The Sexual History of London (35 page)

Wilde had stumbled. He had as good as admitted that, had Grainger been an attractive youth, he would have made advances to him. In attempting to recover himself, he blustered and spluttered, before coming out with: ‘For this reason. If I were asked why I did not kiss a door-mat, I should say because I do not like to kiss door-mats. I do not know why I mentioned that he was ugly, except that I was stung by the insolent question you put to me and the way you have insulted me through this hearing.'
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After this cross-examination, Carson concluded with a reminder to the court that the Marquess of Queensberry had been motivated to condemn Wilde as a ‘sodomite' in ‘one hope alone, that of saving his son',
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whereas Wilde was guilty of consorting with ‘some of the most immoral characters in London'. While he had no proof that Wilde had had an improper relationship with Bosie (Queensberry was adamant that his son's reputation must be protected), Carson proposed to bring in the boys who would testify to ‘shocking acts' with Wilde. Alfonso Conway, in particular, would give evidence that Wilde had dressed him up in gentlemen's clothes, so that he would appear a fit companion. Clearly, this last challenge to the class system was more than Wilde's team could bear: Carson was taken aside by Wilde's barrister, Sir Edward Clarke, and asked if he would accept a plea of ‘not guilty' as in ‘not guilty of posing as a sodomite', if Wilde dropped the charges. But Carson refused, and insisted that Queensberry was justified in calling Wilde a sodomite in the public interest.

Wilde himself was not in court. With the case going against him, he had been given the opportunity to make a dash for France. But he had been adamant that he would stay. Back in the courtroom, the judge instructed the jury to rule in Queensberry's favour, which they did, instantly. The Marquess of Queensberry left the court to loud cheers, while the judge simply folded up his papers and left, but not before sending a message to Carson: ‘I never heard a more powerful speech nor a more searching crossXam [
sic
]; I congratulate you on having escaped the rest of the filth.'
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The case had been the making of Carson, and the destruction of Wilde.

With such damning evidence, Wilde could have been arrested straight away, but the police did not have a warrant ready. He retreated to the Cadogan Hotel, with Robbie Ross and his friends to console him. They urged him to leave for France while he could, but Wilde sat in a state of paralysis, almost unable to comprehend his fate as the last train for Dover left without him.

Wilde went on trial for gross indecency on 26 April 1895, careworn and anxious after a month in jail, and with his hair cut short. The proceedings covered the same ground as the Queensberry trial, with the same witnesses presented to testify that they had committed ‘indecencies' with Wilde. The only strategy Wilde's barrister, Sir Edward Clarke, could pursue was to discredit the witnesses, a plan which was doomed to failure.

One notable feature of this trial was that for the first time Wilde seemed to find his own voice and take the proceedings seriously. When, with reference to a poem by Bosie, Wilde was asked, ‘What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?' he finally dropped the posturing and posing and replied, from the heart:

Wilde had never sounded so superb. Here stood this man, frail and ill after imprisonment, who had been loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, standing there sounding perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He carried the entire court away and had never experienced such a triumph as when the gallery burst into applause. It was Wilde's defining moment, and his swan song. According to Max Beerbohm, Oscar stood up to hear the verdict looking magnificent and sphinx-like, only to be informed that the jury had failed to reach a verdict. The jury was still not convinced as to the evidence. A third trial was scheduled, and this time the prosecution checked the backgrounds of its witnesses and won guilty verdicts on eight of nine counts of gross indecency. On 24 May, the judge addressed the courtroom and complained that it was the worst case he had ever tried and that he felt compelled to pass ‘the severest sentence that the law allows'.
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With that, he sentenced Wilde to the maximum: two years' hard labour. Wilde turned white and looked as though he might faint. As the warders seized him by the arms and led him away, he seemed to want to speak, but the judge ignored him. That night, the Marquess of Queensberry held a celebration dinner with two of Wilde's former friends, Charles Brookfield and Charles Hawtrey, the men who had conspired to betray him.
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Wilde went into exile as soon as he had completed his prison sentence. There could be no return to his old life. He lost custody of his sons, and an attempt to patch things up with Constance ended in tragedy when she died after an operation on her spine. Shunned by his former friends, who were terrified of being associated with him, Wilde died in Paris in 1901, in the arms of Robbie Ross, whose ashes were later placed in Wilde's flamboyant tomb at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Even Wilde's memorial was not without its element of black comedy: designed by Jacob Epstein, the tomb was inspired by Wilde's poem ‘The Sphinx', but looks less like a sphinx than an art deco angel, with genitals on proud display. The tomb, and particularly the angel's genitals, became the object of veneration by Wilde's legions of fans, some of whom chipped away and removed the impressively proportioned equipment. Speculation continues to surround their whereabouts.

