Matthew Houlbrook’s 2005 book Queer London opens with a romantic letter from one man to another. It’s a good introduction, it’s a very helpful description of queer 1930s culture, but what struck me, more than the story, was the citation.
Figure 1. Photograph of Cyril’s letter to Billy, 1934. The National Archive of the UK (PRO), ref no. MEPO 3/758. Material in the National Archives in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority.
What bothers me is this: it is not merely that most documents about gay life from early 20th-century England have only come to us through the police, it is that it is still the Metropolitan Police Authority who grants permission. Gay history in Britain is still filtered through not merely illicitness or secrecy, but through illegality: in many ways, the oppressors are still telling the story.
Before I ever opened Queer London, before I had looked at any documents of gay history, before I moved to Britain, I read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst’s novels, of which there are currently five, are all aware, in some way or another, of the tensions of gay history, and the way that this history is haunted by the missing, the unknown, and the dead. Of these, three deal directly with gay history in twentieth-century Britain: The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Line of Beauty (2004), and The Stranger’s Child (2011). I am only writing about three, because you can do that in an essay, cut out the parts that aren’t relevant, focus on what is.
Britain in general has a habit of leaving things unspoken. Even now, gayness, hookups, wealth, or anything considered not-quite polite conversation, is sometimes indicated in whispers or eyebrow gestures, or the pauses in jokes. It happens often enough, at parties, in class, that I too have gotten into the habit, and the game that comes from guessing in the silence. It is not supposed to be about shame, merely politeness, but the silence indicates otherwise. Yet when the stories themselves are missing, when the stories being told are about silence and loss, about what is unspoken, it is a habit that is hard to break. It is not that Hollinghurst’s books leave sex out– quite the opposite, in a way that finds me sometimes reading his novels in public with the covers barely open, angled so that no one can read an explicit scene over my shoulder. And they are not niche or unread: The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker prize in 2004 and was made into a BBC miniseries; Hollinghurst is interviewed by newspapers and attends literary festivals. But even in highlighting the silences and omissions, the novels further them, and the unsaid and unpublished of the characters remains so for the readers.
For books about gay life, out gay life, they are remarkably oblique. The Swimming Pool Library is set in the summer of 1983, described in the first line as “the last summer of its kind there was ever to be […] it was my time, my belle époque – but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye.” It is the last summer of its kind because of AIDS, which in 1983 was just beginning as a disease in England. It is also the last summer of its kind for the narrator, a young, almost absurdly privileged man, whose title, wealth, and sexual magnetism render him a kind of sexual superhero, able to pick up men anywhere, without regard for schedules or self awareness. At first, he appears as a caricature of racist, out of touch, upper-class Britain, with his boarding-school-and-Oxford education, useless job editing an encyclopedia of architecture, and fetishization of his Black lover, Arthur, whose name he describes as “a kind of time travel, [the kind of name] cried out in passion when my grandfather was young.”
This lazy nostalgia for colonialism returns to haunt him and those around him. Will accepts a job writing an old man’s memoirs, with their similar plot to Will’s life, haunt Will’s own narrative, particularly when the memoirs reveal that the man was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for homosexual acts. A pertinent fact goes unspoken: that the politician who persecuted him, and is later elevated to the peerage, is Will’s own grandfather. It is this grandfather from whom Will has gained his title, and presumably his money; it is this grandfather who funds Will’s life and haunts Charles’. Will cannot edit the memoir, and tells Charles that “All I could write now […] is a book about why I couldn’t write the book […] I suppose there are enough books of that kind to make that of some interest.” Where there is a story to be told, Will can only be silent: even to tell the stories of the past is too risky. In the end, he is trapped between that past, with its secrets and threats, and the future, the knowledge of AIDS and Will’s sexual habits having haunted the reader throughout the book.
Will Beckwith, even with his title and money, describes himself as “tugged between two versions of myself, one of them a hedonist and the other — a little in the background these days– an almost scholarly figure with a faintly puritanical set to the mouth.” I love this description, and feel like it is some shared trait between myself and the narrator. I am, absolutely, on the other end, an almost scholarly figure, mouth pursed, half-longing to find some hedonistic urge, to cut loose and make gleefully bad decisions. Yet I find now that I can’t. After spending so much time reading these texts and attempting to adjust to the English culture of reticence and omission, I find that there are parts of myself that have turned from present to invisible, no longer able to be articulated.
