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Some Men in London #2
Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960–1967
In the 1940s, it was believed that homosexuality had been becoming more widespread in the aftermath of war. A moral panic ensued, centred around London as the place to which gay men gravitated. Peter Parker's fascinating new compendium explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they were well-known figures such as Francis Bacon, Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams, or living lives of quiet – or occasionally rowdy – anonymity in pubs, clubs, more public places of assignation, or at home. It is rich with letters, diaries, psychological textbooks, novels, films, plays and police records, covering a wide range of viewpoints, from those who deplored homosexuality to those who campaigned for its decriminalisation. This second volume, from 1960 to 1967, shows how key elements in British society gradually changed their views on homosexuality, resulting in the landmark 1967 act by which it was no longer considered a crime if it took place between adults in private. This did not end violence, discrimination and prejudice, but it at least curbed official persecution. Some Men in London is a testament to queer life and its thriving, joyous subculture – a subculture without which the 1960s would have been immeasurably impoverished.
405 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 26, 2024
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364 people want to read
About the author
Peter Parker
10 books14 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Peter Parker (1954-) was born in Herefordshire and educated in the Malverns, Dorset and London. He is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and Public-School Ethos and biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. He edited the Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel and The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, and was an associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He writes about books and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines and lives in London’s East End.
Peter Parker (1954-) was born in Herefordshire and educated in the Malverns, Dorset and London. He is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and Public-School Ethos and biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. He edited the Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel and The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, and was an associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He writes about books and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines and lives in London’s East End.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
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November 3, 2024Second in this outstanding pair of anthologies of post-war queer men in London up to the moment of legalisation of male homosexual behaviour. There's a good balance between the utter hate-spewing awfulness of the Press and the politicians (then as now a twin pair of pustulent boils on the nation's arse) and the thoughtfulness, defiance, courage and joie de vivre of many individual lives in the face of everything thrown at them. Also some massive fuck ups, wild Establishment corruption, and the ever absurd censorship exercised over plays. A really involving slice of history.
December 16, 2025
A really first rate anthology, and I this goes for volume I as well, that provides a wonderful insight into gay male life in London in the years between WWII and the Wolfenden report in 1967. I really can't pretend that I have read it all, but I would like to, and it is a sterling resource for younger gay men to use if they want to understand their past - which is so close but so different. It is also an essential corrective to lazy way the struggle for gay rights in the UK has been elided into simply a variation on what happened in the USA. The UK was different - not better - and the differences reflect how the two countries were, despite a shared language. It is important to reminded that the homogenisation of so much popular culture that we no today was far less comprehensive in the past - though at the time people thought it was monolithic. It is important to understand how different the past was to understand where we are today.
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December 8, 2024The two volumes of Peter Parker's Some Men in London are an anthology of primary material about gay life in London, beginning in the aftermath of the second world war, before ending with decriminalisation and the death of Joe Orton. The material in question spans diaries, newspaper reports, novels, parliamentary speeches, plays, police records and poetry, featuring accounts from figures like EM Forster, Harold Macmillan, Noel Coward, Kenneth Williams, John Osborne and Cecil Beaton.
Broadly speaking, there are two central aspects to the two volumes. One is simply an account of gay relationships and a gay scene that is easily recognisable today, with a relative lack of hindrance from the law. One particularly amusing example is a newspaper article querying how people like Ivor Novello had remained bachelors for so long. Throughout the final volume, there's a marked sense that society had already moved towards decriminalisation long before Parliament timorously codified it: "From being the despised and rejected, not to say abhorred, on God’s earth, the queer is rapidly assuming the role of Hero of the Sixties, a romantic, mysterious figure tormented perhaps, but laughing gaily to hide the tears... in 1924 the mere acknowledgment that such monsters exist, that they breathe the same air, eat the same food and travel in the same tubes as the rest of us, was sufficient to cause a furore. To suggest that some homosexuals might be fairly happy, and the sort of people that ‘decent folk’ could even want to know, would have been unthinkable."
