Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In August 1934, young Cyril L. wrote to his friend Billy about all the exciting men he had met, the swinging nightclubs he had visited, and the vibrant new life he had forged for himself in the big city. He wrote, "I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I knew nothing about it." London, for Cyril, meant boundless opportunities to explore his newfound sexuality. But his freedom was limite: he was soon arrested, simply for being in a club frequented by queer men.

Cyril's story is Matt Houlbrook's point of entry into the queer worlds of early twentieth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown sources, from police reports and newspaper exposés to personal letters, diaries, and the first queer guidebook ever written, Houlbrook here explores the relationship between queer sexualities and modern urban culture that we take for granted today. He revisits the diverse queer lives that took hold in London's parks and streets; its restaurants, pubs, and dancehalls; and its Turkish bathhouses and hotels--as well as attempts by municipal authorities to control and crack down on those worlds. He also describes how London shaped the culture and politics of queer life--and how London was in turn shaped by the lives of queer men. Ultimately, Houlbrook unveils the complex ways in which men made sense of their desires and who they were. In so doing, he mounts a sustained challenge to conventional understandings of the city as a place of sexual liberation and a unified queer culture.

A history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture, Queer London is a landmark work that redefines queer urban life in England and beyond.

"A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London."--Matt Cook, The Times Higher Education Supplement

Winner of History Today' s Book of the Year Award, 2006

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xi)
• Note on Terminology (p. xiii)
• List of Abbreviations (p. xiv)
• Introduction: This is London (p. 1)
• Part 1 Policing
• 1 Regulation (p. 19)
• Part 2 Places
• 2 Geographies of Public Sex (p. 43)
• 3 The Pink Shilling (p. 68)
• 4 The Baths (p. 93)
• 5 A Room of One's Own (p. 109)
• Part 3 People
• 6 "Piccadilly Palare": The World of the West End Poof (p. 139)
• 7 "London's Bad Boys": Homosex, Manliness, and Money in Working-Class Culture (p. 167)
• 8 "The Heart in Exile": Respectability, Restraint, and the City (p. 195)
• Part 4 Politics
• 9 Sexual Difference and Britishness (p. 221)
• 10 Daring to Speak Whose Name? Queer Cultural Politics (p. 241)
• Conclusion (p. 264)
• Appendix Queer Incidents Resulting in Proceedings at the Metropolitan Magistrates' Courts and City of London Justice Rooms, 1917-57 (p. 273)
• Notes (p. 275)
• Bibliography (p. 341)
• Index (p. 365)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

What begins as the story of Cyril L., who, at 20, was married and had a daughter, but discovered he was gay shortly after moving to London??s West End in 1932, quickly turns into an overwhelming sprawl of meticulous research that, despite its commendable intentions, is too dense to appeal to anyone other than very devoted scholars. Houlbrook, a lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool, examines London??s fourth wall, its roles in self-discovery and its inextricable links to gay culture, but often loses the reader within the vast tracts of information he presents in his historic tour of ??London??s queer geography,?? which has frequent stops at public urinals (??identified as the locus of sexual offences??), clubs, bathhouses, police patrols (one officer concludes in a surveillance report the two men he??d been observing were ??undoubtedly of the Nancy type,?? while his colleague determined the men were, actually, ??West End Poofs.??) and courtrooms. Surely, there is no dearth of material presented, but some tidbits, such as public urinal geography and the detailed order of police units detached to apprehend ??sodomites,?? come off as frivolous and detract from what could be an engaging read.. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

CHOICE Review

Houlbrook's excellent analysis portrays queer Londoners without a shared identity or fellow feeling. This history is about separation and conflict along lines of class, gender, age, and ethnicity. Most historians argue that British homosexuals were liberated by the 1957 Wolfenden Report and the consequent 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Houlbrook (Univ. of Liverpool) dissents. That law gave homosexuals privacy from the state, which cemented "a growing division between the private" respectable homosexual and "the public ... disreputable queer." Like George Chauncey's pansies in his Gay New York (CH, Nov'94, 32-1725), Houlbrook's working-class "queans" [sic] self-identified as female and found sex in public venues. To "discreet" middle-class queers (and Wolfenden), this was "sordid," "revolting." Legal, scientific, and medical discourses informing Wolfenden sympathized with publicly "normal" men whose homosexuality was strictly private. Elite queers advising Wolfenden effectively created "the homosexual in their own image" and excluded "vibrant alternatives." Houlbrook follows Chauncey in using police and prosecutors' records to locate queers. Like Chauncey's, Houlbrook's sources map "micro-geographies" of public space for "homosex." For the "discreet" middle-class arrangements, the author often turns to novels and memoirs. His queer studies jargon, challenging to general readers, is well worth tackling. Excellent bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. P. K. Cline Earlham College