Post-war Perverts1 |
The Lord Chamberlain, our stage censor, bans any mention of homosexuality.
TERENCE RATTIGAN
In summer 2010, I visited an exhibition, A Dictionary of Dress, held at the unlikely venue of the Victoria and Albert Museum repository – once the Post Office Savings Bank – near Shepherd’s Bush. I turned a corner and the repository loomed abruptly over a gentrified side street, the artisans’ cottages pastel painted and flanked by French cafés and twee boutiques. The building must always have been and still is a thundering, oppressive irruption into this once humble neighbourhood of corner shops and modest lives. Astonishing in its grandeur, it is a sublime monument both to the banking principle and to the wearisome burden of small savings, poised somewhere between prison, barracks and palace.
The theme of the exhibition, curated by Adam Phillips and Judith Clark,2 was the meanings of words in relation to dress. Clark’s surreal conceptual creations were thought-provoking installations on words such as ‘comfortable’ and ‘pretentious’, ‘diaphanous’ and ’armoured’, placed at strategic intervals through the endless rooms. Yet what was primarily a meditation on words had to compete with the repository itself as small groups of visitors were escorted on a journey from the giddy heights of the lead roof down tiled staircase after tiled staircase, through room after room of objects assembled endlessly to what purpose, held in a perpetual limbo, simply accumulated for the sake of accumulation, never seen. The effect was of chaos barely held at bay, as if all the objects in the world had to be gathered up into this mountain of things, swords next to toys, vases, chairs, cellos, no longer arranged or belonging, disoriented and disorienting in a giddying void of surplus that almost negated the idea of objects as precious and meaningful.
My visit to the exhibition in West London was a journey back into childhood, because I went to school nearby in Brook Green and the school is still there, built in the same period as the repository – around 1900 – but in a more gracious style somewhere between Lutyens and neo-Georgian. I remembered borrowing a copy of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s lachrymose tale of blighted lesbian love, from Hammersmith Central Library, another imposing building from the beginning of the twentieth century, which still stands in Shepherd’s Bush Road. (The book was on a restricted list, so would-be borrowers had to endure the embarrassment of asking for it specifically, one of many trials of growing up lesbian.) But while the 100-year-old buildings have survived, the Hammersmith Palais de Danse – a reminder of the cheerful side of the austerity years and its democratic mass pleasures – no longer faces the library across the road.
My brief stroll into the past coincided with a reading of Richard Hornsey’s The Spiv and the Architect, an account of the collision between post-war queer London and the social democratic planning of the 1940s and 1950s.3 At first I feared that Hornsey’s critique of the post-war settlement might resemble Kynaston’s. Hornsey is indeed critical of post-war planning, but his perspective is different and more interesting. He describes how the post-war functionalist vision of a stable society set out by planners such as Patrick Abercrombie came up against the Other of this vision: the post-war (male) homosexual, the deviant who, like the spiv, could not be contained. Lesbians do not feature in his account, but I think this is justifiable, for they played a role rather different from the feared figure of the gay man, were pathetic creatures who had missed out by not ‘getting a man’, rather than being perceived as dangerous.
Hornsey’s account begins with a telling metaphor taken from evidence given to the Wolfenden Committee, set up in 1954 to make recommendations on male homosexuality and (heterosexual) prostitution. In written evidence, Peter Wildeblood, a homosexual prominent because of a sensational trial which had resulted in prison sentences for several well-known upper-middle-class gays, including himself, likened homosexuality to colour blindness – in other words, a natural deviation in a minority of individuals, for which they should not be punished. Sir Jack Wolfenden, the chair of the committee, made a note in the margin, answering the question ‘Is it logical to punish them?’ with ‘Yes, if colour-blindness results in them driving cars across traffic lights’. This note succinctly summarises the collision (I initially typed ‘collusion’, and perhaps there was also a peculiar collusion in the post-war discourse) between conflicting ideologies of desirable social behaviour, which is the subject of Hornsey’s book.
