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Many of the famous figures honoured with a London blue plaque lived private lives outside the sexual norms of the time. Some were persecuted for it and some helped to challenge public perceptions of gender and sexuality. Below, we explore some of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) stories associated with London’s blue plaques.
Standing in the dock in 1895 on trial for gross indecency, playwright Oscar Wilde was asked to explain the phrase ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’. ‘It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection,’ Wilde responded. ‘There is nothing unnatural about it.’
The phrase came from a poem called ‘Two Loves’ by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. Wilde explained that the line referred specifically to the ‘intellectual’ love between an elder and younger man (Wilde was 38 and Douglas 22 when they met), but the phrase was ultimately adopted as a euphemism for homosexual relationships. Although Wilde denied the charges against him, he didn’t deny his love for Douglas, as demonstrated in this exchange with Prosecutor Charles Gill in which love letters between Wilde and Douglas were presented to the court:
Gill: In letter number one you use the expression ‘Your slim gilt soul,’ and you refer to Lord Alfred’s ‘red rose-leaf lips.’ The second letter contains the words, ‘You are the divine thing I want,’ and describes Lord Alfred’s letter as being ‘delightful, red and yellow wine to me.’ Do you think that an ordinarily constituted being would address such expressions to a younger man?
Wilde: I am not happily, I think, an ordinarily constituted being.
Gill: It is agreeable to be able to agree with you, Mr. Wilde? (Laughter.)
Wilde: There is nothing, I assure you, in either letter of which I need be ashamed.
In the 20th century Wilde’s defence of his relationship with Douglas would inadvertently turn him into a gay icon. However Wilde himself didn’t benefit from his public stand in court. After his first trial ended in a hung jury he was convicted on retrial and sentenced to two years hard labour. He was bankrupted and suffered from increasing ill health. After prison, he travelled in Europe and reunited briefly with Douglas but died three years after his release. In De Profundis, a long letter written while in prison and published in 1905, Wilde wrote:
Society as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.
Another figure who rebelled against the social prejudice directed towards homosexuality in the early 20th century was the novelist Radclyffe Hall. Writing in 1928 to secure the publication of her novel The Well of Loneliness, Hall had this warning for the publisher:
I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world… So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted in fiction.
The people she referred to were, in her words, ‘congenital inverts’ – a term she also used to describe herself. ‘Invert’ was a term popularised by sexologists such as Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis to refer to people whose natural gender – they claimed – was different to their biological one, meaning that their sexual impulses were towards people of the same biological sex. In these early scientific studies of sexuality, there is little differentiation between transgender identity and homosexuality.
Hall dressed in men’s clothes and often used the name John, though she referred to herself as ‘she’. In 1907 she fell in love with the singer Mabel Batten and their romance lasted until Batten’s death in 1916. Hall later formed a long-term relationship with Batten’s cousin, Lady Una Troubridge, living with her from 1918 until Hall’s death in 1943.
Although both Hall and Ellis considered sexual inversion to be an affliction, they also believed it to be a condition people were born with and something which should be accepted. It was for this reason Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness. The novel follows the life of an upper-class woman called Stephen Gordon (so named by her father) who is forced to abandon her relationship with another woman due to the social isolation they experience. ‘[T]he book,’ Hall wrote, ‘is a cry for better understanding, for a wider and more merciful toleration, for acceptance of these people as God has made them.’
The censors, however, were not moved by Hall’s cause. The book was banned three weeks after it was published in 1928 and it wasn’t available in the UK again until 1949. The Well of Loneliness has since achieved recognition as one of the first novels to write openly about lesbian relationships, but Hall herself is a complicated figure in the context of human rights movements. Her defence of same-sex relationships was courageous, but she held conservative views in many other matters. She didn’t support women’s suffrage, for instance, and by the 1930s she was expressing proto-fascist views.
Among the famous literary figures ready to defend The Well of Loneliness at the 1928 obscenity trial were Virginia Woolf (see below) and EM Forster. In the end, neither of them were called upon, which may have been just as well. Neither Forster nor Woolf admired the novel in artistic terms and Woolf records that Radclyffe Hall ‘screamed like a herring gull, mad with egotism and vanity’ when Forster told her as much. Forster wrote a piece in The Nation defending the novel on the principle of literary freedom but wrote to Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, that he found ‘Sapphism disgusting’.
By this time however Forster had authored his own novel about homosexual love. He wrote Maurice in 1910–13, shortly before he had his own first homosexual affair. The novel follows the life of Maurice Hall, a privileged Cambridge student-cum-stockbroker who falls in love with Alec, a gamekeeper. “I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort,” Maurice confides to another character in the novel.
Forster was inspired to write Maurice after visiting the early gay rights advocate Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill. (Carpenter had no known permanent base in London, and therefore doesn't have a blue plaque.) ‘I approached [Carpenter],’ Forster wrote, ‘as one approaches a saviour’.
In its frankness about homosexuality, Maurice was revolutionary for the times. It was also, Forster thought, completely unpublishable. He only shared the manuscript with friends during his lifetime and Maurice wasn’t published until 1971, the year after Forster’s death. Forster wrote of the novel:
A happy ending was imperative… I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.
