Pre 1967 experiences
- Once your name was in the paper, your job had gone, everything had gone. The only way out if you got caught - well a lot committed suicide. The Canon told me that a man came to talk to him at the cathedral and said he was gay and his family was against him. The next night he picked up the Evening Post and read that the man had hanged himself.
- There was a cinema on Market Street called the Scala. I found it out quite by accident. It was like musical chairs, people were moving around all the time. For one and ninepence you could have a wonderful night out.
- I first put my toe in the water in the 1960's. If you've seen "The Killing of Sister George" then you will have seen the club I went to in London called the Gateway. It was horrible ... I suppose it was all right if you thought that women and women should behave like men and women, but I didn't. You were either so butch or so femme ... it was a bit like the drag queens.
Very few men dared or had the moral courage to set up home together. Mostly they lived with their parents or got married, though I do know two men who did and they have lived together now for fifty years.
- When I was living on Brun Lane, I had a visit from Jackie Forster and two of her friends. I was walking with them on the way to my local pub with these two and one of them had a long elegant walking cane and a hat and started swishing the weeds and exclaiming "Oh, God isn't it wonderful to be in the country!" and behind her tottered her little girlfriend in high heels and a flowery skirt.
I went to Iraq. There were no European women, except nurses - and they were reserved for officers! So the troops had no outlets. I found out then that most young men would have sex with another man rather than not have sex at all. There were 2000 men. I had the time of my life.
- The News of the World was the worst. They used to have witch hunts. A fellow I met was in a party which was raided. They were all taken to prison. It was headlines in the News of the World. When he came out of prison, the Governor said "Watch what you're doing, you don't want to be back in here", to which he replied "I've had more in here than I do outside".
You never told anyone. You couldn't defend yourself. The police, the law, the church, society, everybody was against you. It was the blackmailer's charter. I was blackmailed and I know a fellow who was blackmailed by two policemen.
I went to the Algarve. We went into the dining room and there were two waiters and they sort of looked at us. They must have put two and two together. On the table was a small vase of flowers. One of the waiters came up to me and he took the flowers away and came back with the most enormous vase of flowers I've ever seen and plonked those on the table. There was uproar in the dining room because the women could not stand it to think that we were getting attention and they were being ignored.
Pubs in Chelsea and that area sort of alternated. You would go there one week and the following week you would find it was deserted, because rumour had got round that there was going to be a raid. Unless you were in close touch, you'd never know where to go because you didn't know where the crowd had dispersed to. The White Bear in Piccadilly was quite good for a long time. One occasion I went there with two ballet dancers, one on each arm, the manager came out and said "Sorry boys, not tonight". He'd been tipped off there was going to be a raid. He turned to me and said "All right for YOU, sir."
During the war it was blackout in Nottingham. Bombs were dropping. They dropped incendiaries on my house. You weren't allowed to show a light. I remember meeting a Canadian Commander in the pub. We walked out in pitch black on the corner of King Street and Queen Street and had ten minutes of love there with everybody walking about in the blackout. You knew you were going to die tomorrow, there was a bomb with your name on it so everybody enjoyed themselves.
- I stayed at a club for Officers in Sloane Square and got mixed up with the gay crowd in London; chiefly ballet dancers from Covent Garden. I had short hair and was always properly dressed and I stood out like a sore thumb. We would meet someone, and they would look at me and say "Is he so?" or "Is he musical?" We used Polari to have talks in restaurants where other people couldn't understand what we were talking about.
- This talk about homosexuals in the armed forces - my experience in the RAF was that as long as you did your job properly nobody took any notice of it at all. My first love affair was with a young man in the Armoured Cars Unit and he got killed. I was then working with the Assistant Provo Marshall for the RAF. I went into work on the morning that my boyfriend had died and my boss said to me "I understand that you know about Edbrook's death" and I said "Yes, sir" and he said "I understand he was a very special friend of yours, would you like to take some time off?" That was the attitude.
In the early 1960's a tabloid newspaper ran an article called "How to spot a Homo". Characteristic features included wearing sports jackets, smoking a pipe, wearing suede shoes and leaning backwards at an angle of 95' to the ground when walking.