Hornsey’s first discussion is of Patrick Abercrombie’s plan for post-war London, The Greater London Plan (1944). This blueprint was to be frustrated by the exigencies of post-war shortages and short-term pressures, but Hornsey regards it, along with the 1946 ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition and the 1951 ‘Southbank Exhibition’ at the Festival of Britain, as a crucial ideological statement. Not only was the dark Victorian city of slums, disease and crime contrasted with the modern world of pedestrian precincts, landscaped green spaces and functional zoning; the reconstruction of London (and this would apply to all major cities) was to be ‘the formative crucible for a cybernetic mode of urban governance in which social order, stability and national cohesion were pursued through the fragmentation of the populace into mobile individuals and their insertion into different patterns of circulation’. The Plan did more than advocate the dispersal of a London population considered too large for its own good; it did more than seek to provide adequate housing and open spaces; it attempted to create a city ‘outside historical time’ where ‘by discreetly spatialising daily activities and ordering these within prescribed routines … conflict, change and social upheaval were perpetually kept at bay by an endless repetition’.
Hornsey links this to another key text of the period, T. H. Marshall’s 1950 Citizenship and Social Class. Its argument (crudely summarised) was that if all members of society were and felt themselves to be ‘citizens’ (in today’s parlance ‘stakeholders’) then this made the abolition of social class unnecessary. Indeed, class distinctions could be part of a functionalist consensus in which everyone had their place in a stable and well-ordered society.
Hornsey argues that Abercrombie took this socially cohesive functionalism in a sinister direction, in that he was keen, indeed determined, to include in it every daily activity, even the most seemingly innocent. Leisure as well as work was to become yet another disciplinary function. ‘Escapism’ could lead to ‘untidiness’ if not properly organised, and the Plan was ‘particularly attentive to those interstitial portions of the day in which the disciplinary imperatives of functional zoning were at their weakest’ – times, it was implied, though not stated, when Satan might make work for idle hands (or other body parts) to do. The commute, for example, ‘as a period of neither work, domesticity nor, properly, leisure … [was] a site of anxiety – an unproductive time defined by no activity and thus haunted by the spectre of social instability. The weekday lunch hour was another such potentially disruptive moment.’ Special areas of parkland were to be provided for this purpose, free, Hornsey suggests, from the dangers of ‘metropolitan sexual disorder’.
For sexual disorder is the unspoken fear occluded by the busily intrusive functionalism of planning ideology. The word is never mentioned, but this is a surveillance society, a utopia in which nothing unplanned can possibly occur. Hornsey notes that even the routes through ‘Britain Can Make It’ and the ‘South Bank Exhibition’ were carefully prescribed, but this was how the planners wanted the whole of society to be, for, as The Architectural Review put it:
There are many places where the town-planner needs to guide the pedestrian in one direction rather than another and prevent his feet straying where they shouldn’t. Rather than rely on the solid wall or the forbidding high iron railing he can make use of many more imaginative means, generically known as ‘hazards’, which, instead of putting a solid barrier in the pedestrian’s path, suggest a barrier by subtle psychological means … the potential decorative value of these is illustrated in many parts of the exhibition.4
The ‘South Bank Exhibition’ was marked by the mid-century’s continuing faith in technological and scientific advance (even as the developments in nuclear armaments was beginning to undermine this faith). This was deployed to reinforce Abercrombie’s highly conservative view of society as an organism in which each part is essential to the functioning of the whole – the false analogy of a society to a single body; the City of London, for example, is not the ‘heart’ of London, or Britain, in the way that a heart is essential to the functioning of a mammal. (This view, of course, has no place for the homosexual, who is unable to promote the functioning of the whole of society, since he is barren and sterile.) The optimistic belief in science was beginning to be undermined by the terrifying reality of the atom bomb and nuclear warfare, but here the atom was domesticated. Textile designs, for example, were based on the atom, and in the science exhibition the atom was presented as an eternal and stable structure.
Above all, the post-war planners focused on the needs of the family. Abercrombie’s plan had local neighbourhoods at its heart, and these neighbourhoods were significantly planned around the local primary school. A specific type of family as much as a specific type of neighbourhood was promoted as ideal, for this was the brief heyday of the nuclear family: the breadwinner husband; the wife who was essentially a home-maker and housewife, although she might engage in part-time paid work; and the two or three children that were considered the ideal.
