Shute, Passionate Friendships, p. 30.
66 Shute, We Mixed Our Drinks, p. 23.
67 Shute, Passionate Friendships, p. 25.
68 Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1971), p. 105.
69 Shute, We Mixed Our Drinks, p. 23.
70 Ada Chesterton, Women of the London Underworld (London: Stanley
Paul, 1928).
71 Lee Israel, Miss Tallulah Bankhead (London and New York: W.H. Allen,
1972), p. 305.
72 Cited in Robert Gottlieb, Lives and Letters (London: Macmillan, 2011), p. 6.
73 Israel, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, p. 305.
74 Archer, The Cloven Hoof, p. 81.
75 Ibid.
238 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

76 This had been a commonplace of medical discourses on lesbianism since the

nineteenth century.
77 Archer, The Cloven Hoof, p. 84.
78 Suzanne Neild and Rosalind Pearson, Women Like Us (London: The Women’s
Press, 1992), p. 47.
79 Ibid., p. 59.
80 Ibid., p. 45.
81 Jack Glicco, Madness After Midnight (London: Elek Books, 1956), p. 120.
82 Ibid., p. 122.
83 Ibid., p. 115.
84 Ibid., p. 116.
85 Fanny Burney, Stage, Screen and Sandwiches: The Remarkable Life of Kenelm
Foss (London: Athena Press, 2007), pp. ix–x.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Unattributed newspaper clipping, 1925. Every possible effort has been made
to source the copyright holder and we would be happy to acknowledge them
in future editions should they get in touch.
89 Marguerite Steen, Looking Glass: An Autobiography (London: Longmans,
1966), pp. 79–80.
90 Ibid., p. 40.
91 Stella Condor, Woman on the Beat: The True Story of a Policewoman
(London: Robert Hale, 1960), p. 149.
92 Zoe Progl, Woman of the Underworld (London: Arthur Baker, 1964),
pp. 23–24.
93 Glicco, Madness After Midnight, p. 82.
94 Violet Powell, Within the Family Circle: An Autobiography (London:
Heinemann, 1976), p. 162.
95 Ibid.
96 G.E. Lewis, Out East: In the Malay Peninsula (Petaling Jaya: Penerbit Fajar
Bakti Sdn. Bhd., 1991), p. 22.
97 Jan Gabrial, Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 36.
98 Cited in Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, p. 110.
99 Lyrics to ‘Gerrard Street’, London Is the Place for Me, Vol. 2. http://www.
allmusic.com/album/london-is-the-place-for-me-vol-2-mw0000643989
(accessed 12 June 2015).
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Chasing Community: From Old

Compton Street to the Online
World of Grindr
Marco Venturi

The word ‘community’ is one of the most controversial in use today.

Academics of various disciplines have proposed several definitions, with
differences often arising from within the same branch of knowledge. Over the
last few decades, the multiplicity of perspectives seems to have undermined
the concept of community itself. Even in everyday life, the term ‘community’
is used indiscriminately to define such a broad variety of different things,
from specific interests to needs and beliefs, that its usefulness as a descriptive
term is now being questioned.
A first discussion around the term ‘community’ arose across the end of
the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries following the
advent of mass society and urbanization. The progression from personal
face-to-face interactions of small groups of people in rural areas to those
defined by more impersonal relations in urban spaces was seen as a
symptom of human alienation and a push towards the end of community.
Even though small urban groups, such as neighbourhoods, were initially
seen as the only spaces where a sort of communal feeling may have been
reproduced within the city, by the 1960s, due to processes of gentrification
and urban development, this view started to be challenged, too. With the
advent of deindustrialization and globalization in the 1980s, even urban
neighbourhoods could not provide a space for community anymore. Space
was reorganized, urban communities were displaced, people became mobile
and cities became global.
240 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Accordingly, Benedict Anderson has argued that ‘all communities larger

than primordial villages of face to face contact (and perhaps even these)
are imagined’.1 In fact, thanks to the advent of modern technology, people
no longer needed to know each other or to share the same space to form
a community. Today, it is possible to imagine a plurality of communities,
often interconnected, whose members can enter and leave as they like
because boundaries have become more malleable and porous. Moreover,
these communities are not based on previous hierarchical structures, such
as family, nor do they oblige members to follow strict rules of behaviour.
They are composed by the self-identification of different individuals who
share a commonality such as similar tastes, lifestyles or needs. Therefore,
the sense of belonging to these communities will only be a consequence
of processes of identification, not the base on which identity is formed.2
More specifically, as a result of capitalism, access into community can
now be purchased, transforming members into consumers and consumers
into members. However, given that identity and community are now often
based on consumption, it is clear that they also become exclusive, as not
every individual will have the possibilities, or the will, to purchase access
into them.
In the last few years, virtual communities have become central to the
discussion. They are understood as more fluid and temporary forms of
social relations which are redefining space and identity. Virtual communities
not only empower people but, as Gerald Delanty has noticed, are also
more democratic in the formation of plural identities.3 People can access
these communities regardless of their socio-economic background and can
build new identities which they would not be able to create in real life.
Interestingly, Manuel Castells has argued that virtual communities could
best be defined as social networks more than communities since it is the lack
of community in the first place that makes them attractive.4
As the previous examples show, community is far from being a weak
concept. Even though the definition has constantly been challenged, active
discussion around it demonstrates that community is still central for our
understanding of the world. What is important to notice is that today, more
than ever before, the idea of community has gained new multiple meanings
and that its understanding will always depend on the context in which the
term is used. In this chapter, I reconsider the role that the district of Soho
plays in the community-making process for gay men in London and how
the area interacts with the new virtual space of Grindr. To do so, I analyse
both the history of the district as well as the main characteristics that have
turned Grindr into such a major cultural and social phenomenon. If we
accept the idea of urban spaces as unable to (re-)create community, what
is the contemporary function of Soho? Likewise, if virtual communities
are the expression of a lack of community in the first place, what are the
consequences for those gay men who use Grindr as a means of interaction
with other gay men? Most importantly, should Soho and Grindr really be
 CHASING COMMUNITY 241

considered as two different realities or should they be analysed as two sides

of the same coin? The understanding of their similarities, differences and
interrelations will, I hope, contribute to the discussion of how community is
formed and what particular meanings it gains for gay men in London.
Throughout the chapter, I use both the term ‘queer’ and the term ‘gay’ to
refer to homosexual men. However, these terms are not used as synonyms.
The first one is employed in relation to a specific time frame (namely the
late 1980s and early 1990s) when a new sexual identity was emerging as
a reaction to the inability of both society and gay rights groups to respond
to the AIDS crisis. In that context, ‘queer’ was a politically charged term
which differs very much from its current definition as an umbrella term that
includes any self-identified non-normative expression of sexual identity (be
it gay, lesbian, bi, trans or straight). Consequently, I favour ‘gay’ as a general
term that is currently more widespread and less tied to a specific historical
or political period. Although queer men and women initially constituted
a key presence and had an active role in the definition of Soho as a gay
district, as I will explain, the identity that was promoted in Soho had less
to do with politics than it had with consumption. Contemporary Soho may
have been born queer, but it definitely developed as gay.

(Un)Changing Soho
As Jonathan Fryer notes, Soho is often identified as ‘the tight little grid
of streets north and south of Old Compton Street’.5 This part represents
both its heart and its oldest area. Here, on what were once hunting fields of
Crown property, the first households were built to accommodate the large
movement of people from the City of London towards the surrounding
unpopulated fields following the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire
of 1666. Notwithstanding, Daniel Farson argues that there is no clear
understanding of where its boundaries are situated.6 Soho could be enclosed
within Piccadilly, Oxford, St Giles and Cambridge Circuses and delimited by
Oxford Street to the north, Regent Street to the west, Charing Cross Road
to the east, and Coventry Street and Leicester Square to the south – although
Shaftesbury Avenue is often mistakenly envisioned as its modern south
border. These Georgian and Victorian streets were built following a process
of modernization that redesigned the map of London in the nineteenth
century in order to facilitate the capital’s traffic flow. In so doing, Soho
assumed, in Judith Summers’s phrasing, the form of a ‘small island land-
locked in London’s West End’.7 This characteristic contributed to preserving
its village-like atmosphere throughout the years.8 Not even the development
of a public transport system affected the area. No buses run through Soho,
apart from along Shaftesbury Avenue, and the underground stations of
Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester
Square are situated in correspondence with the four imagined corners of the
242 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

district and also serve other important areas such as Marylebone, Fitzrovia,
Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, St James and Mayfair.
Even though it was initially conceived for the aristocracy, Soho soon
became home to many foreign refugees: from the Greeks escaping the
Turks at the end of the 1670s to the French Huguenots who were in turn
escaping the religious discrimination of Louis XIV; from the Irish escaping
the Potato Famine between 1845 and 1852, to the Italian refugees of the
1860s and the Polish and Russian Jews escaping anti-Semitism in the 1880s
and 1890s. All these people had one thing in common: they were escaping
from somewhere. As Summers notes, ‘persecution comes in many shapes and
forms, and in whatever incarnation it appears – political, religious, social or
sexual – Soho has always seemed to provide the persecuted with shelter and
with the freedom to be themselves’.9 Nevertheless, the foreign character of
the district strengthened the image of Soho as a slum on a more general
level. The district soon became synonymous with poverty and its potential
consequences such as prostitution, gambling and crime.
The sleazy and indulgent character of the district contributed to the
development of a lively nightlife during the interwar years and transformed the
area into the place to be. In fact, between the late 1950s and the early 1960s,
many different kinds of revolution took place in Soho. The countercultural
youth revolution was born in the district’s streets, in its shop windows and,
most of all, in its new coffee bars and clubs. Jazz and rock ‘n’ roll went
hand in hand with a change in fashion and clothing. The intervention of the
newly formed Soho Society, in the 1970s, also forced Westminster Council
to restrict the number of sex establishments – more than two hundred – that
had appeared at every corner throughout the years. As Frank Mort suggests,
film, television and publishing industries, together with local businesses,
rapidly started to advertise the foreign nature of Soho as the more attractive
and lucrative theme of cosmopolitanism.10 Soho had gradually been cleaned
up and its frontiers had increasingly been opened to a wider crowd.
In this period, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the
1980s, the new male-oriented consumeristic culture invaded the area and
transformed it into something of an open-air mall where the ‘yuppy’ (the
young successful business man) could purchase style, goods and, to some
extent, identity.11 Thom O’Dwyer pointed out that men’s fashion was ‘coming
out of the closets’.12 Indeed, the commercialization of masculine identities
in Soho represented a huge attraction for many homosexual men who were,
at the time, becoming visible both to each other and mainstream society.
Still, if style and clothes worked as representational tools, it was in the new
clubs and bars that the interaction was taking place. American-style clubs,
on the model of Studio One in Los Angeles or Studio 54 in New York, were
opened in and around Soho. The most famous were the Sundown Club in the
basement of the Astoria Theatre in Charing Cross Road, which opened in
1976 and offered three main nights (Bang! on Mondays and Saturdays, and
Propaganda on Thursdays), and Heaven, which was inaugurated in 1980
 CHASING COMMUNITY 243

