Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945–1959

Some Men in London #1

by Peter Parker

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.

In a major new anthology, Peter Parker explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they were well-known figures such as John Gielgud, ‘Chips’ Channon and E.M. Forster, 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 first volume, from 1945 to 1959, details a community forced to live at constant risk of blackmail or prison. Yet it also shows a thriving and joyous subculture, one that enriched a mainstream culture often ignorant of its debt to gay creators. Some Men In London is a testament to queer life, which was always much more complex than newspapers, governments and the Metropolitan Police Force imagined.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, London, Gay, Politics

464 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2024

About the author

Librarian 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.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

A really excellent and comprehensive anthology focusing on queer men in London post war to the end of the 50s. Includes extracts from newspapers, letters, diaries, novels, plays, and quite a bit from the censors of plays. Many queer voices.

Obviously a lot of it is homophobic, and some of it really vile stuff. The last extract of the book is, jawdroppingly, a court report about a young man accused of sexual assaults on two women. The accused had had homosexual encounters before, and a psychologist literally described his attempted rapes *in court* as "a step in the right direction". I mean...fucking hell. Fuck.

A lot of this makes one feel, as one might feel now, that the British press en masse needs to be shot at dawn. However, there are also lots of non-awful pieces--loving, thoughtful, atmospheric, defiant, humane, and often very funny. I shall cherish Noel Coward's remark on seeing a poster of Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them: "Why not? Everybody else has."

Brief but very useful annotations from the anthologist. This includes, in the biographical notes, a comment that one individual's book Come Cruising "disappointingly turns out to be about yachting".

A fantastic bit of work bringing the queer London 1950s to life. Highly readable and invaluable. I shall get the 1960s volume.

[Emily G · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful deep dive into a specific period of LGBT history.

This was a wonderful anthology, edited to perfection and provided a brilliant insight into post-war life for 'Some Men in London'.

Thankyou to Netgalley and the Publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Martin Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Peter Wildeblood’s A Way of Life (1956):
“They undressed quietly, folding up their clothes and putting them on separate chairs. When Johnny was naked, he began to comb his hair with great concentration, in front of a mirror which hung on the wall. The flesh on his back was white and smoothly muscled. Gordon had never looked at a man’s body in this way before; he saw it for the first time as something to desire and fear, an instrument of tenderness and annihilation whose purposes he could not know. Closing his eyes, he stretched out his hands and felt Johnny’s shoulders firm and warm against his palms.
The light burned all night, looking down upon the bed like the fiery eye of an angel.”

[Harry McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential panorama of the lives of queer men post-war. Funny and surprising and determined.

[Jon Paul Roberts]

Expansive, immersive, and expertly edited. In all, an enthralling anthology.

[Christopher Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking forward to part two coming out in Sept , so so satisfying ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[Anthony McGill · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silly thing to say about an anthology, I know, but this is a bit episodic. You're just getting into someone's diary or novel or letter, and the narrative switches. I suppose when it comes to the really interesting ones you can always hunt out the full text. That aside, all I can say is how stupid it was to spend all that time and resources persecuting those over the age of 21 for having consensual sex. It's a bit like today with the police infiltration of environmental pressure groups. Which also involves the use of agents provocateurs to induce otherwise law-abiding members of the public to commit 'offences'. Plain daft.

[Daniel Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful anthology of queer life in Britain (largely London) after WWII. First hand accounts paint a picture of happiness in a challenging social environment.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really first rate anthology, and I this goes for volume II 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.

[Bookshire Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thoroughly researched view of the life of gay men in London. The materials include letters, diaries, newspaper articles, court records, fiction excerpts and more. It will give you a good idea of what gay men faced during these fifteen years. It was the period when the Wolfenden Report was conducted and published and we see here also its immediate reception - this is the part I found most interesting, together with the glimpses into private diaries and correspondence.

I would appreciate more thorough commentary on the individual pieces to provide more detailed context. The biographies of people included in this volume are very useful.

