Against the Law by Peter Wildeblood (Penguin, 1955)
I picked this old Penguin paperback up at the Oxfam bookshop in Bloomsbury, not long after seeing a BBC documentary earlier this year about the Peter Wildeblood’s trial, in 1954, for homosexual offences. I was glad I did, because although the documentary was informative, Wildeblood’s book is a brilliant, urgent plea for understanding and tolerance of male homosexuality; it makes a powerful case for penal reform, too.
I shall not try… either to explain or to excuse it, but simply to describe my condition. Briefly, it is that I am attracted to men, in the way in which most men are attracted towards women. I am aware that many people, luckier than myself, will read this statement with incredulity and perhaps with derision; but it is the simple truth.
Wildeblood had a relationship with a young airman, and wrote him passionate letters; he went on holiday with him, staying in a beach hut at Beaulieu in Hampshire, belonging to a friend, Lord Montagu. But not long after, two boy scouts complained that Montagu and another man (not Wildeblood) had indecently assaulted them; and this attracted the police’s attention to everything that had happened at Beaulieu that summer.
He said that most of the officers at the station had been ‘gay’, and looked at me as though this was some password to which he expected me to reply. I had not heard the expression before, but apparently it was an American euphemism for homosexual.
Wildeblood was arrested and put on trial, with his former boyfriend, who’d turned Queen’s evidence in return for immunity, acting as the chief prosecution witness. Wildeblood chose to tell the court, and the world, the truth about his sexuality, and faced the inevitable penalty.
A man aged about seventy… went into a lavatory at the side of the public house. He was followed by the younger of the two men. Almost immediately there was a sound of scuffling and shouting, and the older of the two… also ran into the lavatory. He and his companion dragged the old man out... He was struggling and crying… I went towards them and shouted at them to let him go, or I would call the police.
The younger man said: ‘We are Police Officers.’
He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, and served more or less a year, at Winchester and then Wormwood Scrubs, where he experienced a prison system he thought did little good, failing to rehabilitate criminals or even to help them if they were determined in themselves to reform.
He faced me squarely, peering up and me under his wig, and demanded: ‘Your character has been put in at its highest, and I agree in every way – nothing has ever been brought against your character. You can hold your head high. But you are an invert?’
‘Yes, I am an invert.’
This is a book whose very datedness paradoxically increases its importance to us today. It gives insight into an old world of 1950s England: intolerant, corrupt and squalid in many ways compared to today. A world of police agents provocateurs, of the denial of legal rights, of prurience, respectability, clear social stratification and ruined reputations. It also shows us glimpses of the old gay community before we even called it that, when, though there were many obvious gay clubs and pubs, and not a few ‘effeminate creatures’ (Wildeblood’s words) ‘who love to make an exhibition of themselves’, to be ‘out’ was not an option for most homosexuals and outward ‘respectability’ was vital.
Going to gaol is… a powerful shock. Suddenly, in the space of a few hours, a man’s whole life is changed; he loses friends, possessions and free will and finds himself alone in a hostile place, wearing clothes designed to rob him of his last vestiges of self-respect and eating food which… makes him feel ill and depressed. Whatever values he may have had are destroyed; whatever faith he may have had is shaken. If his life is to be rebuilt, the process should begin at that moment.
Wildeblood’s own attitude to his sexuality is also fascinating: he sees himself as abnormal and unfortunate, an attitude many modern campaigners might think too self-abasing, but which I suspect must still be held by many gay men. The plea he makes, for tolerance rather than equality, is no less powerful because of this, and to read his yearning for a state of society in which gay men might lawfully pursue committed relationships brings home how far we have come since the 1950s, and how much is owed to men like him.
[The homosexual] cannot see why he should be condemned to perpetual continence, when there are so many other men like himself with whom it would be possible to enter into a relationship which would do no harm to anyone.
Finally, the story of Wildeblood’s incarceration and the argument he makes about prison reform is compelling in itself, and as relevant today, when rehabilitation is not much more vigorously pursued by Jack Straw’s Ministry of Justice’s than it was by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe’s Home Office. Quite a compelling read, this book; and an important one.
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