under the Arches in Villier Street. Consequently, homosexual men started to

be seen as a profitable target by many other types of business in the area.
In just a few years, new bars appeared all over Soho and its surroundings,
including Bar Code, KuBar, Kudos, Village Soho and The Yard, along with
cafés and restaurants such as The Edge, Freedom and Balans, and shops
such as Boy Zone, Clone Zone and Paradiso.
Soho therefore functioned as a rendezvous, as a place where gay identities
were shaped and displayed outside in the streets as well as inside in its bars.
At the same time, the pliability of the district let the performance of these
identities shape its own structure and image. Nikki Usher and Eleanor
Morrison have suggested that, similar to the areas with a high concentration
of immigrants, those with a large presence of gay people were born out of
the need to create a safe environment on the basis of a shared identity. These
neighbourhoods make gay men visible ‘through the claiming of spaces such
as storefronts, sidewalks, and public parks as gay, as well as through the
performance of gay or queer identity in these places’.13 Soho represented
the first urban district in London where such a high concentration of gay
activities arose in the public eye.
Beyond doubt, in contrast to previous gay venues characterized by their
anonymity and their underground activity, those that appeared in Soho
were defined by a more explicit and ‘in your face’ attitude. Clean and bright
interiors were employed in the design of the new venues as a marketing
strategy and as a visual response to the AIDS crisis. Many bars featured
large windows at street level which allowed customers to see outside as
well as pedestrians to see inside.14 After decades of forced invisibility,
homosexuals were finally becoming visible. In February 1993, during the
Queer Valentine Carnival, two thousand gay men and lesbians marched
through Soho’s streets to reclaim the area as theirs. Soho was now gay;
as gay as it would ever be. Most importantly, it seemed that gay men had
finally found a home.
Gay men from all over Britain and, more recently, from all over Europe and
the rest of the world have found shelter and recognition in this area, building
up an intense network of connections. Gradually, even for those who were
not regular visitors or who had never visited the area, it did not take long to
associate the name of the district with ideas and stereotypes of homosexuality
and ‘camp’. Be that as it may, the development of gay identities and community
based on the consumption of a particular lifestyle might be viewed as ‘double-
edged’: it is true that gay men managed to give new meanings to the city and
its spaces, but this process also distanced many people from the initial ideals
of political activism and change that had shaped the community itself.15 Chris
Woods sees consumerism as something ‘sold as a tool of empowerment’ but it
could also be seen to represent a way of taking advantage of

the need of most homosexuals for a sense of community by packaging

and then selling to gay men and lesbians real or imagined aspects of their
244 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

identity or lifestyle. The commodification of homosexuality has less to

do with the politics of liberation or community than with the cynical
creation and maintenance of a gullible niche market.16

In addition, it is important to keep in mind that trends and fashions change

with time and that, most of all, even though gay men are often seen as a
uniform group of wealthy consumers, not everyone can, or wants to, afford
the same lifestyle. Consequently, as Alan Sinfield emphasized in 1998, even
though ‘Old Compton Street has given London its gay village … it has only
done so for a short eight years’.17 When, in May 1999, three people were
killed and at least 70 were wounded in the bombing of the Admiral Duncan
pub on Old Compton Street, it became clear that Soho was not the gay
haven that many had initially proclaimed.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Soho still attracted a large
number of gay visitors and its fame as a gay district became consolidated in
many people’s imaginations on both a national and an international level,
helping to promote the image of London as a cosmopolitan city. However, it
could be said that Soho as a gay area has been the victim of its own success.
New concepts of gay identity, and community at large, are undermining
the very spirit and image of Soho, to the point that its function and future
as a magnet for gay men is at risk. Even Clayton Littlewood, one of the
most honest observers of contemporary Soho, seems often divided on his
position towards the district and its people: ‘this place pulls me backwards
and forwards. One minute, it’s the greatest love of my life, and the next,
a love affair that’s coated in sadness wherever I turn’.18 On the one hand,
the opening of Soho’s services and infrastructures to a more heterosexual
clientele, its ‘straightening’, has changed the composition and the target of
its devotees. Many heterosexuals are, in fact, attracted to gay spaces not so
much as spaces of sexual experimentation but as spaces of consumption.
Here, straight men and women can consume the (safe) exotic ‘other’ and feel
cosmopolitan.19 Unquestionably, heterosexual tourism, often in the form
of hen nights and stag parties, has become a common presence in Soho.
On the other hand, the growing visibility and inclusion of homosexuals into
mainstream society and politics, the so-called gay sprawl, has reduced, in
the last few years, the need for a specifically gay place and, to some extent,
the need for a distinctive sexual identity.20 Consequently, many gay men are
now trying to get away from Soho and the stereotypes of camp and gayness
which it may represent in British culture, with obvious repercussions on the
district, its businesses and its image.

Moving spaces
At the present moment, no district or urban area in London can represent
the idea of gay community for gay men the same way Soho used to. In fact,
 CHASING COMMUNITY 245

despite the presence of gay bars and clubs in other districts of London, such
as Vauxhall, Clapham or Shoreditch, none of these areas has so far played
a leading role in the production and re-production of a concept of cohesion
for the community itself. Nonetheless, a new place seems to have appeared,
only it is not in Soho, or Vauxhall, or Clapham, or Shoreditch, and yet it is
present in all these places at once: the Internet. Online media are having a
huge impact on our lives. Throughout the day, we spend a large amount of
time connected to the Internet, which has clearly radically changed the way
we interact. However, this is no news to gay men. Websites like Gaydar or
Gayromeo, to name just two, have been active for more than ten years and
many gay men will admit to having or having had an active profile online at
some point in their lives. Indeed, as Larry Gross emphasizes, homosexuals
were among the first to realize the potential of the new medium, becoming
both the main consumers and the main producers.21 Living in a world where
no one teaches you how to be gay and where sexual identities always need
to be negotiated within a heteronormative ‘reality’, the Internet has become
the place where gay men can not only learn what it means to be gay but also,
and most importantly, where they can build their own space, with their own
meanings, and connect with people in a similar situation. Coming out videos,
chat rooms, virtual communities, porn movies, networking: they are all
aspects of a fervent activity that is reshaping the idea of homosexuality itself.
The anonymity of the Internet and the protection offered by the mediation
of the screen can help people who are struggling with their sexuality to
explore and experience gay connections in a less invasive way. Many gay
men, for example, find it easier to come out online before doing so in ‘real
life’. Similarly, gay men who are already aware of their identity can try to
negotiate new aspects of their sexuality without feeling the pressure to fit
a precise stereotype. In other words, the Internet seems to have freed many
gay men from the constrictions of the physical world and to have expanded
their possibilities for connection.
In particular, what really changed the situation was the Apple Revolution.
Following the globalization of the smartphone industry and its exponential
growth in numbers, functions and availability, the way we conceive notions
of space and our connections to space have completely changed. The Internet
has become something that does not imply a computer and a desk – that is,
a specific location in space – but something which can be accessed from a
smartphone at any time that a telephone or a wifi connection is detectable,
with no limit of mobility. Furthermore, the localization of devices by specific
programs (GPS) makes it easy not only to access the virtual space but also
to determine one’s own position in both this space and the physical world.
We move in the city, we walk down the streets, we enter different buildings,
we use different modes of transport, and so does the Internet, or at least
so does our virtual being. Apps are now giving new meanings to spatiality
and how we interact with each other. From the point of view of the gay
community, not only do they offer a new means of creating individual
246 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

sexual identities online but they also offer an alternative space for cruising
and community-making.
Consequently, mobile applications such as Grindr have been hugely
successful. The Grindr app was launched by Joel Simkhai on 25 March 2009
for the Apple iPhone 3G – which for the first time included GPS programs –
but it was soon extended to BlackBerries and Androids. Grindr rapidly
became the world’s biggest mobile network, with more than five million
men in 192 countries.22 In 2011, London topped the list of the cities of users
with almost 400,000 users, and numbers have increased exponentially since
then. The simple mention of it by Stephen Fry on BBC’s Top Gear (Series 13,
Episode 2, 2009) caused a massive reaction with about 10,000 downloads
on the same night.23 Over a million people worldwide use Grindr on a daily
basis, sending more than seven million messages and two million pictures.
They do so for an average of one-and-a-half hours every day and it is
estimated that almost 200,000 users are logged on at any given moment.24
The success of Grindr may also be due to its simple and appealing design.
The app shows small square thumbnail images of hundreds of gay men
available in the surrounding areas, often within walking distance, ordered
by proximity and without the limit of the physical boundaries that a bar or
a club would imply. As Sharif Mowlabocus highlights,

in what is perhaps the most direct digital interaction of the term

‘Gaydar’ – the original use of the term as opposed to the website – these
applications ‘scan’ the local area and allow the user to not only see who
else nearby is subscribed to the service, but also provide the means for
instant communication.25

Grindr is not officially described as a space devoted to sexual pursuit and

explicit reference to any sexual content (both texts and images) is strictly
prohibited in the public area. Its creators describe it as a way to find ‘a new
date, buddy, or friend’ but they also highlight another implicit goal:

0 feet away: Our mission for you. Grindr’s different because it’s
uncomplicated and meant to help you meet guys while you’re on the go.
It’s not your average dating site – you know, the ones that make you sit
in front of a faraway computer filling out complex, detailed profiles and
answering invasive psychological questions. We’d rather you were zero
feet away. With Grindr, ‘0 Feet Away’ isn’t just a cute slogan we print
on our T-shirts. It’s a state of mind, a way of life – a new kind of dating
experience. Turning Grindr off and being there in-person [sic] with that
guy you were chatting with is the final goal of using the app. Being 0 feet
away is our mission for you.26

In other words, breaking with past online experiences that required more
effort and time, Grindr markets itself as a quick and easy way to find other
 CHASING COMMUNITY 247

gay men. It can be accessed at any time, from any location, even if someone is
on the move. In theory, Grindr could represent a new and safer way to cruise
the world, a space where only members are allowed, one that is protected
from the heterosexual/mainstream judgement and presence, where the whole
process of trying to understand if someone is gay or not is eliminated by the
fact that, supposedly, everybody using the application is gay or is looking for
a connection with another man. Most importantly, it incentivizes physical
encounters more than deep and meaningful conversations online. The final
goal, as expressed by its creators, is that of finding yourself in front of the
person you were chatting with as quickly as possible.
However, the immediacy and facility of this encounter implies that, on
one level, the effort put into getting to know each other beforehand will
be pretty low and, on the other, it also entails that as quickly and easily as
the first date, a second one can be found. The whole communal experience
that could be lived in Soho, such as going out for a drink or a meal and
socializing with the people around you, no matter what your intentions,
is then replaced by the centrality of the cruising and the immediacy of the
meeting. Consequently, it does not take long to understand that cruising
and sexual encounters are actually the real driving force of this application.
Whereas meeting someone demands not only interest but a considerable
amount of time (and often money), users of the app can find a possible
match by only scrolling down the screen and, in this way, reducing both the
effort and the money invested while increasing the possible choice. In this
sense, the ‘urgency’ of Grindr ‘works to bring down the investment’ while
also representing ‘the epitome of instant gratification’.27
It becomes clear, then, that on Grindr a great stress is placed on the visual,
more than the textual. The image not only reflects the idea of one’s own
opinion of self and the way one wants to represent oneself, but it also allows
an authentication from other users. In effect, as Mowlabocus notes, digital
images ‘appear as a stabilizing force for identity formation and cultural
legibility, offering a structuring device for the proliferation of specific ideas as
to what it is to be a gay man in contemporary Western culture’.28 The pictures
uploaded on Grindr and similar applications become a currency used in what
Mowlabocus defines as ‘the Gaydar economy’.29 Users are required to find the
best way to promote their profile and to get the attention of others: ‘the profile
is as much a mechanism for self-identification as it is one of self-promotion’.30
This visual emphasis is combined with a brief but very clear textual message.
Unlike previous websites, the profile that can be created on the app is very
basic: a username, a headline, information such as height and age, and a very
short description. In just a few words, users often manage not only to describe
themselves but also what, or who, they are looking for on Grindr. The textual,
as well as the visual, functions to create new standards and requirements
which must be fulfilled in order to promote one’s own profile successfully.
However, it is astonishing how many users express their racial, age, body
and sexual preferences. Far from being politically correct, Grindr texts often
248 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