Over a century later, it is possible to make a case for Wilde as our greatest sexual martyr, but it also seems as if he was punished for that great British sin of being ‘too clever by half'. Wilde's subversive attitude towards institutions such as marriage and the law provoked the wrath of the establishment, as did his breathtaking arrogance and apparent lack of contrition. Few, if any, writers would take the stand against an eminent lawyer today. Wilde certainly remains the world's most famous homosexual. With his exclamatory manner and witty putdowns, he established a stereotype for gay men which echoes down the years and found its expression in characters as diverse as Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh's novel
Brideshead Revisited
and the comic creations of Kenneth Williams and John Inman. Although it is tempting to deride these figures as unwelcome caricatures which expose the homosexual to ridicule, it is worth remembering that Wilde inadvertently paved the way for awareness, if not acceptance, of homosexuality in a way that it had never been recognized before. For this reason, Wilde deserves his status as a sexual martyr, a St Sebastian shot through with the last arrows of Victorian hypocrisy.

From the days of the Romans to the twentieth century, London had always offered rest and relaxation to visiting military. From the
lupanaria
of the Bankside to Damaris Page, ‘the great bawd of sailors', and the docklands whores recorded by Mayhew, there had always been plenty of action for men who wanted to forget the terrors of battle. But London reached its zenith as a city of pleasure during and between the two world wars. The impact of these wars transformed a generation's attitude to sex and swept away many of the tattered remnants of Victorian morality at all social levels, from the aristocracy (who had always done what they liked anyway) to the working classes. The wars also changed the status of women dramatically, permitting them to develop sexual and social autonomy.

The young men arriving in London from France and Belgium were desperate for distraction after the horrors of trench warfare; the young women waiting to greet them back in Blighty were going through upheavals of their own, many exhilarated by their own new-found freedom but also devastated by grief. Young widows, married less than a year, found themselves as eager for sexual solace as the men on leave, while the threat of sudden death, in the form of Zeppelin raids, loomed above the city like an evil shadow. (A total of 600 people were killed by Zeppelin raids in London during the First World War.) The prospect of imminent annihilation was a tremendous aphrodisiac, and of course London's sex workers rose to the challenge, as one contributor to the
Weekly Dispatch
observed:

Purity campaigners, struggling to retain their hold on the nation's morals, seized the opportunity to swoop on any unlawful sexual activity, ostensibly in the interests of preventing the spread of venereal disease, but essentially in a desperate attempt to gain social control. With the men away at war, it was left to a battalion of hatchet-faced killjoys to patrol the streets of London seeking out acts of gross indecency. In the name of the NCCVD (the National Council for the Control of Venereal Disease) eagle-eyed women broke up courting couples, berated prostitutes and on one occasion reported a couple of homosexuals to the authorities for having sex in a cemetery. But the sex spies were impotent when it came to controlling the sheer scale of prostitution and the unrepentant activities of the amateurs of all classes, and the women who, experiencing more freedom than at any other time in history, were also discovering the freedom to have sex like men. Bored, frustrated debutantes at last got the opportunity to do something constructive in the form of nursing or performing clerical duties for the army, while working-class women found themselves pressed into service in the factories, railways or on the land, performing the tasks forsaken by the men who had signed up ‘to have a go at the Bosch'. For all the hard work and the danger, the freedom these women enjoyed was unparalleled: restricting gowns were exchanged for uniforms, and silk slippers replaced with stout boots; hats with long trailing veils were laid away, in favour of caps. The scores of widows were discouraged from wearing full Victorian-style mourning on the grounds that heavy veils and black crepe dresses were impractical, and also because the returning soldiers did not want to see dozens of girls in widows' weeds as they walked through the city. Practical dress and a welcoming attitude towards men on leave were considered good for British morale. Girls learnt to smoke cigarettes and even carry condoms, as eager as the men to experience every pleasure before they died. Armistice Day, when it eventually arrived, developed into a bacchanalian festival worthy of the days of Roman London: as crowds celebrated the end of the war to end all wars by dancing in the street and drinking the pubs dry, men and women embraced freely. The writer Norman Douglas wistfully recalled seeing scenes of wild lovemaking on the streets of the West End.
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While the First World War offered liberation for straight women, it proved a godsend for lesbians. Hitherto caricatured as ‘mannish' women with Tyrolese hats and waistcoats, and reviled as ‘the shrieking sisterhood',
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lesbians had inherited a new, exciting world where being physically courageous and practical were positively encouraged and having cropped hair and work boots passed without comment. The writer Vita Sackville-West, who had always been something of a tomboy, experienced an epiphany one afternoon in 1918, when a parcel of land girl's clothes arrived at her country home. Dressed in breeches and gaiters, ‘I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday.'
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This episode was just the beginning of an outrageous affair with Violet Keppel (daughter of Alice, mistress of Edward VII) during which Vita regularly dragged up in men's clothes and paraded along the streets of Mayfair, smoking a cigarette and being addressed by newsvendors as ‘Sir'. The fact that she was almost six foot tall was a great advantage in this escapade, and she recalled later that she looked rather like a scruffy undergraduate. ‘The extraordinary thing was, how natural it all was for me,' she remembered. ‘I never felt so free as when I stepped off the kerb, down Piccadilly, alone, and knowing that if I met my own mother face to face she would take no notice of me.' Vita and Violet regularly spent the night together in a hotel as ‘man and wife', and Vita relished her double life, always returning home to Knole (her stately home) in time to greet her husband, Harold Nicolson, when he returned from London.

Vita continued to wear mannish clothes for the rest of her life; years later, the writer Peter Quennell described her wearing a pearl necklace, lacy blouse, tweedy gardening trousers and knee-high boots and concluded that she looked like Lady Chatterley to the waist, while beneath was all the gamekeeper's.

Vita and Harold's relationship survived her entanglement with Violet, and many other affairs on both sides, through a mixture of genuine love and mutual regard, wonderfully chronicled by their son Nigel Nicolson in his memoir
Portrait of a Marriage
. Vita and Harold were typical members of a set informally known as ‘the Bloomsbury Group', an assortment of writers, artists and intellectuals which included Virginia Woolf and her publisher husband Leonard, Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, the economist Maynard Keynes, and the writers Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and David Garnett. In some ways, these individuals were similar to the ‘privileged wantons' of the Elizabethan court, permitted a great deal of irregular behaviour on the grounds of wealth and social position. They also owed much of their sexual freedom to the recently translated works of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, whose theories on sexuality were wilfully misinterpreted by an entire generation as an incitement to sexual licence. As we have seen throughout this book, the wealthier and more influential members of society have always permitted themselves greater freedom, and in some respects the Bloomsburys were a recent manifestation of this phenomenon. If it seems to the outsider that the Bloomsbury men appeared to be extraordinarily tolerant of their wives' romantic liaisons, it is worth noting that the Bloomsbury men were predominantly homosexual. There was consternation among the set when the hitherto gay Maynard Keynes married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballet dancer; Leonard Woolf appears to have been the only truly heterosexual man in the group. D. H. Lawrence, the provincial working-class novelist taken up by the Bloomsburys, was genuinely scandalized by the antics of this arty crowd, an irony given that his most notorious book,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, would become the subject of an obscenity trial.