*
Nick Guest, the protagonist of The Line of Beauty, does not have the connections or wealth that Will possesses, but instead is driven by his desire to fit in with those who do. In Nick’s newly discovered social circle, a family which includes a newly elected Tory MP, it is known but not mentioned that he is gay, just as it is known but barely mentioned that the daughter, Cat, has ‘moods’, which extend to self-harm and terrible depression. Nick does not see the harm in silence; he himself was raised in the habit by his middle-class family: “It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the told was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.” Nick becomes complicit in the silence surrounding gay life, even as the AIDS crisis hits Britain.
AIDS, which haunts the whole novel, also provides the ultimate excuse for omission. One death is described as “some extraordinary bug that he’d picked up in the Far East last year. No one knew what it was. It’s thought to be some incredibly rare thing. It’s just frightfully bad luck.” Another simply mentions that “George is gone,” and Nick does not try to remember who George is, only pausing to think that ‘gone’ does not mean that George has gone on vacation. Another man in the baths looks far thinner than he did the previous year, but again, the implication is ignored. Nick, along with the Conservative circles that dominated 1980s politics, ignores what AIDS, and its stigma, means for so many people. Nick is not haunted by his past or his ancestors, instead, he and his social circle are obsessed with Margaret Thatcher: what she thinks of them; if she will attend their parties; what others think of her: it is reputation that haunts the characters, and which silences them. It is reputation that causes characters to ignore the signs of their disease, talking about it so obliquely that the record of what killed them is missing. Even when homosexuality is legal, its reputation makes it unspeakable. Hollinghurst helps all of this along: the texts of AIDS, the public discovery, the panic, the political struggle, are all missing. The narrative simply jumps from 1983 to 1986, skipping the unseemly and disturbing, and all the emotions that go along with it.
I first came across The Line of Beauty as I flew to England for an admissions interview at Oxford university, a place I had wanted to go since I had read Brideshead Revisited at fifteen (a book that deserves its essay about silence, and one from which I suspect I learned much of mine; I still feel too close to it to really be able to write about it). For some reason, the airline had the miniseries version of The Line of Beauty as one of its entertainment options, and I spent half the flight watching pre-Downton Abbey Dan Stevens as Nick Guest get embarrassed about asparagus etiquette and meet men for blind dates. A few years later, trying to navigate the odd society that university life brought, I picked up the book, and found Nick’s experiences trying to fit into that society a mirror to my own.
By that point, I had picked up the perverse habit of deliberately not picking up hints in conversation, of being silent when the other person is angling for me to ask the obvious question. I had to learn silence in Britain. When I arrived I was forever asking personal questions, or talking too much about my emotions. And I know– I know — that there are parts of Britain where this is ludicrous, some utopia where people talk openly about their feelings and a normal conversation is not preceded with twenty minutes of tiptoeing around. I know, but somehow I chose the other version, the silent version, in the same way that Nick Guest did, with the assumption that it was posher, more authentic, something to which I should aspire. I even once found myself, after tuning out for a few minutes, in a conversation about the excellence of Margaret Thatcher, at which point I, unsurprisingly, simply left the conversation and said nothing. And this is harmful: it is harmful not to talk about AIDS, it is harmful not to argue about politics; it is harmful to let the politically and socially powerful dictate the rules of conversation without question. Like Nick Guest, I wanted to be let in, and I hoped that an invitation to the right parties would shield me, protect me, make me special. Like Nick Guest, it worked for a bit; like Nick Guest, it didn’t stay that way, and eventually all of my knowledge and habits that I had collected as armor didn’t help, and a mistake was made with my visa and I wasn’t able to stay in England.
*
It is thus a relief that The Stranger’s Child is a novel about how facts and gossip are ephemeral, that what has been collected and learned will inevitably be lost. It starts in 1913, in the kind of setting that Merchant Ivory likes: a young poet, Cecil, goes to stay with his lover George, a fellow student at Oxford, and his middle-class family: his older brother Hubert, his 16 year-old-sister Daphne, and his widowed mother, who is being courted by the man next door. While he’s there, he kisses his lover’s sister, is caught naked in a pool with his lover, and writes a poem ‘Two Acres’ about the house and, in subtext, about his lover. The first section of the novel feels like pastiche, which is sort of the point: as time goes on, the poem, and the story, are manipulated through the century, into the familiar narrative of, say, Atonement, or A Room with a View. When the poet dies in World War I, the poem takes on a new purpose, and becomes a shorthand, for politicians and popular historians, for idyllic, pre-war Britain. Daphne, partially on the strength of Cecil’s brief visit, goes onto marry the his brother, holding onto that secondary fame to lead an artistic life of her own.
