Stuart Feather: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Stuart Feather
Interviewed by Rachel Larman
4th March 2019

SF: My name is Stuart Feather. I’m… gay, a gay man, and I was born on the 7th of May, 1940.

RL: Okay. So, Stuart, could you tell me a little bit about your days in Huddersfield?

SF: Ah, yes. Well… the reason I moved from York to Huddersfield was because my boyfriend, we’d been together for about two years, he finished his studies as an architect and got a job in Huddersfield. And I was working for British Rail in York as a clerk so it was quite easy for me to get a transfer to Huddersfield station, to a job there. So… we moved first of all in to the theatre digs in Huddersfield, which was kind of a cool place to be. I’d been at the amateur dramatics society in York and I’d been in the Mystery Plays so… I… rather fancied myself as an actor at the time, so that was good and then, but, the digs were okay but they weren’t that private so we, John and I, well John actually found this house with two bed sits that were for rent. One on the first floor which he took, because he was earning more money than me, which had actually a separate bedroom, and a bed sit, a real bed sit, on the second floor, which I took.

And so… well… first of all Huddersfield was this extraordinary place, it had a pub, I cant remember the name of it now and I couldn’t tell you quite which street it was on, I’ve forgotten its name. But I know that it had, like York, that it had a room at the back of the pub where gays could meet, and it was just gay men, I cant really recollect, there would have been one or two women, occasionally, who would be there, but, generally it was just full of men. And, you could get to the pub by the yard, I think it was on the right hand side, of the pub, and there was a big yard, so you could walk off the pavement in through the yard, and then there was an entrance to this back bar… which was, had more gay men coming to it than the one in York. It was also a place where on a Sunday night, gay men would come from Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, for a drink in Huddersfield, and of course on Saturday nights, John and I had the choice of going either over to Manchester for a drink, or to Leeds, and because we were very familiar with everybody in Leeds and all the gay bars and stuff, we did go to Leeds quite a lot because we’d been going to it from York.

RL: So, what were the places you would go to in Leeds?

SF: The first place we would go to in Leeds would be what was called The Chop House in Briggate, in Lower Briggate, and then we would go on, sometimes to The Metropole Hotel or The Metropolitan, I cant remember, and then to The Great Northern, which was a big, very definite gay bar, which you’ve probably heard of before, and then, because closing time I think was half past ten, we would go back to Upper Briggate, to, I think it was the Flamenco coffee bar, or Flamingo I can’t remember, and have a quick, you know, cappuccino, and then rush back to the station to get the last train back to York. The joke being that if the last train to York crashed, England would become a republic. And, the other thing in Huddersfield which was remarkable, was the cottaging scene, it was just so busy, there were so many of them.

RL: So, when was this, roughly, Stuart?

SF: 1958, 1960 when I was living there, and the major one was the bus station. There was, in the cubicles there, the walls were absolutely covered in all these mad stories, all these quite sexy stories, and very well written they were as well, and periodically I don’t know the council, or the bus company, would paint it all over, paint it all out, but within, a matter of hours of the paint drying, you’d go there and find a new set of stories. And that got so bad that in the end they closed them for a while to do some work and when the work was finished and they were reopened, they’d put huge circular discs of rough concrete on each wall. And the concrete was like, you know like, zinc corrugated, and they were huge corrugated furrows that were you know sort of round in this circle, and so then the stories then started appearing in the grooves and on the tops of the… you know it was, so that was just a mad scene. And that’s where I first began to see, I can’t remember his name now, but he was known as Emma Lady Trinity [?] and he was the vicar of Trinity Church, in the centre of Huddersfield, which was kind of Anglo-Catholic, because he always wore a full sort of suitar[?] and biretta, and he had a Lambretta and he used to go out cottaging in his clonicles, or in his you know, priestly outfit kind of thing. Yes, extraordinary. And he would travel all over the district. It wasn’t just Huddersfield.

RL: Right.

SF: I mean you saw him out you know, sort of on the moors, sort of going along with his Lambretta to some village cottage or something.

RL: And he was never in trouble for this?