One particularly striking example of this is how gay themes were freely explored in writing well before decriminalisation. Drama was a difficult area, given that it was subject to censorship but this practice was essentially defeated long before the government saw fit to discontinue doing so. When the Lord Chamberlain demanded that scenes like a drag ball be excised from Osborne's A Patriot For Me, the theatre responded by temporarily re-classifying itself as a private member's club and putting on the full production regardless of what the Lord Chamberlain thought. As one censor complained about another play: "It is a serious Play about homosexuality and it can be said to achieve the stated object of the author in showing the results of persecution of homosexuals. In the course of achieving this object, the dialogue, acting and form of production (clothes, etc.) have all been devised to give homosexuals pleasure at seeing their way of life depicted on the stage."
Nonetheless, the other theme of the two volumes is the long march towards decriminalisation from the deliberations of the Wolfenden Report, the activities of the Homosexual Law Reform Society towards the final passage of the Sexual Offences Act. It's important to recall that particularly with the passing of the 1885 Labouchere amendment and its use to prosecute Oscar Wilde, Britain had the most draconian and puritanical legislation of any country, leading to a war against human nature that was both ruthlessly destructive and utterly futile. Political scandals involving gay sex were sufficiently common that Macmillan's initial reaction to the Profumo Affair was relief that it hadn't involved another man. Parker's book records myriads of police prosecutions being carried out in this period and lives destroyed, even as newspapers clamoured for firmer action against the 'beastly vice' and Parliamentary speeches were made replete with imbecilic nonsense. One intervention in a debate in the House of Lords particularly amused me: "I am not sure what evidence the hon . Member is referring to or to what it testifies. Speaking with what limited knowledge is available to me as a professional man in this field, I may say that this is one long string of claptrap."
A lot of the populist language used during this period remains depressingly familiar, often being loaded with complaints that Northern constituents (we would say 'red wall' now) would be unhappy at Parliament debating decriminalisation rather than addressing their concerns. This particular interjection could easily be made by the likes of Farage today: "Ordinary people sense this. But not the ‘intellectuals’. The pundits in an ITV discussion welcomed the new procedure because it was ‘implementing the Wolfenden Report without actually passing anything through Parliament’. One said: ‘Public opinion has elements of the mob in it. This is the sort of subject in which public opinion has to be cheated.’ There speak the liberal fascists."
When the bill is passed, a lot of the sense is of weary inevitability. Noel Coward wrote: "Really some of the opposition speeches were so bigoted, ignorant and silly that one can hardly believe that adult minds, particularly those adult minds concerned with our Government, should be so basically idiotic. However, now all will be well apparently and the law will be changed at the next session. Nothing will convince the bigots, but the blackmailers will be discouraged and fewer haunted, terrified young men will commit suicide." Earlier, EM Forster had simply said: "Adding when I am nearly 85 how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousnesses that might have been avoided."
In practice, the Sexual Offences Bill was far from the end of the matter and Parker would doubtless have material for many more volumes if he ever wished to continue. Firstly, in keeping with the general English establishment tendency to infantilise people, it established an unequal age of consent at 21, that was only lowered to 18 in 1994 before finally being equalised at 16 in 2000. The unsustainable consequence of the 1967 bill was to create a social group that was now legal but entirely unequal in the absence of having the same rights as the rest of the general population. Depending on your definition, that was only unwound with the introduction of equal marriage in 2013, by which time it was largely impossible to discern why any of the demented hysteria around this had ever existed.
Broadly speaking, there are two central aspects to the two volumes. One is simply an account of gay relationships and a gay scene that is easily recognisable today, with a relative lack of hindrance from the law. One particularly amusing example is a newspaper article querying how people like Ivor Novello had remained bachelors for so long. Throughout the final volume, there's a marked sense that society had already moved towards decriminalisation long before Parliament timorously codified it: "From being the despised and rejected, not to say abhorred, on God’s earth, the queer is rapidly assuming the role of Hero of the Sixties, a romantic, mysterious figure tormented perhaps, but laughing gaily to hide the tears... in 1924 the mere acknowledgment that such monsters exist, that they breathe the same air, eat the same food and travel in the same tubes as the rest of us, was sufficient to cause a furore. To suggest that some homosexuals might be fairly happy, and the sort of people that ‘decent folk’ could even want to know, would have been unthinkable."