As the book goes through the years, the unreliability of narrative is revealed. A particularly shameless literary biographer tries, in the 1980s, to make his reputation by proving that Cecil was gay, and also that he, not his brother, fathered Daphne’s baby while on leave. But his guesses are really never more than guesses: no one who he tried to talk to will reveal any information. They are too worried about protecting their own reputations, and he is too much of an outside, too eager, too lower-middle class, to be let in. The poem, ‘Two Acres,’ is quoted by Churchill at the start of World War II and is memorized by students in schools, without any mention of its subtext, which is in turn hidden, ignored, and forgotten.
At the end of the novel, long after the biographer’s poorly written, sensationalist biography, someone finally reveals a text and a clue. An antique book dealer finds a book with copies of letters sent by Hubert to the man supposedly trying to marry his mother, which make it clear that the man is in love with Hubert, as well as a few inexplicable letters sent by Cecil The dealer shows them to an antique dealer, thinking they might be valuable. Of course they would be, because Hollinghurst has finally shown us a gay text not curated by the police department, one that simply reveals itself in the fullness of time. It does not help the characters: Hubert, too, was killed in World War I, and his whole family, even his later-aristocratic sister, is gone; the biographer has moved on. When the dealers search for copies Daphne’s book online, it sells for hardly any money, a few pounds, even copies personally inscribed to some of the other characters. To find the book then almost seems pointless, and in the end it might be sold to some private dealer. With the original letters are missing, and the copies do not hold the same interest: we still do not have the original text. It seems futile to even search for another history.
*
I have spent so much time learning this way of communicating, speaking a new language, interpreting the awkward silences in British films or comedy for others, that I don’t want it to be lost. I just want it to be expanded. I know that before I learned it, I was somebody else, someone more open, someone who could write this essay without needing to hide behind extended literary metaphor. I have spent so much time learning this like a course of study, that I seem to have cut out what was deemed irrelevant, and it now seems impossible to bring back.
I want to see texts because I want to know that they ever existed, that about which society has am silent has not always been silent or murmured, even in Britain. I want stories that don’t always end with arrests or loss. I want scholarly biographies that matter-of-factly discuss gay life. I want novels that don’t require an argument for a queer reading. I want to find a narrative that doesn’t require that we always first and foremost consider shame.
I miss Britain. I miss the air, the trains, the London Review of Books cake shop, the strange geography of the cities, the weather, the cooking, and my friends. I miss the tacky holiday decorations in pubs, I miss dances in church basements, I miss red wine at dinner parties, I miss waking across the countryside to get to pubs, and I miss people knowing what I mean when by whispers or eyebrow gestures, or the pauses in jokes. I wish I hadn’t learned to be so damn careful, that I hadn’t learned that language.
Here is the thing, the awful thing: I originally picked up Queer London to do research on a novel, about gay college students in the 1920s. And I am writing this novel with all the hints and winks of the time period, with characters who apologize for their sexuality, who scheme to hide it. I am trying to write it differently, to take that which is historically accurate and polish it so that the shame is rubbed away, so that through the tarnish people’s real lives, and their joy and plans and petty university concerns and love shine through, but there doesn’t seem to be a guidebook, not for the past, and I feel ill-equipped to do it. I can’t blame Hollinghurst– or any writer, really — for not writing another narrative; it feels like rewriting what has actually happened, an alternative-universe version of the real history. In the end, I suppose, the most that can be hoped for is that what is spoken can make up for what is silent, that with enough text a few letters owned by the Metropolitan Police Authority is simply a small part of the story. Because you can do that in a novel, cut out the parts that you don’t want to tell, focus on what you do.
And yet. Moving to Britain, much as I wouldn’t recommend it, felt like finding home, and even as I describe its rules and silences, even as I know that none of this frankly useless knowledge can help me get back there, I cannot help but miss it all desperately. Perhaps that is why writing a novel within the this culture feels like an act of love, even when I know how destructive it can be, when it is forced upon one, when it is the silence of shame.
There’s a lot to digest and ponder, so I’ll come back with more thoughts, but for now let me start by saying thanks for giving me so many titles to add to my to-read list!
This is lovely, Sarah!