SF: Well, he seemed to be able to get away with it, but then in those days, I mean, poor priest, he must have you know, got taken short. And so I got to know him, because, well I was told, by everybody in Huddersfield that I knew to you know, make his acquaintance, because he had this huge porn collection, which he kept in the church tower, because he thought police couldn’t raid holy property. So, one evening he invited me over and showed me all his pornographic pictures and stuff. But the most amazing thing for me which I’ve never forgotten, was he had a copy of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, a really expensive red leather Morocco bound edition and all the papers were gilt edged and there were these engravings inside by Jean Cocteau of all these sailors… and it was just amazing. [RL coughs] That was I think Maurice [?] from the Olympic Press who published Jean Cocteau’s stuff but also put out these deluxe editions which became collectors items. They must pass in from hand to hand I think among very very rich gay men because they really were deluxe things and so rare and so collectable these days I’ve never heard a word about anybody collecting them or enquiring about them even because I don’t know people.

RL: So what else did he have?

SF: That’s really all I can remember. The rest were photographs of men with big knobs and you know, maybe and there were some of sort of gay men having sex and so forth. That’s all he had… the other… I think John and I had met a really nice man from Halifax, handsome guy who had been on his national service, he’d spent it in Korea. And he came back having met all these Americans in the Korean War. Gay men who’d passed on their Physique Pictorials and other sort of art photography of the male you know male bodies, and that’s how we learnt about from those Physique Pictorials we learnt about the Mattachine society. Which was the first time I’d ever come across anything to do with politics or that there was a homophile organisation of any kind.

RL: So what impact did that have on you?

SF: I think it kind of boosted one’s self confidence to know that there was that kind of I suppose civil rights going on in the States I wouldn’t have known the term civil rights at that stage. But just the fact that there was an organisation that was trying to promote some kind of understanding of our situation and I thought that was very good, so I always remember that.

RL: You were talking about the bed sit before I switched on the recorder do you want to talk about that and the separate rooms?
SF: Oh yes, that’s right. When we moved out of the digs we got this flat just at the beginning of Edgerton road well it was two bed sits. John took the one on the first floor which was a nice big room and had a separate bedroom but that was his because with the single bed, but that was his because he was earning more money than me and I took the one in the attic which was just a bed sit. And I was thinking recently about that knowing that you were coming, and I began to think about that situation and the flat, because, I thought that by us taking two separate bed sits it kind of conformed the idea that we were being very very discreet which we were with the landlord. But, I remembered that then that there was this thing that I never kind of resolved in my mind which anyway was that I woke up one night in my bed and there was this man trying to get in to my bed with me. And it turned out to be the policeman who lived next door. And this became a sort of regular thing for a while. It was always unpredictable I never knew when it was going to happen, but we were having this, he’s quite a sexy young guy, so we were having this nice scene together. The only thing I could never work out, was how he got in to the house, and how and how he got in to my bed sit. But that was just a detail it wasn’t of burning importance, I was enjoying his visits… so I didn’t put much emphasis on that. Thinking about it just recently I thought well, we never had any trouble from the landlord and landlady but they must have known I mean I was eighteen and John would’ve been twenty one then and he, funnily enough I never, ever asked John if the same thing had happened to him. We had an open relationship but that was one thing I never mentioned to him. Now I think well there were two policemen living in that flat, him and his boyfriend they were both in the police and now I wonder if they both came in to the house and one took me and one took John. Now one shall never know because John died in ‘96.

But that was, and I suddenly thought it must have been something with the landlord who got suspicious and knew there were two policemen living next door and went and asked his advice but I think somehow they must have hatched a plan that they would keep us under observation and creep in in the middle of the night and check whether we were sleeping in one bed together or whether we were sleeping in separate beds. Not realising of course, who would realise, I think in those days, that you know, that a policeman would be gay, and it was a policeman, you trusted them. So I can well see a person like that handing over the keys to the house and I think in those days we knew, it was common knowledge, that a lot of gay men, or a lot of men who discovered they were gay decided to join the police force because it was the easiest place for them to hide their sexuality because no one would believe that there was such a thing as a gay policeman. So that was one of the events that happened to me in Huddersfield. [Laughs]

RL: So you mention about the cottaging at the bus station where the other places around Huddersfield?

