Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895–1957 by Helen Smith (review)

Helen Smith begins her engaging book with an anecdote about her grandparents. Her grandmother had arrived at a South Yorkshire dance hall, sometime in the late 1940s, on the arm of Alf, her grandfather’s best friend. But by the end of the evening her grandparents had fallen for each other. Alf didn’t mind; he was gay and accepted as such by his circle of working-class mates. Smith’s study is an exploration into the larger social context for this event. Was this an isolated instance of acceptance, or was it indicative of a much broader tolerance toward queer sex and relationships in working-class communities in the industrial North? Smith diligently sifted through court records, provincial newspapers, oral histories, and the Edward Carpenter archive in search of an answer.

As she points out, this is the first academic study of nonmetropolitan men who desired men in England between the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 and the Wolfenden Report of 1957. And her findings will not come as a surprise to those who have been following trends in queer history over the past few years, trends that emphasize sexual fluidity, the establishment of the sexual binary much later than we once thought, and class-differentiated experiences of sexual knowledge and expression. Thus, inter alia, she argues that prosecutions for homosexual offenses were much less frequent in the North than in London, because such activities were much less visible (there was no gay subculture), and there was a greater live-and-let-live attitude toward them. This was partly due to the resistance against the intrusion of authority into private lives that was central to working-class culture and partly because the masculine homosociality of the factory or the mine had habituated men to each other’s bodies. Male affection, including touching, dancing, and the sharing of beds, easily crossed the line into sexual activity without impinging on the masculinity of the men involved. Absent the new language of sexology, which took a long time to percolate down into the laboring classes, men who had sex with men simply did not perceive themselves as having a different sexual identity or appreciate that they were doing anything wrong or illegal. This began to change only in the late 1950s, when increasing affluence began to reorient the working-class male focus from the workplace to the developing consumer culture of home and family, and after the homosexual scandals and inquiries of the decade had given a new visibility to a coherent homosexual identity.

In many ways this picture is compelling. Yet doubts about the plausibility of every aspect of Smith’s argument begin to form, because she almost always reads the evidence in a way that best suits her preconceived ideas. For example, in relating the story of Fred Dyson, a Barnsley coalminer who was convicted of cottaging (having sex with men in public lavatories) in the early 1960s, she argues that the fact that his workmates did not spurn him represents a casual acceptance of same-sex activity in such northern working-class communities. Maybe so; but as Smith herself implies, there is another way of reading this tale. After all, “naturally, he believed that this would be the end of his job and the end of his friendships with his workmates” (113), so where did this fear come from if casual acceptance was the norm? His workmates teased him as a “poof,” subjected him to sexualized banter, and “seemed to be fascinated by him” (114), all suggesting that he was seen as different and unusual. They might tolerate him and protect him as a workmate, but was this really casual acceptance of same-sex activity?

A second example: In her discussion of George Merrill, Edward Carpenter’s working-class boyfriend, Smith describes his unsubtle come-ons to a farmer by the name of George Levick. On two occasions in the...