Ok, here’s my first thought that has bubbled up to the surface, and apparently I’m a total philistine because it’s about a movie, but has everyone seen Pride? It covers that political gap that gets skipped over by The Line of Beauty as it’s set in 1984 during the Miner’s strike. I think maybe still some of the issues in it are approached more directly than others, but I’d say it mostly did a very good job of being frank all around.
I watched it three times back to back on a plane and cried every. single. time. Such an interesting story for today’s activism as well.
Yeah, it helped soften me up that “Solidarity Forever” and “Which Side are you On” were like nursery rhymes for me, but I cried quite a bit too.
That is BASICALLY my favorite movie ever now, I watched it so many times last year
This could use some copyediting as I found some of the sentences very confusing with missing words, etc.
That being said, I think the idea is very interesting. I just spent 2 years living in the London, and I’d be there now if I could. The Brits are known for their reticence, obviously, but I found that they were quite happy to open up with me. Perhaps it was easier because I was an outsider. I would guess that Oxford is probably one of the last real strongholds of the old tradition of not talking about anything indelicate (but maybe raising a well-timed eyebrow to share mutual conclusions). I think of this as a sort of old-fashioned English trait, but anyone should feel free to tell me I’m wrong. I only lived there for two years, so not an expert. But London, at any rate, is so multicultural that it’s a lot harder to communicate with a raised eyebrow. I don’t think I changed my behavior into a more English way of being silent or reserved while I was there, nor did I feel pressure to.
I’m right there with you on missing it terribly though!
>>”The Brits are known for their reticence, obviously, but I found that they were quite happy to open up with me. Perhaps it was easier because I was an outsider.”
No, it’s just because while there are obviously cultural differences between Britain and America, the idea that these can be reduced down to “Britons are repressed and can’t talk about anything emotional and are terrified of Teh Ghey!” is a tiresome myth.
I love this: “Moving to Britain, much as I wouldn’t recommend it, felt like finding home…”
“Swimming Pool Library” is such a stunning, brilliant book. I’ve taught it twice now, and I always end our discussion with the question: Is this is a book about AIDS? I agree, so much, that the future knowledge held by the reader (and author) must color the whole book, and really, even shapes it.
I wonder how “The Spell” would fit into your theme here. I don’t think it’s as strong a book as the ones you’ve addressed, but that scene of Alex taking his first LSD pill and suddenly feeling NOT anxious, NOT shameful, and able to enjoy the dancing and the sex and the hedonism fully for the first time — that’s an image that has stayed with me. The moments when I’ve transcended my own cultures of silence & reticence are so powerful.
Hm, you are semi-inspiring me to re-read Swimmimg Pool Library. I read it after Line of Beauty and thought it suffered a lot from the comparison : LoB seemed like such a rich, full, human book, and SPL seemed narrower and colder and kind of meaner.
(Though I think it’s also that I much prefer my upper-class Tories shown through the eyes of someone who recognises that they’re kind of awful.)
Hi are you me? This is so many of my feelings about having moved to england. Even in super liberal central oxford, queer couples NEVER held hands in public, because it would have seemed just too much like a statement.
Really? I’ve done this in big cities and small towns across the UK without any problems.
I always have done, too, with no worse abuse than you get for being female in public anyway. I know less femme couples who won’t, though, and very few male-male couples who will (except in carefully delineated areas like Canal Street, obviously.)
Where queer couples refrain from holding hands , it’s more because (as elsewhere in the world) it might expose one to homophobic comments or even assault than because it’s “too much of a statement”. However, while sadly not everyone can feel or be safe doing it, queer couples certainly do not NEVER hold hands in public. It’s fairly common in central London and I’ve seen noisily out-and-proud kids in Oxford — in 2002. I’d be amazed if it was *less* accepted there now.
At least you don’t get shot at for doing it, as recently happened in New York.
Er – I’m British. I am really quite uptight, even for a British person. I’m gay. I spent ten years at Oxford & held my partner’s hand wherever I bloody well wanted to! I really don’t recognise this version of Britain. We’re certainly more reticent generally than Americans, I think it’s fair to say that, but I’d be cautious about drawing wider conclusions such as these on a fairly small sample of gay texts & British cities! Hollinghurst is a master of this Jamesian, slightly tortured tone – try Ali Smith or Max Schaefer’s work for a very different take on it.