SF: There was, there was one in the park on the, near the railway station. There might have been two or three in the park itself but there was one at the sort of entrance… I think. I can’t think of any others. But there were a lot of cottages in Huddersfield at that time. And also there was this lay preacher from the Methodist Church who was a famous for giving these sermons and he’d always manage in his sermons to refer to Huddersfield at an earlier time when it was just a group of cottages connected together by well worn paths. He would say this in every sermon and people you know gays of Huddersfield would flock to those churches [laughs] wherever they were just to listen to this and have a titter to themselves about something that only they recognised as being funny.

RL: So how did you find out about the cottages?

SF: Well John and I had met in a cottage. I discovered cottages in York when I was… it was odd I was out I had taken my sister by bus to – I can’t remember whether it was Leeds or Bradford – and she was, I put her on the bus to Keighley where my aunt was going to meet her because she was a bridesmaid at our cousin’s wedding and she had to be there the day before we all went to have a fitting for a dress and so on. And I got the bus back to York and on the way I was dying for a pee and so when I got to the bus stop in York I kind of raced as fast as I could to the only loo I thought would be open because I didn’t know it was half past eight/nine o’clock at night I can’t remember and I was fifteen. And I didn’t know whether it would be open or not but it was and I went in there and there was one other man in there and I realised what he was doing and I mean he was sort of masturbating himself and looking at me and I knew what was happening, and so I lingered a bit and then I left and he followed me and so on… on the route I followed him up through Ousegate and in to Piccadilly and then I followed him from Piccadilly to this other lavatory by the side of the labour exchange in York and he… once he got in there he turned, he was in the urinal and he turned to look at me and showed himself off and that was enough for me I knew then it really was, you know, another way of picking up men. And so, I left it at that and went home because I was late already anyway.

And later on, in that same loos was where I met John when I was sixteen. But also, we started going to the Punchbowl which, the backroom there in Stonegate in York which was a gay bar, and that man was there, and that’s, and I got to know him there. And then I heard from his friends that he’d been arrested for cottaging a few years earlier and he’d been beaten up by the police and was heavily fined and his name and address and job was published in the paper, and he was, you know, thrown out of his home and beaten up by the neighbours, and lost his job, and that happened I think twice, and then the third time he was just picked up one evening and thrown in to the police car and roughed up a bit at the police station and told to plead guilty or else, and the whole thing, you know, process went through again.

So, he, I don’t know how, what his job was when I met him, how he was surviving I don’t know, but he never talked about it himself you see, you didn’t in those days, you’d find out from his friend, or his friends, what had happened, but you didn’t talk about what happened to you. Because, you know, who wants to be the wet blanket or the killjoy at the party. And, I remember once when I was still living with my parents in York so I must have been about, I must have been seventeen or so, there was a guy in Leeds one Saturday night, who came on to me and we made a date and I came back to Leeds on a Wednesday I think it was, and when I got back he didn’t have anywhere to go and we ended up on this building site and so two policeman caught us in this little shack in this building site and beat us up. Him… they did, they beat me up a little bit, but they beat him up a lot because he was the older one and because he really fought back. I didn’t, I’ve always been a sissy when it comes to fighting, but I was really badly shaken and sort of bruised on my body. They hadn’t hit me in the face or anything, so I was all shaken up.

RL: Did your family find out?

SF: No, they didn’t, they didn’t. Because, my parents had a fish and chip shop and when I got home they were still working in the shop, so I was able to get in to the house and go to bed and sort of you know, get myself together for the next morning. So… yes that’s how life was in those days.

RL: So, cottaging was very risky?

SF: It was. And I’ve just been lucky that I’ve never, ever been caught. So, yeah.

RL: Should we talk a bit about you getting involved in the Gay Liberation Front? That would be good.

SF: Yeah. Can I just turn the heat off?

[Stuart stands and turns the heating off]

RL: Yeah, so how did you get involved in the Gay Liberation Front, Stuart?
SF: Well, two friends, I was living with my boyfriend just off the Kings Road, and we had two friends, a former boyfriend of mine and his lover. And they went out shopping on Oxford Street, and they had a leaflet thrust in to their hand and they came back and showed me and said we must go along and see what this is all about. And I wanted to, very much, because it rang a bell, because I had read in maybe the Sunday Times or something like that, of a Gay Liberation Front in America, and that I thought, gay liberation, that seems, it seems such a sort of odd idea. But, it stuck with me somehow, it was only one little paragraph or something.

RL: Why did it seem odd?

