Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957

Helen Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349566020, 9781137470980
• eBook ISBN: 9781137470997
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 explores the experiences of men who desired other men outside of the capital. In doing so, it offers a unique intervention into the history of sexuality but it also offers new ways to understand masculinity, working-class culture, regionality and work in the period.

1

Introduction

The idea for this book began over a decade ago after a conversation with my grandparents. I wanted to know how they had met and fallen in love. It was in the late 1940s and my grandfather, who was on leave from the Marines, where he was doing his national service, went to a local dance hall. My grandmother was there on the arm of his best friend Alf, but by the end of the night they were well on their way to becoming an item. I was a little shocked by this, ‘didn’t Alf mind?’ I asked. ‘No’, my grandfather replied, ‘Alf was a puff and your grandmother was his pretend girlfriend. He was happy that we liked each other.’ After asking them to elaborate further, I found out that my grandparents’ circle of friends (all working-class and from the South Yorkshire mining and steel town Rotherham) knew about Alf and even had other gay friends. As a teenager, I had never seen my grandparents as being particularly liberal, but they certainly did not care about the unusual bedroom habits of their friends when they were younger. This casual acceptance was replicated when they met my own gay friends over the following years. The story stuck with me, but I did not consider the wider implications of it for many years.

On reading the numerous histories of sexuality now available, it became apparent that either my grandparents were very unusual or more work had to be done in understanding the experiences of working-class northerners who desired their own sex. My grandparents were not unusual, their fathers had backgrounds in the steel industry, neither had been to grammar school or university, and both came from traditionally respectable homes. And yet, my grandfather was unfazed by having a best friend who was attracted to men, and my grandmother colluded with Alf to help him make his life easier and even to meet partners. Alf was able to live as open a life as possible in a time when homosexuality was illegal and retain a large and supportive group of friends. How did this happen in the small and often conservative town where I grew up? The purpose of this research was to attempt to answer that question.

If this story sowed seeds in my mind of a level of tolerance towards sexual difference in the north, the reaction to my research at conferences over the years has confirmed that most people do not have the same impression. One of the first things that academic colleagues ask after I have given a paper that has demonstrated the potential fluidity of working-class sexuality or unexpected levels of tolerance in the north is ‘what went wrong then?’ Other variations of this question are ‘when did this change?’ and even ‘but hasn’t the north been a terrible place for gay people to live?’ There seems to be an assumption by many, both historically and in contemporary life, that either the north presents few opportunities for men who desire other men to live open and fulfilled lives, or prejudice is rife. Reflecting on these assumptions has been part of the challenge of completing this work. Although in the current historical record it seems as though men who had sex with other men in the north existed only rarely and in isolation as compared with the rich life that could be led in the capital, this was not the case. Many men were able to live lives that were just as fulfilled, albeit different from those in the capital. The more low-key lifestyles of many northern men can be taken as evidence of a discomfort with both their sexual preference and the area where they lived, but it is also possible that this demonstrates a particularly northern understanding of sexuality. Many life stories of northern men who desired other men that have been collected over the years convey narratives of escape from a dreary and oppressive north to the bright lights and opportunity of an inclusive London.¹ However, many of these men were not the ordinary men discussed in this book. They were often artists, dancers and writers, or were heavily politicised. Many of them wanted to wear their sexual identity as a badge to mark themselves out as different, and it was perhaps this expression of their sexuality that made it impossible for them to find happiness in the north.

This book is the first detailed academic study of non-metropolitan men who desired other men in England during the period 1895–1957. It places issues of class, masculinity and regionality alongside sexuality in seeking to understand how men experienced their emotional and sexual relationships with each other. Perhaps the boldest argument made by the book is that the majority of working men in the north of England did not subscribe to a coherent sexual identity – even by the late 1950s. In fact, notions of sexuality and sexual identity are not useful ways of thinking about the period and region under study here. The book also rejects the notion that the sexual and emotional lives of working men can be divorced from notions of class, work and masculinity. It deconstructs the assumptions that have been made about the attitudes, emotions, lifestyles and sexual experiences of northern working men by analysing a wide range of sources that touch on the lives and experiences of these men. In today’s terms, sexuality is a crucial element of men’s identities and experience and one which all men have in common (regardless of what that sexuality constitutes). For many, it is the defining factor of who they are and how they present themselves to the rest of the world. This is particularly true for many gay men, whose own personal struggles or their awareness of their antecedents’ struggles for political and social recognition ensure that their sexuality is key to their sense of self. This has not always been the case, and, as will be shown, for many men in the north has only been a recent development.