I received the ARC through NetGalley and I'm providing an honest review in exchange.

[Mike Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notorious specimens: not an easy read, though compelling, this. Peter Parker has, in an impressive feat of collation, assembled a variety of pieces on the homosexual experience in those difficult years between VE Day and the end of the 50s, an era of grim austerity and conformity, which, despite the flicker of hope afforded by the Wolfenden Report (which after protracted delays by both Conservative and Labour governments would make its way into law as partial decriminalisation), saw increasing suppression and oppression of gay and bisexual men (and to a lesser extent, but only because of greater invisibility, lesbians and trans).

What shines out is the courage, resilience and stoicism of many of the men quoted here, and the bravery of what would now be called allies. This is a time when it was apparently perfectly fine for a police psychologist to tell a court that a teenage sex offender was ‘improving’ because he’d molested two girls, whereas in the past he’d been convicted for assaults on boys - so that’s alright then, he’s just a normal, healthy rapist! And where it was quite routine for respectable people to demand that anyone who was ‘that way’ should be strangled at birth. “Sybil, don’t be silly,” says a character confronted with this bile whilst out shopping at a department store in Peter Wildeblood’s Against The Law, with admirable common sense: “if that were done, we should have no plays to go to, no books to read, no television to watch, and what is more, this place would be self service!”

What also comes across is the role of the press - and their attendant acolytes in politics and the church. The media in particular led a spittle-flecked campaign of hysteria against queers (which persisted for many years after the span of this book - I still recall The Sun for example in the 1980s referring to gay vicars in the C or E as “pulpit poufs” and it didn’t end there). Good news though - time and decrepitude has at least seen most of the worst offenders off: the Daily Sketch (extinct), the Sunday Pictorial (gone and forgotten), the Screws of the World (self-immolated), the Daily Express (moribund). Perhaps a commission should be set up to examine the issue of reparations for all the damage and harm caused to countless lives by these worthless rags?

More positively, Some Men In London is evidence that not everyone took it lying down and not everyone who wasn’t a homosexual at the time was automatically a purse-lipped hypocritical old square. For all the self-appointed ‘clean up groups’ advocating the return of flogging (and not for fun) and mostly comprising in Simon Hoggart’s phrase, “old women of both sexes”, there were plenty prepared to stick their necks out in the cause of allowing consenting adults to make their own choices. Simon Raven, in a 1958 response to an utterly batshit letter from a seemingly-deranged Tory MP, who quoted two verses from Deuteronomy and signed off, said, “this consists solely of two verses…in language which is a pleasure to read but scarcely indicates a sane approach to a soluble problem of law and ethics. It is as if a biologist sought support from Herodotus. Let us then have civilised and logical argument about this matter, or let us drop it all together.” Hear hear!

Finally, in case it all seems too harsh, we can finish with “Two of the Tweed Set” from the News of the Screws in March 1959. A London beat copper “received a complaint about two women wearing tweed skirts”, one in a blue jacket, the other red. Needless to say when taken in for questioning, they were found to be men. At Bow Street, they pleaded guilty to “insulting behaviour and importuning men for an immoral purpose,” said the paper, becoming palpably excited at this notion. (Which probably meant they’d done nothing more than ask a couple of passers by if they fancied a good time - such were the priorities of law enforcement in the Metropolitan Police at the time.) One of the convicted men “in his statement, …said: ‘Being homosexual is very hard. We do try to be normal.’” Quite so, madam.

[Sigurður · Rating 5 out of 5]

Besta bók sem ég hef lesið í langan tíma. Sagan er vissulega sorgleg og átakanleg á köflum, en bókin er vel upp sett og vönduð á allan hátt.

