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He stood next to a good looking guy who turned out to be a policeman (“very pretty, nice cock as well”) and a witness - required to make any charge stick - appeared out of nowhere. Here he discovered the cottaging scene, only to be arrested in 1973 at a urinal in Deptford. Dermot, is in his seventies and moved to London from Ireland. The case collapsed because so many middle-class men were arrested and they all brought barristers with them.”Īfter the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, there were still very few gay bars in the UK so men who wanted fast sex often found it in toilets. “People thought such things only happened in London,” Evans noted, “but it was reported in the national press. James's Park was one of London's earliest documented cruising groundsĪ few years ago, Manchester-based historian Jeff Evans learned of a raid on a “drag ball” in the Hulme area of the city in 1880 when about 40 men, wearing women’s clothing, were arrested. They began to rendezvous in Turkish baths and swimming pool cubicles.
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The jury acquitted the earl but the trial and that of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency five years later prompted many gay men to be less brazen. In 1890, a case was brought against the Earl of Euston, who had allegedly been cruised by a male prostitute in Piccadilly and accompanied him to a notorious Cleveland Street brothel, in London’s West End. A 1706 court report vividly details Edward Barker being prosecuted for poking his member through a hole in a cubicle wall, and in 1728 John Bennet was found guilty of attempted sodomy. Public toilets, or bog-houses as they were known at the time, were also haunts for gay men. These were frequently raided by the police, but the publicity this caused only served to draw more gay men to the capital, with the London Journal reporting that men cruised for sex in Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn, St James’s Park and a path in Moorfields that was dubbed Sodomites’ Walk. The turn of the 18th century saw the rise of molly houses: taverns, coffee houses and private rooms where gay men could meet. Sodomite’s Walkīut cottaging and cruising have links dating back to at least the 17th century, with the first recorded instance of entrapment being the 1698 case of Captain Edward Rigby, who was lured to a private room in a London tavern by a man on the payroll of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, a group which aimed to suppress what it saw as profanity and immorality by bringing private prosecutions. “It was another form of anonymous sex and again not all that satisfactory,” he notes.įlash-forward to the present, and gay sex has never been easier to arrange - as simple as ordering a pizza, delivered to your door via an app or served up in gay saunas around the country.
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Having older gay men teach younger gay men how to survive in a hostile society was very important.”Īs an architecture student, Bernard moved to Huddersfield and discovered the concept of cruising in cinemas, where there was a lot of furtive sexual behaviour in what were then dark and dingy auditoria. “That’s an art that has largely gone now and very often it was the older gay men who mentored the younger ones. They were cautious and used Polari, “which I didn’t understand at all at first,” he laughs. "They’d discuss chat-up etiquette, which included approaching someone and, if they weren’t interested, making it seem like a joke.
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It was full of straight people but towards one end of the room a group of gay men would meet up.” “You couldn’t say it was a gay bar because the concept didn’t exist.
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Luckily, Bernard was eventually introduced to a barman whose place of work served as a meeting place for a small group of gay men. “You’d spend hours trying to find somebody, visiting one set of toilets then another, enduring the cold and damp, spending a lot of time waiting for a fleeting sexual experience that wasn’t particularly satisfying,” he adds. Bernard, 74, says he began cruising at a time when the concept of being 'out' didn't exist in its current form