Darryl W. Bullock - The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran The Swinging Sixties

Copyright 2020 Omnibus Press

(A Division of Music Sales Limited)

Cover designed by Raissa Pardini

Picture research by the author

ISBN: 978-1-787602-31-1

Darryl W. Bullock hereby asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.

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Printed in the Czech Republic

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For Jayde, A-J and Zach

Pop promotion sought to glamorise testosterone-fuelled boy bands and make them appealing to young girls. Is it unsurprising that many of those behind the scenes were gay? Who better to know where attraction lay? Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard

B ecause we live in a time when many musicians, performers and their managers are happy for their sexuality to be known, its easy for us to forget that this has not always been the case. Thanks to advances in the law and in the change in attitude towards people once vilified as poofs, queers, lezzers and the like, many of todays biggest stars are able to talk openly about their own sexuality and even incorporate it into their art. But this inclusivity has only come about very recently. Go back a little over a generation and you discover LGBT performers being told by their management that coming out would destroy their careers. As ridiculous as it might seem to us in these more enlightened times, at their hit making height both Boy George and Marc Almond were warned by their respective record companies not to talk to the media about their sexuality. Even Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford, the defiantly out duo that fronted the multi-million-selling Frankie Goes to Hollywood, were told that they would never be accepted in America if they dared to mention the g word. Following a blip in the early 1970s when, thanks to womens lib, gay lib and the carefully marketed androgyny of many glam rock artists it became fashionable for artists to embrace bisexuality, with the exception of a few notable cult musicians including Jayne County and Tom Robinson it was not until the 1980s that a new breed of pop star decided to talk openly about homosexuality. Frankies debut, Relax, arrived in November 1983, but in June 1984 Bronski Beat would become the first group consisting entirely of out-gay musicians to have a chart hit. It would take a while before their contemporaries would be so bold but, slowly, established stars began to feel comfortable enough to defy their management and open up about their sexuality to their audience.

Back at the start of the rock n roll era, no one dared dream that popular musicians would one day be able to be honest about their sexuality, or that their audience would accept them for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. Despite that, the pop music industry in the UK would be fashioned by a coterie of gay men (and at least one lesbian), many with backgrounds in fashion, retail and the theatre; people who understood what the kids wanted and knew exactly how to give it to them. In their quest for the top, they would rub shoulders with some of the most notorious criminals in the country, risk all in illegal gambling dens and fall foul to blackmailers, yet they also formed a loose network that helped the biggest stars of the period reach their apex, while providing support, friendship and opportunities to their LGBT associates. Behind their backs, these titans of the industry would be referred to by envious rivals as the gay, lavender or Velvet Mafia.

Life in Britain during the first half of the 1950s was pretty grim. We may have won the Second World War, but Britain had taken a battering; it was broke and broken, and heavy rationing continued for almost a decade. A pall of desperation hung over a country where bomb craters still scarred major cities. In December 1952, in the dirty, decrepit capital, a severely cold winter combined with the fumes belching out of factories and homes to create the Great Smog of London, causing the deaths of more than 4,000 people in just a few days and going on to claim thousands more. Something had to change. The old king was dead; a new, young and vital queen sat on the throne, and her coronation, filmed in spectacular colour, added a splash of vibrancy to an otherwise miserable black-and-white world.

In that first decade following the end of hostilities, a new enemy emerged. In May 1952 top-selling tabloid the Sunday Pictorial ran a three-part series entitled Evil Men that reporter Douglas Warth promised would mark an end to the conspiracy of silence surrounding homosexuality in Britain. Warth and his editor, Hugh Cudlipp, did their damnedest to drive homosexual men in positions of power out of their respective closets. It was the first time that any British newspaper had been so brazen, but Warth justified his prurience in his introduction, claiming that the natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence is providing cover for an unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip on this country. He stated that there were over a million known homosexuals in Britain before the war, and that the number of pansies and queers had only increased since. A report commissioned by the Home Office revealed that the number of convictions for homosexual acts (as well as those for prostitution) rose rapidly in the immediate post-war period. It seemed as if the Government was backing the Sunday Pictorials claims.

In truth, there was little evidence that there were more prostitutes plying their trade in London than before, just as there was no proof that there were more poofs, yet any and all sexual acts involving two or more men were criminal offences, and, in the wake of the publication of Evil Men, the Home Office pursued prosecution more rigorously than ever before. Police forces around the country were encouraged to root out by fair means or foul any man breaking the law.

Why this sudden interest in sex? Cudlipp was revolted and alarmed by homosexualityGuy Burgess, the diplomats-turned-spies who defected to the USSR in May 1951.

People did not dare talk about being homosexual. If you were to discuss your feelings with your teacher or your doctor, the chances are you would be referred to a psychiatrist. If you were arrested, tried and found guilty of being a homosexual, you could be fined, imprisoned and forced to undergo electric shock therapy or even chemical castration, and your name and address would be printed alongside the degenerate crime you had committed in the newspapers, for your family, friends, neighbours and work associates to see. In 1952, when code breaker and mathematics genius Alan Turing was charged with gross indecency, he was offered a choice between imprisonment and probation, the latter conditional on his willingness to undergo hormonal treatment (the aforementioned chemical castration) designed to reduce his libido. Following a year of treatment, which was usually accompanied by nausea, vomiting and dehydration, Turing who was key to breaking the Enigma code during the Second World War and so significantly foreshortening hostilities took his own life.