The general and public reaction was largely one of indifference or even hostility. It was believed that queer men ‘had brought it on themselves’, that it ‘was all their own fault’ and that they ‘deserved it’. Attacks on queer men did not diminish in intensity. The level of public hostility was emphasised in 1988 by the Conservative government’s introduction of Clause 28 into the Local Government Act which decreed that ‘a local authority shall not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. One columnist in The Times declared that ‘this country seems to be in a galloping frenzy of hate, where homosexuals are concerned, that will soon, if it is not checked, lead to something like a pogrom’.
The queer reaction to the bigotry was one of understandable fury, but it was now alleviated by one small consolation. The horrors of the Aids epidemic, and the need for voluntary cooperation in trying to deal with the effects of the condition, had lent a sense of communal identity to many of those who might otherwise have gone separate ways. Some were enraged by what they considered to be the insufficient official response to the crisis, and saw Clause 28 as another attack upon the rights of what by then had become known as the ‘gay community’ – even though many queer males and females would have been horrified to be considered a ‘community’ at all. Now there emerged a sense of belonging, and of real if unspoken common humanity.
And then the band began to play again …
The incidence of mortality among the sufferers of Aids had abated, and new forms of treatment had become available to allay the worst symptoms of the condition. This amounted on occasion to complacency, as if the epidemic had never happened. The clubs and bars were more crowded than ever, and some previous activists lamented the fact that the once libertarian and radical aspects of queer liberation had been subsumed by a generally capitalist and consumerist culture. Many men and women felt excluded by queer liberation, alienated by the emphasis on youth, fashion and good looks. Perhaps it has always been thus. The effects of Clause 28 were, as it turned out, minimal; its most important consequence lay in the self-definition of those who protested against it. As the London newspaper Capital Gay put it, ‘the visibility of our community has rarely, if ever, been greater’. In February 1994 the age of sexual consent for queer men was lowered to eighteen and then, six years later, to sixteen. In that year, 2000, the ban on queers serving in the military was finally lifted. What had once been barred or banned was now accepted and welcomed.
In the spirit of tolerance, same-sex civil partnerships and marriages are now condoned and even encouraged. Recent surveys have indicated that queer couples now seek the permanent union of marriage for the same reasons as their parents or grandparents; they are eager for love and commitment. They want ordinary lives based on loyalty and intimacy. This is a long way from the activism of Stonewall. There is now no question of estrangement from the larger society or of the reinvention of cultural and sexual identity.
So, gradually but inexorably, gay London has become part of the normal world and a corner of the Western playground of Europe. Bars have emerged on many street corners of central London with no ambiguity at all about the inclinations of their clients; they have large plate-glass windows rather than the closed doors and barred windows of the twentieth century. Their customers spill onto the streets. Some areas of London, most notably Old Compton Street in Soho, have become gay zones. Gay newspapers, gay magazines and gay switchboards for multifarious purposes have sprung up, together with gay accountants, gay builders and gay undertakers. It would be no cause for wonder to find a gay fish-and-chip shop or a gay abattoir.
In the last few decades academic interest has become focused on what has become known as ‘queer theory’. Much of it was established upon postmodern versions of ‘construction’ and ‘performance’, ‘narratives’ and ‘scripts’. It is a new way of devising questions for old problems.
The abiding question is also the most ancient. Are queers born or are they made? The ‘essentialists’ suppose that homosexuality is a fixed and universal component of the human condition; ‘constructivists’ believe that it is a cultural invention that responds to various social and political initiatives. A definitive answer has yet to be found but, in the meantime, very few outside the academic community seem preoccupied with the dilemma. The matter has in fact been complicated by the emergence of other types of sexuality including transgender and transsexualism. Those who cultivate and foster the transgender life are involved in what might be called existential change; those who decide upon practical and surgical intervention merit the name of transsexuals. It is an ambiguous distinction – but in this realm ambiguity rules.
One of the most significant developments in recent years has been the increasing incidence of those who reject their presumed gender. Many do not believe that they belong to the gender to which they were assigned at birth; some decide actively to change it by means of surgery; others defy it by dress and behaviour. Others do not subscribe to the concept of sexual difference in the first place, arguing that time, circumstance and opportunity prevail rather than stereotypes of gender. It is possible, even likely, that people without a fixed gender or stable sexual identity have always existed but have been ignored or unnoticed for many London generations. In the early years of the twenty-first century, at last they have been granted recognition and identity. They have come of age. The apparent change in popular stereotypes (though not necessarily obvious in popular culture) is now exemplified by openly gay politicians, gay singers, gay comics (who can be very gay indeed), gay writers, gay sports stars, recent transgender celebrities, and transgender people in the sciences.
2013 was one of the most significant years. Civil marriage between partners of the same sex was amplified by the rite of marriage itself. The law was passed without a change to the legal definition of marriage. The prime minister, David Cameron, sought to soothe the apparent contradiction of a Conservative government supporting such a move. He declared that he believed in gay marriage not ‘in spite of being a Conservative, but because I am a Conservative’. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Carey, warned that the meaning of marriage would change, and that no single body, neither the state nor the Church, ‘owned’ marriage.
