London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, and: Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (review)

For those in the know, the public spaces of late-Victorian London, especially around Jermyn Street and St. James's Park, could be a great place for men who liked men to meet other like-minded men. These two books have a lot to say about where in the city such assignations took place, if not exactly how the men managed to recognize each other or what they did having done so.

London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 maps in some detail the erotic geography of London's fashionable West End, with its cruisy shopping streets, fancy hotels, stylish cafes, bohemian theaters, exotic Turkish Baths, and—those havens from domesticity—gentlemen's clubs. The East End though, and some sense of what homosexual relations might have been like for working-class Londoners, remain as undefined as those blank territories on the map that so intrigued the young Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899). The "culture" of this book's title is mostly the high culture of Oxbridge- educated gentlemen; the few working-class lads who make an infrequent appearance do so by virtue (or vice) of their association, in public scandal or private memoir, with reputable members of the upper classes.

Matt Cook has delved deeply into legal records and assembled an exhaustive table collating all the arrests and convictions for sodomy, intent to commit sodomy, and gross indecency between males in London from this twenty-five-year period. He has also scoured the newspapers of the time and plumbed the journals and letters of men like Roger Casement, who kept notes about all his erotic encounters, to discover where homosexual men could find each other in the city. The book, while full of facts, names, and geographical placements, lacks those features that would give more point and purpose to the dull weight of fact: ideas and stories.

One of the more interesting speculations about the changes brought about by late-nineteenth-century sexologists appears not in Cook's plodding discussion of that movement but in a quotation from Henry Oosterhuis, who suggests that sexology marked "the transition in the urban bourgeois milieu from the ethos of Christianity and productivity, which dictated self-discipline and control of passions, to a consumerist culture of abundance, which valued the satisfaction of individual desire" (82). Cook immediately distances himself from this intriguing claim, adding quickly that "It's a contentious argument," but the reader is grateful that somebody ventured to come up with one. Likewise, the dearth of good stories in this study that might enliven the inert factual material becomes apparent in another quotation that stands out in vivid relief against the backdrop of Cook's colorless reportage. In a short anecdote from his diary, Lytton Strachey sums up in one catty remark the incessant queer-chat of the Bloomsberries: "dinner at Gordon Square. Clive very fat. Discussion as to whether sods were a priori better than womanisers. Very dull" (33). Of course we can't expect Cook, or anyone else, to be as sharp and entertaining as Strachey, but more telling anecdotes and more compelling speculation about the social practices described would help to animate this rather dry account of a great city's homosexual underground.

The later chapters of London and the Culture of Homosexuality go over ground that has been covered elsewhere, and better, by other critics: the sexology movement, by Foucault and his followers; the Hellenic movement, the focus of Linda Dowling's superb Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994); and the decadent movement, by countless critics who have more interesting things to say about the usual suspects (Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde). The familiar historical figures discussed here (Havelock...