PART 1
POLICING
Figure 3. Map, âThis Is London.â
1
REGULATION
THE LAW
It is received wisdom that, as Liz Gill put it in the Guardian recently, âbeing gay was illegalâ until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.1 If the statement is misleading in its conception of the law, it nonetheless highlights the accumulated battery of legal provisions designed or utilized to suppress sexual, social, or cultural interactions between men in the first half of the twentieth century. As Harry Cocks demonstrates, the offences of buggery and indecent assault evolved within common and statute law from the late eighteenth century to encompass any homosexual encounter, wherever it had occurred, and whether or not the men involved had consented.2 These provisions were codified and elaborated in the late nineteenth century. Sections of the Offences against the Person Act (1861) dealing with buggery and indecent assault were followed by the notorious section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), defining any act of âgross indecencyâ between men in âpublic or privateâ as an offence.3 Statute law was, moreover, complemented by the offence of âindecencyâ under many local bylaws.4
These narrowly defined sexual offences were supplemented by a series of provisions that targeted wider social and cultural practices. Responding to anxieties about the condition of Londonâs streets, the Vagrancy Law Amendment Act (1898) and the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1912) introduced the public order offence of âpersistently importuning for an immoral purpose,â which attempted to suppress queer menâs use of public space for âcruisingâ and social interaction.5 Generalized public order statutes and licensing provisions, moreover, notionally made it an offence for a commercial venue to tolerate queer menâs presence. It was never illegal simply âto be gay,â but the law criminalized a series of discrete social, sexual, and cultural practices in which men might participate.6
The formal regulation of male sexual and social behavior was thus structured around a dual logic. Although the introduction of legislation was often ad hoc and haphazard, in practice the law constituted a pervasive system of moral governance, defining sexual ânormalityâ through the symbolic ordering of urban space. Acceptable sexual conduct was defined around the bourgeois nuclear familyâprivate, between adult âheterosexualâ married couples. Legislation against homosex thus echoed that against prostitution or public sexâin Philip Hubbardâs phrase, making âdominant moral codes clear, tangible and entrenched, providing a fixed point in the attempt to construct boundaries between good and bad subjects.â7 In so doing, the law collapsed the conceptual distinctions between public and private that, notionally, went to its very heart. As Leslie Moran suggests, public space was understood as the realm of lawâs full presenceââa space of order and decency through the law.â The private, by contrast, was âan alternative place where the law is absent.â8 The lawâs âabsence,â however, was contingent upon conforming to notions of normative sexual and social behavior. The âbad subjectââthe sexual deviantâremained subject to state intervention, and was deemed sufficiently dangerous as to warrant intrusion into the sanctified private sphere.
For queer men, these provisions had profound implications, for the law threatened to follow them into the intimate, prosaic, and ubiquitous spaces of everyday urban life. If they looked for partners in the street or park or simply had sex in their own home, they could be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned for up to ten years, andâin certain casesâwhipped. If they met friends in a cafĂ© they could be caught up in a police raid, their names taken, and the venue closed. The formal technology of surveillance institutionalized and embodied by the law suggested that the British state was unwilling to tolerate any expressions of male same-sex desire, physical contact, or social encounter. In all its erotic, affective, and social relations the queer bodyâand the spaces it inhabitedâwas a public body, subject to the draconian force of law. De jure, the modern metropolis held no place for the queer.
To read queer menâs experiences of the law from its formal provisions, however, fails to comprehend the complex and often contradictory ways in which legislation was implemented. Only through the intermediary agencies of municipal governance established in the nineteenth centuryâthe Metropolitan Police (the Met), the London County Council (LCC), the Metropolitan Borough Councils, and the Military Authoritiesâdid that legislation acquired tangible significance.9 Rather than what it said, the issue becomes how, and with what effects, was legislation translated into practice on Londonâs streets. How was the law embodied through the daily routine of police operations?
While queer urban cultures were subject to surveillance by a diverse range of agencies, this chapter focuses upon the operations of the Met and, in particular, their enforcement of the sexual offences laws. It was in Londonâs public spaces and through the figure of the policeman that queer men most often encountered the law. The Met were always most active in policing menâs behavior, providing information to all other agencies. Moreover, this case study highlights the tensions between legislative pronouncements and the realities of regulation. I will return to the policing of commercial venues and the activities of other official agencies throughout part 2, setting shifting forms of regulation against the changing organization of queer sociability. My argument hereâelaborated in the chapters that followâis simple: policing was idiosyncratic and contingent, rendering specific practices and places invisible while bringing others into sharp relief. The de jure exclusion of queer men from metropolitan London collapsed amidst the operational realities of modern police systems.
THE POLICE
To explore the operationalization of the sexual offences laws means reconstituting the cognitive landscape inhabited by individual policemen, the maps through which they organized and understood their own movements across the city. The legal and administrative rules governing policing, as well as the informal knowledge officers gained through experience on the ground, interacted to produce an imagined geography of sexual transgression that defined whom the queer was, where he was to be found, and how he could be apprehended.