Maureen Le Marinel, a gay woman, became president of Unison, one of Britain’s largest unions. Paris Lee, a trans woman noted for her lively political journalism, became the first transgender person to appear on Question Time. In the same year Nikki Sinclaire became the United Kingdom’s first openly transgender parliamentarian in Europe and Lucy Vallender the first transgender woman to convert to Islam. As a result of these actions the visibility of trans people has strengthened noticeably over the last few years.
In 2014 the same-sex marriage law came into effect. The marriage of Nicola Pettit and Tania Ward represented Britain’s first Jewish gay women’s union. Boy Meets Girl, a situation comedy about transgender people, was commissioned by BBC2, a reminder that social change has been actively promoted by television and other media. Amid all this the Queen found time to issue her personal congratulations to the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard on its fortieth anniversary. It is a measure of quite how far the gay community has entered the respectable fold not merely that its oldest organ should receive royal endorsement, but that that endorsement should be offered by a monarch who takes her duties to the established Church very seriously indeed.
In 2015, Mikhail Ivan Gallatinov married Marc Goodwin, the first such marriage to be held in a prison; Laverne Cox received the signal favour of a statue in Madame Tussauds. In the field of sport Sam Stanley became the first Rugby Union player to come out as gay. The television soap opera EastEnders introduced Riley Carter Millington, one of the first openly transgender actors in British ‘soap’ history. In a bold and for many disquieting move, the BBC aired the performance of a phalloplasty
.
Trans people, whether or not they have undergone any sort of transition, represent a tiny portion of the population. Here, however, questions of gender ‘fluidity’ arise. The current acronym for queer society as a whole is no longer LGBT but LGBTQIA – an expansion from ‘lesbian gay bisexual transgender’ to include ‘queer intersex asexual’. Queer in this context means those who are unsure of their sexual identity, while intersex means those having the primary or secondary sexual characteristics of both genders. This list will no doubt grow.
But the question is bedevilled by the fact that for a long time sexuality itself has been seen as a matter of identity. Gore Vidal maintained that there are no heterosexual or homosexual people, only heterosexual or homosexual acts. This was unexceptionable at the time; now it would be considered almost reactionary. The rise of social media is of some significance. ‘Identity politics’, once a somewhat arcane movement local to university campuses, now has social media as its forum, especially with regard to questions of sexuality or gender identity. Many people eminent in the conventional media have found themselves attacked on the ‘blogosphere’ or on Twitter for failing to recognise new orthodoxies of expression. Sometimes the matter becomes more public and more serious.
The last decade has at one level been a quiet period for the queer community. Its contours have been soft, its colours tending to the sepia. The great gay scandals of the last century are largely absent, perhaps partly because to be gay is no longer a scandal. What was once termed the gay ‘scene’ is a more muted affair than that which existed twenty years ago. The expression itself, ‘scene’, with its connotations of performance and abandon, is now rarely used.
The picture, at first or even second glance, is not a vibrant one. Bars and clubs, which might once have been termed louche, are fast closing or becoming ‘safer’. The brocade of Old Compton Street seems to be fraying yearly. The Candy Bar, once the hub of London’s lesbian scene, closed in 2014. Its quondam owners swiftly opened a replacement but this, KU Girls, is only an adjunct to its male counterpart on the ground floor. The drag venue once considered the ruby in Soho’s crown, Madame Jojo’s, was shut down in 2014 after a violent altercation outside its doors. The Admiral Duncan in Old Compton Street, bombed in a homophobic attack of 1999, still flies the LGBT flag, but its old panache is scarcely discernible.
The City of Quebec, arguably London’s oldest gay bar, still has its affectionate devotees. It is instructive, if not saddening, to note that one younger visitor to its website commented: ‘I didn’t know it was gay.’ Of many former queer venues, not a rack is left behind. The Play Pen in Notting Hill, the favoured haunt of impecunious aristocrats in the illegal as well as illicit days, has long vanished. Nevertheless the Royal Vauxhall Tavern is still thriving. In fact Vauxhall has in many ways taken the place of Soho as the ‘gay village’ of London – in consort with the Vauxhall Gardens of the eighteenth century.
The substantial lesson of the past decade is that queerness, with all its panache and ferocity, is in elegant retreat. A possible exception is Hampstead Heath, a locus amoenus for generations of queer Londoners who found the combination of bushes, trees and long grass irresistible. It flourishes still. While it would be an exaggeration to conclude that the queer world is in terminal decline, it is certainly in a process of reinvention. ‘Cruise bars’ are increasingly open only to members, saunas are increasingly clean (Continental visitors to queer England have austere standards), and bars no longer have back rooms which remain open after public rooms have closed. More importantly, a dichotomy has emerged between those venues that bellow and those that whisper, those that are openly gay and those that are merely ‘gay-friendly’.