display stipulations such as ‘white men only’, ‘no Asians’, ‘no fatties’, ‘not
into older guys’, ‘no twinks’, ‘only for tops’ and ‘Brits only’. Moreover, users
very often stress and praise a straight-acting identity. Requests like ‘straight-
acting lads only’, ‘be masculine’, ‘only real men’, ‘no camp’ or ‘act straight’
appear on many profiles. It is interesting to notice how, on an app for gay men,
the word ‘straight’ is used much more frequently than the word ‘gay’ itself.
Camp and ‘effeminacy’, as well as a strong inclusive pride in being ‘queer’
and being ‘here’, have been replaced by a new idea of male homosexuality
that differentiates itself from heterosexuality only by the nature of the
sexual act. If, on the one hand, this desire of absolute detachment from the
gay community and its culture can be seen as an example of integration by
the mainstream society of a sexual minority, on the other, it might assume a
questioning and a denial of one’s own sexual identity in order to be accepted.
What the straight-acting homosexual denies, then, both online and offline,
is not his own sexuality, as it might have been in the past, but his own
sexual identity and the chance of being identified with a gay community that
promotes different expressions of homosexuality.
Of great significance, in this sense, is the use that most users make of the
‘block’ button in order to delete other users’ profiles from their view and deny
these same users the chance to contact them again. Through this process,
they can create their own community based on the exclusion of the other.
In Jaime Woo’s opinion, ‘the beauty of Grindr is that it decoupled hooking
up from the specific places, away from the bars, bathhouses, parks, and
washrooms’.31 Yet, whereas no client in a Soho bar can decide who should be
allowed in the premises, or what age, ethnic or other specific group he wants
to be surrounded by, on Grindr users can block and eliminate other people to
their liking. Sexual racism, as a form of sexual discrimination based on racial
connotations, is enacted and disguised as personal preferences legitimated
by the private nature of the application itself.32 The same mechanism is then
enacted for all other physical features such as age or body type, as well as
for the degree of perceived masculinity or the sexual preference of the users.
Consequently, the promoted image of the Internet as a new space for sexual
freedom and connection becomes in truth a very narrow one. Stereotypes,
commonplaces and power relations are recreated in the online world and
users not only carry with them their cultural baggage but they also impose
it over other users through the celebration of specific images and identities
as well as the exclusion of others. The promise of a new-found land seems,
once again, to have been breached.

Rethinking community
For most of its existence, Soho has represented many things to many people,
being considered, in Mort’s view, ‘as both a real and an imagined space,
where complex economic and social relationships intersected with the
 CHASING COMMUNITY 249

equally rich resources of urban fantasy’.33 Its permeable boundaries have

managed to preserve the area almost unchanged for hundreds of years while
allowing it to evolve and recreate itself according to the needs of different
communities. The understanding of its nature and the way it managed
to evolve throughout history is a necessary tool for comprehending the
contemporary situation. As previously explained, Soho as we know it is a
fairly recent invention. Its streets and bars have functioned as a place where
gay identities have been made and, at the same time, a place made by the
performance of these identities. In fact, ‘like Greenwich Village, Soho was
projected as part of the geographies of the imagination and as an intensely
compressed but mutable social environment’, becoming ‘a major site for
cultural and sexual experimentation throughout the twentieth century’.34
However, because homosexuality is now so widely accepted in British
society, it seems that those who still identify Soho as a safe space where
it is possible to express their sexual identity freely may also be excluding
themselves from a deeper experience available almost everywhere else in
the city. Soho, the place where gay men first became visible in London, is
now perceived by many as a ghetto. Its boundaries have become too rigid
for gay men, showing that gay spaces may be in decline or, at least, may
be changing their nature. It is possible today to find gay venues scattered
around London, sometimes miles away from one another. Physical
concentration of gay activities is not seen as a necessary feature in order
to guarantee safety and create community. Many gay men feel safe to
express their identity outside of these venues and, similarly, outside of gay
communities. Moreover, with the advent of the Internet, gay men seem to
have now moved online and to have colonized a whole new space. Yet,
even though online technologies may represent a new space for interaction
which overcomes the limits imposed by physical areas, Grindr shows that
this is not completely true. For instance, Mort talks of membership when
referring to the purchase of masculinities/identities in Soho.35 The same
idea can be applied to Grindr as gay men need to create and negotiate
their masculinity/identity online in order to play. Following the same line
of thought, Gross explains that ‘the Internet is not utopia’. In his opinion,
the Internet does offer a new world to inhabit but, similar to physical gay
spaces, online communities can also be both spaces of freedom and of
restraint. Given that most users will bring along the same preconceptions
that they have in real life, the Internet will automatically recreate the same
hierarchy and the same power relations.36
Still, considering online and offline spaces as something separate, or
seeing the first as ‘an escape from, or a response to’ the latter, would be
misleading because, as Mowlabocus argues, ‘these two concepts are not
discrete but pervade one another’ in a relationship of ‘dialogue’.37 Grindr
cannot be a substitute for the physical space. Even if connections are made
online, given the sexual aspect of Grindr, they are likely to take form in the
physical space, be it Soho or another place. For this reason, Woo argues that
250 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Grindr will not eliminate physical gay spaces. It only becomes a threat if we
take for granted the fact that gay men use Grindr as a substitute for Soho.
If, on the contrary, we acknowledge their interrelation and structure the
nature and needs of gay venues accordingly, then physical gay spaces will
continue to exist.38 However, as already mentioned, the discourse around
the disappearance of Soho as the gay district of London is not limited to the
offline/online dichotomy but also involves other factors which characterize
contemporary society. The inclusion of gay men into mainstream society,
combined with Soho’s natural need to reinvent itself, is already producing
a visible change in both the composition of the district and the attitudes
towards it. This is not to say that every gay bar will disappear from Soho.
As Italian and French restaurants can still be found in the district, as well as
retail shops and jazz clubs, so will gay spaces. Their function, nonetheless,
may become more touristic than communal, a reminder of what it used to
be more than an expression of what it actually is.

Conclusion
As the case of Soho and Grindr shows, defining community is a very
challenging task. To complicate the picture, the demise of those communities
based in specific spaces and their movement to the online world of the
Internet have meant that, today, community is ever-present while also being
harder to identify given that it is experienced in a more individualistic way.
In the specific case of gay men, if we understand the gay ‘community’ as
an exclusive term aimed at the definition of a precise number of members,
to which someone either belongs or not, then its use becomes completely
arbitrary. Soho has never represented the gay community as a whole, but
nor has, or will, Grindr, given that it often preserves the same stereotypes
and contradictions. Sure enough, everybody experiences community in a
different way and, even though at the beginning of the gay rights movement it
seemed possible to achieve a universal gay community into which everybody
would fit regardless of ethnicity, class, age, gender, sex, body type or sexual
identity, this has never really been achieved.
On the contrary, if we interpret the definition of community as an
inclusive, mobile term, we can see how both Soho and Grindr become spaces
of representation. One’s own idea of community is usually connected to the
degree of involvement in the community itself and, although it might not
be representative, this idea still represents a useful tool for the expression
of a more personal feeling of belonging. When identifying themselves with
the gay community, gay men express their need and will to feel part of a
group of people who share a particular experience. The duration, the terms,
and the degree of involvement in this experience will obviously depend on
their personal choices. In fact, it must be kept in mind that, because the gay
community is something someone gets to and not something someone comes
 CHASING COMMUNITY 251

from (as it may be with a religious or an ethnic community), belonging for

gay men is always optional and the result of an often long and difficult
path of identification. Today, the term ‘gay community’ should then be
understood in a postmodern sense: it is mobile (can move from one space
to the other), imagined (members do not need to know each other), open
(members can enter or leave at any time), plural (there is not just one gay
community) and placeless (or present in different spaces).
Still, this nature of the gay community, while expanding its potential, also
tends to transform it into a very private experience. It is true that nowadays
online applications such as Grindr are experiencing a huge success at the
expense of gay districts such as Soho, but the problem with online spaces is
that, in contrast to their physical counterparts, they are actually invisible to
those who are not members and basically impossible to come across unless
someone is specifically looking for them. Whereas in the past, being gay,
although not a choice, still implied a radical choice to be taken – whether to
live in or out of the closet – nowadays we are witnessing an historical period
where the inclusion of homosexuality into the current political and social
agenda, even reflecting a huge cultural shift, has transformed gay politics
into a much less radical movement. Equality implies inclusion, but so far the
inclusion has happened on what appears to be heteronormative conditions,
reflecting, with the new normal ‘straight-like’ gay identity being more
respectable than the previous self-identified gay identity, a deep confusion
of what it means to be gay and what actually makes the gay community.
The risk is that the idea of gay community and culture, which took centuries
to be developed and which still represents a very fragile concept, might in
the near future be erased and that gay men, in order to be accepted into
mainstream society, will sacrifice their culture and their visibility in districts
such as Soho and will adapt once again to being hidden in the closet – only
this time, a virtual one.

Notes
1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6.
2 Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 120–21.
3 Gerard Delanty, Community (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 182.
4 Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business,
and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 128.
5 Jonathan Fryer, Soho in the Fifties and Sixties (London: National Portrait
Gallery Publications, 1998), p. 5.
6 Daniel Farson, Soho in the Fifties (London: Michael Joseph, 1987), p. 4.
252 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

7 Judith Summers, Soho: A History of London’s Most Colourful Neighbourhood

(London: Bloomsbury, 1989), p. 1.
8 Richard Tames, Soho Past (London: Historical Publications Ltd, 1994), p. 9.
9 Summers, Soho: A History, p. 38.
10 Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 241.
11 Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in
Late Twentieth-Century Britain, 2nd edn. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009),
pp. 157–63.
12 Thom O’ Dwyer, ‘Liberated Man Power Arrives’, Men’s Wear
(23 August 1984), p. 8; quoted in Mort, Cultures of Consumption, p. 16.
13 Nikki Usher and Eleanor Morrison, ‘The Demise of the Gay Enclave’, in
Christopher Pullen and Margaret Cooper (eds), LGBT Identity and Online
New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 274.
14 Johan Andersson, ‘East End Localism and Urban Decay: Shoreditch’s
Re-Emerging Gay Scene’, The London Journal 34.1 (2009), pp. 55–71, 55.
15 Mort, Cultures of Consumption, p. 166.
16 Chris Woods, The State of the Queer Nation: A Critique of Gay and Lesbian
Politics in 1990s Britain (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 41.
17 Alan Sinfield, Gay and After: Gender, Culture and Consumption (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1998), p. 196.
18 Clayton Littlewood, Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho (Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press,
2008), p. 57.
19 See Jon Binnie and Beverley Skeggs, ‘Cosmopolitan Knowledge and the
Production and Consumption of Sexualized Space: Manchester’s Gay Village’,
in Jon Binnie et al. (eds), Cosmopolitan Urbanism (New York: Routledge,
2006), pp. 220–45.
20 Usher and Morrison, ‘The Demise of the Gay Enclave’, p. 276.
21 Larry Gross, ‘Forward’, in Kate O’ Riordan and David J. Phillips (eds), Queer
Online: Media, Technology, and Sexuality (New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
2007), p. ix.
22 See Grindr’s official webpage: http://grindr.com/learn-more (accessed
28 March 2014).
23 Laurence Watts, ‘Feature: The Grindr Story’, PinkNews, 22 February 2012.
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/02/22/feature-the-grindr-story/ (accessed
28 March 2014).
24 Amy Ashenden, ‘Study: Six Million Users Log onto Grindr an Average of
Eight Times a Day’, PinkNews, 27 March 2013. http://www.pinknews
.co.uk/2013/03/27/study-six-million-users-log-onto-grindr-an-average-of-
eight-times-a-day/ (accessed 28 March 2014).
25 Sharif Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment
in the Digital Age (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), p. 195.
 CHASING COMMUNITY 253