SF: Well, the very idea of gay liberation, I mean what did that mean? I mean I knew about, you know, the Liberation Front of, I don’t know, Mauritania or the Palestine Liberation Front and stuff, but that was all to do with sort of armies and politics and things, and I… so I couldn’t see it applying to anything to do with being gay [laughs]. So, we went along, and I absolutely loved it because a woman spoke and said that she’d like us to think about how we behaved at work, and how we disguised our sexuality in front of other people. And I immediately saw all my tactics and all my games I played in order to maintain this straight front I had at work. And I was kind of pretty disgusted with myself really, that I had allowed myself to be deceitful like this over my own nature which was gay, and you know, I think because I lived in London in the sixties, from 1960, and there was much more freedom down here, and you met people from – well I had Spanish friends, I had Italian friends, friends from South America and South Africa and we had lots of places to go to and it was all breaking up, and much more freedom in the sixties than there’d ever been before. So, and in fact, I used to occasionally hold hands with some boyfriends you know going down the Kings Road and places like that, and I rather enjoyed doing that, because it kind of, I could see the shock on people’s faces and stuff, and I kind of enjoyed that. That one, was doing something publicly that was sort of banned. So, I took to gay lib straight away. They didn’t want to know anything more about it, and my boyfriend quickly got sick of the fact that I was out every night of the week going to all these different function groups and you know, just sort of learning what they were doing, and also trying to find out where I could fit in and become more involved than just attending the meeting on a Wednesday night.

RL: So, when did you get involved, what year would that be?

SF: Well, we’re now unsure as to when gay lib was actually founded, which was the first meeting. I think it was probably apart from the planning meeting, the first demonstration was on the 8th of October 1970. And after that, there must have been, and then they had a formal meeting, and the idea was, Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walters had met each other in Philadelphia – you know the story – and they had come back to found the Gay Liberation Front. Well, I think their idea was that it was just going to be a movement for students, and much to their surprise, lots of non-student young people turned up, just guys from the bars who, and so on, and I don’t think they had in mind any women, but well but, the women turned up at the second meeting, Mary McIntosh and Elizabeth Wilson, and stuff, and I reckon I was there on the third meeting, so towards the end of October 1971 I think. And there was, I don’t know, probably about fifty gay men and gay women as we called ourselves in those days… and as I say this woman really made me think by what she said, and so I became hooked [laughs].

RL: So, just thinking about what the woman said and what she was making you feel, what did you feel you were doing at work, what were you hiding?

SF: Well I was hiding who I was, I was pretending I was a straight man in a way. I was silly to think I was getting away with that but there you are there’s self-delusion for you. But, I don’t know, I mean you would switch genders, you know what your boyfriend was doing, you’d say it was your girlfriend, and so on.

RL: Okay. So, what did you get involved in, with the Gay Liberation Front?

SF: So, I, at Christmas, there was a call for people to join a street theatre group. So, with me am-dram background I thought that’s what I can do. So, I joined the street theatre group, and that was also the meeting, I’d been trying to get in touch with John, because we’d kept up a relationship, even though we’d broken up in 1960 when I came down to London. And, I’d left, I don’t know, I can’t remember now, but anyway I kept phoning him and he turned up at Christmas with himself and a group of his friends, and I had seen him around, well, there was a point where we connected again before gay lib, when I knew he was sort of in to drugs, but I didn’t know what, and then I worked out that it was acid, and I was interested in acid myself because I’d heard all these stories about it, and so on. So, anyway, he’d been away in Formentera which was why I couldn’t get hold of him, and he came at Christmas to the GLF meeting which was in the Arts Lab at Roberts Street because the LSE was closed for Christmas. And he came with a group of his friends, or what he termed his family, his hippy family kind of thing. Which was, Sue and Anne Winters who were sisters and Tarsus Sutton who was a New Zealander and a gay male couple Angus and Mitch, and John was beaming all over his face I mean, you know. I think the thing is John and I, we both… we’d been, we talked a lot when we were in York together because the Wolfenden Report came out, and we wanted to you know, we were waiting for it to come out because we wanted to know what Wolfenden was recommending and also because we wanted you know the lowering of the age of consent, and that had got us, John particularly in to thinking about what life could be like, if things were decriminalised. And so, we connected up very well together again at Christmas… and anyway I went along, and also Sue Winter and Mitch and Angus and Tarsus Sutton they all joined the street theatre group as well.