This is paradigmatic of a fundamental and long-standing dilemma: the queer community has never quite made up its mind whether it desires or fears integration. This ambivalence has been thrown into relief by the passage of several parliamentary acts. With the right to marry and adopt, gay people seem less involved with the rush and roll of cruising and carousing than they were thirty years ago and are more concerned with settling down within a domestic environment. A clear link is emerging; with the opportunities for marriage beckoning, the need for an aggressive counter-culture has dwindled. Legal acceptance has bred a certain placidity. This can be seen in the way that some cities, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester among them, have gay ‘villages’ which are, on the whole, pedestrianised to create a human space. It is not altogether surprising that England’s ‘Lesbian capital’ should be the quiet trans-Pennine village of Hebden Bridge, where female couples raise their children side by side with an easy-going local community.
But violence and prejudice still abound. In some cities the gay and trans communities have suffered several attacks over the past few years. ‘Coming out’ is still a rite of passage, frequently characterised by trauma. Where sixty years ago homosexuality itself was a crime, homophobia has now taken its place, and the very expression ‘coming out’ testifies to lingering societal prejudice.
The process by which poor or neglected areas are galvanised and renovated by the wealthy – a process rather lazily termed ‘gentrification’ – is one to which gay people have usually been pivotal. It seems, however, that this very gift for improving an area has turned on these pioneers. Soho, for example, is indeed too expensive now to afford much genuine bohemianism. The solution, once again, is simply to look further afield – into Whitechapel, Spitalfields and beyond.
As the history of religion shows, people are never more contentious than when the source of their quarrel is something unfalsifiable. Here is where the notion of a queer ‘spectrum’ has proved unhelpful: when the meaning, if any, of a term is uncertain, it will be fought over. The increasing preference for a notion of gender ‘fluidity’ itself accounts not only for the almost bewildering array of terms now approved within debates about gender identity, but also for the remarkably ad hominem or ad feminam sparring that takes place in social media. The initially puzzling exhortation to ‘Check your privilege!’ is, at its best, merely an appeal for a recognition that our opinions can be rooted in personal circumstances that not everyone is heir to. Thus a white middle-class woman is not best placed to lecture a working-class black woman, or vice versa. When the question turns to gender identity, however, something farcical can ensue. A ‘cis woman’ (one born a woman in gender as well as in sexual characteristics) will tell a trans woman to check her privilege for having been able to avoid the difficulties of growing up a woman; a trans woman will retort that the cis woman should check her own privilege for not having undergone all the agonies entailed by growing up in the wrong biological sex, or for never having confronted transphobia. So it goes on.
William Blake put it best in 1809 when he noted that ‘Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay’. He stated this in the context of Chaucer’s London pilgrims, some of them not so different from the sexual pilgrims followed in this book. And, as Blake added, ‘the characters themselves remain for ever unaltered … Names alter, things never alter.’ In truth there are many sexes in London. There have always been many sexes in the city. This book is a celebration, as well as a history, of the continual and various human world maintained in its diversity despite persecution, condemnation and affliction. It represents the ultimate triumph of London.
1 Greek red figure pottery (c. 480-323 BC) with idealised males in various erotic poses.
2 A Saxon chieftain, part of a rich and homo-erotic culture. The men dressed more extravagantly than the women.
3 An image of London under Roman domination. A statue of the military emperor, Trajan, who is believed to have been exclusively gay, close to the remains of the Roman bathhouse at Billingsgate on what is now Lower Thames Street.
4 London Bridge delineated by Claes Visscher (1586–1652) in the early seventeenth century. Its lavatories were well known sites for queer assignations.
5 William II or William Rufus, well known for creating a gay court and prom
oting orgies with young men.
6 The murder of Piers Gaveston. Gaveston was bitterly resented because of his extraordinary closeness to Edward II, which had all the appearance of a sexual union
7 The joint effigy of two Knights Templar. The Templars were regularly accused of sodomy and related sexual practices, and were banished from the kingdom.
8 From William Blake’s engraving of the Canterbury pilgrims on their way out of London. Chaucer provides two of the first descriptions of London queers, the Pardoner and the Summoner.
9 A map of London before the Great Fire. Certain divines and moralists blamed the conflagration on the prevalence of sodomy among the clerisy and nobility of the city.
10 Shakespeare treated sodomy as a natural thing, and his eighteenth sonnet is a love poem that seems to be addressed to a man. Of course he also made full use of the theatrical convention whereby boys dressed as women on the stage. But he was of so fluid and mercurial a temper that the matter is undecided.
11 Christopher Marlowe’s most famous remark, ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’, was accredited to him by a government agent but it has survived as a permanent clue to his sexual identity.
12 James I of England and James VI of Scotland, a notorious devotee of gay sex. He was known to slobber over his favourites and to one of them, the Duke of Buckingham, he wrote that: ‘I desire only to live in this world, for your sake … I had rather live banished in any part of the world with you, than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you … god bless you my sweet child & wife & grant that you may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.’ It was said that King Elizabeth had been succeeded by Queen James.
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