Gay Life, Straight Work

by Donald West

  Had this soldier made a scene, the consequences could have been devastating. About this time a fellow medical student was summarily expelled from the university after being found by the police one night in a park with a soldier. Doubtless the authorities considered the prospect of a homosexual becoming a doctor impossible to contemplate. Medical writings at this time were equating male homosexuality with serious personality disorder and advocating sex-suppressant drugs or ‘deconditioning’ with electric shocks. When some students were talking about the expulsion, I ventured a word of sympathy, but all I remember was the comment “Well, he was breaking the law”. Before this exposure his fellow students had had no reason to suspect he was homosexual. With the law and public opinion as it then was, with venues for gay socialising illegal and certainly not advertised, and public references to homosexuality limited to lewd jokes by comedians and newspaper reports of sex crime, it was risky and difficult to make contacts unless one knew where to go. The reactions of strangers to approaches suggestive of sexual interest could be catastrophic. Discreet gay pick-up places, including certain public toilets and secluded wooded areas existed and became known by word of mouth. However, if one had not met other gay men who knew where to go, this was not much help. It was years after leaving the town that I first learned that a circular shaped men’s toilet in the centre of Liverpool, nicknamed the ‘wheel of fortune’, which I must have passed many times, was a famous gay venue.

  The male art of ‘cottaging’, that is making contact by displaying genitals in public urinals, was something I was to learn about much later, through being asked to write a preface to a book on ‘tea-room trade’ (the American term for it), from studying criminal statistics of male importuning (an offence largely centred on public conveniences) and of course from personal experiences. One of the earliest of these was during my first visit to the United States in 1949 when I had occasion to use the toilet in Grand Central Station in New York and was surprised to find myself in a row of men admiring each other’s erections. One of my fellow medical students was a boastful acquaintance and great admirer of the politician Tom Dreiberg, but that was before the publication of his posthumous autobiography Ruling Passions, revealing his addiction to cottaging. Today, most of the more notorious toilets have been closed down or replaced by structures designed to discourage immorality. However, the availability of openly gay clubs and pubs, has not eliminated gay cruising grounds or all gay toilets. Some questionable locations can even be found on the internet or listed in gay guides.

  I am getting ahead of myself here. Suffice to say that while a student my reading extended to material on homosexuality, though mostly psychoanalytic writings about the origins of what was considered a horrible abnormality destructive to the sufferers and a danger to others. The Kinsey Report, portraying homosexuality as a natural and common sexual variation, did not appear till 1948 after I had left medical school, by which time my actual experience of homosexuality hardly extended beyond masturbatory play with Richard when sharing a bed on holidays. Promiscuous homosexual contacts were yet to come.

  A PROFESSIONAL PARAPSYCHOLOGIST

  The Society for Psychical Research (SPR)

  Determined to pursue psychical research, and with the help of an ever-indulgent father, I purchased life membership of the SPR, the benefits of which I am still enjoying seventy years later. I tried unsuccessfully to transfer to a London medical school to be near SPR headquarters. Attendance at meetings and contributions to the Society’s Journal led to being elected to the Society’s governing Council and even, when still only twenty-one, to receiving the title of Hon. Asst. Secretary. More significantly, my enthusiasm attracted the attention of an influential member of the organisation, Kathleen M. Goldney, MBE, Mollie to all her friends, who was to become an important figure in my life. She had been a member of the British Raj, till her much older husband retired from civil service in India. A one-time ‘beauty’, now in late middle age, she enjoyed taking young men under her wing. She was the daughter of an Irish judge, and had an acute awareness of her upper-middle-class status and connections. Soon she was instructing me in proper pronunciation, but my Liverpool accent took time to fade.

  The SPR was founded in 1882 by a group of distinguished Cambridge academics, mostly from Trinity College. The membership soon included leading politicians, authors, clerics, scientists and nobility, many of them household names. It set out “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis”. The conflict between religion and science was at its peak, spiritualism had become popular, and the Society’s publications were widely known and discussed. By the time I joined, the affluent upper-class intellectuals with private resources of time and money to devote to laborious inquiries had disappeared. Wartime conditions made matters worse. Even so, the headquarters preserved a faded dignity, occupying the whole of a six-storey Georgian terraced house in Tavistock Square, with an elderly, slow-moving caretaker in the basement to answer the door, spacious offices on the ground floor and the entire first floor devoted to a library lined with oak book cases, large enough for use as a meeting room – all very different from the SPR’s current accommodation in two small rooms in a building shared with funeral directors.

