Queer London in Literature1

In literature about queer men, London's parks, squares, streets and ‘public conveniences’ have figured more significantly even than bars and clubs, let alone bedrooms. What matters more than where men eventually make love has been where they meet. Some do so in great national spaces and thoroughfares—Piccadilly Circus principal among them—others in more obscure corners. The queer presence in them emerges, often in the weighty moment of cruising's backward glance, as an ‘open secret’. Notwithstanding the changing pressures of wars and laws, the queer subculture is represented as continuously occupying the same public social spaces as the culture that abhors and attacks it.