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Pride and Prejudice

Comparing the lives of gay men over two centuries

By Chris Chambers

21-02-2005

"When we first think about the life of a homosexual in the Victorian age in the nineteenth century it sounds as though it would have been living hell because sodomites were punished and pilloried and put in prison but the reality is that it was more of a twilight existence. It was a sense of shame they had the fact that they were leading lives which were a sham and that there was this whole part of their lives which they couldn't possibly make public or usually express even in society or in private." Graham Robb, author of "Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century".

Life for a homosexual man in the nineteenth century was certainly difficult considering the social constraints of the time and the impossibility of "coming out" to family or friends. It would have been better to remain silent about one's leanings.

Click to listen to the programme, first broadcast in April 2005

This is the accepted, perceived wisdom of a gay man's lot in this period but what is little known is that at the same time there were certain parts of big cities around the world that had large gay communities and where men could be flagrant and flamboyant. And very few men were prosecuted for their sexuality. The statistics actually show that it was in the twentieth century that the openly repressive age began, especially in the United States and Britain, where in the 1950s huge numbers of gay men were rounded up and deliberately persecuted. 

19th century drawing

Grand clubs
John Leander grew up in Chicago in that period and says that gay bars were often raided by the police and the names and addresses of the men were printed on the front pages of respectable newspapers.

At the same time though, he remembers secret clubs in London which were very popular:

"Some of them were frightfully grand. There was one called the Apollo club that actually had their own notepaper. They had copies of 'Horse and Hounds' and 'Country life'. It was terribly, terribly nice. I'm almost sorry it's not still there."

Such clubs also existed in the nineteenth century. From St Petersburg, to Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam. And books were published which outwardly gave the impression of moral diatribes against such behaviour but in fact would be pointers for where gays could go to find like-minded men.

Tolerant Dutch capital
Amsterdam continued to be a magnet for homosexuals throughout the twentieth century. Guy Duncan, an Englishman who's now in his eighties says that Amsterdam was the only place he went to abroad for many years. At a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain and the chances of being prosecuted were high, Amsterdam was a haven of tolerance. It was here you could go to clubs and bars and meet people of many different nationalities who had also descended upon the city for the same reason. 

The Netherlands is still considered to be at the vanguard of tolerance and equality for gay men and lesbians, and in 2001 was the first country in the world to legalise marriage for them.

Gay Pride 2004 in Amsterdam (image taken from a poster)

It's a far cry from the legal position of homosexuals at the turn of the twentieth century and the way in which they were perceived. The medical profession treated them as experimental subjects. Hypnosis, psychoanalysis and electric shock treatment were widely used. And the early medical textbooks based on so-called research were just prejudice dressed up as science. One such example was by the French doctor Monsieur Tardier who wrote:

"I have encountered some of these ambivalent individuals who not only had shriller voices, weaker muscles and softer, more flaccid flesh but also that greater proportional width of the pelvis which as we have said characterises the bone structure of the female body and consequently they walked like women."

Medical enlightenment
Concurrently though, a degree of medical enlightenment started to appear during this period. Graham Robb says "the big change that happened very gradually in the medical profession in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the human being who was gay but also happy and normal. As more detailed investigations of the mental world of these people came in, doctors - at least the more intelligent doctors - were forced to listen to the people they were investigating."

Graham Robb

Ironically, the medical profession performed a great service for gay men because by publishing their accounts of life as a gay man they made other gay men who may have thought they were unique, aware that there were other people like themselves. These were the first gay books and the onset of the gay liberation movement.

Certainly, Europe has seen massive changes in the legal and medical arenas. Although there is a caveat to that. Graham Robb says:

"Ideas about homosexuality have certainly changed but I think etiquette has changed more than private attitudes so that people will now behave in public in a different way but they still have some of the same ideas and really a lot of those changes that seem so dramatic to some people are dangerously superficial."

Advancing integration
Many may disagree and would say that rights for homosexuals have been integrated into the very framework of western society. As a consequence any retrograde steps are highly unlikely and social attitudes against homosexuality will gradually erode away through time.

The last word can be left for Guy Duncan, who as someone who's lived through most of the twentieth century is well placed to comment. "There's absolutely no doubt in my mind at all. I have been very, very happy as a gay man," he says.

Tags: 19th century, gay, homosexual, liberation, prejudice, pride

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