A delightful vignette of a lesbian couple from 1913.

These homosexual intellectuals did not have complete freedom, of course, due to the existing legislation which had remained unchanged since the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, and the fate of Oscar Wilde continued to act as a deterrent to all but the most blasé. Public humiliation was still the fate of those who got found out; William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, was driven into permanent exile in Europe when his vindictive cousin, the Duke of Westminster, threatened to ruin his political career by exposing his homosexuality. Lygon was subsequently the inspiration for Lord Marchmain, the patriarch in
Brideshead Revisited
, although Waugh reflected the climate of the times by making Marchmain an urbane heterosexual adulterer rather than a homosexual. E. M. Forster, author of celebrated novels such as
A Room with a View
, abandoned publishing fiction in despair because the existing laws meant he could not write about the subject matter which really interested him: sexual relationships between men. His autobiographical novel
Maurice
was eventually published in 1971, after his death.

Despite the continuing drawbacks of ‘feasting with panthers', London offered solace for homosexual men to an unparalleled degree. They were drawn to London like moths to a flame, aware that the city presented them with a plethora of public and private arenas in which to explore their sexuality and obtain a level of acceptance inconceivable in the provinces. In London, many elements converged to create a world in which homosexuality was acknowledged, if not legally condoned; the theatre, light entertainment, the media and the rag trade all offered opportunities for a lonely boy who had grown up thinking he was the only one in Barnsley, or Gainsborough, or Port Talbot. The establishment itself, with its guardsmen's barracks, lawyers' chambers and the palaces of Westminster and Buckingham, provided rich pickings. In 1916, a young student, Robert Hutton, arrived in London and had his first sexual encounter with a man who picked him up in Victoria Station. After they had sex underneath the trees in Belgrave Square, Hutton wrote: ‘it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. I could see clearly what had been partially obscured before. This was what I had been looking for. I knew now, that other people felt the same way as I did. I was no longer alone.'
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And there was no need to be alone. London was a gay paradise during the war years, with Piccadilly Circus its glittering hub. Just as, decades earlier, prostitutes of every caste had been drawn to the Haymarket, ‘the Dilly', with its distinctive statue of Eros and flashing bright lights, became the centre of the universe for homosexual men. Baedeker described the district as ‘the centre of London' for the ‘pleasure seeker' and this was certainly the case. There was Oscar Wilde's former haunt, the Cafe Royal on Regent Street; the Empire and the Alhambra, music halls still going strong despite the passage of the years; there was the Trocadero and the Regent's Palace Hotel, and pubs like the Bunch of Grapes, the Wellington and the Griffin, while the bar at the Strand Hotel attracted a wide range of men, from servicemen on leave to clerks and ‘respectable' married men. Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street (known to the cognoscenti as ‘the Lilypond') was to all intents and purposes a gay café, where shop assistants and labourers rubbed shoulders with intellectuals and ‘pansy boys', and the waitresses, aware of the nature of their clientele, discreetly steered women away from the homosexual patrons. ‘Pansies' or ‘queens' represented one public face of homosexuality, the unrepentantly flamboyant homosexuals such as Quentin Crisp who risked a beating by parading along Piccadilly in lipstick and rouge. One Alex Purdie recalled that he was ‘a swine for make-up; my perfume was called
Soir de Paris
…if I could scrounge together half a crown to have a bottle of this, my day was made'.
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With powdered faces and eyebrows ‘plucked to hell' these boys ventured out to battle. As one of them observed, ‘it's not make-up, it's ammunition!' and sometimes ammunition was what one needed. Quentin Crisp recalled: ‘If I was compelled to stand still in the street…to wait for a bus or on the platform of an Underground station, people would turn without a word and slap my face, if I was wearing sandals passers-by took care to stamp on my toes, housewives hissed and workmen spat on the ground.'
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