Psychotherapists claim that they are able to help in cases where the homosexual bias is weak, or when it is accompanied by self-condemnation or social maladjustment. The course of treatment is bound to take a very long time and cost a great deal of money, and its effects are always uncertain, depending on the willingness of the patient to be cured and the degree of trust which he feels towards his psychiatrist. Ironically enough, this kind of treatment is only likely to be successful with those who have failed to come to terms with their abnormality. With the man who has learned to accept his condition, it is almost certain to be useless.
In spite of this, it might have been possible for me to embark on such a course, if I had not been sent to prison. At Wormwood Scrubs, which is so often pointed out as a centre for the psychological treatment of offenders, the facilities for such treatment were not so much inadequate, as virtually absent. I met many men who had been told by judges that they were being sent for three, or five, or seven years to a place where they would be properly looked after and encouraged to mend their ways; but nothing whatever was being done for them. Out of 1,000 prisoners at the Scrubs, only 11 were receiving psychiatric treatment at the time I was there, and only a small proportion of these were homosexuals. Dr. Landers, the Principal Medical Officer, was an intelligent and honest man who admitted the limitations of the system; but I could not help feeling that he would be doing more good if he had devoted his efforts to improving the revolting sanitary conditions of the place, instead of concentrating on the highly problematical redemption of such a small group.
Once I was in prison, as I have described, I was not only not encouraged to take psychological treatment, but actively discouraged. Men in prison, whatever their crime may have been, do not merely remain as bad as they were when they came in; by a visible process of moral erosion which goes on week after week and year after year, they become worse. This is particularly true of sex offenders, and I do not pretend to have been any exception.
The essential reason for my imprisonment had been my tendency to enter into emotional relationships with men who were not, as Mr. Roberts would say, my social equals. In prison, I was surrounded by such men. Partly because of the natural tolerance of their class, and partly because of the relaxed moral atmosphere of prison, they expressed no disapproval of my tendencies and appeared to expect that I should choose one of them as a companion; and that is exactly what happened.
There was never any doubt in the minds of the other prisoners—or, for that matter, of the warders—as to the meaning of my friendship for Dan Starling. There was nothing physical in it, because there could not be; but it was a friendship a great deal less selfish and more true than a mere physical attachment would have been.
Strangely enough, it helped me to find some measure of happiness in prison; and, even more strangely, freedom. I knew that I should never be afraid any more, or angry, or ashamed, whatever might happen to me afterwards.
There is not much to be gained from considering the prosecution from the point of view of compensation for the injured, because nobody ever pretended that the smallest harm had been suffered by Reynolds and McNally. On the whole, they did rather well out of it. The police took every possible precaution to see that their photographs did not appear in the press, and as a reward for their behaviour in court they were promised by the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Air Council that no action would ever be taken against them in respect of the homosexual acts with 24 other men which they had admitted. As a result of various sarcastic questions in the House of Commons they were, however, dismissed from the RAF. I do not know what career they took up after this, or where they are.
In all sincerity, I cannot really believe that the case was very successful in ‘satisfying the indignation of the community’. It was McNally and Reynolds who were hissed and booed outside the court, not us. The Press comment, as I have shown, was almost uniformly hostile to the manner in which the convictions had been obtained. The Government was finally goaded into setting up a Committee to investigate the antique and savage laws under which we had been charged. When we came out of prison we found, not hostility and ostracism, but sympathy and acceptance from people in every walk of life. As an ‘example’, the witch-hunt left everything to be desired.
Perhaps the strangest feature of the case—and, indeed, of the law as it stands today—was the way in which it placed everyone connected with it in a position which was, to some extent, a false one. The Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, was obliged to pretend that the ‘crime’ involved was of such a serious nature that any methods were justifiable, provided that the ‘criminals’ were brought to book. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, in order to obtain convictions against Edward, Michael and me, had to act as though the offences admitted by McNally and Reynolds were, in comparison, trivial. Mr. Roberts, QC, was forced to express a horror of homosexuality which contrasted strangely with his conduct of the Croft-Cooke case. Lord Winterton, who had previously called for revision of the laws, was impelled—for reasons known only to himself—to adopt an attitude of hysterical condemnation. The prison officials had to keep up the fiction that I and my friends were criminals; the psychiatrists had to pretend that I was being rightly punished for something which they regarded as an illness.
The effect on me was exactly the opposite. I was able, at last, to move out of a false position and take up a true one. There was no further need for pretence; I could discard the mask which had been such a burden to me all my life.
When I first went to prison, an official asked me: ‘Why do you think you were put on this earth? What do you think is the purpose of it all?’
I still do not know what my answer should have been. At that time, I was incapable of giving any. It seemed to me, during those first few days of solitude and degradation, that my life had been a hopelessly unilluminating one, from which no conclusions could be drawn. I was unable to find any moral in what had happened to me. I had tried to lead a good life, doing no harm to anybody, hating no-one and helping those who needed my help. But this had not been enough. When the time came I was not judged by what I had done; I was judged by what I was.
If my life had ended at that moment, it would have been a failure. It was necessary for me to redeem it if I could; to make it mean something, if only to me. A man born with some defect of the body does not try to deny or to conceal his handicap; he acknowledges it, and does the best he can.
That, I decided, was what I must do for myself.
Against the Law Page 22