A secret gay history of UK espionage: ‘The skill-set of homosexuals and spies overlapped’

Since 2019 the writer, artist and historian Huw Lemmey has curated and copresented a cheeky alt-LGBTQ history with the podcast Bad Gays. The series, which last year was distilled into the thrilling book Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, appraises a sometimes roguish gallery that includes the Roman emperor Hadrian, Lawrence of Arabia, Lord Castlereagh, Morrissey, Roger Casement, Freddie Mercury and Francis Bacon.

To date, Lemmey and his co-presenter Ben Miller are the only historians to properly evaluate the “evil twink energy” of Bosie, aka Lord Alfred Douglas, the author of Oscar Wilde’s downfall.

“One thing that got me interested was the rehabilitation of Alan Turing,” says Lemmey. “The files started to come out in my teens, and to see that English relationship with sexuality from 20 years ago, and this desire to look for a figure who reconciles the story of homosexual identity in England to the British state in such a way that acknowledges what the British state did to a certain extent – but then also valorises the British state by saying he was a hero for Britain and this is how we treated him and, actually, now he’s on the £50 note. That’s a very British-establishment way of dealing with history. It really erases the complexities and violence that was going on. Because he did commit the crime that he was charged with. If you later decide the crime was not a crime, it should still stand on the record so we know that we persecuted people for their sexuality.”

[ Oscar Wilde, my grandfather, ‘talked himself into prison’ ]

Lemmey, who is based in Barcelona, has written three novels: Chubz: The Demonisation of my Working Arse, from 2016; Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell, from 2019; and Unknown Language, from 2020. He also writes essays through his Utopian Drivel Substack. And now he can add films to his CV.

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Ungentle, which he has directed with Onyeka Igwe, explores the complicated relationship between British espionage and male homosexuality. As Lemmey has noted in Utopian Drivel, “the skill-set of homosexuals and spies in mid-20th-century Britain had a significant degree of overlap”.

Ungentle offers an intriguing psychogeographical tour of espionage England as narrated by an imagined composite spy figure, voiced by Ben Whishaw. The enigmatic storyteller speaks on sex, politics and imperialism as the 16mm camera traverses such related locations as St James’s Park in London, a historical cruising ground, and Beaulieu, the Hampshire country house that doubled as a training school for the Special Operations Executive, Britain’s “underground army” during the second World War.

Patrick Keiller’s immersive Robinson travelogues around England’s military installations (Robinson in Ruins) and institutions (Robinson in Space) provided key reference points.

“That was a very conscious reference for us in how we represented the English countryside and also to tell a story of the monologue,” says Lemmey. “I think there are significant differences in the way the camera moves. But the Robinson films share a relationship with Englishness, and there is a very strong queer undertone. The relationship between the narrator and Robinson is very indeterminate and was possibly romantic at some point.”

The narration is entirely fictional but inevitably draws heavily on the Cambridge five, the ring of English spies that passed information to the Soviet Union during second World War and the cold war. Of the known members – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross – Burgess and Blunt were gay, while Maclean was bisexual. Real-world inspirations operating for the Allies include Denis Rake, Noël Coward and Hardy Amies.

[ UK cold war spy Kim Philby details betrayal in Stasi video ]

“Both my grandparents worked in the Special Operations Executive,” says Lemmey. “So it was an interesting realisation for me that my grandparents, who I thought of as an older, conservative generation, had a lot of gay male friends in the 1940s. We think of tolerance as something that emerged over the past 50 years as part of the western liberal-democratic project. But that’s not the case. Our script is entirely fictionalised.

“I didn’t use any materials directly, although there are references to real people around Cambridge. It’s based heavily on a lot of stories. I did a lot of archival research. I went to the National Archives, which brought up a whole bunch of different stories. One of the most interesting was Rake, a former musical and light-opera star who joined the Special Operations Executive. He was very charismatic and very brave. He swam to Vichy France from a submarine. He had an 18-month relationship with an SS officer in Paris. He was caught three times and escaped. The way he’s talked about in his files is very instructive for understanding the culture of tolerance for these men in the security services.”

FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who was himself rumoured to be gay, directed the agency to investigate and monitor numerous gays working within the government

That tolerance is amplified by transatlantic comparisons. In 1953 US president Dwight D Eisenhower signed executive order 10450, initiating the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the US federal government. The policy, which became known as the Lavender Scare, was predicated on the fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail. FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who was himself rumoured to be gay, directed the agency to investigate and monitor numerous gays working within the government. Documents released in 2015 depict the UK Foreign Office scrambling for a cover story to tell the US.

“The relationship between security services and homosexuality in the UK is unique,” Lemmey says, “because in the US it was quite clear: these people are perverts; get them out. While researching, I came across a document from the 1970s. One of the early gay-rights groups wrote to every government department asking if they would sack someone for being gay.

“I looked at foreign-office memos around this, and it was very interesting. The way it worked was that a low-ranking bureaucrat writes a response and then it gets passed up. So the first response was: of course if we found a homosexual in the foreign-office they would be expelled. But as it went up the chain: wait, what would it matter if it was a low-ranking official? And, finally, a higher-up asks: are we discussing people who are homosexual now or at school?”

Lemmey’s extensive historical research was complemented by a delve into fictional spies. It’s no accident that the film is narrated by Whishaw, the 007 veteran and London Spy star.

The gay subtexts of John le Carré’s cold-war-era spy fictions The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy have been made more explicit in recent adaptations. Even James Bond has come out as bisexual in an erotic scene with Javier Bardem in Skyfall.

“The creation of the gay identity, the creation of homosexuality as a political subject, is based on his history and historiography. It’s based on looking to the past to try and find meaningful examples to create this identity. What’s interesting is how the creation of that identity and literature is so similar to the creation of British masculinity, especially through novels and also spy novels.

“The emergence of James Bond is something that could only come out of a postcolonial moment when Britain no longer has geopolitical and military reach. It can’t be a coincidence that that’s when this ultramasculine, heterosexual spy emerges to reassure British men that they still have geopolitical relevance. It’s counter to America’s swaggering military power that says: we’re just cleverer than they are. And that’s been challenged in recent spy media, like the insinuations in Bond, the film remake of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and London Spy.”

Ungentle is screening, as part of Gaze International LGBTQIA Film Festival, on Sunday, August 6th