“I feel like it is rewriting what has actually happened”
This cuts to the core of my problem as a consumer of historically set queer fiction. I’m queer. And. I like happy endings. I like genre romance. I like characters living happily ever after. But. I don’t want to erase our history. And. I know terrible things happened to queer people in the past (and now). But. I am also sure that some queer folk must have managed to carve out their own happily ever afters. And we don’t get enough of those stories. And some days I just want to read happy stories about lesbian pirates or gay detectives.
I…may actually be writing a slightly anachronistic lesbian pirate story with a happy ending. 🙂
I would read that!
Ann Lister is always a great story of “just sodding did it, the end.”
One of my parents is British, I grew up on the Yank side of the Pond AND had lots of therapy. After unintentionally starting a family feud one visit via explicitly stating accessibility needs (the horror!), my new thing with family is to talk about Feelz around them sometimes just to the edge of discomfort. My grandmother has actually written the sentence “I love you” to me in a birthday card now, which is unheard of because she just…doesn’t say those things. All this is a little too real is what I’m saying. Seriously though, I’m pretty sure the silences have killed some of the black sheep in my family. There’s something to be said for uncomfortable conversations, if you want to relearn them.
I *still* only feel comfortable saying ‘i love you’ to my romantic partner – saying it to family or friends, even though I feel it, seems Outrageously Forward. And I’m not even English!
It’s almost as if reticence about emotions wasn’t a rare or uniquely British trait.
This makes me want to re-read Hollinghurst right now.
“Britain in general has a habit of leaving things unspoken. Even now, gayness, hookups, wealth, or anything considered not-quite polite conversation, is sometimes indicated in whispers or eyebrow gestures, or the pauses in jokes”
Oh, does it? Nice to be informed.
I thought of leaving this “unspoken”, but that would I guess, be to further the stereotype: it weirds me out that some Americans are so comfortable and certain in their assessment of British culture gleaned from very brief aquaintance with Britain, and without apparent referral to the thoughts of actual British people. I mean, I get that the privilege differential between America is not as great as it is elsewhere, but I feel that there would be some self-questioning before an article full of “Italians are…” “French people are…” and lots of feeling apparently oppressed by learning the quaint foreign ways of this peculiar Other Country was publlished. Maybe what you perceive as reticence and carefulness and that ever-fetishised “reserve” is not actually perceived or interpreted as such by us. Even in settings where much is “unspoken” (and really, where is there NOT, though what is not spoken and the reasons for it may differ) it is not necessarily that what is omitted is unspeakable, it may be that it’s assumed that everyone already gets it.
Maybe we’re not all being “so damned careful” and perfectly arching our eyebrows before we offer a cup of Earl Grey to a duchess. Maybe you were not in fact here long enough to get past the stereotypes, especially as it appears you were deliberately seeking them out and disregarding anything that did not match them.
“And I know– I know — that there are parts of Britain where this is ludicrous, some utopia where people talk openly about their feelings and a normal conversation is not preceded with twenty minutes of tiptoeing around. I know, but somehow I chose the other version, the silent version, in the same way that Nick Guest did, with the assumption that it was posher, more authentic, something to which I should aspire.”
OK — so, you acknowledge Britain is not all eyebrows and glances and repression and no one can talk about being gay or anything, but you dismiss it as “some Utopia” — presumably largely inaccessible and possibly mythical — and rather than the place where the majority of the British live their lives. You appear to be *still* treating the Brideshead Revisited scene as “posher and more authentic”. Apart from anything else, it can hardly be *both*. Poshness, is by definition, exclusive, experienced by a small and privileged group of people. If you look for it, you can find it, (though there is also a tendency for British people to play up a certain kind of Britishness for Americans who seem to be looking for it — I’ve found myself doing it myself, not deliberately, but somehow unable to stop) and I suppose you can generalise from that about the entire culture and then set out to save it from itself if you must, but it won’t be terribly valid.
Alan Hollinghurst is a privately educated, immensely privileged author (and personally, I’ve never been able to get past a few pages of his books). His experiences and observations are valid, but they’re not very representative of modern Britain. As his books are period pieces, they’re not even *trying* to be.
Finally, “I chose the other version.”
There are actually more than two “versions” of Britain. Just so you know. And it’s changing all the time. Just like everywhere else.
This is a decent personal piece that would have been vastly improved – and far more realistic – if it had remained personal and not made sweeping, wholly inaccurate statements about modern British culture, based on anecdotal evidence and the ideas presented in historical fiction. I honestly don’t understand how reading/watching period dramas – from a privileged, white, wealthy perspective – can give you insight into modern life here. That’s not to take anything away from these novels, which are excellent, but they are all looking backwards, and from a very particular point of view.