One particularly striking example of this is how gay themes were freely explored in writing well before decriminalisation. Drama was a difficult area, given that it was subject to censorship but this practice was essentially defeated long before the government saw fit to discontinue doing so. When the Lord Chamberlain demanded that scenes like a drag ball be excised from Osborne's A Patriot For Me, the theatre responded by temporarily re-classifying itself as a private member's club and putting on the full production regardless of what the Lord Chamberlain thought. As one censor complained about another play: "It is a serious Play about homosexuality and it can be said to achieve the stated object of the author in showing the results of persecution of homosexuals. In the course of achieving this object, the dialogue, acting and form of production (clothes, etc.) have all been devised to give homosexuals pleasure at seeing their way of life depicted on the stage."
Nonetheless, the other theme of the two volumes is the long march towards decriminalisation from the deliberations of the Wolfenden Report, the activities of the Homosexual Law Reform Society towards the final passage of the Sexual Offences Act. It's important to recall that particularly with the passing of the 1885 Labouchere amendment and its use to prosecute Oscar Wilde, Britain had the most draconian and puritanical legislation of any country, leading to a war against human nature that was both ruthlessly destructive and utterly futile. Political scandals involving gay sex were sufficiently common that Macmillan's initial reaction to the Profumo Affair was relief that it hadn't involved another man. Parker's book records myriads of police prosecutions being carried out in this period and lives destroyed, even as newspapers clamoured for firmer action against the 'beastly vice' and Parliamentary speeches were made replete with imbecilic nonsense. One intervention in a debate in the House of Lords particularly amused me: "I am not sure what evidence the hon . Member is referring to or to what it testifies. Speaking with what limited knowledge is available to me as a professional man in this field, I may say that this is one long string of claptrap."
A lot of the populist language used during this period remains depressingly familiar, often being loaded with complaints that Northern constituents (we would say 'red wall' now) would be unhappy at Parliament debating decriminalisation rather than addressing their concerns. This particular interjection could easily be made by the likes of Farage today: "Ordinary people sense this. But not the ‘intellectuals’. The pundits in an ITV discussion welcomed the new procedure because it was ‘implementing the Wolfenden Report without actually passing anything through Parliament’. One said: ‘Public opinion has elements of the mob in it. This is the sort of subject in which public opinion has to be cheated.’ There speak the liberal fascists."
When the bill is passed, a lot of the sense is of weary inevitability. Noel Coward wrote: "Really some of the opposition speeches were so bigoted, ignorant and silly that one can hardly believe that adult minds, particularly those adult minds concerned with our Government, should be so basically idiotic. However, now all will be well apparently and the law will be changed at the next session. Nothing will convince the bigots, but the blackmailers will be discouraged and fewer haunted, terrified young men will commit suicide." Earlier, EM Forster had simply said: "Adding when I am nearly 85 how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousnesses that might have been avoided."
In practice, the Sexual Offences Bill was far from the end of the matter and Parker would doubtless have material for many more volumes if he ever wished to continue. Firstly, in keeping with the general English establishment tendency to infantilise people, it established an unequal age of consent at 21, that was only lowered to 18 in 1994 before finally being equalised at 16 in 2000. The unsustainable consequence of the 1967 bill was to create a social group that was now legal but entirely unequal in the absence of having the same rights as the rest of the general population. Depending on your definition, that was only unwound with the introduction of equal marriage in 2013, by which time it was largely impossible to discern why any of the demented hysteria around this had ever existed.
November 25, 2024
The second volume in this brilliant - I mean what to call it, contribution to the canon? - work by Peter Parker was comprised of writings generally more known to me, but the tone of surprise in the press and police reports that men might find genuine companionship with each other remains profoundly sad. Parker has restored swathes of history, and has given it dignity.
