Colin Spencer (1933-2023): bisexual novelist of the 60s

Today I saw the Guardian obituary for Colin Spencer, treating him primarily as a food writer, which he became in the later part of his career. 

However, last year I did a re-reading (because they turned up during a reorganisation of some piles of books) of his quartet of autobiographical novels, Anarchists in Love (1963), The Tyranny of Love (1967), Lovers in War (1970)  and the rather later final volume which was not in my collection but available as ebook, The Victims of Love (1978). I'm not sure whether they have 'enduring literary value' but they are certainly of historical and sociological interest

As the obituary mentions, Spencer was an out bisexual, and this was very much expressed in these novels, though these days Reg might be considered pansexual: 'I just like sex, a lot'. And it is bisexuality, not attempts to 'go straight' or conceal homosexuality for prudential reasons. 

That said, there are extremely vivid scenes of gay life at various levels, from the alleys of artsy bohemian Brighton to posh London literary circles. On the Brighton scene, re-reading Anarchists in Love after, what, maybe 40 years, I realised why the Brighton section of Queer Beyond London seemed somehow familiar!

There's also a good deal of wider relevance for the historian of sex at the period (and indeed, society in general during this time of change) - there's a certain amount on STIs, from Eddie's panic when he discovers his mistress's husband is dying of tertiary syphilis, to Matthew's experiences as a VD orderly when doing his National Service. There's also mention of contraception ('cock-socks') and abortion.

The bisexuality, however, is primarily male: while Sundy and Jane both admit to some lesbian experience (though in Jane's case possibly on an emotional rather than physical level) this appears to be 'just a phase' in primarily heterosexual lives. 

I felt that there were certain rather period gendered attitudes to Jane as a female academic - and particularly in the later volumes considerable misogyny, but given that she was based on his first wife and they had a bitter divorce during which his bisexuality was invoked over child custody, that was perhaps more individual than generic. Sundy is on the whole a sympathetic figure and indeed in his autobiography, first volume of a planned trilogy (the rest has not yet appeared), Backing Into Light: My Father's Son (2013) Spencer claims that Sundy as well as Matthew was based on himself.

The tetralogy has been reissued with introductions by Spencer in paperback and ebook by Faber Finds.

Collector's item - very rare, something for the private cupboard, sir?

Currently in the process of looking through some boxes of my own archives, going back some considerable while, and coming across various ephemera and memorabilia that colleagues and friends passed on to me as possibly falling within my sphere of interest. One of which was the photocopy of a page from a catalogue of a sale at Christie's in the summer of 1992, 'The Property of Maxwell Business Communications Ltd' - this included various items of medical/pharmaceutical historical interest, so I can see why my colleague had it.

One item was A rare male contraceptive device, of animal membrane, with printed satirical scene, inscription 'Voila mon choix', and thread and silk tie, French, early 19th century - 7⅞in long. (The satirical scene consists of a nun, two monks, and a bishop, all flashing one another.)

The Times Diary, 10 June 1992, reported that 'the dubious honour of auctioning the world's most collectible condom falls to Christie's next month.... expected to to fetch up to £800'. In fact, it finally went for £3300, to an art dealer purchasing on behalf of a Swedish client who was said to be opening an erotica and pornography museum (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 3 July 1992). This possibly remains the record amount paid for a historical condom.

Digging about to find out any more details on this, I discovered that Christie's did a certain amount of business in antique johnnies: in November the same years the Associated Press reported 'Five 19th century condoms have been sold for more than $12,000 in an auction at Christies' (one said to have been illustrated). A 19th-century French reusable condom, 8 1/2 in long, made from animal membrane with a yellow silk pull-string and maker's envelope inscribed 'moisten before using', was auctioned in 1993 and  two 19th-century condoms with blue silk drawstrings in 1995. Three C18th sheepgut condoms were sold in 2000; and one in 2001, illustrated with a sketch of a sexual encounter.

As historical items, the thought arises that these items must have very considerable conservation and storage requirements.