  It is only on looking back that I came to appreciate this atmosphere of other-worldly faded grandeur. What excited me then were the Society’s declared aims, to subject paranormal phenomena to rigorous investigation and where possible to experimental testing, which I imagined would lead to the scientific establishment of the existence of mental powers and mental realities as yet unknown to the prevalent materialistic philosophy. In 1939, the Society’s aristocratic Research Officer, the Hon. C.V.C. Herbert (the future Lord Powis), had relinquished his position in order to engage in military service. He was entitled to reinstatement at the end of the war, but had decided he did not want to return. He later changed his mind, but by then the SPR Council had decided to open the post to other applicants. Mollie Goldney campaigned for me to be appointed. In due course, Herbert and I were both summoned for interview, and I vividly remember sitting with him in a small waiting room. He was the embodiment of gentlemanly politeness, suggesting that as I had been more recently involved in the business I should get the job. He even took me to lunch at White’s, the most aristocratic of London clubs – an awe-inspiring experience for me.

  The appointment of a callow student, whose only justification for applying was intense enthusiasm, gives more credit to Mollie Goldney’s persistence than to the SPR Council’s collective judgement. There being no agreed qualification for a psychic investigator, other than common sense and some understanding of the meaning of scientific evidence, an impending medical degree might suffice as well as any. Although I had completed the formal requirements of medical training, because of the reduction in vacations during the war, I had done so six months before the date one was permitted to take the final examination. Unlike other students, who generally sought temporary hospital work, I truanted to London to begin employment as a psychic researcher, returning to Liverpool in some trepidation when the examinations were due. In those days one was placed on the medical register immediately afterwards without further compulsory hospital experience. Father had great misgivings about the abandonment of a medical career, to which he had contributed his hard-earned money, in favour of such an odd enterprise; but he accepted the situation and even gave further support when, a few years later, I lost the job.

  In return for a substantial reduction in salary, the Society provided accommodation in the upper floors of their building, but on the understanding that I could have ‘paying guests’ in the surplus rooms. Mollie Goldney was pleased to help in choosing the furniture and décor. The latter included some printed reproductions of works by Canaletto and van Gogh, hitherto no part of my Philistine background. When a senior member of the SPR Council, Rosalind Heywood, wife of a
diplomat, called one day, she stood in the doorway exclaiming what sounded like “Ah – oorch”. There was an embarrassing pause before it dawned on me she meant the print. First to share the flat and its enormous old kitchen were relatives of Mollie Goldney, after them a young medical couple and after that various gay men, including my own temporary affairs. This arrangement provided opportunity to develop a covert gay life style alongside apparently respectable professional activity, but it did nothing to prevent my enthusiastic immersion in the work of the Society.

  Curiously enough, it was only on account of homosexuality that I was enabled to continue as SPR Research Officer. Like food rationing, conscription did not cease with the end of the war, and medical students, following completion of their final examinations, became liable for call up. With the prospect of being forced to attempt assault courses, the phobia about my apparent incapacity for physical training that had dogged my schooldays, reasserted itself. I sought the help of a distinguished psychiatrist. He listened carefully and then asked about my sex life. I felt obliged to confess. As a result of his report, the terms of which I never learned, I was classed as unfit. The army would not enlist known homosexuals. I was able to let it be thought that the rejection was due to a history of chest infections. Some years later the psychiatrist asked to see me. He was following up a sample of homosexuals to see if the perversion was lasting. I had the privilege of becoming a statistic in his paper on the topic in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

  I began work for the SPR with the optimistic belief that a conventional scientific approach would produce results. It seemed to me that gaining some understanding of the nature and scope of paranormal perception, and securing some scientific respectability, would most likely be achieved through potentially repeatable experiments such as the Rhine card guessing tests. The pre-eminent British exponent of this approach was S.G.Soal, once an abrasive critic of Rhine’s work, who had changed his tune somewhat on discovering an outstandingly successful telepathic subject, Basil Shackleton. During the war years 1941–3, with the help of my friend Mollie Goldney, Soal had carried out numerous tests with Shackleton using methods seemingly fool-proof against any form of cheating, even by the experimenters themselves. The work was considered at least equal to anything Rhine had done, both for the vast number of trials and the stringent conditions imposed. At the last session with Shackleton, because she was unable to attend, Mollie arranged for me to take part. I took charge of counting the scores myself and could see no normal explanation for the high scoring,

  There was always a nagging doubt about the Shackleton experiments because Soal had been reluctant to have him tested independently by others, although Mollie had urged him to do so. I well remember discussing with other young doubters, notably the psychologist Christopher Scott, how to get around this problem, but we never succeeded. Tests finished three years before I took up residence as Research Officer. Shackleton had become unwilling to continue the boring routine and departed to South Africa. From 1945 onwards Soal was continuing with another successful subject, Gloria Stewart, but working independently of the SPR, assisted by Frederick Bateman, a former student of his, and neither Mollie nor I were invited to take part. Using informal card guessing tests, I took every opportunity to try to find a successful telepathic subject, and encouraged others to do the same, but with no result. The only respectably conducted experimental work yielding positive results was going on elsewhere, leaving me increasingly frustrated.

