#persistently importuning men for immoral purposes

[commiepinkofag]

John Gielgud, 1953

📷 Howard Coster

In the autumn of 1953 the newly knighted actor was at the height of his fame and about to direct himself in a prestigious West End production when he was arrested in a public lavatory in Chelsea. Gielgud was charged with 'persistently importuning men for immoral purposes', a crime that transgressed the social taboos of the era and threatened to ruin him. When the actor appeared in the dock, the name on the charge sheet was 'John Smith', but a journalist recognised the star of stage and screen, who pleaded guilty and was fined £10. Read >

[the-signs-of-two]

So just as a little addition to this post and this post, ideas about male homosexuality in Late Victorian London reflected in the Sherlock Holmes stories were not strictly the reserve of the queer subculture itself. These were stereotypes of queer people (some of them true, some of them just stereotypes) that were held by an increasingly wider audience as new legislation was passed (not just the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, but also such legislation as the Vagrancy Law Amendment Act of 1898 which made it illegal for a man to “in any public place persistently solicit or importune for immoral purposes”) and as the press got increasingly eager to feature scandalous cases of homosexuality. This combination of actual cases and press coverage of those cases spread some ideas about queer subculture and stereotypes about queer men to a very wide readership. Thus, 1) Conan Doyle did NOT necessarily need to be queer or engage in male-on-male sexual behaviour himself to know about the places and stereotypes referenced in Sherlock Holmes and 2), it was not just queer people who would have understood this subtext - the same very wide readership who read newspapers covering criminal cases against homosexual men would have picked up on these references and subtext of “suspiciously insufficient heterosexuality”.

@sarahthecoat @acdhw @crowleys-snek-walk