The other thought that arises is, did illustrating a condom affect its efficacy? What were the health and safety implications in use of the substances used to create the image? Or was an illustrated condom merely a novelty item not intended for actual use?

Booking now open

The booking site for my presentation at Barts Pathology Museum, A Night With Venus, a Lifetime with Mercury, part of their February 'Matters of the Heart' seasonal events, is now open and active.

Giant Microbe 'Syphilis'

Forthcoming appearances

From deviance to diversity? Finding sexuality and sexual science in the archives  
The National Archives, Kew, 29 Jan, 14:00
 
‘A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury’: sexually-transmitted diseases and their history?
Barts Pathology Museum, in Matters of the Heart month series, 18 Feb, 6.30 pm
 

Passions Between Women in Victorian Britain 

The Florence Nightingale Museum, 27 Feb, 6.30 pm

A couple of interesting events in the near future

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction (IWR9)

15 November 2013, 09:30 - 17:30

CRASSH, Seminar room SG1, Ground Floor

• Description
• Programme

Limited places,  Online registration required 

Deadline to Register Online is: Friday 8 November at 3.00pm
Student fee £10.00
Full fee £12.00

CIRF’s 9th annual Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction will focus on the theme ‘Communicating Reproduction’, with the aim of considering how reproduction is constructed and communicated within academic institutions and broader society. The workshop will explore this theme and promote contact and exchange among researchers working on various aspects of reproduction in different disciplines. The purpose of the workshop is to provide opportunities for productive interdisciplinary discussion and evaluation, and give speakers and audience members the opportunity to make interdisciplinary research connections, to share ideas, and to begin new collaborations.

Open to all, but places are limited. Please book online.

Fee include lunch, refreshments, and conference material.

AND

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Keppel Street, London WC1E 7HT

Professor Simon Szreter (Cambridge University) , 'How much Venereal Disease was there in Georgian London? Can we estimate the population prevalence of STIs before the twentieth century?'

The venereal diseases feature strongly in Boswell's diary and consequently Georgian London has passed into literature and popular history as a byword for sexual licence. But is this at all justified as a general description of the capital and its population? Can we hope to know anything about the population prevalence of STIs in Britain before the twentieth century?

Simon Szreter presents new research undertaken in collaboration with Kevin Siena (author of Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor. London's Foul Wards 1600-1800)

The lecture will be chaired by Professor Kaye Wellings, LSHTM and the vote of thanks will be given by Professor Dame Anne Johnson, UCL.

Tuesday, 19th November 2013, 5.30 pm - 6.45 pm John Snow Lecture Theatre B, Keppel Street Building  (Followed by a reception in the Atrium)

ALL WELCOME!  RSVP to Ingrid James: Tel: 020 7927 2434  or email ingrid.james@lshtm.ac.uk

Funded by the Wellcome Trust 

Sex and the Medical Officer of Health

The Wellcome Library's exciting new project : London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972 (post on the Library blog here) has opened up this enormously valuable resource to a wide range of researchers.

The responsibilities of the Medical Officer of Health were wide, ever increasing for many decades up to and beyond the inception of the National Health Service. However, it may not seem obvious that these reports have anything to offer to the historian interested in sexuality.

In fact, Medical Officers of Health were one group of the medical profession (rather like women doctors) who were taking an interest in the subject of birth control at a period when most doctors were reluctant even to talk about it, and a search across the London MOH reports demonstrates that at least some of their number were mentioning the topic (if not always with approval) from the early 1920s.

They had already been tabulating induced abortion among the causes of mortality within their areas for a much longer period.

Sexually transmitted infections were another public health concern and searching on 'venereal' or 'syphilis' or 'gonorrhoea' produces a substantial number of hits.

By the 1940s and 50s, Marriage Guidance had come to be seen as falling within the purlieu of the MOH's interests and work relating to sex education of young people also features.

There are therefore a number of intriguing research possibilities that spring to mind that could be based on this new resource.