  Even before becoming Research Officer I was already classed as a sceptic. Rhine had published research on dice throwing that suggested ‘willing’ for a six or any other face might actually produce a statistical excess of the face desired. This was called psycho-kinesis (PK) – mental influence on the physical environment, analogous, on a much smaller scale, to the spontaneous movement of objects claimed to occur at séances. Crude mechanical processes such as hand throwing of dice never produce absolutely random sequences. Sometimes the scooping out of the dice markings can make the six face slightly lighter than the opposing one face, so that sixes become marginally more likely to come to rest uppermost. In a critique of these early experiments (SPR Proceedings, Aug 1945) I had argued that some of these effects could be explained as the result of bias in the dice and/or allowing subjects to choose which face to aim for. This would not apply to many of the better controlled tests, but the comments were sufficient to add to my sceptical reputation.

  My only contribution which could be considered supportive of the paranormal was to contradict a criticism of Rhine based on a fallacious statistical argument (SPR Journal Sept/Oct 1944). A book by the conjuror John Mulholland – (Beware Familiar Spirits. (1938) – described using a mechanical shuffler that delivered cards numbered 1 to 5 in random in pairs. Analysis of the incidence of matching pairs was said to show that the statistical anomalies found in ESP tests could occur in the absence of a paranormal influence. However, the unusual counting procedures, such as noting the frequency of uninterrupted runs of correctly matching pairs, or finding long runs with no matching pairs whatsoever, had produced figures that looked curious, but I was able to show they were actually within reasonable statistical expectation. Mullholland’s fallacious arguments had been reproduced in a popular book by Harry Price, a celebrated exponent of dramatic ghost stories and poltergeist happenings, who was a dismissive critic of the statistical effects reported from psychology labs. Clearly angry, he wrote to the SPR suggesting they should check the genuineness of my medical qualification.

  Living over the SPR office and library meant that I had many contacts with visitors there and met many people keen to relate their psychic experiences. Some were plainly psychotic, believing, for example, that their thoughts were being read by malevolent neighbours the other side of the dividing wall. As Research Officer, I would try to obtain independent corroboration of the more impressive stories. It proved a disillusioning task. During the three years of my employment by the Society their Journal featured a series of monotonously negative reports. A summary of telepathic guessing experiments over several years showed only chance results (Oct/Nov. 1947). Extensive experiments in the telepathic perception of target drawings, in which percipients had to choose between the real target and randomly selected controls, likewise gave chance results (May 1947). An analysis of ‘readings’ by mediums, based on impressions obtained from token objects contributed by volunteers, produced only chance results. Each participant was given typescripts of five of the medium’s readings from five different objects and was asked to try to identify which one pertained to his own object. Some of these volunteers, strong believers in the powers of mediums, picked out the ‘wrong’ reading and confidently asserted that nearly everything in it applied to them (Sept/Oct 1949).

  An examination of reports of haunted buildings yielded little concrete evidence. The supposedly haunted buildings usually ceased to be a focus of phenomena with a change of occupants (Dec 1947; Oct/Nov 1948). A survey of spontaneous apparitions (hallucinatory experiences), carried out with the help of the organisation Mass Observation, revealed that a larger proportion, 13.3%, claimed to have had such experiences compared with 9.9% in a more extensive survey by the SPR back in 1890. However, ‘veridical’ apparitions conveying information about an event unknown to the percipient, such as the death of a distant relative, were a distinct minority. From over three hundred incidents reported, none of the percipients produced corroboration of the acquisition of unexpected information (Mar/April 1948).

  A claim in Psychic News that Professor Aldine of the School of Oriental and African studies had conversed with spirits in his native Mende language was followed up. The School denied that Aldine was a professor there and when I arranged for an expert in Mende to have a sitting with the medium concerned, voluble responses to his questions were produced, but they were meaningless babble (Sept 1948). In order to investigate so-called physical mediums who produce effects under cover of darkness, the Society had acquired an infra-red telescope.
Some members offered a money prize to any medium who could produce a paranormal physical effect while watched through the telescope. Despite being widely advertised, only three mediums volunteered and none produced anything (Jan 1948). Also discouraging was a long article I contributed to the SPR (July 1948) on the near impossibility of finding a case of spontaneous paranormal experience that could not be accounted for by coincidence, faulty memory, fraud or other normal explanation.

  Losing My Job

  I was becoming frustrated by the absence of results, and also by the apparent credulity of some members of the Society who seemed to me much too willing to accept dubious claims. My reports not only quoted negative results, but rammed them home with injudicious phraseology. For example: “It really seems to me that the presence of the infra-red telescope, which obviates the cruder types of fraud, puts paid to the mediums’ whole performance”. I took part in a frivolous demonstration by the conjuror Eric Cuddon. When he called for four volunteers I acted as one of his two ‘stooges’. We sat at a table on which were mounted three pendulums of different lengths, supposedly under the control of different spirits. In answer to questions from the audience the appropriate pendulum would either oscillate for “yes” or gyrate for “no”. The majority of the audience, when asked to vote, opted for a paranormal effect, although in fact it was caused by our surreptitious pressures on the table in time with the periodicity of each pendulum. Cuddon concluded “It is really astonishing to what lengths a desire for something ‘psychic’ will lead otherwise normal people…” (Journal SPR, 34, 107).