Walking tour highlights gay life of London's Soho districtBy James Meikle, The Guardian
LONDON -- Stephen Crane pointed to the flat above the Quo Vadis restaurant on Dean Street, in London's Soho district. "It was home to Karl Marx. It was also home for Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester (his wife), where she first discovered his predilection for young men."
Along the street, there's The Golden Lion pub. "That's where mass murderer Dennis Nilsen picked up his rentboys," he said.
Crane, a verger at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, one of London's most famous churches, helped devise the lesbian and gay walking tours of Soho to provide a glimpse of life often missed by guidebooks.
Near his own church, at Charing Cross, those convicted in the "Molly trials" (the 17th-century word for homosexuals) were pilloried. "It lasted for two hours and people often died. Dead cats, dogs, bits of iron, broken crockery, glass were thrown at them. Some of them are buried in the crypt at St. Martin's."
The tour takes in places like Stanfords map shop in Long Acre where the camp comedian Kenneth Williams worked as a cartographer.
There's the Salisbury pub in St. Martin's Lane, used for a scene from "Victim," the 1960s film starring Dirk Bogarde, about the persecution of homosexuals. Other former gay haunts include the A and B Club, in Rupert Court, where gays from the theatrical and military worlds met in the 1950s.
Around 200 years ago, William Beckford, a sugar magnate and member of Parliament, lived in Soho Square. He used to go to nearby Seven Dials, which, Crane says, "was the pickup point at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century."
At No. 3 Soho Square, home of the British Board of Film Classification, Richard Payne Knight, the 19th-century author of "The Worship of Priapus" about phallic worship, once lived.
Cole Porter, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward are other gays to get name checks on the tour, which takes in items of general interest, too -- buildings where John Logie Baird developed television, Mozart lived and where Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard and the Shadows once played.
The five-pound tours, starting at St. Martin-in-the-Fields at 3 p.m. each Sunday, are organized by Kairos in Soho, a charity with social and spiritual programs to complement the gay scene.
"Contrary to popular belief, sex is not on the minds of gay men the whole time," Crane said. "It is not just about young things either. My own friends are lawyers, doctors and vets. We often prefer to go into a normal restaurant than into a gay establishment. You can often find a gay establishment rips you off more."
He is urgently seeking more history and anecdotes, particularly about lesbians. "The snag about lesbianism is it has never been a crime, and a lot of what we get is from criminal trials. It has never been frowned on for women to be close."
Neil Whitehouse, general secretary of Kairos, said: "The walking tours are a fun way of bringing the past to the present; appreciating the courage and color of lesbian and gay forebears. The improvements on understanding in modern times are built on earlier spiritual and social struggles."
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