26 See Grindr’s official webpage: http://grindr.com/learn-more (accessed

28 March 2014).
27 Jamie Woo, Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect
(Canada: Jamie Woo, 2013), pp. 14, 22, 45.
28 Sharif Mowlabocus, ‘Look at Me!: Images, Validation, and Cultural Currency
on Gaydar’, in C. Pullen and M. Cooper (eds), LGBT Identity and Online
New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 201–14, 201.
29 Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture, pp. 104–5.
30 Ibid., p. 92.
31 Woo, Meet Grindr, p. 22.
32 See Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, ‘What? What? In the (Black) Butt’,
Apa Newsletters: Newsletter on Philosophy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and
Transgender Issues 11.1 (2011), p. 12.
33 Mort, Capital Affairs, p. 202.
34 Ibid.
35 Mort, Cultures of Consumption, p. 165.
36 Gross, ‘Forward’, p. x.
37 Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture, pp. 2, 21.
38 Woo, Meet Grindr, p. 26.
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Being ‘There’: Contemporary

London, Facebook and Queer
Historical Feeling
Sam McBean

At the Lambeth Women’s Project in May 2012, Joan Nestle was in

conversation with Christa Holka. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Nestle was a
notable figure in the New York City gay and lesbian bar scene and became
active in the gay liberation movement following the Stonewall riots. As well
as being a Lambda award-winning author, she also, perhaps most notably,
co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974, in what was then
her apartment. The Lesbian Herstory Archives is now widely considered
to be the world’s largest archive of materials by and about lesbians and
their communities. Nestle’s work to build and sustain this monumental
institution makes her an integral figure in the archiving of lesbian history.
Holka is an American photographer who lives and works primarily in
London. Her photographs range from classically styled portraits of her
friends, to a series which documents queer club nights, to work which
records LGBT cultural events in London. As Holka describes it on her
website, she is interested in ‘documenting and archiving the communities in
which she exists’.1 Holka’s photographs are much more centred around her
personal experiences than Nestle’s archive – Holka’s work is fundamentally
linked to a community in which she imagines herself as belonging, whereas
Nestle collects and preserves objects, narratives, images and stories from
lesbian-identified women around the world. Yet both Holka and Nestle
share an investment in the importance of accumulating evidence of queer
lives and communities.
256 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

This shared investment in the necessity of documenting queer existence

seemingly motivated the pairing of Nestle and Holka at the talk at the
Lambeth Women’s Project. In pairing Nestle and Holka, the event drew
attention, or imagined a lineage of commitment, to the documenting of
queer communities. As such, the pairing becomes a site for considering what
this lineage might be, or what the relationship is between archives of the
past and archives of a contemporary queer London. Of particular interest
to me here is the way that Holka’s photographs might be part of, as well
as constitute, an online archive of queer community. While Holka’s images
have been exhibited at numerous galleries in cities around the world, they
also have an active circulation online, where in particular her images of
queer club nights are posted, shared and re-posted on Facebook and Tumblr.
Given that Nestle’s archive is housed within the Lesbian Herstory Archive’s
Brooklyn brownstone and Holka’s photographs circulate online, the
dialogue also seemingly invites consideration of what the relationship might
be between these two archival sites. Indeed, I take the pairing of Nestle and
Holka as an invitation to consider the relationship between ‘old’ archives
and ‘new’ archives, particularly in relation to queer subjects. In this chapter,
I read Holka’s photographs and their existence online not as a contemporary
version of Nestle’s Lesbian Herstory Archive. Instead, I argue that we might
draw a less linear relationship between contemporary archives and archives
of the past.
Of particular interest to me is Holka’s photographic project ‘I WAS
THERE’, a series which documents a number of parties in East London –
nights which were either promoted explicitly to, or primarily attended by,
lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans people and their allies. If, as a whole, Holka’s
work displays a commitment to documenting her friends and the queer
communities in which she participates, this series is composed of images
taken in dark basements and on sweaty dance floors, capturing people who
are both unaware of her lens as well as those who are knowingly posing
with their friends or fellow partygoers. The series evokes the energies of
nights out, performances of being seen and of being in a queer space. While
the official series is temporally bound (2009–11) and composed of a select
number of images, Holka’s snaps of club nights exceed the series itself.
A wider range of Holka’s photographs of club nights have been featured
on Facebook (on various club nights’ Facebook pages) as well as on the
UK-based lesbian website The Most Cake. It is this less ‘bound’ archive that
is most interesting, as the hundreds if not thousands of images taken by
Holka circulate freely online. Importantly, these ‘scene shots’, as they might
be described, collectively circulate online as documentation of a particular
contemporary queer London.
For queer subjects, the process of ‘seeing’ oneself in an archive is frequently
wrought with difficulties – both in terms of the lack of documentation of
forms of non-normative intimacy and sexuality in archives, and in terms
of the inevitable problems with ‘finding’ contemporary identities in the
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 257

past. I became interested in these photographs because I watched Holka

documenting partygoers at club nights. I watched people’s desire to be
captured by her lens. Moreover, I knew the importance of not only being
photographed by Holka, but of having this image then belong to the event’s
Facebook page. In other words, the desire to be photographed by Holka
was also a desire to have the image included in an archive of the night.
This inclusion not only offered a professional photo of one’s self that could
be tagged or passed around via online social networks, but it also acted
as evidence of an individual’s inclusion in a contemporary queer London
scene. I thus became interested in how these contemporary desires and
this contemporary archive might be linked to queerness’ past invisibility.
In other words, might the desire to be in these Facebook archives be more
than a performance of self online, and instead be connected to desires to be
present in archives? It is with this in mind that I aim to consider what kinds
of queer historical affects might circulate online, and particularly in Holka’s
archives of contemporary London.
Holka’s emphatic ‘I WAS THERE’ is a seemingly straightforward
utterance of presence in contemporary queer London. In being photographed
by Holka, subjects insist on their presence at a contemporary party and they
perform this presence on Facebook. Yet ‘I WAS THERE’ might also be read
as a claiming of past existence – where the ‘I’ insists on a historical presence.
Perhaps the claim stretches beyond the immediate past (the party last night,
the event last week), and instead asserts a deeper historical reach (I, as a
queer subject, have a history, ‘I was there’). Or, finally, ‘I WAS THERE’, with
its all too emphatic caps lock, might also belie anxieties about being present,
insecurities about the archivability of contemporary queer London. If queer
lives and communities have escaped archival sites, or have proved difficult to
document and evidence, the sheer volume of Facebook photographs of queer
club nights seems to almost over-evidence contemporary queer existence.
Yet, as I suggest, this excess of documentation might reveal the difficulty,
or perhaps impossibility, of photographs shared via social media sites being
able to evidence the specificity of place (London), as well as queerness
more broadly. I consider the entanglement of these three readings of ‘I WAS
THERE’, producing an argument about an archive of contemporary queer
London that links it to desires for queer historicity as well as anxieties about
contemporary queer London as archivable.

The Facebook archive

Similar to Nestle’s work to archive proof of the existence of lesbian lives,
Holka’s project to document the communities in which she exists provides
vital evidence of a queer present. It is frequently from within marginalized
communities that the labour to document and archive comes, as queer
lives are a challenge to traditional archives and archival documentation.
258 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

Traditional and institutional archives have often proven insufficient for,

or incapable of, recognizing and protecting forms of life that do not show
up in the already sanctioned sites of what is considered collective memory.
As Ann Cvetkovich suggests, gay and lesbian archives are ‘[f]orged around
sexuality and intimacy, and hence forms of privacy and invisibility that
are both chosen and enforced’. In this way, ‘gay and lesbian cultures often
leave ephemeral and unusual traces’.2 Slipping through dominant archival
sites, evidence of gay and lesbian existence is often housed as memory, or
as ‘ephemeral and personal collections of objects’ which ‘offer alternative
modes of knowledge’.3 Lesbian and gay lives challenge dominant archives
as evidence of intimacy, sexuality and desire often falls through the cracks
of official documentation, thus both calling into question what counts as
archival material and revealing the failure of archival authority.
In some ways, the ease of collaboratively collecting and sharing images
online has introduced new possibilities for archives. As these technologies
‘expand our capacity to record everything’, the process of archiving might
be stretched to include our everyday practices of managing, indexing and
classifying digital information.4 As Mike Featherstone explains, ‘to be is
to record and to record in volume means to classify, index and archive’.5
Individuals organize an incredible amount of digital data on an almost daily
basis – whether it be music files, digitized albums, or hard drive back-ups
– so that archiving has become part of our everyday routines. Facebook
has emerged as central to personal archival practices, so that in Joanne
Garde-Hansen’s words, ‘Facebook can be seen then as sine qua non of
digital memory-making and personal archive building’.6 Jennifer Pybus
refers to an individual’s Facebook profile as a ‘user profile archive’. For
users of Facebook, uploading a photo is ‘a highly curated moment’ that
evidences ‘an intentional archival event’.7 Of course, Facebook does not
merely exist as a platform for individuals to ‘use’, but instead it shapes what
narratives can be told through delineating the form in which they must
exist. As Jacques Derrida explains, ‘the technical structure of the archiving
archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its
very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.’ The archive
inevitably structures what can be saved, so that ‘[t]he archivization produces
as much as it records the event’.8 In choosing to focus on Facebook as a
contemporary archive in this chapter, I do not aim to claim it as a utopian
space for documenting queer lives. Rather, I would suggest its archival and
affective promises be taken seriously for what they might offer specifically to
queer subjects. Indeed, this necessitates seeing Facebook’s archival potential
as not only personal or individual but also as collaborative in nature. For
instance, through Holka’s photographs of club nights, she produces on
Facebook an archive of not just a personal nature, but of a particular time
and place in London. In other words, Holka’s drive to personally archive
the community of which she is a part extends to producing an archive that
is not just personal.
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 259

Moreover, Facebook is not only or merely ‘new’. Formally, Facebook’s

use of a ‘timeline’ structure and its appropriation of photo albums as a
primary feature of the site both reference and draw on ‘older’ techniques of
mapping and saving memories. This has been well-explored in new media
theory, where concepts such as ‘cultural convergence’, ‘media archaeology’
and ‘remediation’ have emerged to name the way that new media does not
exist in a teleological relationship to other media forms.9 Each term, in its
own way, challenges the ‘newness’ of new media through disrupting linear
narratives. I am particularly drawn to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s
concept of ‘remediation’, which names the way media forms that might be
described as ‘new’ are always drawing on so-called older forms.10 In other
words, remediation invites us to consider the ways in which ‘new media’
might be read for how it reworks forms that are often designated as ‘older’ –
a way to consider how media forms do not work in isolation from each other.
This, as Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska explain, is a means of rejecting
seeing media or ‘media time’ as a ‘series of discrete spacialized objects, or
products that succeed one another’ where ‘we are said to progress from
photography to Flickr, from books to e-readers’.11 As they explain, ‘[o]ld
media come around again in this framework, as a result of which history
is not seen as linear and progressive but rather as nonlinear and cyclical’.12
Remediation helps to name the process by which Facebook, in a formal
capacity, remediates what might be considered older archival forms.
If contemporary media sites are understood as always already in complex
non-linear relationships to media forms with longer genealogies, what
remains unexplored is what kinds of affects – affects that might be seen as
‘past’ – might be bound to new media archival sites. If the past is remediated
in relation to media form, the affective structure of this collision between
past and present is worth exploring. If contemporary ‘new’ media sites are
always already ‘old’, how might we read the affective force of this for gay
and lesbian subjects in particular? If ‘older’ archives have had a tendency
to fail to capture the ‘evidence’ of queer existence, what effect does this
past absence have on contemporary archives? Might there be something of
this past invisibility lingering in the pleasures of a contemporary moment
in which hundreds or thousands of images are produced which purport
to evidence queerness? Indeed, might there be an affective force attached
to contemporary archives – an affective force produced through past
invisibility? In this queer take on remediation, what is remediated in and
through the digital Facebook archive is not so much the technology of
photography itself (the ‘old’ media), but instead affect. Adi Kuntsman, in
her introduction to the edited collection Digital Cultures and the Politics of
Emotion (2012), argues that we might do well to frame the digital through the
following questions: ‘How does affect work in online networks and digital
assemblages? What are the structures of feeling that operate in our everyday
digital life, and what kind of virtual public spheres do they create?’13 Indeed,
online sites such as Facebook, blogs and YouTube are increasingly being
260 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

read with a focus on affect, feeling and emotion – or in other words, with an
insistence that feeling is central to these sites.14 As Jodi Dean argues, social
networks and online platforms ‘produce and circulate affect as a binding
technique’,15 or, in Kuntsman’s words, the digital might be framed through
its ‘affective fabric’.16 This brings me back to Holka and Nestle, and an
insistence on reading Holka’s project not as a ‘new’ archive, where Nestle’s
would be ‘old’. The historical invisibility in dominant institutional archives
means that there is an intense affective force in archives such as Nestle’s –
in their insistence that queer people ‘have’ a history. The affect attached
to ‘the queer archive’ then becomes, I suggest, remediated in the present,
where contemporary subjects’ insistence on ‘presence’ might not be so easily
separable from historical invisibility.

