The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London

3. Trial by Photobooth: The Public Face of the Homosexual Citizen

In 1952, Gordon Westwood (a pseudonym of the sociologist Michael Scho- field) published his book Society and the Homosexual, an “attempt to evaluate the social implications of homosexuality” for a general nontechnical readership. Deploying a similar rhetoric to Douglas Warth’s contemporaneous series of “Evil Men” articles, Westwood also presented his work as an urgent attempt to end the “conspiracy of silence on all sides” that continued to disavow the prevalence of male homosexuality in Britain.1 Yet as much as he mimicked the journalist’s structure of contrived revelation, his text was primarily directed against Warth’s type of populist reportage. Westwood shared with Warth and his colleagues a founding desire to address queer male practices and fix them in relation to the emergent ideologies of the postwar social order. But if the tabloids colluded in an entirely demonic account of London’s queer cultures, then Westwood’s project was firmly one of reconciliation—in part, in least. The conjunction in his title concealed an important dynamic. The commonsense opposition between “society” and “the homosexual”—endemic to populist thinking on the subject—was a misguided notion built on outmoded ignorance and received opinion. Instead, Westwood argued, the modern dynamism of postwar Britain, with its founding principles of equality and diversity, demanded that the responsible law-abiding homosexual citizen should become an inevitable—if c h a p t e r 3 trial by photobooth: the public face of the homosexual citizen I’ve always wanted and never succeeded in painting the smile. —francis bacon, in interview with David Sylvester, 1966 The Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police. —roland barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980 117 118 trial by photobooth still not much more than tolerable—member of the imagined metropolitan community. Society and the Homosexual was a formative text that helped to set the template for how reformers throughout the 1950s would seek to integrate queer male desire into the normative social frameworks of postwar reconstruction . Sympathetic novels such as Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and Audrey Erskine Lindop’s Details of Jeremy Stretton (1955), confessional testimonials such as Peter Wildeblood’s Against the Law (1955), and editorial opinion pieces in the broadsheets and liberal press all coalesced to oppose the vilified queer geographies of tabloid and courtroom scandal, promoting a cultural climate of greater social tolerance that would, it was hoped, open the way to legislative reform.2 This was ultimately a bourgeois project whose recurrent polemics stood in close relation to those mid-1940s rhetorics of urban renewal whose dynamics they fundamentally emulated.3 Both homosexual reformists and town planners invested in a set of scienti fic discourses that had originally emerged in the late nineteenth century and become increasingly professionalized in Britain between the two world wars.4 Both movements also mobilized the authoritative figure of the expert and framed the forceful promotion of their ideas as the progressive enlightenment of an ignorant, if well-meaning, general public. In addition, they both projected a consensual, happy, and peaceful postwar society in which the latest modern science would finally dislodge the obsolescent remnants of the Victorian past, under the cover of which they covertly installed a hegemonic set of bourgeois assumptions about civic sociality, domestic respectability, and appropriate urban conduct. As Gavin and Lowe have so astutely observed, the urban designers who came to prominence during the reconstruction understood the planned environment as an active means to reorder the values and sensibilities of the inhabitants who dwelled there. In this sense, social order and civic participation would be assured by the manner in which citizens responded to their ordinary surroundings, expressing this in turn through their routine daily practices.5 Advocates for homosexual reform adhered to this logic and worked hard to endow their nascent political subject with both a similar sensibility and a normative mode of engaging with the city. The key tools in this construction were the overlapping professional discourses of psychology , psychiatry, and medical criminology, which were used to carve out a space of psychic interiority within the homosexual that in turn transformed the moral significance of queer urban behavior.6 Homosexual practices, trial by photobooth 119 according to this model, were no longer the accreted residue of habitual self-indulgences, the sorry result of repeated capitulation to deadly metropolitan temptation. Instead, they became the unfortunate manifestation of a defective psychological condition, largely...