[Ian B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part one of a two-volume anthology of journalism, excerpts from novels and plays, speeches in Parliament and the Lords, evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, diary entries, personal letters and letters to newspapers, even the occasional piece of poetry, all to do with male homosexuality and attitudes to it in the post-war years. I would never have paid £30 for a hardback copy, so was glad to get this and its sequel (1960-1967) for 99p each on Kindle a few months ago. There is a huge amount of absolutely fascinating material in this book, and although the frequent court reports of men arrested for ‘persistent importuning’ and debates by lawmakers palled a bit, I understand that they had to be included in these proportions to give an accurate impression of the era.

I recently read Hugo Greenhalgh’s book about George Lucas’s diaries and objected to him putting so much of himself into it. I wondered then whether ‘the diaries, unadulterated, would simply have been too depressing and repetitive – or their style too fussy and affected – or their politics too reactionary?’ Peter Parker includes several Lucas entries unfamiliar from Greenhalgh, and I have to say, yes, it seems they were all those things, and that – obviously – a person can be simultaneously an interesting historical source and an unsympathetic, tiresome and not very likeable individual.

It’s not all grim, and some of the extracts made me laugh. Even in the midst of a hostile Daily Herald article, ‘Men Without Women,’ by George Munro (26th November 1958), we get this gem:

I looked at the shabby little, bewizened man. There were traces of make-up on his face. His frayed cuff spoke of hardship. But there was bravery too, in the boldness with which he invited me to appraise his toupée.

and from Peter Wildeblood’s ‘lightly fictionalized account of London’s homosexual world,’ A Way of Life (1956):

About five years ago Percy had made the mistake of telling his mother the secrets of his love-life, which were perfectly obvious to everyone except her, and their relationship had suddenly assumed a grotesque intimacy. She had become his confidante, and now they went everywhere together: plump Percy and his no less plump, peroxided mama... They looked so much alike that some gossips maintained that they took it in turns to be Mother.

[Fred Langridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book. It's an anthology of extracts from newspaper articles, diaries, court reports, letters, parliamentary speeches and some fiction, with minimal editorial comments, depicting the experience and representation of queer men in London. The extracts are arranged into a compelling narrative - I found it much more absorbing than I expected. Looking forward to reading volume 2.

[Ambrogio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m very pleased that this book exists - a kind of documentary history of queer life (largely criminal persecution of queer men) in London in the period before the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Parker has assembled a wide range of sources and reading them is gripping, immersive, often moving. I think Parker could have done a lot more editing - names appear in the sources that are not glossed, and his very short head notes often take an enormous amount for granted. But this is a book that deserves to be read, not least to show how far we have come, and is especially useful on showing the cruelty and hypocrisy of many in the UK’s ruling class.

[Damian North · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing.

Following a conversation with Jim Mac Sweeney, the manager of the independent bookshop in London - Gays The Word, he persuaded me to read this historical book on a period of gay history within London that ranges from the end of the second world war until the partial decimalization of homosexuality by parliament. To be honest, this would not normally be the kind of book I would opt to read, but thanks to Jim it turned out to be a great read and a great insight into a time that I knew only a little about, and that was through the trial of Peter Wildeblood and the writings of Quentin Crisp.

Taking extracts from newspaper articles, plays, novels, biographies, letters and personal diaries, Peter Parker has perfectly brought to life the rawness of what it meant to be a gay man in London at time when not only was it illegal, but when the police actively sought out gay men to bring them before the courts and whereupon the press destroyed their reputations. Read in this day, it seems otherworldly that such persecution could have taken place, but as Peter Parker himself stated in his opening, he has compiled these reports to show 'In an era when homosexual men have legal rights and can even marry, we need to be reminded what people really thought, felt and said in the past - if only to ensure we never return there.'

If ever there was a time for such a book to be compiled and read, it is for this day and age in which we are living. A fantastic read - and I have already put in my order for the second part - just a pity I am unable to make it over to London for the book launch and signing.

Damian North
Author

[Vicuña · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an extraordinary pot pourri of social history. It’s linear from 1945 to 1959, but within that timescale, incorporates a diverse range of views. Peter Parker has trawled resources to give the reader insight into gay life in London. He does so in a way that should appeal to anyone interested in social history, books or the arts.