Queer historical feelings

Contemporary queer London, and Holka’s contemporary archive of queer
London on Facebook in particular, might carry with it something of the past.
While, as Elizabeth Freeman points out, queer theory has a long history of
being interested in temporality, the last decade and a half has seen a number
of thinkers turn to engage more explicitly with this theme – many of whom
participated in a roundtable published in GLQ in 2007, entitled ‘Theorizing
Queer Temporalities’.17 The concerns of these various thinkers are diverse, as
are their explorations of what it might mean to engage in queering temporality,
queering historiography, or in unpacking the ways in which temporality and
historiography might already be queer. Part of this recent work in relation
to history has, as Heather Love explains it, ‘shifted the focus away from
epistemological questions in the approach to the queer past’ and instead
‘traced the identifications, the desires, the longings, and the love that structure
the encounter with the queer past’.18 These explorations of the potential
queer experiences of time and history have, however, been primarily focused
on literature and experimental art practices.19 Queer work that does turn to
new media sites has tended to explore how contemporary queer identities
and communities are being forged on or in relation to interactions with social
media or new technologies.20 A useful exception here is Alex Cho’s work on
the queer temporalities of Tumblr, in which he argues that interaction on
the platform is ‘based on a nonlinear, atemporal rhizomal exchange of affect
and sensation, a “queer reverb” of repeat and repeat’.21 In other words, for
Cho, the platform provides an opportunity for queer experiences of time –
experiences which fall outside of, or re-organize, the linear historical.
Desires to be ‘there’ in Holka’s photographs are, I argue, structured by a
longer genealogy of queer feeling. In other words, they might recall the past
in queer ways. The promise of being captured in one of her images, and of
having that image circulate online as part of a queer event in London, is the
promise of inclusion in a queer archive. Being present in a contemporary
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 261

archive offers queer subjects an opportunity, in Christopher Nealon’s words,

to ‘feel historical’.22 As Love puts it, ‘[t]he longing for community across
time is a crucial feature of queer historical experience, one produced by the
historical isolation of individual queers as well as by the damaged quality of
the historical archive’.23 In Foundlings (2002), Nealon argues that an archive
of early twentieth-century queer literary production might be read for how
this fiction imagines queerness as an orientation towards the historical.
Exploring how authors imagined queerness neither through the dominant,
individualizing pathological models associated with sexology nor the
emerging late twentieth-century lesbian and gay community model, Nealon
argues that ‘queer writers and artists were groping their way toward a notion
of homosexuality defined by a particular relationship to the idea of history’.24
Here, queerness signifies or indexes the gap between present impossibility
and a desire for future legibility, leading Nealon to insist on a model of the
‘historical’ that encompasses ‘the desire for its conditions’.25 Queerness, then,
might be attached to desires for historicity, as much as it might point us
towards the necessity of expanding what it means to feel historical.
Connecting Nealon’s work to my analysis of Holka’s series is the word
‘there’. At the end of Nealon’s book, ‘there’ makes a striking appearance.
It becomes central to the historical affect that Nealon aims to tease out
through his reading of early twentieth-century literature. In the concluding
chapter, Nealon offers a reading of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1953), using this example as indicative of the desire for history
that he reads as being characteristic of certain twentieth-century writing.
In Baldwin’s novel, Nealon reads a possible queer desire in the main
character John’s admiration for his friend, Elisha, a leader in his church
congregation. After John experiences his religious transformation at the
end of the novel, Nealon quotes John’s words to Elisha: ‘ “Elisha,” he said,
“no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me,
no matter what anybody says, you remember – please remember – I was
saved. I was there”.’26 Nealon reads John’s public display of religiosity not
as a commitment to the present of his family and church, but instead as a
transcendence that might ‘operate as a message in a bottle to his beloved, a
sign that will turn out to have been some historical “other” place from which
the unspeakability of his love can gain audition’. The ‘there’, in Nealon’s
description, thus houses the ‘future-anteriority of historical uncertainty’.27
Concluding Nealon’s book on the relationship between queer and feeling
historical, this ‘there’ acts as a linguistic marker of the possibility, the
uncertain possibility, of future legibility – a reaching out towards a moment
in which one’s desire might be read.
While Baldwin italicizes his ‘there’, Holka’s series ‘I WAS THERE’
screams the entire sentence. If, in Nealon’s reading, the italicized there holds
the weight of historical feelings, the caps lock of Holka’s series similarly
registers an affective force. Here, however, this affective force might be read
less as a ‘message in a bottle’ to an unknown future and instead a claim in
262 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

the present to historicity. The performance of presence in Holka’s series does

not necessarily yearn for a future in which one’s historicity might be legible,
so much as it insists on the present as historical. Repeating Baldwin’s ‘there’,
Holka’s series invests in the importance of queer claims to archival presence
through insisting on the importance of the present. Holka’s ‘THERE’ is not
just a revision of Baldwin’s ‘there’ – ‘I WAS THERE’ is a claim inflected and
affectively charged by past queer archival invisibility where the queer past
might be understood not as over, but instead as that which has unexpected
life in the present.28 As Love puts it, the past might be experienced ‘as
something dissonant, beyond our control, and capable of touching us in the
present’.29 Indeed, this resistance to moving progressively ‘on’ from the past
might be seen as the marker of queer historiography, where its practitioners,
in Dana Luciano’s words, ‘ask what it means to think history as something
other than a linear chronology, a public record of steady “progress”
enabled and stabilized by the domestic-familial reproduction of successive
generations’.30 As an example of this kind of historical inquiry, Luciano
produces a reading of the lipstick marks on Oscar Wilde’s grave. Luciano
argues that the ‘pressure of lips on stone suggests a different form of contact
with the past’, one that resists a generational reproduction. This contact
refuses a progressive narrative of linearity that moves on from Wilde, and
instead the lips ‘bend time through the location of partial affinities’ and
‘kiss into being an expansively queer now’.31 As Luciano herself notes,
this epitomizes Carolyn Dinshaw’s concept of ‘touches across time’, where
Dinshaw suggests that ‘queerly historical’ questioning might explore what it
means when the ‘past touches the present’.32 Performances of contemporary
queer London on Facebook, in their insistence on the present’s historicity,
might thus, perhaps paradoxically, be a way of making contact with the past.
Perhaps looking less like lipstick marks on a grave, touches across time
are legible in new media sites. A recent post on the website Autostraddle,
which bills itself as a site for ‘kick ass lesbian, bisexual, and otherwise
inclined ladies (and their friends)’, shares archival event flyers advertising
lesbian or queer women events from the 1930s to the 1970s.33 The post is
titled ‘25 Queer Parties You Should Go To If You Have A Time Machine’
and the flyers are introduced as follows:

If you were reading this website in 2010 but didn’t live in New York,
you’re probably really devastated that you missed our epic Rodeo Disco
Pride Party, especially if you enjoy riding mechanical bulls. But actually
it’s likely that you’ve missed a lot more parties than just that party.
Luckily, we’ve assembled so many of them here so you can really think
about what you’re doing with your life.

This post, on the one hand, remediates the event flyers from the past through
the website format. Through this remediation, it quite directly links the
Rodeo Disco Pride Party to a Gay Liberation dance in the 1970s or a 1930s
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 263

Berlin party. One click brings you from the poster from the 1930s onto the
website of the Rodeo Disco Pride Party. It also insists that the contemporary
party is in a lineage of queer parties. This linking of the present with the
past insists on the historical and cultural importance of this present, of being
present. Through referencing the contemporary party as an introduction to
the parties of the more distant past, it inserts the contemporary New York
Pride Party into an historical archive. Moreover, it also suggests that while
you may not have a time machine to travel back to Berlin in the 1930s, the
parties that are happening in contemporary New York are somehow linked
to this history. The best way to be there (in the archive, in the queer past, in
contact with this queer past) is, consequently, to be here.
The ‘I WAS THERE’ of Holka’s series emphatically screams of presence.
The ‘was there’ is directed towards a prior event and, combined with
images of East London partygoers, references attendance at a particular
place in the recent past. Shared online and archived on lesbian websites
and the Facebook pages of queer events, Holka’s photographs evidence
a contemporary queer scene. The compulsive archiving of this scene
seemingly attempts to give weight to the importance of this present –
both these queer parties and the various incarnations of ‘I’ that were in
attendance. Holka’s photographs – designated as they are as contemporary
queer evidence – promise a performance of the self in the queer archive of
the present. If the archival impulse behind the Lesbian Herstory Archive is
in part a motivation to evidence the existence of queer lives, the impulse
to document contemporary queers is similarly about evidencing a queer
present. However, these Facebook archives of Holka’s photographs might
promise the contemporary and its subjects a relationship to queer history.
Dinshaw and Luciano both describe queer historical affect as a fattening
of the present – for Dinshaw, this is an ‘extended now’ and for Luciano an
‘expansively queer now’.34 The desire to perform presence in contemporary
archives, similar to the desire to attend contemporary parties as voiced in the
Autostraddle post, is not disconnected from affect attached to the inability
to have been ‘there’ in archives of the past. Through performing presence
in Holka’s archives, contemporary queer subjects are not just performing
a presence in the ‘present’, but also in an archive. It is this performance
of presence in an archive that seems to me to be inseparable from certain
queer historical affects – namely anxieties about past ‘unattendance’, about
one’s ability to be historical. Contemporary presence in archives, ghosted
as it is by past invisibility, is thus not separate from ongoing desires for
queer historicity.