Just as Marshall’s work was the ideological bible for class, so Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott and Elizabeth Bott’s Family and Social Network were key texts that promoted a particular sociological view of what family life was about. The research that underpinned Bott’s book was based on interviews with a small number of families, so perhaps her findings should be treated with some reserve. They are nevertheless interesting, for what she found was a distinct difference in the attitudes of working-class and middle-class couples towards sex. For the former, sex seemed to be a disturbing irruption, but the attitude of the middle-class pairs may be aligned with the whole social engineering enterprise outlined by Hornsey, in that it reflected an ideology prevalent in liberal circles since before the Second World War, namely that sexuality was important and should be enjoyable and fulfilling, but only within carefully delineated boundaries that included birth control and consequently a limit on the number of children in a family. This sexuality was still seen as essentially related to procreation. The childless couple, along with the homosexual, were condemned as sterile. The ‘bachelor’, once an unremarkable figure in British life throughout all classes, had become suspect. The spinster, of course, had long been an object of ridicule.
The working-class attitude allegedly uncovered by Bott hints at a reality different from the orderly enjoyment advocated by sexual reformers: at the disruptive force of passion, romantic obsession and sheer lust. Hornsey argues that just as the post-war spiv represented the destructive force of economic individualism and free enterprise, so the queer represented the parallel dangers of a sexual free-for-all in a post-war Britain in which the relatively relaxed, even frivolous attitude towards sex, found at least among the upper classes between the wars, had been replaced – rather curiously alongside a new democratic optimism – ‘with a new pursed-lipped morality and Cold War chilliness’ (as Miranda Carter described it in her biography of Anthony Blunt).
Hornsey argues that quite apart from the changing moral climate, a more practical reason for the crackdown on homosexual behaviour in public was a change in police practices. Surveillance of urinals and street corners was stepped up ‘in response to a generally perceived increase in visible queer activity. The number of men appearing before the magistrates rose exponentially – from 106 in 1942 to 212 in 1947.’ The result was the belief, pumped up by the tabloids, that homosexual activity itself was increasing and the country in the grip of an epidemic of unnatural vice. The sensational Montagu Pitt-Rivers trial in 1953 (in which Wildeblood had been a defendant) further confirmed this view. Such things could only happen in the old Victorian city of crime and vice that the postwar planners aimed to eliminate. In the wake of this trial – and of another, that of the actor John Gielgud for soliciting in a public lavatory – cafés, railway stations, parks and other indeterminate areas through which the populace was supposed to flow became suspect, since they made possible the loitering of the queer, the pervert out to seduce and corrupt the innocent and the weak.
Gay activity could not, however, be entirely suppressed. One of the most entertaining aspects of The Spiv and the Architect resides in its analyses of popular culture. Hornsey uses a mixture of psychoanalytic and deconstruction theory to expose hidden queer meanings in films, posters, book covers and interiors of the period. For example, he reinvents The Lavender Hill Mob as a coded tale of queer male sexuality. On the surface it is the story of a bullion heist, but Hornsey makes a convincing case for a hidden subtext whereby the conspirators are engaged in ‘a parody of heterosexual romance’. Within the safe space of the cinema auditorium ‘the illicit pleasures of social transgression and urban disorder that were elsewhere being excised from the moral projection of the replanned metropolis could be legitimately, if momentarily, enjoyed … the audience … joyfully complicit in … a very queer mode of reading, experiencing and negotiating the city’.
The Lavender Hill Mob was made in 1951, which was also the year in which Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union. Burgess was notoriously gay, and one aspect of the Cold War anti-Communist witch-hunts was the link made between treachery and homosexuality. The homosexual was a dissembler. The Montagu Pitt-Rivers trial exposed the ways in which gay men recognised one another, their secret language and gestures – although ironically, as Hornsey points out, the plainclothes ‘pretty policemen’, now responsible for spying on and cracking down on queer activity in public places, were just as ambiguous as the queers they were hunting down, for ‘a similar disparity between appearance and motive … legitimated [their] access to the illicit codes of queer communication’. At the same time, in an unintentionally parodic return to the playfulness of The Lavender Hill Mob, Burgess and Maclean made their escape from Britain on a cross-channel pleasure steamer, theatrically catching the boat only at the very last moment.