And, Sue Winter and her sister were both straight women and were not interested and never had relationships with the women of GLF or any other women to that matter. It turned out in the end that they were rather there with the idea that we were far too dizzy to organise our own revolution and they were there to do it for us. But that didn’t work out because they spent weeks and weeks and weeks teaching us and then playing these theatre games you know building up trust, all of that kind of thing which was very popular at the time. And I, being the practical being, I wanted to be out there and performing, and I put up with it for quite a while and then I eventually put my foot down and said we’ve got to do something. So, they, there was this lovely young, I think he was only seventeen or eighteen, young man, who worked for Bermans [?], the theatrical costumier, and he pinched a load of costumes, or borrowed them shall we say, and it was claimed and they were bizarre, that they were some costumes that Bermans [?] had made for Fellini’s ‘Satyricon’ and they’d been rejected or something I don’t know, but the story was on those lines, anyway, we were told we were going to meet at Paul Theobald’s flat and dress up, and we were going to go on the tube to Leicester Square from Kings Cross on the Northern Line, and then we were going to go down to Trafalgar Square [coughs], and that seemed to be it and I thought well what is the point? It was going to be, it was winter, it was dark by half past four, what were we doing? Anyway we did it, and then, once we we got to Trafalgar Square, Sue Winter said right we’re going to go off down the Strand now, so okay so we went off down the Strand, and halfway down the Strand she started distributing these theatre tickets. Now she had this, she liked gay men sexually, and so she had this boyfriend, Howard Wakeling, who was an actor, and anyway we were given these theatre tickets and it was for Aldwych Theatre and they were in the stalls, and that’s you know the most expensive seats in the house kind of thing. And it was just so very odd. And anyway, we got to the Aldwych and went in to the theatre, and only the back stalls were occupied, and you know the dress circle and the galleries there didn’t seem to be anybody in them at all, and we were in costume and I thought well are we supposed to perform now or what? It was so bizarre. Anyway we sat down in our seats and then along the row came the news that we were here to watch a show that Howard Wakeling was in and I was furious, I was really annoyed that we’d been duped in to promoting this theatre show.

So, after that, the Winter sisters and Howard Wakeling sort of dropped out, and very quickly we got an invitation, because Angela Weir came to gay lib, for the first time, and she was involved principally in women’s liberation and she’d come along to ask us to join and support the eighth of March, International Women’s Day march, 1971 this would be. And I think maybe from her came the idea of going to perform outside Bow Street Magistrates Court in defence of the women who had been arrested at their womens lib demonstration against the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall. And so, that’s what we did and so for me that was the first real street theatre performance, and we had our own show called – well I forget – the Miss World contest I think, or the Miss World trial, I can’t remember, yes I think so the Miss World trial or something. So yeah it was like a… sort of, we had a compere and we had to answer these questions about why we’d entered this beauty contest or this Miss Trial contest and so forth.

RL: So what were you wearing for this, Stuart? Were you dressed up?

SF: I was wearing kind of padded woman’s bathing costume which has blue eyes for nipples, and a wig, and a pair of tights, and I can’t remember what shoes I was wearing. But anyway, that was really interesting as well because it was the first time I’d really been in drag and I thought it was fascinating that it was so… one could see the confusion that happened when people saw you, and I thought that was fascinating and really interesting, and powerful. And it changed my mind afterwards about wearing a GLF badge, which we’d all, you know, I mean you know, the, the… main thing, well, to be an activist in GLF you had to be out at work and out with your family and everything else… and we were all bought badges. But I began to realise after the drag experience that the badges, when you wore them on the street or in the tube or something where you were sort of next to people who might say something, it was always on a very sort of intellectualised level where people would say ‘what is the Gay Liberation Front?’ and you would say well, responding to that, that we were fighting for our rights and things. Whereas when you were in drag, the question was ‘why are you wearing drag?’ It was immediately personal because the person was affronted and wanted to know what you thought you were doing. And so, I started to think about that as a way of appearing, and then we did the demonstration inside GLF which Sue Winter did actually take part in, and Mitch and Angus, or Mitch did, and several others. Anyway we had – oh, Roger Carr, that’s right – and we had this character that we dreamt up in the street theatre group, that we called Doris Aversham, and she was going, we thought of her as the Agony Aunt of the Come Together newspaper, which was the GLF newspaper, you know. Sort of why are the Marxists, the Maoists saying it’s going to take 200 years before we achieve our liberation that kind of thing you know. And so we all decided, sort of in line with Mao’s permanent revolution – of course we sending up the Maoists somewhat – that we would all stand as Doris Aversham, and we would rotate the role between us on the steering committee because there were these elections for the steering committee, which sort of round the meetings, and every, I think every second month a group would drop out and others would be elected and that was sort of rotating anyway so we thought we would also rotate. So we all gave these speeches and… we nearly got in [laughs] which was not what we’d expected, but anyway we didn’t get in thank goodness. But there again the effect of drag on lesbians and gays was also very interesting and very confusing and they didn’t expect this thing to happen at all.