Queer London
In some ways, I have been tracing feelings of precarity or unease with regard
to archiving queerness. As much as Holka’s series seems to ameliorate
264 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

contemporary subjects’ desires for historicity through its archival promise,

it also might yet again fail, finally, to capture ‘queer London’. In other
words, if thus far I have been exploring how the series might promise
queer subjects the possibility of feeling historical, the circulation of these
photographs online might fundamentally challenge their ability to act as
evidence of a contemporary queer London. If, on the one hand, the series’
claim that its subjects were ‘there’ might be read as an archival or historical
claim, it is also a claim to having been at specific parties. Holka explained
the ‘I WAS THERE’ project in a talk in May 2012: ‘I was there to document
a particular time and place in London, a dance floor, an energy, a moment
that lives in these images, online, in various blogs, and in their travels all
over the world, online and off.’35 Referencing the title of the series, Holka
insists on her own presence ‘there’ at a particular time and place in London.
It is her presence in this moment that enables her to document the energy
of London dance floors. In this statement of presence, Holka describes
her photographs as evidencing not only a temporally specific, but also a
geographically specific location: London. However, she also references the
way in which this documentation has its own kind of movement – online,
in its movement around the world, across blogs, Tumblr and Facebook.
This movement, while not contained in the original images, is integral to
considering how these images might represent contemporary London.
Holka’s series, as she narrates it, might be read as offering particular
representations of a particular group of individuals who move in and out
of spaces in London. Holka’s photographs contribute to a certain visual
representation of, particularly, East London queer club life. In this, Holka’s
series might be closely related to a number of photographic projects which
aim to document and locate the specificities of queer subjects in relation to
place – for example, the work of the South African photographer Zanele
Muholi, whose photography includes portraits of lesbians in South Africa,
or Molly Landreth’s project ‘Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in
America’. Landreth’s project, as she describes it on the project’s website, ‘is
an archive and a journey through a rapidly changing community and the
people who offer brave new visions of what it means to be queer in America
today’.36 This is a distinctly place-based project that aims to document queer
life as it is lived in America in the present. On the project’s website, images
of queer subjects across the United States are featured. The photograph of
the individual, couple or family is labelled with both the name(s) of the
subject(s) and the geographic location of where they live. Emphasizing
further the importance of place to the project, a Google map is included
which pinpoints the location of the individual(s) featured. Viewers are thus
invited to locate the subjects not only in the United States as a country, but
also in much more specific geographic locations across the nation. Indeed,
widening popular conceptions of where it is that queers are traditionally
seen as located (that is, major cities) seems to be one of the project’s
explicit aims.
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 265

Yet these photographs of queer subjects that are in some ways linked
quite explicitly to place and time cannot hold this specificity when they
are housed online. Online, Holka’s photographs can be removed from their
context, via online sharing, linking and re-posting. As Featherstone argues,
digital archives differ from ‘the ledger on the shelf in the archive’ in that
meaning ‘ceases to be contained in a bounded physical textual form, the
page or document, but is able to flow through network nodes’.37 In this
movement, it becomes less certain that these photographs can signify a
particular time and place. The photographs could document any number of
parties in any number of locations and it becomes unclear how they might
represent a contemporary London. In the artist’s talk from 2012, Holka
narrates how she discovered that individuals were taking her images and
re-posting them on various sites. Tracking the movement of some of her
images, Holka describes how her pictures rapidly travelled across blogs,
websites and Tumblr – too many for her to trace.38 It is this act of movement
that Sonja Vivienne and Jean Burgess describe as key to digital photography.
They argue that ‘the web has changed how and what it means to share
photographs’.39 Importantly, the sharing of photographs online means that
Holka’s archive exists within larger networks and flows – images can be
downloaded and appropriated in any number of ways, from being posted
on Tumblr to being added to Facebook groups or timelines. As Pybus argues,
‘[u]nlike the static repositories of information stored in a traditional archive,
digital archives are constantly being worked on, their contents always in
the middle of being recombined, recontextualized, and re-searched’.40 On
the one hand, this is surely one of the pleasures of Facebook, the ease
with which images can be passed around friend circles. It is precisely the
sharing, posting and re-posting of images in networks of circulation that
produce the affective pleasures of platforms such as Facebook. However,
this circulation might also produce a sense of unease as it unhinges
photographs from their specific referent. As Cho explores in relation to
vintage erotica on Tumblr, the images become ‘empty of narrative’ even as they
might ‘hint at a subterranean queer history’.41 Holka’s photographs, then, as
they might circulate without captions or credits, as profile photographs
for users of Facebook or as images incorporated into individuals’ Tumblr
pages, are removed from their specific time and place. This movement,
this constant reconfiguration of documentation, makes it difficult to
see how any of Holka’s photographs, out of context, might evidence a
contemporary queer London. Downloaded from Facebook, shared without
a credit on Tumblr or conjoined to an individual website, the photographs
themselves do not easily signify London. Through the sharing, the tagging,
the re-posting, and the interaction with this archive of a particular time and
place in London, London might disappear – or at least the photographs
might no longer index or evidence London.
Moreover, what might also be lost is the photographs’ evidencing of
queerness. The digital expands the possible meanings of the emphatic
266 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

‘THERE’ in ‘I WAS THERE’. In some sense, the ‘there’ performatively

locates its subjects in a particular time and place: London. However, its all
too emphatic nature perhaps haunts the insecurity that ‘there’ in relation
to place has in some sense become unhinged. If Holka describes her
anxieties about losing track of her images, we might also consider how,
as these images travel, they lose their embeddedness in a particular time
and place: queer London. So we are returned to the anxieties at the heart
of the relationship between queerness and the archive – that the queer
communities documented in Holka’s photographs might again evade the
archive. These contemporary archives are, I suggest, haunted by a past
absence. The caps lock ‘I WAS THERE’, in its over-enthusiastic claiming
of past presence, seems to contain within it a reference to fears, anxieties
or uncertainties about whether ‘I’ was indeed ‘there’. I am suggesting
that, similar to Nealon’s argument that Baldwin’s ‘there’ houses a future
anterior historical uncertainty, the archive of Holka’s photographs online
might not only claim a historical presence, but might also contain within
it an uncertainty about this presence. Through referencing the failure of
queerness to be documented in the past, this contemporary evidence of
queer London might also be haunted by the potential failure of queerness
to be captured in this archival present.

Conclusion
This project started because I wanted to understand why individuals were
so captivated by Holka’s camera at these queer parties. I watched people
watching Holka, waiting for her to turn her lens onto them. I watched
Holka often immediately turn the camera around to show them the image
she had just captured of them dancing or posing with friends. I witnessed
first-hand the desire to be documented at these club nights. Moreover, I saw
and experienced the importance of this photograph then making its way
onto the online archive of the night. In other words, it was not enough just
to be photographed by Holka but it was necessary for this photograph then
to be included in the Facebook album of the event night. This move from
the photograph to the online archive seemed to promise a certain security of
presence in a contemporary queer London. I am hesitant to read this as just
another performance of self that online platforms such as Facebook enable –
the construction of certain identities through photography and presence at
parties. Instead, I suggest that there is a queer specificity to this desire to be
in a particular Facebook album. This specificity is an effect of the way in
which queer subjects have often been denied access to seeing ‘themselves’
in the past – either because of a lack of evidence of queerness or because of
a knowingness that what we might identify ‘as’ is a historically contingent
configuration of desires, acts and relationalities. As Valerie Rohy describes
it, the imperative to resist ‘ahistoricism’ or ‘anachronism’ has been central
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 267

to queer historical critique.42 Denied this ability to recognize queerness in

the past, it seems to me that archival presence is particularly affectively
charged for contemporary queer subjects. As such, the desire to be captured
by Holka’s camera exceeds the promise of the here and now, the present
queer London.
Instead, Holka’s photographic archive is much more entangled with the
queer past. As we think about the sheer number of photographs of this East
London scene and its parties – this particular time and place, London –
what is seemingly unavoidable for me in these narratives is a sense that past
invisibility haunts the contemporary. It haunts the contemporary as a desire
to be in the archive and also as a threat that this archive will similarly fail
to capture or evidence queerness. The emphatic ‘I WAS THERE’ points in
multiple directions yet it also perhaps fails to evidence the very presence
that it emphatically claims. It claims a certainty that is perhaps inevitably a
failure to be ‘there’ – the caps lock insistence reveals a slipperiness around
the ‘there’. It references a past queer invisibility in the archive, yet the
abundance of photographs similarly alludes to the ongoing failure of these
photographs to evidence queerness. So if, as Love or Dinshaw suggests,
the past has unexpected and unpredictable affective holds on our present,
this digital archival space seemingly offers not only a means of exploring
contemporary queer life, but of considering the way in which contemporary
representations might be bound to queer historical feelings.

Notes
1 Christa Holka, ‘About’. http://www.christaholka.com/index.php?
/about/bio/ (accessed 9 June 2014).
2 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality and Public Cultures
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 8.
3 Ibid., p. 8.
4 Mike Featherstone, ‘Archive’, Theory, Culture and Society 23.2–3 (2006),
pp. 591–96, 595.
5 Ibid., p. 595.
6 Joanne Garde-Hansen, ‘My Memories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and
Facebook’, in Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Ann Reading (eds),
Save As … Digital Memories (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), pp. 135–50, 144.
7 Jennifer Pybus, ‘Accumulating Affect: Social Networks and Their Archives of
Feelings’, in Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen and Michael Petit (eds), Networked
Affect (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 235–50, 241.
8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, trans. E. Prenowitz,
Diacritics 25.2 (1995), pp. 9–63, 17.
268 SEX, TIME AND PLACE

9 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York and London: New York University Press, 2006); Erkki Huhtamo
and Jussi Parikka, Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and
Implications (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2011);
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New
Media (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999).
10 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.
11 Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a
Vital Process (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 3.
12 Ibid., p. 8.
13 Adi Kuntsman, ‘Introduction: Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures’, in Athina
Karatzogianni and Adi Kuntsman (eds), Digital Cultures and the Politics of
Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), p. 4.
14 See Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen and Michael Petit (eds), Networked
Affect; Aimée Morrison, ‘ “Suffused by Feeling and Affect”: The Intimate
Public of Personal Mommy Blogging’, Biography 34.1 (2011), pp. 37–55;
Nima Naghibi, ‘Diasporic Disclosures: Social Networking, Neda, and the
2009 Iranian Presidential Elections’, Biography 34.1 (2011), pp. 56–69;
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15 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive
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16 Kuntsman, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
17 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
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18 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
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19 See, for example, Freeman, Time Binds; Love, Feeling Backward; José Esteban
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York and London: New York University Press, 2009); Christopher Nealon,
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NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002).
20 See, for example, Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips (eds), Queer Online:
Media Technology and Sexuality (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Christopher
Pullen and Margaret Cooper, LGBT Identity and Online New Media
(London: Routledge, 2010).
21 Alex Cho, ‘Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time’, in Ken Hillis, Susanna
Paasonen and Michael Petit (eds), Networked Affect, pp. 43–58, 47.
22 Nealon, Foundlings, p. 8.
 BEING ‘ THERE’ 269

23 Love, Feeling Backward, p. 37.

24 Nealon, Foundlings, p. 1.
25 Ibid., p. 13.
26 Ibid., p. 182.
27 Ibid.
28 For explorations of this point, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval:
Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 1999); Love, Feeling Backward; Freeman,
Time Binds.
29 Love, Feeling Backward, pp. 9–10.
30 Dana Luciano, ‘Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: Velvet Goldmine’s Queer
Archive’, in E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (eds), Queer Times, Queer
Becomings (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), pp. 121–55, 123.
31 Ibid., p. 123; emphasis in original.
32 Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, p. 112.
33 Autostraddle, ‘About’. http://www.autostraddle.com/about/ (accessed
9 June 2014).
34 Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, p. 110; Luciano, ‘Nostalgia’, p. 123 (emphasis in
original).
35 Christa Holka, ‘We Belong’. http://vimeo.com/46000354 (accessed
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36 Molly Landreth, ‘About’. http://embodimentusa.com/?page_id=26
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37 Featherstone, ‘Archive’, p. 595.
38 Holka, ‘We Belong’.
39 Sonja Vivienne and Jean Burgess, ‘The Remediation of the Personal
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Journal of Material Culture 18.3 (2013), pp. 279–98, 281; emphasis in
original.
40 Pybus, ‘Accumulating Affect’, p. 239.
41 Cho, ‘Queer Reverb’, p. 50.
42 Valerie Rohy, ‘Ahistorical’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1
(2006), pp. 61–83, 65–6.
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 INDEX

