Camp ‘queans’ were a familiar presence in the pubs of the East End and South London, and the area around Waterloo Road was known to be a place where tough working men could be approached with a reasonable chance of success. Certain venues in Edgware Road, particularly in the 1920s, were host to a throng of queer gents, service staff from Paddington and Bayswater, and army lads from the barracks at Regent’s Park and Knightsbridge. Painted poofs in lipstick and rouge were an everyday if not always welcome part of the cosmopolitan spectacle in Piccadilly and the Strand. It seems that London in the first half of the 20th century was much queerer than the city we know today. Many queer men managed to have lives, friendship networks and relationships that never came into conflict with the law. However much anxiety they provoked, lurid newspaper reports of arrests in public urinals also served as a handy guide to which cottages to avoid. Arrest was always a possibility, but the contingencies of police procedure made it unlikely.
In the story Queer London tells, the pleasures of the metropolis, far from being furtively grabbed, were in many ways as secure and institutionalised as the municipal authorities. But none of this was as a result of central government policy. The ensuing press panic about increased homosexual activity in London, fuelled by the pronouncements of individual judges, in turn convinced the police of the importance of making arrests. As a result, the number of cases brought before West London magistrates increased from six in 1942 to 168 in 1952.
Returning to full manpower after the war, these divisions decided to put more men on vice duty simply because they felt that there were more queers visible – or more visible queers – on the streets they policed. Houlbrook argues persuasively that the sudden increase in prosecutions after the war was caused by a shift in operations on the part of just three divisions of the Metropolitan Police, those covering the West End and the areas around Victoria, South Kensington and Hammersmith. The oppression of these years has been central to the gay account of the 20th century, and the memory of it focused the collective response to more recent government offensives such as Section 28. For decades, scholars have argued that the early 1950s saw an official clampdown on homosexual activity in Britain, enforced by means of increased police activity and the massive deployment of agents provocateurs. Houlbrook expresses this confidence when he asserts that, contrary to historical and popular orthodoxy, the postwar witch hunt of homosexual men never really happened. On ‘Gay London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian McKellen’. Soho’s self-branding in the 1990s as an urban ‘gay village’ has become one of the capital’s major selling points. While London has always been a magnet for queer men, the last twenty years or so have seen a more and more open acceptance of their place in the city. Houlbrook’s history is lucid, subtle and at times very funny. Coverage of recent changes in the law has tended to portray the 20th century as a time of darkness, in which gay men struggled to escape the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment Queer London complicates that account. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership Register, Matt Houlbrook’s impressive study of queer life in London between 19 does much to revise our understanding of homosexuality in that period. Lady Austin would have enjoyed Elton John’s ‘marriage’ to David Furnish last year – even the Daily Express managed to celebrate it as a ‘triumph for gay rights’ – in the Windsor Guildhall, where Charles had married Camilla only eight months before. before long our cult will be allowed in this country.’ ‘You may think so, but it is what we call real love man for man. ‘There is nothing wrong in that,’ Lady Austin retorted. Claiming to find a passing copper too dishy to be a real policeman, she told the inspector who was apprehending her: ‘I could love him and rub his Jimmy for him for hours.’ The inspector cautioned her.
Lady Austin was not inclined to go quietly. The organiser of the ball, Lady Austin (otherwise known as Austin S., a 24-year-old barman from Baron’s Court), was arrested along with 59 others. All the guests were male, half of them wearing lounge suits, the rest evening dresses and make-up. The party they interrupted was packed with domestic servants and staff from nearby hotels. In December 1932, thirty officers from the Metropolitan Police burst into a ballroom on the ground floor of a house in Holland Park.