RL: So what were you trying to challenge by the use of drag?

SF: We were challenging gender, it was the gender fuck as we called it, a thing, at the time. You know, people’s perception of gender, we sort of realised we were messing about with by dressing in drag. Yes so… then, added to that, the women began complaining about the men’s sexism and the men’s misogyny and so that added another layer to drag as well because just by going out in like full drag with heels and you know, so on, you experienced for the first time how restrictive women’s clothing can be and how you know, the fact that you were wearing heels means there was no kind of escape. So, you began to fe-, appreciate, if you like, aspects of a woman’s life that you had never even imagined before, and then of course that opened up the question of well, what is gay about me? What is it that’s gay about me and what is it that’s straight about me? So, I think, one started off an inward journey at that point and it was that that made one aware of feminine issues and femininity as opposed to the masculinity that had been inculcated in to us.

RL: Can I ask about kind of consciousness raising? Did you have those sorts of meanings? You mentioned there about sort of questioning ideas about masculinity, is that something that you did?

SF: It was, but not at the beginning, when there was a great movement towards consciousness raising. In fact, at one point, I think it came up in ‘think ins’ which you said you’d like to get on to. But I think at the beginning there was this idea that to be an activist at GLF you had to be part of an awareness group. Well, I was very, I was very nervous about that because it was all a bit sort of psychological and I didn’t think – because all these people seemed rather clever to me in a way – I could sort of defend myself and I thought id get hurt somehow, in the kind of just saying hey guys lets form an awareness group, or something. But, later on… when there was, when this movement of mainly working class men, not absolutely all working class, not all, there were some middle class men, but predominantly working class men, started to come out in drag, and we all obviously joined together, and then when we formed a commune we were living together, and we were talking about our lives and our thoughts and our feelings all the time, and from a feminist point of view, then that was an awareness group. I mean we never stopped talking about ourselves, never stopped listening to each other about you know, what had happened from the word go, from the day you were born kind of thing. And, what we’d been through in the gay scene and so on. So, that was my awareness group, but I didn’t immediately walk in to one because I didn’t feel I could really cope with it. I think, you know… I hadn’t, I remember saying once when I was working in this job in Huddersfield which was a very sort of liberal town, it sent Liberal MPs to Parliament. I was working with this man who voted Labour and I remember saying to him then – because my parents had both voted Conservative – and I couldn’t see the Labour Party having any place in Britain, I said its all finished for you [laughs]. And so, Conservative for me, I mean I wasn’t in any way political really, I mean just went to the ballot box and voted Labour because that’s what my parents did. And, politics didn’t really enter my life until gay lib, and so… I mean there were lots of socialists who had some political experience, but I wasn’t one of them. So, I was keeping that at bay really, yeah.

RL: So, when you did kind of become part of this consciousness raising, what effect do you think it had on you? What did you find out from it?