1917 Club (Soho) 117, 121, 123, 137, Aldrich, R. 151, 160
223–6 Allen, D. J. 182
‘25 Queer Parties You Should Go To If Altman, D. 58
You Have A Time Machine’ 262 anachronism 266
Anderson, B. 9
Adlard, J. 194, 196 androgyny
Adventures of a Schoolboy or the elements of 98
Freaks of Youthful Passion mobilization of 99
(Reddie, 1866) 154 performance of 98
Affinity (Waters, 1999) 42, 81, 83, Another Man’s Poison (Shute, 1931)
86–8 227
ahistoricism 266 Anthropological Society 43, 135, 150,
Ahmed, S. 4, 29, 71 151–3, 154, 158, 159, 160
AIDS/HIV 241, 243 anthropometry 152
awareness of 58 Antic Hay (Huxley, 1923) 226
backlash 56 anti-gay legislation, Uganda 66
cases in London 52–4 Antosa, S. 31, 42–3, 149
charities 49, 57 Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs:
crisis in London 61 Three Essays on the Power
death rates of 51 of Reproduction (Davenport,
de-gaying of 56 1869) 157
disease of globalization 51 apparitional lesbian 14
experience of 54 Archer, D. 230, 231
fear and insecurity arising from Ashbee, H. S. 90, 137, 154–5
57–8 Astoria Theatre 242
gay men in relation to 50–1 Autostraddle 262–3
GLF activism in early 1970s 55–6 Avery, S. 24, 29
growth of awareness of 58
homeless people with 52 Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer
identification of 52 Streets of New York and London
and London 49–64 (Turner, 2003) 12, 25
national conference on 53 Bacon, Francis 167–84
normalization of 60 bodily performances 172
related deaths in UK 50 career in London 167
reporting of 57 face paintings 172, 178
support, care and treatment 53–5 make-up, use of 172, 178
treatments for 50 queer sexuality 176
wards and clinics 54 sadomasochism 167–8
Ainley, R. 95 selection of paintings 169
292 INDEX

self-fashioning of 168, 169 context of metropolis with 137

sexual tastes 176 overlooked precursor for 136–7
violence and transgression 170 role of 134
visual culture of 176–9 terms of reform of laws 143
Bakhtin, M. 4, 18 n.5, 82, 83 Brixton 65–80
Bankhead, Tallulah 227–8, 230 1981 riots in 70
Bar Wotever’s Female Masculinity racist divisions 71
Appreciation Society 105 sexual history of 73
Bauer, H. 4, 18 n.1 sexual possibilities in 74
Beerbohm, M. 175, 181 n.34, 193 spatial relationship to central
Bell, D. 8, 10, 36 n.5 London 69, 71
Bennett, A. 230 ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ histories of
Bersani, L. 177, 179 n.1 75
BHC. See Brixton Housing Co-op (BHC) Brixton Housing Co-op (BHC) 55
bigot geography 41–2, 65–80 brothels 169, 224
bisexuality 49 Brown, G. 8, 18
Blanchard, P. 224 Bryant, P. 204, 215–16
Blaney, D. P. 178 BSSSP. See British Society for the Study
Bohemianism 44, 117, 187, 189, 191, of Sex Psychology (BSSSP)
194, 223 Burgess, J. 265
‘Boi Box’ Drag King cabaret night Burton, R. 43, 135, 150–7, 159–61
103, 105 climatic theory 159
Bolshevik revolution 223 contradictory hypotheses 159
Bolter, J. D. 259 inequality between races 152
Book Club Negro Art, exhibition of pederasty 159
1920, 121 theory of Sotadic Zone 159
Boone, J. A 151 Butler, J. 9, 65, 85, 101
Booth, H. C. 139 theorizations of gender
Booth, H. J. 124 performativity 101
Bottomley, H. 102
Boulton, E. 174, 188–9 Cannibal Club 31, 43, 135, 150, 151,
Bourcier, M.-H./S. 42, 98, 101–4 153–60
concept of Drag King informal gatherings of 150
performance 98 male social and symbolic spaces of
pratiques transgenres 42, 98, 101, 154
102, 103, 104, 108, 112 n.50 sexology 158–60
and queer theory 101 symbol of 155
Bowen, E. 83, 91, 92 cannibalism 153, 155, 156, 160
Brideshead Revisited (Waugh, 1945) Canning, R. 213
222, 234 capitalism 122, 125, 240
British political discourse, global gay Caribbean migrants 69
rights in 67 carnivalesque, concept of 4, 18 n.5, 42,
British Psycho-Analytical Society 142 82–3, 87, 93
British Society for the Study of Sex Carpenter, E. 120, 133, 136, 137, 138,
Psychology (BSSSP) 43, 133–48, 158, 159
223 Castells, M. 240
activism 140 Castle, T. 14, 92
attitudes towards homosexuality ‘Caves of Harmony’ (Townsend,
134 c.1925) 221
 INDEX 293

Central London Action on Street Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885)

Health (CLASH) 57 11
Chanan, M. 5 Crisp, Q. 171–3, 175, 177, 178
Chapman, C. 138 cross-dressing 5, 11, 82, 84, 85, 168,
charlatanism 86 176, 188, 189,
Chauncey, G. 25 examples of 93
Cho, A. 260, 265 lesbians and 85
CLASH. See Central London Action on Crozier, I. 135
Street Health (CLASH) culture
Clayton, A. 13, 214 England folk 119
The Cloven Hoof: A Study of essentialization of 68
Contemporary London Vices of Francis Bacon 176–9
(Archer, 1932) 230 Jamaica folk 119
Cocks, H. G. 25, 188, 196 lesbian identity and 82
Collins, W. 83, 88 male homosocial 135
colonialism 69, 76, 119, 121, 152, Molly House 11, 173, 174
160 and politics of Queer London 12
The Colour of Memory (Dyer, 1989) queer urban 13
70 queer visual 167
community/communities visual 176–9
alternative space 246 Cvetkovich, A. 27, 29, 258
collectivism and 56
concept of 9–10 Daily Telegraph 227
definition 239, 250 The Darkened Room (Owen, 1989) 86
feminist 91 Darwin, C. 7
gay identities and 243–4, 248, Davenport, J. 157
250–1 David, H. 25, 32
heterosexuals and 244 Day, P. 5
homosexual sense of 243–5, 248–9, Deakin, J. 168
251 Dean, J. 260
modern concept of 239 de Certeau, M. 60
notion of 10 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) 221
queer performance and 106 de Frece, W. 100
rethinking of 248–50 Delanty, G. 240
sense of 106 de Lauretis, T. 77 n.2, 101
urban 239 Dellamora, R. 44, 196
virtual 239–51, 255–67 Derrida, J. 258
comparative anatomy 152, 160 Dickens, C. 5, 6, 83, 88, 89, 118, 192
scientific methods of 152 digital archives 255–67
Condor, S. 233 Digital Cultures and the Politics of
Conroy, C. 42, 44 Emotion (Kuntsman, 2012) 259
Constab Ballads (McKay, 1912) 119, Dinshaw, C. 24, 27–33, 262–3, 267
120, 124 A Discourse on the Worship of the
consumers 240, 243–5 Priapus (Knight, 1786) 157
conventional masculinity 177–8 Disorderly Houses Act (1751) 169–70
Cook, M. 4, 11–13, 25, 26, 31, 41, 45, DORA. See Defence of the Realm Act
186, 188 (DORA)
Cooper, E. 15, 117, 119, 120 Douglas, A. 32, 196, 228, 229
Corfield, P. J. 5 Downing, S. J. 7
294 INDEX

Dowson, E. 193, 194, 196 Fingersmith (Waters, 2002) 42, 81, 83,
Drag King performance 97–108 88–91, 93
Drag Queens and 102–7 flâneur 12, 14, 42, 44, 83, 85–8, 90
events and performance 97 Florida, R. 67, 78 n.11
lack of understanding of 103 The Folding Star (Hollinghurst, 1994)
performance techniques 101, 203
104–5 Forster, J. 192
performers 105 Foucault, M. 88, 149
popularity of 102 Foundlings (Nealon, 2002) 261
strategies 101 Fraxi, P. 155
styles of 102–4 Freeman, E. 27, 29, 260
vocal techniques 100 Freudianism 223
Drag Queens 102–7 Fryer, J. 241
Drag Queens of London (TV show) fundraising 17, 53
106 collectivism and community in 56
Dreadnought (McKay, 1920) 117,
122–3, 125 Gabrial, J. 233
Drury Lane Club 117, 125 Gallery Girls 230
Dyer, G. 70, 73, 178 Gallop, J. 87
Garde-Hansen, J. 258
Edelman, L. 213, 216 Gaunt, W. 191
Edwards, E., 121 gay bars 49, 245, 250
Eeckhout, B. 13, 41, 44 gay community
Egan, B. 228 online media, impact on 244–51
Ellis, H. H. 43, 74, 133, 136, 140, 143, (see also Grindr)
158–60, 190, 193, 229 racism 75
Ellis, N. 118 gay equality 67
‘Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life gay friendliness
in America,’ (Landreth) 264 in Brixton 71–2
Epstein Nord, D. 5 and homophobia in London 68–9
European-style gay bars 49 gay identity
Evans, J. V. 26 community concepts 244, 251
Extraordinary Women (Mackenzie, inequality and 65
1928) 227 Jagose on 108 n.2
law and 32
Facebook 256–60, 262–6 North American context 78 n.8
Falk, B. 186, 187, 189, 192, 193, 196 race and 80 n.35
Farson, D. 179, 241 sexual liberation 78 n.13
Featherstone, M. 258, 265 spatial concentration 67
female cross-dressing, sexual politics Gay Liberation Front (GLF) 53, 55, 74
of 84–5 gay liberation movement 175, 255
female masculinity 100, 104, 105 Gay Monitoring and Archive
female same-sex desire 15 Project 56
female sex workers 57 gay progress narratives 65
femininity 14, 99–100, 103, 108, 174, in London 65, 68
178 stigmatizing and exclusionary
and androgyny 98 effects of 66
Fielding, H. 192 and urban change 67–8
Film Weekly (magazine) 227 vulnerability of 68
 INDEX 295

gay rights 241, 250 Herman, RDK 7

in British political discourse 67 heteronormativity 9, 204
progress for 65–6 heterosexual/heterosexuality 154
gender 26–7, 83, 85, 101, 103, 150, behaviours 9
168, 171, 173, 174 performance of 9
gentrification Hindle, A. 98, 99, 103
in Brixton 72, 74, 76 Hirschfeld, M. 133, 139
definition 78 n.8 HIV/AIDS. See AIDS/HIV
effects of 17 Holcomb, G. E. 117, 118
rental costs and rapid processes of Holka, C. 24, 45, 255–8, 260–7
15–16 photographs 45, 255–6, 258, 260,
spatial dynamics 15–17, 66–8 263–6
theories of 14 Holland, M. 32
urban communities 239 Hollinghurst, A. 13, 14, 44. See also
Gerrard Street 123, 137, 222–4, 233–4 specific novels
Getting Medieval (Dinshaw, 1999) 29, characters in novels 203–16
30 on gay spaces 203–14
GLF. See Gay Liberation Front (GLF) heteronormative space 204, 209–13
Glicco, J. 231–3 on London’s history 204–5, 209,
globalization 51, 239, 245 211–12, 214–16
Glover, E. 142 on queer lives 212–17
Goldring, D. 223, 224 on queer London 205, 209
Gosciak, J. 115, 116, 119, 121, 124, on sexual identities 203, 205
126 on sexual intimacy 211
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin, on time 205–6, 212–16
1953) 261 homoeroticism 151, 153–4
Gowing, L. 14 homogeneity, representations of 73
Graham, K. M. 3, 18 homonormativity 3, 65, 66
Gray, D. 173 politics of 10
Great Exhibition (1851) 7 homosexual/homosexuality 26, 28, 29,
Great War 204, 214, 221, 229 151, 156, 191, 193
Grindr 16, 45, 240, 246–51 discussions of 135
Groddeck, G. 143 emerging models of 159
Groes, S. 13 vs. homosociality 149
Gross, L. 245, 249 identification with 139
Grusin, R. 259 laws on 140
overlapping issues of 153–4
Haire, N. 134 ‘problem’ of 171
Halberstam, J. 27, 104, 178 re-emergence of 34
Hall, L. A. 31, 43 societal toleration of 135
Hall, R. 225–7, 229 unprogressive views on 68
Halperin, D. 27 urban subcultures 168
A Handful of Dust (Waugh, 1934) 222 homosexual rights 138
Harper, C. G. (Queer Things About homosociality 135, 149, 151, 153–4
London, 1924) 28–9 Hopkins, R. T. 193–4
The Haunted Host (Patrick, 1964) 178 Horne, H., 194
hauntings, kinds of 59, 60 Houlbrook, M. 10, 12–15, 18, 24, 25,
health education 52 27, 29, 30–2, 34, 43, 117, 171
Herford, M. 142 Housman, L. 140, 141
296 INDEX