Crucially, while legislation collapsed the conceptual distinction between public and private, that logic did not extend to the procedural rules defining the Metâs formal operational domain. The result, in Nick Fyfeâs terms, was âa set of significant steering constraints of structural importance for [their] time-space deployment.â10 The physical, cultural, and administrative barriers constructed around the home created a de facto private space. Officers could only enter residential spaces with a search warrant. In detecting private sexual offences, the Met thus relied upon public complaints or secondhand information. That the police never made any concerted attempts to pursue the queer into his home placed menâs behavior there almost beyond the law: âsuch acts,â the director of public prosecutions (DPP) admitted in 1954, âare unprosecutable.â11 Access to commercial venues was similarly circumscribed, possible only under particular conditions. These formal âsteering constraintsâ confined the policemanâs habitual beat to Londonâs streets and open spaces.12
Working within these jurisdictional parameters, senior and divisional officers thus established administrative definitions of importuning, gross indecency, and indecent assault that oriented patrols towards public queer spaces, mapping legal offences firmly onto particular urban sites. In Hyde Park, for example, beat officers were directed to the Meeting Ground and Hyde Park Corner.13 Under these formal definitions the public urinal was identified as the locus of sexual offences. Asked to report on âhomosexualityâ in the West End in 1952, C Division police officers simply listed the urinals where men could be found.14 This formal correlation between geography and criminality was, moreover, constantly reproduced at the divisional level. In 1933, for example, the attention of officers at Tower Bridge station was drawn to one Bermondsey urinal âby notes in the rough book.â15 The administrative conventions of policing articulated a narrow operational field that, for the most part, placed alternative sites of queer sexual and social interaction outside surveillance.
Within these formal constraints, the enforcement of the law depended upon the everyday movements of individual officers. Immersed in their operational environment, policemen became ever more familiar with the spatial and cultural organization of queer life, gaining the informal knowledge allowing them to interpret and implement legislation. As one officer was told during a 1932 raid on a ballroom, âyou know what kind of boys we are.â16 The importance of knowing these âkind of boysâ to policing is clear from the experiences of Police Constable (PC) 89/E Reginald Handford. Handford joined the Met in 1925, transferring to Bow Street station the following year at the age of twenty-two. There he became part of a group of twelve plainclothes policemen employed in the âdetection of crimeâ in the district around the Strand.17
Handford learned to police from his more experienced colleaguesâCundy, Mogford, Shewry, Hills, and Slyfieldâdrawing upon their accumulated experience dealing with sexual offences. In part, officers became increasingly sensitized to the visual signifiers of character that allowed them to differentiate the queer from the fluid urban crowd. The effeminate quean became a working definition both of the queer himself and the perpetrator of a sexual offence, his body a demonstrable sign of deviant intent. While Handford, for example, recognized that âthere are different forms of sodomitesâ and, indeed, arrested one man who âhad no outward indication of his nefarious habits,â he clearly visualized the transgressive male body in a particular way.18 When asked, âhave these male importuners . . . anything distinctive about them?â he replied immediately, âYes, painted lips, powder.â19 On the beat, this image oriented officers towards individuals and commercial venues. In 1926, for example, Slyfield and Mogford were inside the Strand Hotel Restaurant when Frank W. drew their attention because of his âheavily powderedâ face. They watched him cruising in other bars, on the Strand, and in Villiers Street before arresting him for importuning.20 Within such mentalities, sexual offences could be defined as transgressions of acceptable masculine styles, leaving conventionally dressed men and the venues they frequented invisible.
The sensitivity of Slyfield and Mogford to the minutiae of self-presentation suggests a further geographical coding of sexual transgression. To put it another way, their experience produced a detailed cognitive map that defined sexual offences as place-specific. While Frank W. may have moved unnoticed outside the West End, in a district imagined as a site of sexual disorder and vice his body drew suspicion. Indeed, the officersâ presence in certain venues on the Strand indicates how policing was organized not just by knowledge of who the queer was but also where he could be found. Sexual devianceâand consequently, police surveillanceâwas, in part, mapped onto the Strandâs commercial spaces and places like the Coliseum Theatre.21 Despite this, procedural constraints and their immersion in public urban life focused officersâ attention upon the streets, parks, and above all, urinals frequented by queer men. If street cruising was fluid and mobile, urinals were fixed and physically boundedâas well as being administratively definedâand therefore easy to keep under surveillance. In 1927, almost all of the arrests made by E Division officers arose in fifteen local urinalsâplaces like Durham House Street, Taylorâs Buildings, York Place, and Cecil Court.22
This local geography of sexual transgression was clearly established by 1917, inherited and elaborated by successive generations of beat officers, and becoming central to occupational definitions of masculinity and competency. The good policeman, quite simply, knew his âground.â23 Within this milieu Handford, apparently, learned quickly. Through conversation he became aware of the Coliseumâs reputation and the âimportunersâ around Charing Cross. On the beat, colleagues introduced him to the âpublic house[s] sodomites are frequenting.â He knew of the blackmailers operating in the neighborhood and the men who had sex under the arches of the Adelphi. He recognized the âconvicted sodomitesâ he encountered. He identified âfour urinals which are used by these sort of people,â having âdiscussed . . . the prevalence of this particular crime at this particular place with Slyfield [and] Mogford.â Drawing upon this remarkable familiarity with local queer culture, he focused his own attentions on one ânotorious urinalâ in the Adelphi Archesââalways frequented by certain sodomites.â Th...