Forster himself was 51 when he experienced that happiness for the first time. He met the policeman Robert Joseph ‘Bob’ Buckingham in Hammersmith in 1930 and formed a loving partnership that lasted until his death. Although Buckingham married in 1932, the three developed a triangular relationship that appeared to work for all of them. Two years after meeting Buckingham, Forster wrote:
I have been happy, and would like to remind others that their turns can come too. It is the only message worth giving
In the early 20th century a set of young, Cambridge-educated men sought to break free of the Victorian morals which had put Oscar Wilde in prison. Starting out as members of the secret society ‘The Apostles’ at Cambridge University, they eventually became part of the London-based ‘Bloomsbury Group’, which also included Virginia Woolf, her sister – the artist Vanessa Bell – and Duncan Grant, also an artist. At the centre of the group were the biographer and writer Lytton Strachey and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Although the group was a closed set in many ways, they were liberal both in their politics and personal relationships. Both Strachey and Keynes had numerous homosexual affairs – with each other, with Duncan Grant, with Woolf’s brother Adrian, and with men entirely unconnected to the group.
Living in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury before the outbreak of the First World War, Keynes recalled the atmosphere of the times:
It was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything.
Strachey, for his part, delivered one of his best one liners to a military tribunal, to which he had been sent as a conscientious objector. Asked what he would do if he saw a German solider trying to violate his sister, he replied archly ‘I would try to get between them.’
It would be too simplistic to call Keynes, Strachey and Grant homosexual. Keynes eventually married the ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova, Strachey set up house with the painter Dora Carrington and Grant had a romantic relationship with Vanessa Bell, with whom he had a daughter. However, their refusal to conform to the moral standards of Edwardian society has been seen by many as a precursor to the gay liberation movement of the 1960s.
Visit the former haunt of the Bloomsbury Group members at Gordon Square in the Borough of Camden. Strachey's plaque is at number 51 and there are two plaques at number 46, a joint one to Bell and Grant and one to Keynes.
While Radclyffe Hall and EM Forster struggled to write openly about homosexuality, Virginia Woolf published Orlando (1928) – a daring but playful novel which unravelled socially accepted categories of gender and sexuality.
Released in the same year Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned, Woolf dedicated Orlando to the writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had fallen in love three years earlier. The title character – inspired by Sackville-West – is a time-travelling, gender-changing aristocrat who has affairs with both men and women across continents and centuries. Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, later called the novel ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’.
Woolf first met Sackville-West in 1922, when she described her in her diary as a ‘florid, moustached, parakeet coloured’ aristocrat. But by 1925 their correspondence had developed into a love affair which lasted until the 1930s. ‘I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,’ Sackville-West wrote to Woolf in 1926. The following year, Woolf seemed similarly love-struck:
Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.
The man in question was Harold Nicolson, Sackville-West’s husband. Nicolson and Sackville-West maintained a more-or-less happy open relationship, in which both had homosexual affairs. Sackville-West had already had one particularly passionate affair with Violet Trefusis, in which the two women eloped to France and Sackville-West adopted the persona of ‘Julian’ to pass as a man.
Woolf identified Sackville-West as a ‘Sapphist’ but she never applied the term to herself. She was married to Leonard Woolf from 1912 until her death, and the union was largely a happy one. For Woolf, sexuality was never easily defined.
In Notting Hill, the Lansdowne House Studios were home to two artistic couples. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who lived there from 1904, were part of the Aesthetic Movement and Shannon’s art celebrated androgynous male beauty. Ricketts and Shannon were ‘in all respects assumed to be in a homosexual marriage’, though this was not something that they acknowledged widely. Together, they built a shared art collection.
They had many homosexual friends, including Oscar Wilde, whose books they designed. Ricketts supported Wilde by visiting during his incarceration and sending him money when he left prison. When Shannon was disabled by a fall in the early 1930s, Ricketts devoted himself to caring for his partner and sold part of their collection to pay for trained nurses too.
Glyn Philpot and Vivian Forbes moved to Lansdowne in 1923 at Shannon and Rickett’s suggestion. Forbes, the lesser known of the two, painted ‘quietly suggestive’ watercolours including Greek Youth and St Sebastian. Philpot was best known for his society portraits, but he subtly represented homoeroticism in paintings such as Fugue (1931–2) and Bistro, Havre (1937). A more explicitly queer painting of a naked St Sebastian (1932) was never exhibited and was discovered turned to the wall in his studio.
Philpot was involved with other men, which caused tensions in his relationship with Forbes, but they were together for nearly 20 years. Philpot died suddenly and unexpectedly after minor dental surgery in 1937, and Forbes took his own life the day after the funeral.
Decades before changes in the law, novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and furniture expert Margaret Jourdain’s relationship was described emphatically as ‘a marriage’ by their friend Herman Schrijver. They were there for each other in sickness and health. Jourdain cared for Burnett when she was recovering after falling prey to the 1918 influenza epidemic and suffering a physical and mental breakdown. They lived together from 1919 and moved to Braemar Mansions in 1934 where they had window boxes bright with flowers and received awed visitors.