Humphrey, B. 173 Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 56

Humphreys, T. 173 Lesbian Herstory Archives 255–6, 263
Hunt, J. 43, 150–2 lesbians 31
Hutton, L. 223 cross-dressed 85
Huxley, A. 226 culture 82
Hytner, N. 173 description 82
feminist community 91
Industrial Revolution 82 flâneur 82, 87–8
interdisciplinarity 17 gay men vs. 56
International Socialist Club (ISC) 117, identity 14, 82
125 ‘invisibility,’ 14
Internet 24, 50, 60, 245, 248–50 relationship with metropolis 82
ISC. See International Socialist Club role in the sexual politics 82
(ISC) sociocultural effacement of 92
Israel, L. 230 and theories of gentrification 14
Ives, G. 136, 140 Lewis, B. 25, 153
‘I WAS THERE’ project (Holka) 45, Lewis, G. E. 233
256–7, 261–4, 266–7 LGBT asylum seekers 66
Lilly, C. 93
Jamaica Lim, J. 8
colonial education in 119–20 The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst,
folk cultures of 119 2003) 44, 203–4, 209–12, 218
Janes, D. 43–4 Littlewood, C. 244
Jarman, D. 54, 55, 57, 59, 60 London and the Culture of
jazz clubs 115, 250 Homosexuality, 1885–1914
Jekyll, W. 119–20, 124 (Cook, 2003) 11, 20 n.38, 25
Jennings, R. 138, 142 London Triptych (Kemp, 2010) 13,
Jim Crow Laws 120 32–5
Joannou, M. 115 Love, H. 27, 29, 37 n.20, 261, 262
Johnson, E. P. 31, 175, 194, 196 Love of Women (Stuart, 1934) 227
Johnson, L. 31–2, 194 Luciano, D. 31, 32, 262, 263
Jordan, M. D. 29 Lutz, D. 156, 159

Kaplan, M. B. 13 Mackenzie, C. 225, 227

Kember, S. 259 Madness After Midnight
Kemp, J. 13, 14, 32, 33, 35, 222–3 (Glicco, 1952) 231
London Triptych 13, 32–5 Malchow, H. L. 155
Kertbeny, K. M. 159 male cross-dressing 188
King, V. 226 male homosociality
Knopp, L. 8, 66 bonds 150, 152
Kontou, T. 87 culture 135
Koven, S. 25, 192, 193 Sedgwick’s definition of 151
Kuntsman, A. 259, 260 male impersonation 83, 84, 98, 100,
103, 107
Lambeth Women’s Project (2012) male impersonators 74, 98–103
255–6 Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Lanchester, E. 221, 224–6 Sexualities (Bell and Valentine,
Landreth, M. 264 1995) 8, 9, 10
Lefebvre, H. 205 Marcus, J. 123, 226
 INDEX 297

Margaret Morris Club 225–6 Nine Till Six (Stuart, 1930) 227
masochism 154, 155, 177–8 NLGS. See National Lesbian and Gay
Maxwell, W. J. 120 Survey (NLGS)
McBean, S. 16, 24, 31, 45 Nordau, M. 191
McKay, C. 25, 43, 115–26 normative sexuality 168, 204, 213
early life of 119 normativity 99–100
experiences in London 114–17 Norton, R. 5, 173
life in British colony 119 Noyes, J. K. 178
poetry 122–5
politics and 117–27 O’Dwyer, T. 242
use of creole 118 Ofield, S. 11, 12
McKenna, N. 11 Old Compton Street 10, 15, 239–51
Medhurst, A. 175 Operation Cottage (documentary) 57
Mellor, L. 92 Oram, A. 5
Mill, J. S. 134 orientalism 151, 158
modern girls 44, 224, 227–9, Owen, A. 86
232, 234 Oxford Dictionary of National
Molly House culture 11, 173, 174 Biography 134
Moore, O. 54
morality, public standards of 169 Palmer, P. 15, 41–2
Moran, J. 17, 18 Pankhurst, S. 116, 117, 122
Morland, G. 189 Park, F. W. 174
Morris, M. 225, 226, 233 Patrick, R. 178
Morrison, E. 243 pederasty 159
Mort, F. 242, 248, 249 Pellegrini, A. 30
The Most Cake (UK-based lesbian Peppiatt, M. 171, 173, 176
website) 256 Phillippy, P. 172
Mowlabocus, S. 246, 247, 249 Podmore, J. A. 14
Muñoz, J. E. 27 Pohl, R. 88
Munt, S. 14, 82, 85 polygenesis theory 152
Murger, H. 190 pornography 12, 13, 149–60
Murray, G. 134 Powell, V. 98, 102, 233
Music Hall stage 97–8, 102 pratiques transgenres. See Bourcier,
male impersonation on 98 M.-H./S.
pre-Chinatown Soho 44, 221–34.
National Lesbian and Gay Survey See also Sink Street
(NLGS) 52, 54 Prichard, J. C. 152
Nazi photography 169 primitivism 122
Nealon, C. 261, 266 Progl, Z. 233
Nestle, J. 255–7, 260 prostitutes 4, 12, 57, 90, 171, 190,
New Spring Gardens. See Vauxhall 233. See also sex workers
Pleasure Gardens prostitution 14, 82, 153, 176
New York Pride Party 263 Pybus, J. 258, 265
Night in a Workhouse (Greenwood,
1860) 193 queer
Nights Out (Walkowitz, 2012) clubs 169, 255–7, 264
116–17 definition of 27, 29, 186
The Night Watch (Waters, 2006) 42, historical affect and 257, 260–1,
81, 83, 91–3 263, 267
298 INDEX

historicity 45, 257, 263 sexually transmitted infection (STI)

history 12, 29–30, 75, 203 clinics 54
queer London Sexual Offences Act (1967) 13, 176
black histories of 65–80, 115-32 sexual psychology 133–48
communities 24 sex workers 57, 85
contemporary 256–7, 260, 262–7 Shaw, S. J. 115
disappearing 16–18 Shute, N. 227–9
recovering 11–15 Sigel, L. Z. 135, 152, 153, 155
spatial understanding of 3–22 Sinfield, A. 244
theorizing 8–11 The Single Woman and Her Emotional
Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in Problems (Hutton, 1935) 223
the Sexual Metropolis, 1918– Sinister Street (Mackenzie, 1914) 225
1957 (Houlbrook, 2005) 117 The Sink of Solitude (Egan, 1928)
queer theatre, interwar heritage of 178 228–9
queer theory 26, 27, 82, 101, 108 n.2, Sink Street 221–34
167, 203, 204, 213, 260 Waugh on 222–8
Queer Valentine Carnival 243 slavery 152
social networks 240, 257, 260
race Soho. See also pre-Chinatown Soho
categories of 152 cafés and restaurants 242–3
philological view of 152 gay venues 242–8
and sexuality 151 Grindr and 249–51
racism 69, 71, 75, 115, 120, 121, 122, homosexuality 243–5, 248–9, 251,
124–7, 248 261
Rawson, C. J. 155 masculinities/identities 249
rent boys 12, 33 nightlife 44, 221–2, 228, 231, 242
Reynolds, S. 196 Old Compton Street 10, 15, 239,
Rhys, E. 194 241, 244
Richardson, J. 190 online and offline spaces 248–50
Rivkin, J. 211 sexual experimentation 244, 249
Rodeo Disco Pride Party 262–3 Solomon, S.
Rodger, G. 98–100 conviction in 1873 186–8
Rohy, V. 27, 266 early life of 187
Romain, G. 9, 15, 25, 42–3, 226 life in poverty in London 191
Roman Catholics 169, 227 ‘ragged figure’ of 194
Ross, R. 31, 186, 187, 189, 192 residence of 185
Rothenberg, T. 14 sexuality 185–202
Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT) 7, workhouse records of 188
15–17, 106, 112 n.53 Somerville, S. B. 159
Songs of Jamaica (McKay, 1912)
sadism 177 118–20
Said, E. 151 The Spell (Hollinghurst, 1998) 203,
A Saturday Life (Hall, 1925) 225 210
Schwarz, A. B. C. 124, 192 Spencer, H. 7
Second World War 134, 170, 234 spiritualism 86–8
Sedgwick, E. K. 27, 29, 33, 150–2 Spruce, E. 16, 31, 41–3
Seigel, J. 190, 191 Stacey, J. 55
Sellon, E. 153, 154, 157 Steen, M. 233
sex workers 57, 85 Stenbock, E. S. 186, 194–7
 INDEX 299

Stephens, M. 121 Verlaine, P. 187, 189, 190–1, 194, 196

Stevenson, J. 141 Villarejo, A. 25
STI clinics. See sexually transmitted Villin, E. 158
infection (STI) clinics virtual communities 240, 245
Stokoe, K. 15–16, 42 Vivienne, S. 265
Stonewall riots 255
The Stranger’s Child (Hollinghurst, Walkowitz, J. R. 116
2011) 44, 203–4, 212–17 Waters, C. 10
Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Waters, S. 10, 42, 74
Sexual Inversion (Ellis, 1936) Affinity 42, 81, 83, 86–8
158 carnivalesque dimension of
Studio 54 242 metropolitan life 82
Studio One 242 Fingersmith 42, 81, 83, 88–91,
Sullivan, N. 4, 195 93
Summers, J. 241, 242 narrative strategies 83
Sussman, H. 154 The Night Watch 42, 81, 83,
The Swimming-Pool Library 91–3
(Hollinghurst, 1988) 203–5, 209, Tipping the Velvet 42, 74, 81, 82,
212 83–6, 87, 93
Swinburne, A. 155, 157, 158, 187 Watney, S. 55, 59
Symonds, J. A. 158–60, 190, 193 Waugh, E. 222–5, 228, 233
The Weekly Dispatch 232
Taylor, A. 9–10 Weeks, J. 153, 158
telephone advice service 53 The Well of Loneliness (Hall, 1928)
Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) 49, 56 226–30
Tilley, V. 42, 97–103, 107 Wesner, E. 98
Timothy, A. 234 West, R. 137
Tipping the Velvet (Waters, 1998) 42, Whitman, W. 12, 120, 156–9
74, 81, 82, 83–6, 87, 93 Wilde, O. 13, 31–5, 120, 136, 172,
Titterton, W. R. 98 174–6, 186, 191, 194, 196, 208,
Townsend, S. 221 262
Tumblr 256, 260, 264–5 Wilson, E. A. 82
Turner, M. W. 12, 25, 214 Witchard, A. 9, 15, 31, 43–4
The Woman in White (Collins, 1860)
Uganda, anti-gay legislation 66 83, 88
UK, gay progress narratives in 66 Woods, C. 243
underworld 188, 208, 225, 228–34 Woo, J. 248
urban change, gay progress and 67–8 Woolf, L. 15, 23, 134, 143
urban renewal, progress narratives of The Workers’ Dreadnought 117, 122,
70 123, 125
Usher, N. 243
utopias of belonging 9–10 Yeats, W. B. 194
YouTube 259–60
Valentine, G. 8–10, 82, 243
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens 4–8, 15 Zimring, R. 226
Venturi, M. 9, 16, 31, 45 Zylinska, J. 259