This book argues that fluid notions of sexual expression were rooted in deeply embedded notions of class and region. Amongst northern working men, ‘normality’ and ‘good character’ were not necessarily disrupted by same-sex desire. As long as a man was a good, reliable worker, many other potential transgressions could be forgiven or overlooked. This type of tolerance of (or ambivalence towards) same-sex desire was shaken by affluence and the increased visibility of men with a clear sexuality from the 1950s and into the era of decriminalisation. The book analyses patterns of work, sex, friendship and sociability throughout the period to understand how these traditions of tolerance and ambivalence were formed, and why they eventually came to an end. Although the impact of affluence and decriminalisation had countless positive effects, both for working people in general and specifically for men who desired other men, the book acknowledges that this impact irrevocably altered a way of life and of understanding the world.

Therefore, the book relates to a wide range of themes in terms of the social history of twentieth-century Britain. It places working-class men at the forefront of understanding social change, and seeks to understand class as a social and cultural concept rather than an economic or political one. Understanding the nuances of working-class culture, particularly in the industrial north, is vital to understanding contemporary conceptions of appropriate sexual and social behaviour. This new analysis of the experiences of working-class, northern men will also shed further light on gender relations, interpretations of masculinity and the patterns and experiences of working-class marriage in this period, thereby offering a more rounded picture of the emotional lives of a significant proportion of English people. Region and class are used as analytical categories to interpret the research behind this book, which often contradicts the established wisdom in the historiography of sexuality. The book will show that the police and conceptions of the law and legality played little part in forming the identities of northern men who desired other men, that northern police forces did not pursue active campaigns against such men, and that, for a significant minority of working-class men, same-sex desire presented a legitimate option for emotional and sexual fulfilment regardless of marital status. A central point of argument in the book relates to the impact of affluence on working-class life. This has often been considered in terms of the break-up of community life, changes in heterosexual relationships and participation in consumer culture, but not in terms of male identity and sexual culture. It was crucial in changing how men saw themselves in relation to their work, their peers and their friendships, and this, in turn, offers important insights into the significant social changes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.

The historiography of sexuality and masculinity

There has been a significant amount of research undertaken over the past 40 years into the history of homosexuality during the late Victorian period and into the twentieth century.² Yet the history of homosexuality in Britain during this period has been focussed on the capital and has been skewed towards middle and upper-class men, more often than not with literary tendencies that have ensured the survival of letters, memoirs, diaries and autobiographies.³ The history of men from the provinces and men who were working-class has often been ignored or marginalised, and this oversight has the potential to present an inaccurate picture of how ordinary men experienced their sexuality. After all, this group represented the majority of men living in England for the first half of the twentieth century. There has also been a tendency to separate histories of sexuality both from more broadly focussed social and cultural histories and from other, complementary disciplines such as gender history. Sexuality should not be a separate category of study but, rather, a complementary facet of social and cultural experience that, when considered, presents a fuller and more nuanced reading of the past. Laura Doan has recently written that sexuality has the same powerful, universal potential as a category of analysis as class, race and gender, but this will not be achieved as long as the discipline remains marginalised.⁴ The following chapters will examine sexuality and sexual experience as one element of working men’s experience and use it to provide new interpretations of working-class culture, masculinity and the varied social ties between all elements of working-class communities. In turn, this will shed light on the impact on the lives of working men of the following: the growth of a national culture (and thus the weakening of regionality); changing relationships between working-class communities and authority; establishment ideas of, and attitudes towards, same-sex desire; and increasing affluence.