SF: Well I suppose the same as everybody else did really. How, because of your sexuality, you know, you were denied any kind of voice in society. How, your sexuality had been manipulated so that you could only occupy and find your sex in the dark corners of the world, and what was fascinating to me was that other people had the same ideas and thoughts that I had, and then you began to realise that they were because of the political situation that you had been pushed in to. And so, you know, yes you wake up then, because you realise you’ve been manipulated and… and so that whole thing becomes a raising of awareness, a consciousness raising act. And so, yes that’s what we found, among, in this group who were termed radical feminists, by the Maoists, who put that label on us really, because they’d tried, because when they saw us coming out in drag, they’d tried the same thing, you know, well they hadn’t tried, they were a bit more soft about it, a bit more if you like discreet, they’d turned it in to a bit more of a feminine look. I think I always think of it as they got, they were exhausted by trying to keep up the effort for this and it was much easier for them to go back to being how they were [laughs]. So they discarded the radical feminist experiment – I suppose they’d call it – and declared that we were the radical feminists, and we said ‘no we’re not because only women can be feminists’ [laughs], but let’s say we became the radical queens then because I mean it just, you know, that just was the label, that’s what typified us, what we called the straight gays, the ones that refused to look at themselves, the ones that wouldn’t take an inward journey as it were.

RL: So, what was your kind of view of, I suppose commercial gay bars at that time, were there places that GLF would go in?

SF: Um… I’ll have to think about that. Well, yes we still went to gay bars, we had nowhere else to go except at the LSE after the meeting we would all go to The George and so it would become [laughs] the gay bar Wednesday night. I can’t remember when we moved to Middle Earth where we used to go and drink, I can’t remember that, but then when we moved round here to All Saints Church Hall which is the next street over from here, or was, I think it’s been pulled down now, but we were all spread out around the area but there were two gay bars, one called The Chepstow in Chepstow Road which had been gay for a while, and then there was The Champion, which was a long running gay bar in Bayswater which is about a mile away, and you could go there but the landlord was a really uptight bastard and we had trouble later on with him. So, we just used to go to the local bars here and then the police started their attack on us and so we had to defend ourselves and that was when we had our demos against the police here. They’d gone round the bars saying, telling the barmen that they’d lose their licence if they served us, or anybody wearing a GLF badge… so, we had a campaign and it ended with a sit in, in the Chepstow, where the landlady there, she was round the bend about homosexuals, it was really… and they, her and her husband had to back down after the police, we did the sit in because the police didn’t come when they phoned the police, and they had to phone Scotland Yard to get the other police down to clear the pub. So, after that they’d officially backed down but anybody that tried to go back there who they thought was gay they’d still ban, because she was just apoplectic about it really.

RL: Could you tell me about the think ins? What were they?

SF: Yes, the think ins, that was because, they came about because we had, these problems that we couldn’t sort out in the public meeting once a week in the two hours that was available. So, I suspect Aubrey and David got the think ins together which was a really good idea to hire a room or a hall or a room in a library, and spend all day trying to sort out these issues. And the structure of that was different to the general meetings, and I think all of us wish we’d adopted the think in way of running things rather than sticking with the big meeting on a Wednesday night. Because, the think ins worked really because everybody that assembled there broke down in to groups of eight or ten people and then talked among themselves and then talked through the issues that we’d come to sort out and then try and reach some consensus and then one person would report back to the general meeting as a whole and then a decision would be made that way, and it’s the most democratic way that we were ever able to work out, which worked. Because, in a general meeting, people could vote who’d never been to a meeting before and had never given the issue any thought beforehand, and so that wasn’t really the best way of going forward. So, the think ins were really vital I mean… I’m just trying to think of the issues we had. Well, we had to, have a secretary and a treasurer even though we didn’t want that, we had, we realised we had to have it, so we had to vote for a treasurer because we needed to raise money for our campaigns, and… then there was the question of should we have an office, and so on and that needed money as well, and so that was a debate. There was the debate about should everybody who comes to GLF be a member of an awareness group, and that was a decision that was yes everybody should, and when that was put to the general meeting to vote on, everybody said what a wonderful idea and blah blah blah but none of them would commit themselves to doing it so that fell… those kind of things.

RL: Can you tell me about the think in in Leeds, the one that CHE were invited to?