Forthcoming appearances

Giant Microbes: Syphilis

'Sex and the City: The STDs of Old London Town' (scroll down) at History in the Pub, A London Historians Event, Tues 8 October, 7pm, doors open 6:30pm. The Bell, Middlesex Street, Spitalfields. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East or Liverpool Street. Booking form here

A version of this talk will be reprised at an event at Barts Pathology Museum, 18 Feb 2014, details tba


'“Send in the Clones”? Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane)’s Musing on Reproduction, Breeding, Feminism, Socialism and Eugenics from the 1920s to the 1970s', Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum Mon 4 No, 5 pm

Forthcoming presentations

Contributing at the Queer London Conference, University of Westminster, 23 March.

Debuting a new Insights session at the Wellcome Library on 4 April, Sex and the city: the STDs of old London

Keynoting at the colloquium Civilising Bodies:Literature, rhetoric and image 1700-present day, University of Exeter, 25-26 Apr

And have a bonus crosspost of my recent posts on the Wellcome Library blog: for Rare Disease Day and for International Women's Day and the annual roundup of what archives our readers are using.

A couple of things I am doing within the next fortnight

I'm giving a guest lecture ('The sons of Belial: the contaminated/contaminating Victorian male body') at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College Dublin next Wednesday, 17 Oct, and I shall be participating in the 'Eat Your Heart Out' event at Barts Pathological Museum with a presentation on 'Sex and the City', or, as I prefer to think of it, 'The STDs of olde London', on the afternoon of Friday 26 Oct.

Sex Sin and Suffering in paperback

I am gratified to be able to announce that Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (eds), Sex, Sin and Suffering: venereal disease and European Society since 1870, first published in 2001, is now available in paperback rather than an hardback edition priced for libraries rather than individuals. It can be purchased directly from Routledge at their website as well as from Amazon (which also has a Kindle edition, but the paperback is significantly cheaper).

The books includes chapters on the UK (with one specifically on Scotland), France, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Germany, Italy and Sweden in Europe itself and also addresses the colonial context, both generally and in essays on Uganda and Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Catching up on journal articles and chapters XIV

Adrian Bingham, 'The British Popular Press And Venereal Disease During The Second World War', Historical Journal, 2005, 48, 1055‑76: very useful on the extent to which the Daily Mirror actually broke through the general taboo in the popular press which watered down the Ministry of Health public awareness campaign on VD in WWII and the wider context for this.

Joanna de Groot, '"Sex" and "race": the construction of language and image in the nineteenth century", in Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 37‑60, great stuff on the pervasiveness of Orientalist tropes around gender and sexuality in the C19th; and in the same volume ; Sonya O. Rose, 'Sex, citizenship and the nation in World War II Britain', 148-79 about attitudes to women, fear of their enjoying themselves in time of war, and the massive panics about their relationships with American troops, esp, of course, Black GIs.

Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, ' Middle-Class Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Glasgow' Journal of Family History, 1999 24: 468 - indicates that there were a lot more female-headed (middle-class) households than the patriarchal family paradigm would have us think, and not all widows or unmarried women were living under the roof of some male relative.

Emma L. Jones, 'Attitudes to Abortion in the Era of Reform: evidence from the Abortion Law Reform Association correspondence', Women's History Review, 2011, 20:2, 283‑98 - how attitudes were changing in the early 60s - changes in language used and sense of this being a question one can ask, about access to proper medical facilities. 

Jane Pilcher, ' Sex in Health Education: Official Guidance for Schools in England, 1928–1977'  Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 17 No. 2/3 June/September 2004, 185‑208 - that up until 1943 there was no official guidance, and the absence of anything about the reproductive system in the BoE guidelines on health ed had a negative influence. In the 1950s (after the 1943 sex ed guidelines go out of print) a chapter is incorporated into the health ed guidelines but it's very much as one would expect about control and health and even a continuing eugenic agenda rather than anything about pleasure well into the 70s

Tanya Evans, 'The Other Woman and her Child: extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain', Women's History Review 'Lone Mothers' issue, 2011, 20, 67-86: the hidden prevalence of unmarried couples (because of inability of one partner to divorce etc) and of illeg offspring absorbed into the mother's family - instances where these things didn't come to the attention of authorites (really until those surveys of the post WWII era?) and people were pretty determined to conceal that all was not as it should be (presumption of marriage, etc)