September 12, 2024
Peter Parker has restored dozens of queer writers into the canon over the course of this two-volume survey of queer life in London between the end of World War Two and the partial decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967.
I’d not heard of Rupert Croft-Cooke until he cropped up in Volume One. Yet the value of his work is clear from his contribution in Volume Two, (taken from a later volume of his 23-part autobiography), where he suggests that (in the eyes of those who made the rules and those who toed the line) the gravest crime committed by queer people was to be seen to enjoying their queer lives:
“If those who framed the Wolfenden Report had made known the fact, of which they must have been aware, that queers are for the most part happy people who would not change their way of life if they could, their report would have received even less sympathy than it did. For our conscience is still a puritan one, and older than Puritanism goes back to mankind’s earliest moralists who cried that all happiness is sin and all misery virtue.”
I’d not heard of Rupert Croft-Cooke until he cropped up in Volume One. Yet the value of his work is clear from his contribution in Volume Two, (taken from a later volume of his 23-part autobiography), where he suggests that (in the eyes of those who made the rules and those who toed the line) the gravest crime committed by queer people was to be seen to enjoying their queer lives:
“If those who framed the Wolfenden Report had made known the fact, of which they must have been aware, that queers are for the most part happy people who would not change their way of life if they could, their report would have received even less sympathy than it did. For our conscience is still a puritan one, and older than Puritanism goes back to mankind’s earliest moralists who cried that all happiness is sin and all misery virtue.”
March 2, 2025
“Why, then, are there perhaps one million of these perverted men in our midst?” asks Quentin Crewe (a name which sounds as much like a provincial gay bar as a journalist writing for the Daily Mirror in 1965).
The second and concluding part of Peter Parker’s exhaustive survey brings us into the Swinging Sixties, but swinging for whom? Whilst a small coterie in the coffee bars of Chelsea and certain demimondaines in Soho may have swung, or spun like a top, for most, Britain was still a nation of pipe-smoking, gaberdine-sporting, missionary position conformity. If the press was the villain of the first volume, then in the second, the legislature - specifically the House of Lords, minor judiciary, police and other apparatus of the state take centre stage, just as partial decriminalisation hoves into view.
What comes across most is fear of the unknown and seeking scapegoats for the apparent decline of the country from its imperialist Victorian pomp to postwar reduced circumstances as the poor relation of Cousin America, whose empire was vanishing like dew in the morning sun. Always useful to find people to blame in those situations.
Of the fear, it was seemingly that (a) homosexuals were loveless perverts who would poison the well of humanity and (b) any attempt to portray them as otherwise would undermine the arguments for (a) and must be stamped out remorselessly. A circular argument then ensues.
“If it is a loving embrace,” says a censor in the Lord Chamberlain’s office of a play they were considering, “then we should invoke section 14 and cut it.” S14 being the bit of the Theatres Act that allowed the LC to ban any work considered likely to cause a breach of the peace.
As for scapegoats, then, as now, a sense of enveloping panic that society doesn’t work so well and there isn’t the money to buy our way out of problems like there once was. “People continued to insist that ‘sodomy’ was much to blame for the country’s decline,” observes Parker tartly - rather than wondering whether the failure to face up to colonial legacy, industrial decline and an insular ignorance are perhaps the problems which need addressing. For example, whilst the public worried about delinquent youth, knife crime and the growth of armed robbery, Metropolitan Police commissioner Joseph Simpson took it upon himself to assign the equivalent of nine full time officers to dealing with West End cottaging. One likes to think of the old fool turning in his grave today at the thought of police marching in Pride parades.
Some Men In London is a significant contributor to queer history and not to be gainsayed - if I didn’t find this volume quite as compelling as its predecessor it’s perhaps because in place of the voluminous news cuttings and contemporary accounts of its predecessor (still present, but in less quantity), there’s a much greater reliance on published work - books, play texts, celebrated diaries - which somehow makes it feel less immediate. Still, overall, Parker has crafted a work of a high order.