The anarchic pleasures of this Ealing comedy could not be tolerated in real life (and even the film had to end with the capture of the miscreant, played by Alec Guinness). Nevertheless, after the Montagu trial, a new and partly medicalised understanding of gay love – one that was equivalent in the psychological realm to the post-war planners’ vision of a functionalist and stable society – gained traction. Peter Wildeblood himself made a distinction between the invert – a man (or in The Well of Loneliness, a woman) who was born gay or became gay in early childhood, and whom it was therefore inappropriate to punish – and the pervert, a character of the lowest moral quality, who was either corrupted and happy to be so or rejoiced in his deviant sexuality, whether innate or acquired. The Wolfenden Report, published in 1957, promoted this analysis and hastened the emergence of a new type, the respectable homosexual. Here, an archetypal text was D. J. West’s Homosexuality, published by Penguin in 1960. West (pen name of Gordon Westwood, who was himself gay) portrayed the ‘good’ gay as an upright citizen in control of his sexuality. His sexual being was rigorously confined to the private sphere; he would never hang about street corners or importune in ‘cottages’ and he was probably a middle-class professional man with a serious career. The class implications of the Montagu trial, with its trysts between working-class servicemen and upper-class toffs, were thus reworked in social psychological mode.
This was consistent with the dominant theme of the Wolfenden Report: a strengthening of the public/private divide. So far as prostitutes were concerned, the report wanted them off the street; it also recommended that homosexual activity between two consenting adults over 21 years of age in private should be partially decriminalised (this became law only in 1967, a decade later).
The public/private divide became an important focus for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, since one of its implications was a reinforcement or at least an endorsement of the Victorian idea of the public sphere as the sphere of men, and the private sphere, the home, as the realm of the ‘angel in the house’. In other words, public and private were highly gendered.
This divide was also part of the post-war concern with public order. This continues today but has possibly shifted to a concern about political activity, as demonstrations and direct action become ever more closely policed and prevented, while the more carnivalesque aspects of public activity (open air concerts and festivals, for example) are increasingly tolerated, or have simply become more common – just as regulations concerning correct ways of dressing have hugely relaxed in the public sphere of entertainment (a few still wear evening dress and many at least a suit or smart dress to the opera, but jeans are perfectly acceptable) and on the street, while becoming more rigorous in many workplaces: a trend in tune with the mania for school uniforms as an agent of order, stability and obedience.
In the 1950s and 1960s the preservation of a sober public demeanour still seemed extremely important. People did not wear beach clothes (i.e. shorts and flip flops) on Oxford Street. The respectable homosexual, especially, was surely wearing a tie. Yet the integrity of the public and private divide was continually breached, and certainly could not be maintained in the sphere of reading. As Hornsey points out, no one could be certain that West’s Homosexuality would be bought and read for the ‘correct’ reasons – might not readers purchase it less in search of enlightenment and understanding than in order to get an illicit thrill similar to that offered by the homosexual novels published at this period – many of which, despite their lurid covers, were actually serious explorations of the dilemmas of gay love? (And when I first borrowed a book whose title had attracted me – Sodom and Gomorrah – was it really that I wanted to read a great French classic, or because of the illicit knowledge Marcel Proust’s novel seemed to offer?)
One of Hornsey’s case histories from the period (along with a rather less convincing account of the queer possibilities of the photo booth, in particular as exploited by Francis Bacon) is another notorious ‘crime’: the defacing by the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell of a series of library books from Islington and Hampstead branch libraries. The public library had been since the nineteenth century an important location of civic pride, the approved alternative to the public house or the gambling den. It was a temple of industrious self-improvement and a monument to the benefits of education. Orton and Halliwell subverted this noble enterprise with their mischievous alterations to books they borrowed or stole.
