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When, in May 1952, the weekly tabloid Sunday Pictorial began a three-part series of articles titled “Evil Men,” the journalist Douglas Warth felt it necessary to justify the topic of his piece within the opening paragraphs: The natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence is providing cover for an unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip on this country . . . I thought, at first, that this menace could best be fought by silence—a silence which Society has almost always maintained in the face of a problem which had been growing in our midst for years. But this vice can no longer be ignored. The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread. Homosexuality is an unpleasant subject, but it must be faced if ever it is to be controlled.1 Warth’s presumption of an outraged readership for whose sake the “conspiracy of silence” surrounding urban vice must now be broken was a journalistic trope with a distinguished heritage. In the 1880s and 1890s, the “new journalism” associated with radical titles like the Pall Mall Gazette c h a p t e r 2 the perversity of the zigzag: the criminality of queer urban desire It seems clear that there has been a considerable increase in the number of homosexual offences since 1946. The explanation for the steep rise in 1951 and fall thereafter is that in that year a large number of provincial visitors came to London for the Festival of Britain. This is borne out by the fact that the increase took place during the exact months when the South Bank Exhibition was open. —sir john nott-bower, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in a memo to the Wolfenden Committee, 1954 81 82 the perversity of the igag and Truth had similarly embarked on self-styled crusades to expose London’s institutionalized networks of sexual exploitation, supposedly kept hidden by a sinister combination of vested interests and editorial discretion. In July 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette’s sensationalist exposé of child prostitution within the capital, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” had provoked a massive public uproar and helped precipitate the Criminal Law Amendment Act, whose Labouchère Amendment would famously create the offense of gross indecency between men. Five years later, the sustained coverage of the Cleveland Street scandal, in which aristocrats were discovered cavorting with telegraph delivery boys in a private West End brothel, suggested further how illicit vice was entrenched just below the surface of the city. All this reached its climax, of course, during Oscar Wilde’s prosecution of 1895, his acts of gross indecency with assorted young valets and grooms confirming London’s image as a metropolis in which the young and vulnerable were ever at risk from the irrevocable damage of sexual debasement.2 Warth’s three-part article was one of a cluster of similar exposés to appear in the early 1950s and followed the same contrived dialectic of conspiratorial concealment and heroic exposure. Provoked by an increasingly competitive fight for sales, populist tabloids posed as outspoken moral guardians and deployed melodramatic narratives, emotive tones, and stock characterizations of urban villainy that were all deeply reminiscent of their late-Victorian predecessors.3 Central London—and the commercial leisure district of the West End in particular—became presented once more as a shadowy zone of danger and intrigue, in which affluent older perverts could be found mercilessly preying on naive and impressionable hard-up young lads. Warth, for instance, conjured for his readers “a man in Mayfair nicknamed ‘the Duchess ,’ who acts as procurer for rich degenerates” and who regularly scoured the city’s all-night cafés in search of vulnerable borstal boys he could willfully seduce into a life of vice and squalor.4 Following the Cleveland Street telegraph boys or Wilde’s young valets, London’s guardsmen, laborers, and other urban drifters now became cast as potential victims, dangerously afloat amid the promiscuous entertainments of the decadent West End and ever on the brink of irreversible corruption. Matt Houlbrook has shown how the renewed concern over London’s male vice in this period was largely provoked by certain operational changes in the procedures of the Metropolitan Police. As the force returned to full manpower after the war, those divisions with responsibility for managing the city center stepped up their surveillance of urinals and street corners in [3.22.61.246...

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