The second and concluding part of Peter Parker’s exhaustive survey brings us into the Swinging Sixties, but swinging for whom? Whilst a small coterie in the coffee bars of Chelsea and certain demimondaines in Soho may have swung, or spun like a top, for most, Britain was still a nation of pipe-smoking, gaberdine-sporting, missionary position conformity. If the press was the villain of the first volume, then in the second, the legislature - specifically the House of Lords, minor judiciary, police and other apparatus of the state take centre stage, just as partial decriminalisation hoves into view.
What comes across most is fear of the unknown and seeking scapegoats for the apparent decline of the country from its imperialist Victorian pomp to postwar reduced circumstances as the poor relation of Cousin America, whose empire was vanishing like dew in the morning sun. Always useful to find people to blame in those situations.
Of the fear, it was seemingly that (a) homosexuals were loveless perverts who would poison the well of humanity and (b) any attempt to portray them as otherwise would undermine the arguments for (a) and must be stamped out remorselessly. A circular argument then ensues.
“If it is a loving embrace,” says a censor in the Lord Chamberlain’s office of a play they were considering, “then we should invoke section 14 and cut it.” S14 being the bit of the Theatres Act that allowed the LC to ban any work considered likely to cause a breach of the peace.
As for scapegoats, then, as now, a sense of enveloping panic that society doesn’t work so well and there isn’t the money to buy our way out of problems like there once was. “People continued to insist that ‘sodomy’ was much to blame for the country’s decline,” observes Parker tartly - rather than wondering whether the failure to face up to colonial legacy, industrial decline and an insular ignorance are perhaps the problems which need addressing. For example, whilst the public worried about delinquent youth, knife crime and the growth of armed robbery, Metropolitan Police commissioner Joseph Simpson took it upon himself to assign the equivalent of nine full time officers to dealing with West End cottaging. One likes to think of the old fool turning in his grave today at the thought of police marching in Pride parades.
Some Men In London is a significant contributor to queer history and not to be gainsayed - if I didn’t find this volume quite as compelling as its predecessor it’s perhaps because in place of the voluminous news cuttings and contemporary accounts of its predecessor (still present, but in less quantity), there’s a much greater reliance on published work - books, play texts, celebrated diaries - which somehow makes it feel less immediate. Still, overall, Parker has crafted a work of a high order.
April 27, 2025
The second and final volume of Peter Parker’s fascinating anthology of letters and diary entries, extracts from Hansard, novels and plays, newspaper articles about spy scandals and gangsters and murder enquiries, reports by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, film scripts, guide books and sociological investigations – all centred on male homosexuality and attitudes towards it in the final years before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967. He even finds room for a classic Julian and Sandy sketch from Round the Horne (‘Jules’ marvellous – he’s a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright’).
I particularly liked the excerpts from plays: from the stiff upper lip Look on Tempests in 1960, in which a middle-class family is aghast at having an offstage gay son, to Joe Orton’s cheerfully subversive Entertaining Mr Sloane and Charles Dyer’s dispiriting Staircase (incidentally, the 1969 film version with Rex Harrison and Richard Burton, bizarrely cast as the two cantankerous old queens is currently on Youtube; it has to be seen to be believed).
The Biographical Notes contribute an additional layer of interest: it really is intensely curious that the married and presumably heterosexual Dyer should have used his own name for one of the characters in Staircase and an anagram of it for the other. I also laughed at this nugget under the entry for Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran, who sponsored the Sexual Offences Act in the House of Lords:
Arran also presented a Bill to the Lords for the protection of badgers. Asked why this, unlike the one to implement the Wolfenden recommendations, had not passed, he replied: ‘There are not many badgers in the House of Lords.’
Finally, the intercutting between Kenneth Williams’ diary and that of his friend Joe Orton, shortly to be murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, just as the Bill becomes law is highly effective; I might almost say cinematic.