The report of the incident in the Library Association Record describes how the pair typed false blurbs onto inside covers, pasted alien images onto dust jackets and defaced and altered illustrations inside books. All these alterations served to create unexpected surreal and/or obscene meanings that the innocent borrower would eventually discover. It seems extraordinary today, but in 1962 the pranks of these culprits actually attracted a prison sentence.
Hornsey discusses the interior of the flat the two men shared in Noel Road, Islington, where the walls were completely covered with an enormous collage of pictures, many of nude men, taken from books and magazines. The couple, and the plays of Orton, which became a hugely popular expression of their queer deviance, are rightly seen as subversive by Hornsey, although the lovers were also tragic, paying a high price for their radicalism. (I lived a few streets away from Noel Road at the time, had come home one lunchtime to see the crowd round the flat, and soon afterwards heard the news on the radio: Halliwell had murdered Orton and then committed suicide. A few weeks later I visited a local junk shop with a [gay] friend. The owner gestured to a couch covered with a blanket and said with a dramatic flourish, ‘that’s the couch, you know’.)
Hornsey describes the Orton/Halliwell flat as a queer interior and this takes him to his final subject: the domestic interior as yet another environment policed and gendered by the stylistic conventions first promoted at the ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition and at the Festival of Britain – conventions of modernist, Scandinavian design with clean lines, cybernetic and ergonomic. A 2009 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970’, explored the way in which this style fused with a utopian view of a scientific space-age future in postwar designs for the home as well as in town planning and, say, aeroplane design. Hornsey shows how the first viewers of this modernism – a style rapidly popularised as ‘contemporary’ and enthusiastically promoted by the Council of Industrial Design – not only disliked the interiors of the specimen rooms on show at ‘Britain Can Make It’, preferring traditional arrangements, but actually assigned a moral dimension to the contrasting decors. ‘This is definitely a family room and … morally we want to encourage family rooms’, wrote one visitor, whereas the ‘contemporary room’ was ‘very much for a rather immoral type of person – it’s out to impress, it’s not sincere’.
That interior decoration should be so heavily moralised now seems rather quaint, but Hornsey reminds us of the way in which interior design had been fraught with moral meanings at least since the aesthetic movement of the 1870s. In the 1920s the masculine values of Corbusian rationality were contrasted with the fashionable ‘amusing’ style of neo rococo and whimsical clutter. Yet it was difficult for the gay man to steer a course between this and an over-masculine room that might seem to protest too much. Of course, the mere fact that he was living on his own or with another man, and therefore without the feminine touch to the interior provided by a wife, made him suspect, even without the added hurdle of solving the conundrum of arranging a room that did not somehow speak his deviance.
Hornsey does not exaggerate when he insists on the importance of interior design for morality and social engineering. Throughout the early post-war period state institutions and its representatives went on the rampage to educate the public into correct taste. John Newsom, a prominent educationalist, revealed the class and gender bias underlying this obsession when he wrote in 1948 in The Education of Girls:
Our standards of design, and therefore our very continuance as a great commercial nation, will depend on our education of the consumer to the point where she rejects the functionally futile and aesthetically inept and demands what is fitting and beautiful … Woman as purchaser holds the future standard of living of this country in her hands … If she buys in ignorance then our national standards will degenerate.5
In the New Towns built during this period many residents disliked the layout of their houses. Instead of a front parlour with separate kitchen, they found open-plan design. Judith Attfield, in her study of Harlow, A View from the Interior, quotes a censorious account of ‘mistakes’ made by tenants:
They fight shy of open plan living … there is a strong tendency to shelter behind net curtains. Large windows are obscured by elaborate drapes and heavy pelmets, by dressing table mirrors and large settees. Corners are cut off by diagonally placed wardrobes and sideboards … the open plan houses are being closed up again, light rooms are darkened and a feeling of spaciousness is reduced to cosy clutter … in achieving cosiness they are completely at variance with the architects’ achievements in giving them light and space.6
Hornsey cites the 1961 film Victim as a key moment in the passage of the homosexual from pervert and public menace to responsible citizen. Openly propagandist for a reform of the law, it deployed a variety of gay ‘types’ in its thriller format, which revolved, understandably, around blackmail – since this crime was a major spin-off from the illegality of male gay love. Here, as elsewhere, interiors speak the man. The unhappily married hero, ironically played by the always closeted Dirk Bogarde, is shown as living in a traditional house filled with bibelots, antique furniture and fussy figurines, while the well-adjusted gays of the tale are provided with the ideal contemporary home. ‘Startlingly modern’, their open-plan flat has walls covered with contrasting textures, and is furnished with lightweight ‘Scandinavian-style’ furniture and a few tasteful glass ornaments and floor rugs.
Hornsey includes the emergence of DIY in the later 1950s as an integral part of the new incorporation of the nuclear family into the domestic interior, but as with The Lavender Hill Mob, finds a subversive subtext. DIY was, naturally, highly gendered, but Hornsey has found some hilarious examples of unintended double entendres or possible queer meanings. For example, he reinterprets an advertisement designed in the shape of a strip cartoon. ‘It began on the 8.14’ is the strap line, and it charts the induction of one commuter by another (casually met on the train, of course) into the joys of DIY. Hornsey rereads the whole ad as a story of gay seduction, occurring in just one of those indeterminate spaces – the commute – that caused Abercrombie so much angst.
Both serious and entertaining, The Spiv and the Architect is an original approach to the cultural history of the early post-war period, especially in its juxtaposition of unexpected areas of 1950s’ society. In conclusion, Hornsey suggests that the antics of Orton and Halliwell were taken forward by Gay Liberation as a strategy to be used in radical politics. Gay Liberation was indeed a carnivalesque moment, but it did not, as carnival is often alleged to do, merely act as a safety valve so that things could go on as normal for the rest of the time. On the contrary, it was a moment in the trajectory whereby today, in official discourse at least, the gay is a well-integrated and even cherished member of society. But this came about (and in fact the transformation is far from complete; homophobic attacks – at least one resulting in murder – appear to have grown in number in recent years) not just as a result of subversive activity, but also because of the promotion of the idea of gays and lesbians as respectable and largely ‘normal’ – the reformist rather than the radical idea of gays. In privileging the disruptive and subversive nature of post-war queer culture, Hornsey is insufficiently critical of an outdated postmodern agenda. The postmodernists of the 1980s launched an attack on what they saw as the oppression of ‘totalising’ theories, which claimed to liberate and revolutionise, but only effectively promoted the preoccupations of the ‘white, Western male’. They claimed that their deconstruction agenda would bring the marginalised to the fore and fragment, and thus destroy the status quo. What resulted was the opposite: the entrenchment of consumer capital as celebrities flaunted new and often fleeting identities and fetishised their choices of leisure activities.
Figure 8: DIY ad re-imagined as gay seduction. Courtesy Richard Hornsey.
In an influential article, ‘Walking in the City’, Michel de Certeau contrasted the all-seeing eye of the planner to the wanderings of the pedestrian in the interstices of the planned city, always seeking to subvert the planner’s intentions. But he acknowledged that the pedestrian only ever has ‘tactics’ and can never rise to ‘strategy’. He reacts rather than creates. The words ‘subversion’ and ‘transgression’, so popular in postmodern discourse, have always suggested their own limitations. In the end transgression became an end in itself, something fashionable rather than challenging. Queer theory ended up as merely the opposite of what went before, with the paradoxical effect that ‘transgression’ could come to mean erstwhile gays embracing heterosexuality even as former Marxists discovered their inner bourgeois.
Hornsey is in danger of following this path insofar as he positions the subversive life of the 1950s’ queer as a valid critique of the conformist certainties of the Abercrombie way of life. It is indeed valid. At the same time, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that those lives were at times blighted by the harsh attitudes and laws of the time. The respectable homosexual may have been a restricted and dreary figure, and those who defied the laws were creative and life-affirming as well as brave, but attitudes could not have changed without both of them combining against prejudice and persecution.