More from that productive team of Gayle Davis and Roger Davidson,  ‘Big White Chief’,‘Pontius Pilate’,and the ‘Plumber’: The Impact of the 1967 Abortion Act on the Scottish Medical Community, c.1967–1980' , 2003, Vol.18 pp.283–306: how the Scottish medical (and nursing) professions reacted to the demand for abortion once it was legal, the massive regional variations, the attempts to negotiate decision-making in a charged area, the temporary use of psychiatrists (which changed as things became more routine), the influence of specific individuals, for or against, in particular areas (also, different local cultures) - Aberdeen vs Glasgow. Suspect that quite a lot of this would have been much the same in England and Wales? 

 

Leanne McCormick, Regulating Sexuality: women in twentieth-century Northern Ireland (2009)

A splendidly meticulous study of the particular spins on various issues around women and sexuality in the context of Northern Ireland and the particular pressures that pertain there. We observe that not merely was there significant concern not to undertake policies that might disturb the Catholic population, but that the Protestant interest had very similar concerns relating to sexual morality. This led to a culture in which women were supposed to be the carriers of sexual purity (this clearly relates to wider issues of national and cultural identity) and particularly stigmatised and blamed for behaviours considered immoral. In fact the book sits very neatly between e.g. Luddy's work on the discourse of pure Irish womanhood and its implications for transgressors, and Davidson and Davies's work on late C20th Scottish sexual culture.

McCormick covers a great deal of ground with considerable effect: prostitution and the role of refuges and rescue homes (where her work finds similar phenomena to those uncovered by Luddy in her study of prostitution in Ireland), various strategies of preventive work such as organisations aimed at providing healthy and chaste recreation for young women (Belfast, in particular, has a high proportion of women in the workforce for whom these arguably provided a valuable social resource), treatment and prevention of VD (including the reluctance of several local authorities to admit that this was anything like a problem requiring action in their areas), the arrival of US troops in significant numbers during the Second World War and the various clashes of sexual cultures that produced, and attempts to establish birth control clinics. Abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland, but McCormick suggests that there was a significant degree of illicit abortion taking place (some of it by doctors), while particularly of more recent decades facilities available on the mainland have been resorted to.

As McCormick has focused her study on women there is nothing about the failure to extend the 1967 decriminalisation of male homosexuality and the problem of homosexuality in Northern Ireland. It would have been intriguing to have had something about lesbianism but one imagines that this would be extremely difficult to retrieve, at least much before the end of the C20th. However, we get enough sense of the general moral climate to be able to make some speculations.

Forthcoming in person appearance

The Thing Is... Caught in the act: 20 July 2011, 19.00 - 20.00, at the Wellcome Collection, where I shall be conversing about the Contagious Diseases Acts, Victorian prostitution, venereal diseases, etc at an event connected with the current Dirt exhibition

Catching up on journal literature VII

Carol Smart 'Reconsidering the Recent History of Child Sexual Abuse, 1910-1960' Journal of Social Policy 29 (2000), p. 55-73: v useful piece on this subject - a) it was not just the evil influence of psychoanalysis that militated against people realising the prevalence of child sexual abuse, the way the courts and the criminal justice system dealt with it was really very very problematic and was pretty much set into assumptions that children lie and that false accusations were rife and failing to take on board the trauma of court appearance for children etc (plus, incestuous fathers still had huge legal patriarchal powers) b) but feminist and social purity organisations and women doctors and a few concerned magistrates were already saying this in the 1920s - there was a 1920s Royal Commission on Sexual Offences Againt Young People

Ivan Crozier,'Rough Winds do Shake the Darling Buds of May. A Note on William Acton and the Sexuality of the (Male) Child', Journal of Family History 26 (2001), p. 411-420 : Acton and educating (warning/terrifying) the young boy as the best strategy against the evils of self-abuse.