I was drawn to the title by excerpts from numerous well known figures including Tennessee Williams, Chips Channon, Forster, J B Priestley…the list is endless. The biographical notes about those included are extensive, along with a comprehensive bibliography, including newspapers and periodicals.

It’s a truly compelling insight into life in postwar London. A city of secrets and subculture which is difficult to comprehend only 60 or 70 years later. The stories of individuals, from the ordinary man in the street to others, better known, are touching and totally engaging. Particularly so against a backdrop of the Wolfenden Report into homosexuality and the legislative changes proposed. It would take some years to see these recommendations passed into law and any meaningful change. Some of this reads as if from the Dark Ages and the freedoms currently enjoyed by a minority group owe much to a handful who endured persecution and discrimination for many years. Very readable, so much so that I’ve also bought the companion volume which covers the years 1960 to 1967.

[Alexander Gardiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

They say the past is a foreign country, but what a bitter, intolerant place Britain was in the 1950s. This collection of diaries, letters, books and speeches from gay men and those that saw them as deviants really brings home what dark days these were. Entrapment by coppers keen to up their arrest record that would leave to public humilation and career ruin.
The Lord Chamberlain's office, which in 1957 still had to approve scripts before they could be performed in theatres, felt that they needed to relax their rules given shifting public opinion yet still their list of what was forbidden included the following:
(c) We would not allow a homosexual character to be included if there was no need for such an inclusion.
(d) We would not allow any "funny" innuendos or jokes on the subject.
(f) We will not allow embraces between males or practical demonstrations of love.
Thankfully we have moved on, but the antics of Trump and his supporters suggests not as far as we would have hoped.

[Pippa Catterall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable anthology! It draws on an impressive range of sources as the bibliography makes clear. An equally large range of lived experience is covered. In the process the influence of homophobia in Parliament and the press is also given due weight. The predatory nature of police surveillance is also brought out. The result is a comprehensive picture of a shifting landscape, with due weight given both to the well-known turning points such as the Wildeblood trial and the Wolfenden Report, and to less familiar episodes such as the relaxation of the ban on representation of homosexuality on stage in 1958. The compilation includes a dazzling array of material from police reports to sociology and psychology. It even includes some poems. And the gently unobtrusive commentary steers the reader expertly through the unfolding story. All in all, this is a model to emulate.

[Peadaar Morrissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This anthology is an absolute gem, beautifully capturing the vibrant lives of queer men in London during the specified period. I couldn't put it down—it was such a page-turner that I devoured it all in a weekend!

While some of the information was familiar, there were many magical pieces that were incredibly exciting to discover, especially the enchanting Denton Welch extract, among many others!

Expertly edited, it's filled with detailed and fascinating accounts. Overall, it's an engaging and enlightening read that's both informative and deeply interesting.

[Mark Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers a period that I have been curious about for many years. it provides some fascinating insight into the lives of queer men, showcasing the good and the bad. Naturally, it can be quite the difficult read, as it shows just how hateful people can be, but I still regard this book as a very important piece of literature.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid and important work of history/ethnography. Reading the introduction alone even and with the retrieval of the voices and words and accounts of the men themselves raises our empathy to a high level. Thoughtfully set out in thematic terms. Sadly, the backlash today makes one shudder that this recent past still threatens

[KC · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very thorough and expansive anthology that provided a large collection of accounts of queer men living in London during the specified period. It is well-edited and contains an extensive amount of detailed information. In summary it was a very interesting and informative read.

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important and truly unique anthology that is bound to become a classic.

[Felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fascinating read. In parts heart-breaking, entertaining, insightful and demoralising. A must-read for any gay man, if only to reflect on the privilege of having been born in a different age.

[Tyler Tousley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting, but a bit dry and disconnected in some parts. I'll likely read the 2nd one in time.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminating.