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Some Men in London
Reading List
When assembling material for my two-volume anthology Some Men in London, which describes queer life in the capital between 1945 and 1967, I drew upon a large number of books, as well as unpublished letters, diaries and other documents. Here are my suggestions for books that I either found essential or so intriguing or enjoyable that I want to recommend them to other readers. I have included both fiction and non-fiction, and while some of these books will be familiar, others were certainly new to me, and I was very pleased to have come across them during my researches. Like my book, they provide a wide variety of viewpoints, some of which now seem reprehensible and offensive. They are, however, all part of our history, a history that we should remember and learn from.
- Peter Parker
Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955; 2019)
Wildeblood has been criticised as too socially conservative by later generations of gay historians, but this autobiography of one of the men who challenged the law that criminalised homosexual acts is still powerful. In particular it exposes corrupt and illegal police methods when dealing with homosexual ‘crimes’– tampering with evidence, searching houses without warrants, refusing access to a solicitor. It also provides a highly critical account of what it was actually like to be in prison, a fate that many queer men of the period suffered.
Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (HMSO, 1957)
Otherwise known as the Wolfenden Report, this was a surprise best-seller when it was first published, even though Parliament failed to act on its recommendations for a whole decade. Not exactly a gripping read, it is nevertheless stuffed with fascinating statistics, and presents the detailed findings over four years that led the committee to conclude that homosexuality should be partially decriminalised.
Gordon Westwood, A Minority (Longmans, 1960)
Commissioned by the British Social Biology Council, this study was hailed as ‘the most extensive research on the subject of male homosexuality yet to be published’. It was written under a pseudonym by the queer sociologist Michael Schofield. He interviewed over 100 gay men, and their frank and detailed testimonies provide a picture of what they really thought about their sexuality, in stark contrast to how their lives were portrayed in parliament and the tabloids. Here are voices that at the time were rarely heard.
Douglas Plummer, Queer People: The Truth About Homosexuals in Britain (W.H. Allen, 1963)
The pseudonymous author comes out fighting in this invigorating and hugely readable book, the first chapter of which is titled ‘I Am Not Ashamed’. Plummer was attacked in the press for outing a number of well-known but dead people, possibly because he also accused the newspapers of printing sensational and misleading stories about homosexual life. The book is splendidly defiant, suggesting among other things that queer men should stop being so tolerant of those who disapproved of them.
Harold Martin, Men and Cupid (Fortune Press, 1965)
One of the most level-headed and sensible books on homosexuality from this period. The nonagenarian and heterosexual Martin, who was not a professional psychiatrist and rightly has little time for those who were, provides an invaluable and enjoyably debunking survey of the kind of books they wrote. Unusually for the period, he regarded homosexuality not as a psychological or hormonal disorder but ‘the chance burgeoning of a bloom which has its stem and roots in normal organic life throughout the animal world’, and his book is a wide-ranging and well-argued corrective to prevailing views.
Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries (Methuen, 1986)
Covering only the last six months of the playwright’s life, from mid-December 1966 to the beginning of August 1967, these diaries have achieved notoriety for their highly detailed accounts of his sexual exploits. Orton’s chief virtue as a diarist was that, unlike many queer men at this period, he was completely without fear or shame, and simply didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about his sexuality. They also provide a scarifying account of his fraught and eventually fatal domestic relationship with Kenneth Halliwell.
Mary Renault, The Charioteer (Longmans, Green, 1953; Virago, 2013)
Not included in my book because it doesn’t take place in London, this is nevertheless my favourite gay novel of the period. Renault would go on to describe homosexuality in the Ancient World, but here took the bold decision to set the action in 1940 and make her principal characters wounded servicemen. Laurie has to decide between the platonic ideal offered by a conscientious objector and a more realistic sexual love offered by a fellow Dunkirk veteran, and this dilemma maintains narrative tension until the very end of the story. Emotionally intelligent, beautifully written and deeply moving.
D.J. West, Homosexuality (Duckworth, 1955)
Perhaps the most famous and influential book on the subject to be published during this period, though it makes dispiriting reading. West’s aim was ‘to bring the problems of homosexuality out into the open, and to discuss them calmly and without bias’. Although West was himself gay, he concluded: ‘Given a simple choice, no one in his right mind would chose to be homosexual.’ I bought this book as a teenager and was both frightened and depressed by it, but it is a landmark study that became a best-seller when it was published in a revised edition by Penguin in 1960.
Homosexuality and Prostitution: a memorandum of evidence (British Medical Association, 1955)
If you want to learn just how ignorant and out of touch the psychiatric and medical professions were in the 1950s, then this brief official report submitted to the Wolfenden Committee provides the evidence. It is full of astounding and largely unsubstantiated assertions of the sort that, though familiar from tabloid newspapers, are truly shocking to find in the official submission of a professional body to a parliamentary committee.
Peter Wildeblood, A Way of Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956)
Unlike Against the Law, this curious amalgam of fact and fiction has never been republished. Clearly based on the circles in which Wildeblood moved, is a series of portraits of homosexual types, among them a former inmate of Wormwood Scrubs, a gushing newspaper columnist, an extremely camp rent boy, and a pretty, manufactured pop star. The characters also
discusses homosexuality more generally, with references to real criminal cases in which judges are named and criticised. This extraordinary kaleidoscope of queer life in London in the 1950s richly deserves rediscovery.
discusses homosexuality more generally, with references to real criminal cases in which judges are named and criticised. This extraordinary kaleidoscope of queer life in London in the 1950s richly deserves rediscovery.
C.H.B. Kitchin, Ten Pollitt Place (Secker & Warburg, 1957; Valancourt, 2013)
Perhaps my favourite ‘discovery’, this novel is set among a varied cast of people living in a large house in South Kensington that has been divided into flats. Among them is Hugo, the clever, disabled and illegitimate fifteen-year-old son of German stormtrooper. Multiply an outsider, Hugo is besotted with the local dustman, and doesn’t want to grow up, telling his mother: ‘Nobody loves a grown man – at least not the kind of person I want to love me – and not in the way I want to be loved’. Funny, elegant and heartbreaking.
Ethel Mannin, The Blue-Eyed Boy (Jarrolds, 1959)
Who could resist this forgotten novel about a queer Teddy Boy? Not that Mannin’s sixteen-year-old anti-hero, Len, would describe himself as that, but he doesn’t much care for ‘tarts’, is chiefly interested in clothes, and has a keen eye for the kind of older men who would ‘see you right’ if you ‘do him a favour’. Far from being a teenage ‘victim’ of the sort often mentioned in the press and parliament, Len becomes a ruthless exploiter, greedy, vain and utterly amoral.
Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (Hutchinson, 1960; Peepal Tree Press)
Johnnie Sobert is a sexually confused middle-class Jamaican working in a Soho bar. He has a white girlfriend, but is sharing a flat with a man, also white, who is in love with him, and in the end he has to decide in which direction his future lies. A rare example of a novel of this period by a black author that describes inter-racial relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual, as if they were the most natural thing in the world – which indeed they were and are.
Gillian Freeman , The Leather Boys (Anthony Blond, 1961; Valancourt, 2014)
The publisher Anthony Blond asked for a novel featuring ‘a Romeo and Romeo in the South London Suburbs’, and Freeman obliged. Unhappily-married Reggie leaves his wife to move in with his biker chum Dick, who has no spare bed. A much-needed risposte to those who maintained that no working-class man could be homosexual unless ‘corrupted’ by his social superiors. It lacks a happy ending, alas, but is a touching and very well written book, infinitely superior to the 1964 film adaptation.
Richard Hauser, The Homosexual Society (The Bodley Head, 1962; Facsimile Publisher, 2019)
A hugely entertaining attempt by a heterosexual sociologist to categorize the different ‘types’ of homosexual. Based on interviews with some 400 people, some of them very funny, the book is well-intentioned but often wrong-headed. It nevertheless marks an advance on the works of Clifford Allen, the well-known Harley Street consultant whose crackpot theories about ‘the nature, causation and treatment’ of homosexuality were frequently and approvingly quoted in the press.
Gerard Hastings, Awkward Artefacts: The ‘Erotic Fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press, 2017)
Beast known for his wonderful paintings depicting queer desire, Keith Vaughan also wrote some of the best and most detailed diaries about being a gay man. He could not be described as a happy homosexual, but wrote gracefully and very frankly about his sex life and the bars and clubs of London. Extracts from the diaries, which run from 1939 to 1977, have been published in several editions, but those reproduced here concentrate on the erotic aspects of his life and art.
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