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Introduction: Social Modernism and Male Homosexuality in Postwar London
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
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In the summer of 1954, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the Conservative Home Secretary, asked John Wolfenden to form a Departmental Committee to make recommendations on the twin problems of male homosexuality and female prostitution. During the previous half-decade, both of these phenomena had become popularly perceived as virulent metropolitan threats, stoked by frequent tabloid exposés and mounting calls for political intervention . One of the new committee’s first actions was to invite various doctors , policemen, youth leaders, and military personnel to submit written evidence detailing their own experiences of queer men and their thoughts concerning what could and should be done about them. These documents can now be read as part of the Home Office files in the National Archive in Kew, where one of the researcher’s pleasures comes from reading Wolfenden ’s own comments, handwritten in the margins, as he responds to the various arguments being made. Among those to submit a report was the journalist Peter Wildeblood, who had shot to public notoriety in the spring of 1954 when he was found guilty (alongside Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and the landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers) of conspiring to incite acts of gross indecency and buggery with a pair of younger airmen. Wildeblood’s statement remains a rare and valuable attempt by a well-known homosexual to justify his way of life within an official public forum. His overall presentation situated homosexuality as an unfortunate medical condition, a view derived from both nineteenth-century sexology and the interwar psychiatry that was becoming i n t r o d u c t i o n social modernism and male homosexuality in postwar london London is there, waiting indifferently for her poets; and so long as she exists, and they, the challenge of her aloofness to their intention will remain. —colin macinnes, “City of Any Dream,” 1962 1 2 introduction increasingly familiar by the mid-1950s.1 But within this document there is one particularly interesting passage, in which he writes: Havelock Ellis once compared homosexuality to colour-blindness. You do not punish people for being colour-blind, and you do not force them to take medical treatment, for none exists. Is it any more logical, or just, to punish people like me?2 In the margin alongside, Wolfenden has written: “Yes, if colour-blindness results in them driving cars across traffic lights.” This brief exchange between Wildeblood’s typewriter and Wolfenden’s pencil encapsulates many of the themes with which this book is concerned. On one level Wolfenden, as the head of a public Departmental Committee, was countering Wildeblood’s liberal defense with a more communitarian framework typical of British policy makers during the early postwar period. Sometimes, he was suggesting, the wider interests of society must be privileged over those of certain disruptive individuals who threaten the stability of its underlying norms. Indeed, Wildeblood had already anticipated this kind of maneuver by grounding his apology in medical science—a move that, on its own terms, shifted the fact of a man’s homosexuality beyond the boundaries of individual culpability and thus opened the way for some form of social realignment.3 Yet Wolfenden’s rejoinder had an even more timely significance. The automated traffic light had been introduced onto London’s streets during the early 1930s, as part of a series of measures to combat the exponential rise in road accidents and congestion brought on by the arrival of the motorcar. As a technology with regular and predictable effects, it strove to manage— in an impersonal and equitable manner—the ordered flows of vehicles and pedestrians. As such, the traffic light was an early example of a wider approach to the administration of metropolitan life that would come to sudden prominence as Britain emerged from the Second World War. In the mid-1940s, the swift ascendency of town planning ideology would firmly embed such strategies of spatial management within public visions of postwar reconstruction. As this became disseminated via the popular media, it helped to reinforce an emphatic moral imperative around the use and experience of everyday urban space, sustaining a prescriptive notion of ordered civic life that would dominate official thinking well into the 1950s. Wolfenden ’s reply to Wildeblood, therefore, by casually invoking the mode of spatial [54.157.35.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:10 GMT) introduction 3 governance through which social consensus was then being sought, unwittingly articulated the very terms through...