Queer London by Matt Houlbrook

Author:Matt Houlbrook [Houlbrook, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780226354620
Google: wyV9ejoQRS4C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 467218
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2005-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

PART 4

POLITICS

9

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND BRITISHNESS

KARL’S STORY

In June 1937 the Danish milliner Karl B. left Paris for London. At Croydon Airport he was met by an immigration officer and turned back. This was not the first time Karl had been refused entry to Britain. Initially barred in 1933, he was denied permission to land at Harwich in 1934 and had an application to return declined in 1936. “He is a sex pervert,” noted an official from the Home Office Immigration Branch, “he should not be allowed to land in the United Kingdom.”1 While there was no suggestion that Karl had been prosecuted for a sexual offence, in 1933 officers found the addresses of several Government officials on him and suspected that his “visit was for the purpose of blackmail.” He was, further, “in possession of a considerable number of letters written by [Arthur P., his business partner] couched in affectionate terms which left little doubt that both persons were moral perverts.” Arthur visited the Harwich Immigration Office and Home Office, seeking permission for his partner to land. He was unsuccessful.2

Why was Karl B. kept out of Britain? We might widen the question, since if Karl was excluded from Britain’s territorial boundaries, queer men in general were positioned beyond the imagined boundaries of Britishness. In part, this was a physical process, embodied in the criminalization of particular queer practices and the logic of imprisonment—removing a source of danger from the community. Exclusion was also a cultural process, emblematized by the construction of sexual difference and queer urban culture as disturbance, immorality, and threat. These were, indeed, mutually constitutive. The sexual offences laws were underpinned by ideas of the queer’s transgressive character, which were, in turn, reinforced by the operations of those laws. Again: why were queer men legally and culturally excluded from British society? Rather than identify an innate hostility towards the “sexual pervert”—the ahistorical category of “homophobia”—we need to understand the public meanings of “homosexuality” in the early twentieth century. What negative attributes was it invested with? Why was the sexual deviant deemed so threatening as to warrant the forms of regulation explored above?

The answers lie in the law itself. If official surveillance exercised a profound influence on the cultural and geographical organization of queer urban life, it also exercised a similar influence on official and public knowledge of that world. While many queans flamboyantly carried their difference into London’s streets, most men sought to avoid the public gaze. It was only through their encounters with the police that they were, reluctantly, drawn into that gaze. Whether through the nightclub raids that initiated the spectacular “pansy cases” of the 1930s or the everyday patrols behind the stories of errant clergymen and cottaging laborers appearing each week in the News of the World, police operations were central to the process through which queer lives were uncovered, codified, and named for popular consumption.

Policing’s importance to this process was reinforced by the conventions of newspaper reportage. In contrast to the “new journalism” of the

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