Elizabeth Stephens,  'Pathologising Leaky Male Bodies: spermatorrhoea  in C19th British medicine and popular anatomical museums', Journal of the History of Sexuality  17 (2008), pp 421-438: excellent - points out that it was not just imposed by evil docs, men themselves bought into the pathologisation of the leaking oozing male body. Shift from anatomical museums to docs warning against 'quackery' at time of the Medical Act,  but still promoting spermatorrhoea as a disease entity. Wider discourse of problematic male sexuality  - suggests that the fearful secret was becoming like the femininised body, weak, feeble, excessive etc

Philip Howell, 'Sex and the City of Bachelors. Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America' Ecumene 8 (2001), p. 20-51: v good, about how to know the city, the city as male space, the need for knowingness and initiation, these guidebooks as aspirational texts (cf M Collins on Playboy etc) for wouldbe working/lower middle class 'swells' rather than actual men about town. Bachelor culture 'The city is/as woman/women' - desires and fears 

Katie Hindmarch-Watson, 'Lois Schwich, the Female Errand Boy. Narratives of Female Cross-Dressing in Late-Victorian London' GLQ. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14 (2008),pp 69-98: the different narratives in different places about Schwich, young woman of 20 who had masqueraded as an adolescent errand boy, found out largely through involvement in criminal activities (theft, and trying to incriminate other people) at work. Class, gender, issues, etc, questions of particular urban spaces. As a boy she was very much in the working class 'swell' mode of dress, also smoking etc. Paper points out that much of the historiography and stories of female cross-dressers involves criminality (which may just be because those are the cases that came to light???)

Pamela Cox,'Compulsion, Voluntarism, and Venereal Disease. Governing Sexual Health in England after the Contagious Diseases Acts' Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), p. 91-115: really useful piece about the means of compulsion outside actual practices of articulated governance employed upon various groups who didn't match the model of citizen capable of taking responsibility/being responsible for their own health - predominantly women/girls/children. The invisibility of these processes and the involvement of voluntary philanthropic bodies.

Oldies but goodies

While it may seem very retro in the days of Web 2.0, I still subscribe to several listservs and still find them of considerable value in ways that I'm not sure all the exciting new ways of online interaction can really replicate. Though possibly these days I do a lot more skim-reading or deleting on the basis of subject line than I used to.

There was a particularly interesting (at least to me)  discussion recently, which ranged across both VICTORIA and H-Histsex, about whether society women of the 1880s would have known about syphilis, if so whether they would have talked about it, and in particular, would married women have discussed the topic in front of a younger unmarried woman.

My initial reaction was that unless they had had some involvement with the social purity movement and the campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, probably not, in an era when doctors usually did not inform married women that the underlying reason for their ill health/failure to conceive/sequence of miscarriages or stillbirths was a venereal disease given them by their husbands.

However, it subsequently dawned upon me that the long-drawn out and high-profile Campbell v Campbell divorce case*, in which Lady Colin Campbell sued for divorce on the grounds of her husband's adultery, plus cruelty in the form of communicating syphilis to her in spite of having been cautioned about his condition by doctors, took place in 1886. She had already been granted a judicial separation on the latter ground a few years previously. It seems entirely probable that this sensational case - Lord Colin Campbell had cross-petitioned claiming multiple instances of adultery on his wife's part  - was widely gossiped about. Though in its syphilis-related aspects almost certainly in whispers, and not in front of unmarried women.

*This scandalous case is set in the wider context of Lady Colin Campbell's unusual and fascinating life in a recently published biography by Ann Jordan.

Website updates

Added today:
To Reviews:  external links to several reviews I did for Medical History, 1981-1996 (mostly, for some reason, books about nurses), now available via PubMed Central.
To History of Sexuality: my own writings: link to free downloadable version on PubMed Central of my article "The Cinderella of Medicine": sexually-transmitted diseases in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' Genitourinary Medicine, 69, Aug 1993
To Publications on Archives: links to articles of mine on various archival collections now online in PubMed Central and elsewhere.