I particularly liked the excerpts from plays: from the stiff upper lip Look on Tempests in 1960, in which a middle-class family is aghast at having an offstage gay son, to Joe Orton’s cheerfully subversive Entertaining Mr Sloane and Charles Dyer’s dispiriting Staircase (incidentally, the 1969 film version with Rex Harrison and Richard Burton, bizarrely cast as the two cantankerous old queens is currently on Youtube; it has to be seen to be believed).
The Biographical Notes contribute an additional layer of interest: it really is intensely curious that the married and presumably heterosexual Dyer should have used his own name for one of the characters in Staircase and an anagram of it for the other. I also laughed at this nugget under the entry for Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran, who sponsored the Sexual Offences Act in the House of Lords:
Arran also presented a Bill to the Lords for the protection of badgers. Asked why this, unlike the one to implement the Wolfenden recommendations, had not passed, he replied: ‘There are not many badgers in the House of Lords.’
Finally, the intercutting between Kenneth Williams’ diary and that of his friend Joe Orton, shortly to be murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, just as the Bill becomes law is highly effective; I might almost say cinematic.
December 23, 2025
This is a deeply engaging and quietly powerful portrait of a community living, loving, and negotiating identity in a city on the brink of social change. The book beautifully captures the texture of everyday queer life—moments of joy, fear, companionship, secrecy, and resilience—while situating them within the political and cultural currents of the 1960s. What makes it especially compelling is its human warmth: the people here never feel like historical “subjects,” but like fully realized lives whose hopes and vulnerabilities still resonate today.
The narrative is rich with atmosphere, evoking smoky clubs, cramped flats, tense streets, and intimate friendships, all rendered with empathy rather than nostalgia. It shows how courage often looked ordinary, how connection could be both fragile and defiant, and how community was built in small, persistent acts. The book balances careful historical insight with storytelling that feels alive and immediate, inviting readers to reflect on how far society has come—and how much is rooted in the bravery of those years.
Thoughtful, poignant, and quietly celebratory, Some Men in London is both an essential historical document and a deeply moving read, offering a luminous reminder of queer endurance and humanity.
The narrative is rich with atmosphere, evoking smoky clubs, cramped flats, tense streets, and intimate friendships, all rendered with empathy rather than nostalgia. It shows how courage often looked ordinary, how connection could be both fragile and defiant, and how community was built in small, persistent acts. The book balances careful historical insight with storytelling that feels alive and immediate, inviting readers to reflect on how far society has come—and how much is rooted in the bravery of those years.
Thoughtful, poignant, and quietly celebratory, Some Men in London is both an essential historical document and a deeply moving read, offering a luminous reminder of queer endurance and humanity.
February 12, 2025
My only quibble with this magnificent tome is the absence of an index. Given the cornucopia of material and the cross-cutting themes, a subject index would certainly help to track the processes that are explored through this multifarious collection of texts. There are a whole selection of play texts, interspersed with the responses of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. These usefully trace the stages whereby the ban on homosexuality on stage was gradually undermined, even if Parker’s selection does not quite go up to the abolition of theatrical censorship in 1968. Instead, his terminus point is the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1967. It is less easy to pick out the changing climate of opinion on this subject. Iconic moments, such as the film ‘Victim’ are picked out alongside the clampdown on cottaging that persisted until the Oppenheim case in 1965. Homophobia is shown as rife in sections of the press. Yet a trajectory toward greater knowledge and tolerance of homosexuality is discernible here. In mapping that process, Parker has produced a remarkable and very valuable work.
May 18, 2025
Another fascinating insight into the lives of gay men in 1960s' London, following on from volume 1 which covered the post-war period. Set in the run-up to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, it shows a slow liberalisation but also an enormous amount of repression and anxiety. A must read for gay men!
February 1, 2025
Fascinatingly interesting. Historical. Brilliantly set out so easy to read. The things that were said and thought about homosexuality at the time! 🙄 And the way gays were treated. Hardly seems believable now.
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