The history of homosexuality in Britain has been seriously studied since the mid-1970s, when Jeffrey Weeks’s pioneering Coming Out issued the challenge to other British academics to continue the work that he had started. On reassessing this work in 2012, Weeks has recognised that early theoretical work had focussed ‘on the evolution of the category of the homosexual’ and lent weight to the idea of a homosexual/heterosexual binary that coloured how we viewed the sexual past and present.⁵ Many subsequent histories used this theoretical framework to focus on the impact of the sexologists, the medicalisation of homosexuality, middle-class experience and the experiences of famous homosexual men such as Wilde and Carpenter. Although much of this work was groundbreaking and set the precedent for the field as a whole, this kind of approach proved limited for understanding the experiences of men who did not fit into the categories deemed appropriate by fashionable sexual theory. This meant that working-class men, men without a clear sexual identity and men outside the capital (in fact, the majority of men who had had some form of sexual experience with other men) were largely overlooked, thus leaving a significant gap in our understanding of male sexuality. Weeks further acknowledged that his original approach and that of his contemporaries in the 1970s and 1980s were based in the politics of gay liberation: writing the history of gay men and reclaiming a legitimate past was a political act that sought to emphasise the importance and solidity of sexual identity.

The historiography evolved throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and though its focus on social constructionism was seen by many as limited, it began to challenge these categories of identity and analysis. A special issue of the Journal of British Studies from July 2012 has assessed the state of current British queer history. Queer history is ‘dedicated to disrupting sexual identities and hetero/homo binaries’ and, in doing so, provides a platform for the study of the millions of men who have previously been written out of the queer past.⁶ It allows for the diversity of experience amongst men who have had sex with other men that has been explained away rather than embraced in the past. In engaging with this theoretical approach, Weeks has written:

What do we mean when we speak of ‘British queer history’? Are we concerned with a history of same-sex desire, in all its complexities, or of specific sexual formations and cultures? Is it a history of attitudes toward homosexuality, and perhaps also of gender nonconformity, or should its focus be the evolution of lesbian and gay and transgender subjectivity? Is it a history of the structuring binarism between heterosexuality and homosexuality or of sexual diversity? Are we speaking of a history of regulation and control or of transgression, resistance, and agency? … Is queer history about content or approach, empirical detail or theory, a past that is irredeemably other or a living history at the heart of current politics?⁷

There are clearly many questions that need to be asked when undertaking this approach, but its greater fluidity and inclusivity are a great attraction; it sidesteps some of the restrictions of social and psychological theory that have perhaps kept the field outside of the mainstream in the past.

The main proponents of what has been christened by Chris Waters as the ‘New British Queer History’ are Matt Houlbrook, Harry Cocks and Matt Cook.⁸ In their pioneering work, they have looked less at the medical and legal theories of the past in isolation and more at the actual experiences of the men involved. Cocks has challenged the primacy given to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act in the development and persecution of a homosexual identity by placing it, and the high-profile trials preceding and succeeding it, back into the wider context of the experiences, both legal and personal, of men who desired other men throughout the nineteenth century. He does not try to locate ‘antecedent identities’ in the past, and finds a focus on ‘acts’ and ‘identities’ unhelpful in analysing the evidence of same-sex desire that his exhaustive research has unearthed.⁹ This approach has challenged the idea that a homosexual identity emerged in the late nineteenth century, along with the idea that the Wilde trials launched homosexuality from the private closet into the public discourse. It successfully argues that throughout the nineteenth century homosexual men were a part of the public discourse, and the impact of this had far-reaching implications for Victorian masculinity and society as a whole. Cook takes a different approach, located in cultural analysis and in some places literary theory. However, he comes to the same conclusion as Cocks and Houlbrook: that ‘there was no Gay London, either in 1885 or in 1914. Rather, there were men from various walks of life, some who would have recognized the others, some who would not.’¹⁰ All three studies emphasise the point that if a researcher attempts to locate a coherent and uniform sexual identity in the past, they will be disappointed, and this does not just apply to the capital, as Cocks begins to highlight with his use of some non-metropolitan source material.

In Queer London, Houlbrook’s separate analysis of working- and middle-class experiences explicitly acknowledges that they were generally different – both materially and emotionally.¹¹ This approach highlighted the two key issues that have guided the focus of this study: t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Policing and Prosecutions
• 3. Working-Class Culture
• 4. Work and Family
• 5. Sex
• 6. Language
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index