Compton-Burnett was heartbroken when Jourdain died in 1951, though she later had another significant relationship with Madge Garland, Vogue editor and founder of the school of fashion. As well as living life on her own terms in private, Compton-Burnett’s acclaimed and dialogue-packed novels featured homosexual relationships, lesbian clasps and gay romances, and one of her characters even commented on the normality of people having same-sex interests.
Although the liberal attitudes of some creative groups signalled the start of a gay liberation movement, the state lagged far behind. In 1952 the brilliant mathematician and pioneer of computing Alan Turing was convicted for gross indecency under the same laws that ruined Oscar Wilde in 1895. Unlike many gay men of the time, Turing was open about his sexuality. When his house was burgled in 1952, he told police that the culprit was a friend of his lover, Arnold Murray, and Turing was subsequently arrested for his homosexuality. At his trial in March that year, Turing didn’t deny the charges and told the court he saw no wrong in his actions.
His punishment was severe. To avoid prison, Turing was forced to take injections of oestrogen. Called a ‘chemical castration’, the drugs were designed to render him asexual. He wrote to a friend:
I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don’t accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams.
Although he continued to work, developing his morphogenetic theory and renewing an early interest in quantum physics, his conviction barred him from continuing his role at GCHQ. His sexuality was regarded as a security risk and he was monitored closely by the government.
He died two years after his conviction in an apparent suicide.
Sir John Gielgud was one of the nation’s most famous actors when he was prosecuted for ‘persistent opportuning’ in 1953. His arrest in a Chelsea lavatory – just a few weeks after he was knighted – caused a national scandal. Gielgud had given the ‘glad eye’ to a young man who turned out to be an undercover police officer. The next day Gielgud appeared before a magistrate, who fined him £10 and told him to ‘see your doctor the moment you leave this court.’ Despite Gielgud’s attempts to hide his identity, a reporter from the Evening Standard recognised his voice in court and the story made front-page news.
His fellow actors and producers in the play he was appearing in – A Day By The Sea – stood by him. Hate mail was redirected from the stage door to Dame Sybil Thorndike at her request and the public received him warmly. Nevertheless Gielgud suffered a personal breakdown five months later and never spoke in public about the incident.
Coming a year after Turing’s conviction (see above), Gielgud’s arrest has since been placed in the context of a 1950s witch-hunt against homosexual men. But the attention that Gielgud’s case received and the apparent public sympathy for him has led some to suggest that the case helped to bring the country nearer to legalising homosexuality. It was a measure of how far attitudes towards homosexuality had changed when in 1975 Gielgud played his first gay role, in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, directed by Peter Hall.
Gielgud contributed privately to the gay rights organisation Stonewall but had earlier told Ian McKellen that he didn’t want to be known as ‘the first queer to be knighted’ and confined his public political gestures to animal rights. Gielgud died in May 2000, 16 months after the death of his partner of 40 years, Martin Hensler.
‘How bona to vada your dolly old eek again!’* With this oft-repeated catchphrase on the 1960s BBC radio show Round the Horne, an unwitting British public was introduced to polari – the London slang used by gay subcultures. Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick played the two camp out of work actors Sandy and Julian, and together they loaded their lines with exaggerated innuendo from the secret language: ‘huge lallies’ was one favourite phrase, ‘lallies’ actually meaning legs.
A jumbled mixture of Yiddish, Italian, lingua franca and backslang (saying words as if spelt backwards), polari allowed gay men to communicate and identify themselves as homosexual without risking exposure or censure. When the programme was first broadcast in 1965, homosexuality was still illegal, but following its decriminalisation in 1967 polari fell out of common usage among the gay community.
Kenneth Williams did not talk publicly about his own sexuality but was less reticent when in character and his camp persona made visible a homosexual subculture which was only just beginning to secure a place in public society.
Maverick film-maker Derek Jarman made male homosexual experiences more visible in his work. His first feature, Sebastiane (1976), featured homoerotic relationships between St Sebastian and his fellow soldiers. When it was shown on Channel 4 in 1982, it resulted in a major media controversy. The crowd-funded film both showed changing attitudes and helped to create change by bringing images of gay sex to commercial cinema and television.
Jarman was also an activist and prominent member of gay rights group OutRage! He campaigned against Section 28 of the Local Government Bill (1987), which banned local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’, and in early 1987 he publicly announced that he was HIV positive just one month after his diagnosis. He was one of the first public figures in the UK to talk openly about his illness in an era when HIV was often considered taboo.
Jarman and his partner Keith Collins moved to Prospect Cottage in Kent in 1987, where they developed a world-renowned garden in the inhospitable coastal environment. Jarman wrote about the garden and his experience of living with AIDS in the influential Modern Nature (1991). His abstract film, Blue (1993) featured excerpts from his diaries and poetry about living with AIDS and was testimony to his ability to turn his experiences into art.