‘Even now, gayness, hookups, wealth, or anything considered not-quite polite conversation, is sometimes indicated in whispers or eyebrow gestures, or the pauses in jokes.’ This statement bothers me *immensely*, it’s such a gross over-generalisation with no basis in fact – just because we don’t immediately shout our opinions to anyone within earshot doesn’t mean we are *silent*, that these things are a dirty secret. Maybe they’re none of your damn business, but that doesn’t make it ‘not-quite polite conversation’. (The fact the author thinks hookup culture doesn’t exist either is hilarious, and so, so wrong.) I also just feel like this ‘new way of communicating’ is simply the author not understanding British humour – understatement, sarcasm, double entendre, dry wit, all things that can be misinterpreted as a ‘new’ language, I guess.
British reticence isn’t the opposite of American oversharing – and yes, you do overshare – we are still intimate, we share our feelings, we can be loud as hell with no provocation (clearly the author has never seen a hen party on a bender, or what happens whenever there’s a football match on), we don’t hide important details ‘in the pauses’; we just might not share these things immediately, and especially not to people we don’t know. The thread throughout this piece about homosexuality remaining something secret, something ‘not for polite conversation’ is just so upsetting, and so utterly wrong. Maybe in the small circle the author travelled in this is still the case, but not everywhere; I definitely feel far safer being open here than I do in America. Of course there are still places where you have to be careful, but homosexuality isn’t *taboo*, it isn’t the love that dare not speak it’s name, not anymore.
I’m a Norwegian living in the UK. I don’t recognize the US version of the UK.
As a Brit who has, for the last two and a half years, lived in Glasgow, this picture of the UK is so strange as to be alien. Before Glasgow I lived in Manchester, home to one of the biggest and oldest gay areas in the UK. In neither of these cities have I ever seen men walking hand in hand being commented on or shunned; nor has it been an infrequent sight. In neither city has queerness of any kind been a matter of the pauses and silences; it’s openly spoken about. This… caricature of a specific social milieu claiming to stand in as characterisation of the whole UK is utterly, utterly unrecognisable, and I’d invite the author to observe queer life in either of the cities I mentioned to demonstrate that.
>> “Perhaps that is why writing a novel within the this culture feels like an act of love, even when I know how destructive it can be, when it is forced upon one, when it is the silence of shame.”
OK, I should leave this alone, but one more thing. As a British bisexual person, I find this not “loving” but deeply offensive. Who are you talking about, when you talk of our culture being “forced upon one”? Given our colonialist history we are hardly innocent, as a nation, of destructively forcing our culture upon people. But you seem to be talking as if from experience, when certainly British culture cannot be said to have been forced upon *you*, as you deliberately sought out a very particular enclave of it. Or do you mean that British LGBT people experience our culture as being “forced upon” US? As if we neither had, nor could desire, ownership of that culture? As if we were, intrinsically, something else? As if we not only did not but could not belong? What has historically been forced upon us is state-enforced homophobia. State-enforced homophobia is, regrettably, not at all globally unusual, and it is not identical with Britishness. It is not identical with American culture either — despite the fact that in America, prosecutions continued until *1998*. British queer people were and are both products and CREATORS of British culture, not simply passive butterflies crushed under its wheel. It is not challenging cultural homophobia, but reinforcing it, to treat them as quintessential outsiders, who merely suffer elegantly from society’s cruelties rather than contributing to its achievements. It does not counter erasure of our history to write as if oppression here were all about delicate wincing and never about fists, and as if oppression was always met with neurasthenic martyrdom and never with vocal rage; as if our anger, and our raised voices were anything but British. It is offensive to treat British LGBT people’s desire to be free of bigotry (insofar as you even credit us with the agency for such a desire) — with a desire to be free of their culture.
“Material in the National Archives in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority.
What bothers me is this: it is not merely that most documents about gay life from early 20th-century England have only come to us through the police, it is that it is still the Metropolitan Police Authority who grants permission.”
Umm. I know this is a very late comment, but: that is how copyright works. No ideological implications. While criminalising homosexuality is terrible in a hundred different ways, that does not stop the copyright holder of documents granting permission for reproduction of said documents. While there is an unbroken history of the organisation existing, the Met Police in the 1920s who created the documents is not *actually* the same organisation as the people now who say yes, sure, publish allll the things! (they could say no; that would be far worse, since they are the ones who hold the rights to this material because their predecessors created it.)