Suzanne Harrington: 64 countries around the world still criminalise LGBTQ lives

Suzanne Harrington. Picture: Andrew Hasson

On a busy city bus, a tall thin young man flows down the stairs wearing a long white shirt, a long slinky black skirt, and stiletto-heeled boots.

He has a shaved head, diamond jewellery, and Beats headphones. He languidly disembarks, emanating effortless Bowie energy. Not that long ago, he’d have had his head kicked in for his trouble.

Today, halfway through Pride Month, such hostility might be hard for Gen Z to imagine.

That once upon a time, places where LGBTQ people could be themselves were strictly demarcated, and before that, such places didn’t officially exist at all, so that those gathered inside were always under threat of raids, violence, blackmail, persecution. Like Stonewall.

One of the most eye-watering aspects of music historian Jon Savage’s new book, The Secret Public: How Lgbtq Performers Shaped Popular Culture Between 1955 And 1979 is his writing on what it was like to be gay in the old days.

Before backgrounding and contextualising artists from Little Richard and Johnnie Ray to Sylvester via James Dean, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, (although few lesbians, apart from Dusty), Savage writes about how the legal and medical establishment regarded homosexuality. 

A “moral plague”, an “unnatural vice”, a psychiatric condition to be “cured”.

One handsome trucker, Roy Scherer, was “obviously homosexual” and had to be “intensively reprogrammed into an all-American masculinity”, after he was renamed Rock Hudson in 1947 by his manager.

Masking was key. In ONE, the only self-declaring ‘homosexual magazine’ of the era, a semi-spoof article appeared in 1955 on “masculine deportment”. 

No hands on hips, better your cigarette dangling from your mouth “in a brutally tough effect”; and watching your language; “no gushing, no fizzing superlatives”.

You had to retrain your body, voice and speech to present as someone else entirely.

In another recent book, The Diaries of Mr Lucas, journalist Hugo Greenhalgh edits the diaries of a gay Mr Nobody in the 1960s.

Respectable civil servant by day, discreet but enthusiastic inhabitant of the unofficial gay scene of London’s West End at night, George Lucas wrote it all down. Obsessively recording a lost world.

He notes how Piccadilly was thronged with Irish rent boys, and takes us into long gone pubs such as Ward’s Irish House, situated down narrow stairs underneath Piccadilly Circus, making it harder to raid.

Mr Lucas, with his half pints of ale and his predilection for ‘guardsmen’, lived in constant fear of being outed, blackmailed, ruined.

His diaries are a window into an era where being gay meant having to spend most of your life pretending you weren’t.

This is still the case in 64 countries around the world with laws that criminalise LGBTQ lives, from cultural homophobia to the death penalty. 

Closer to home, thanks to vociferous exclusionists, transphobia remains rampant.

Yet in 1955, ONE magazine remained hopeful, despite the suffocating climate: “Such terms as ‘better half’ and ‘weaker sex’… will disappear, while words such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ become obsolete for sheer lack of meaning.”

It remains a work in progress.