SF: Well, that’s in my book [Blowing the Lid: Gay Liberation, Sexual Revolution and Radical Queens], I hadn’t thought about that for ages. Well, we wanted to connect up London with all these other groups that had formed around the country, and there was I think then or subsequently a GLF office in Leeds, and Manchester didn’t have a GLF group but… a CHE group, but that was really I think because CHE started in Manchester anyway. I can’t think where other groups might’ve been at that time, well there might have been one in Brighton, perhaps one in Bath… Cardiff… I can’t remember now at that time. But anyway, we wanted to meet up with everybody and… I suppose the issues were one of communication, and agreeing to joining campaigns and stuff, and I suppose, I don’t know how it happened but CHE were also involved, I can’t think why they were. But I suppose it was a sort of national thing for all the activists, all the lesbian and gay activists. So, yes, so CHE were there, and… I don’t know, it seemed very tiring to me, [RL laughs] is my impression. Very exhausting, there were lots of disagreements between individuals, both in CHE and GLF, I think the superstars were out and they were clashing with each other.
RL: Oh, okay.

SF: It was a bit tedious, I think, and taking pot shots and so on.

RL: So, were there definite leaders in GLF?

SF: There were people who were more voluble than anybody else, yes. I mean, that’s why Sue Winter and Harold Wakeling were running straight theatre when they arrived because they talked the loudest and the longest, really. And they talked a lot about the media and I think they were obsessed with the media and that’s how they got in to that position. And yes in GLF there was Warren Haig the Canadian who kind of had some experience of gay liberation or certainly gay politics in Canada before he came here so his attitude was he’d seen it all before in a way and he was the experienced one and he was good at it and he could think on his feet and he was very quick, and very anti-the left as most Americans are or most American Canadians are. Anything to do with socialism really frightens them and did them and still does now really and.. most particularly so with one American woman, Carla Toney who in every other way was a real feminist and women’s leader but when it came to anything to do with socialism she was dead against it, just because of being brought up with all those fears you know, all really, the way the right in America you know smashed the socialist after the First World War I think, when there was all that danger of communism taking over the world. And America never really recovered from that.. democratic kind of people. Yes, I think on, I think it was Martin Stafford really in CHE who was also a bit of a star as well. So Warren Haig and Martin Stafford were having these – and also John because John was always kind of independent, he never really, he would go round from group to group but he was never fixed on one and he was kind of on another level really. In Lisa Powers book she says he declared himself to be a Trotskyite] which I never thought of John like that which I suppose I did when I thought about it afterwards because he was never part of a group he was always acting independently… and I know my friend Sarah Grimes thought of him as very sinister because he was always dressed in black but yes, I mean he had good ideas and he was, John was brilliant when it came to the attack on the Festival of Light he organised it really superbly. But he was always independent, so he was one of the stars as well and he had a clash as well with, I don’t know probably with Warren and Martin Stafford. Yes.

RL: So how did you as a member of GLF perceive CHE?

SF: Oh well they were, they were the straights, the closet queens, the ones who wouldn’t come out, the ones who I thought were resentful of the fact that we had stolen the thunder they thought they had. And no, and yes, and they were always sort of conservatives one instinctively didn’t like, the squares, the straights. Yeah.

RL: What was it like, Stuart, for you to move from sort of York, Huddersfield, to move to London, like the differences in the sort of the gay scenes and politics. How did that strike you when you first got here?

SF: When I got here in 1960, well I must say I had been coming down to London when I lived in Huddersfield, because I worked the railways I could get cheap tickets. So I used to come down when John and I sort of started to break up a bit and, I used to come down to London on a weekend and having a whale of a time. So, in a way it was no different in one way, there were gay pubs, there was loads of cottages… what was a plus was the theatre, particularly the theatre for me, and… and I suppose yeah, the sort of… and the restaurants, the gay restaurants too, yes, that was new, I don’t think I’d ever been to a gay restaurant, no I hadn’t there were no gay restaurants in Huddersfield or York. So going to London where there was gay restaurants yes that was an added sort of thing to go out to. And just the amount of people and making friends and discovering new things, you know, all sort of … the social life was much richer.

RL: When you mentioned going to that pub in Huddersfield, it sounded like you had to go around the back through the yard to get in. So what was that like having to go in there?

SF: Like the pub for days.. it was wonderful it was good yes.

RL: It wasn’t an issue if anyone saw you going in?

SF: No I don’t think so, no I never checked that out so obviously I didn’t think there [laughs] was any problem at all. No I wasn’t, I mean well, even in York I didn’t sort of think someone might recognise me, I don’t think I ever thought that, so I didn’t in Huddersfield either. No, no.

RL: Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

SF: [long pause] I can’t think of anything.

RL: [Laughs] Okay. Thank you very much.

[END]