Advent Calendar 10th December 2011: Public baths part 2 – the freedom of nudity

December 10th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

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Let’s continue where we left off on the 8th December: The public baths in London, as experienced by Michael Davidson in 1917. Page 91 (chapter 6) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

I became, as the years went by, an authority on the swimming-baths of London; I could have compiled a guide-book to them. They were as much the habitual playgrounds of youthful voluptuousness as any Roman or Greek bagni can have been; and very recently, notwithstanding the restringent vigilance of today’s ubiquitous authority, I’ve seen overt juvenile orgies that would have surprised any of our prevalent fetichists of moral welfare. What might surprise him more, is the argument – not perhaps outrageous when solemnly considered – that such behaviour among the young is, in a sense, moral welfare; though doubtless not the etymon from which acquiescent social discipline derives.

The exalting freedom of nudity, solitary or in company, releases naturally – not perversely – other freedoms, of the mind, the spirit and the body. A smooth, untimid, eruption of these freedoms, as natural as an errand-boy’s whistling, surely must lead to moral health (if that’s what moral means); their constriction, to deformities of the spirit.

[...]

Now and then there would be a brief, bewitching encounter in one of the dressing-boxes; but generally the delight was reticent and contemplative; and I’d go back exhilarated and mentally flushed to the evening’s drinking appointment. I remember one gathering in the Duke Street pied-à-terre that Bertie fleetingly had: one of his young woman friends, intuitively percipient, suddenly said: ‘There’s something fishy about Michael – I think he’s a woman-hater. I believe he likes little boys!’ Of course I roared with laughter; my double life had taken shape.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: London, Michael Davidson, nudity, public baths

Advent Calendar 9th December 2011: Prostitution

December 9th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

Michael Davidson on prostitution (The World, the Flesh and Myself, page 90):

Because, I suppose, my sexual objective has never been primarily physical gratification, I’ve never liked ‘prostitutes’ – people, I mean, for whom the primary objective is payment. Of course, every sexual transaction contains an element of ‘prostitution’; a girl expects a present or a seat at the pictures; a bride – even at St Margaret’s – wants position or security; a young man, from his patron, male or female, hopes for a new suit; a boy needs cigarette-money or a new inner-tube for his bicycle.

‘Love’, whatever its form, requires a tit-for-tat – it’s a kind of natural law.

But for sexual pleasure, for emotional happiness, the ‘love’ must come first, the honararium second in the scale of preference. No fortuitous ‘pick-up’ could ever attract me unless genuine sexual interest were his first motive – or unless there were a touching need of ‘mothering’; the frequent combination of both hankerings in the farouche boys of Berlin was one of that city’s enthralling features in 1930-33.

As we will see later on in this advent calendar!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: boy prostitute, Michael Davidson, prostitution, rent boys

Advent Calendar 8th December 2011: Public baths part 1

December 8th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

London in 1917. Michael Davidson was 20 years old and hospitalised. When he got out, he discovered the London of “Q” – “elder brother of Lord Alfred Douglas”, a London where “only eccentrics went into public-houses – the word ‘pub’ had scarcely appeared”. The following passage is from page 90 (chapter 6) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

When I left hospital, arm out of its sling, I began deliberately pursuing my secret wants. I didn’t look for boys ‘on the game’ – I hardly knew there were any; remembering the delights of boyhood bathing places, I started to explore London’s swimming baths – I’d slip away after lunch, making some suave excuse to Bertie or whomever it might be, and spend the afternoon till the evening’s drinking appointment at some borough pool. Because I had to wear uniform, I couldn’t go to the ’2nd class’ baths in the poorer districts which I haunted in later years; but to the ‘first class’ in Westminster or Victoria where I wouldn’t look so out of place.

[...]

At that stage in my development, in 1917, I was less interested in doing than in seeing – or perhaps less daring than I became, and so largely contented myself with seeing. I discovered some swimming baths which amply supplied the needs of the voyeur I was becoming: generations of ‘dirty old men’, apparently, had systematically bored peep-holes through the wooden partitions between every dressing-box – observation posts which, to my knowledge, remained unaltered by the City Council for the next 30 years at least.

Mixed bathing, then, was still municipally considered indecorous; most baths were as a matter of course labelled ‘men and boys only’, and generally there were more boys than men.

What a complete reversal in the social conscience has occurred in these 40 years* – in the last ten or 20, indeed; and especially since the doctrinal inundation of the Montagu Case: the public awareness of homosexuality has become so general, the fear of a sexual fifth-column so publicized – a sort of English spectre of Alfred Krupp or Prince Eulenberg – that nowadays the bikini type of bisexual exhibitionism is almost desperately encouraged and the old ‘men and boys only’ has been given the savour of decadence.

To be continued!

*Keep in mind that Davidson wrote these words in 1962, and that another 50 years have passed since that. The ‘men and boys only’ period he describes thus occurred almost 100 years ago.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, public baths

Advent Calendar 7th December 2011: Inviting Ganymede to the bath

December 7th, 2011, 6:00 | 1 comment

In 1916, Michael Davidson was 19 years old and still in the military. He had advanced in rank, and once visited a brothel with his comrades: “A bulbous woman started to caress me; but horror made me rush out, throwing down a wasted 25 frs, or whatever the fee was.” The following passage is from page 82 (chapter 5) in The World, the Flesh and Myself (Thompson was Davidson’s lower rank assistant, who used to dry him with a towel after bath):

Leave was the occasional ecstasy. One early morning, covered with the dirt of war, I rushed to the Savoy for a sumptuous bath. A Ganymede of a page-boy took me up and, crazily, I told him to come back in 20 minutes to dry me. To myself I argued that, being accustomed to being dried by Thompson, it was my right to be dried by a Savoy page-boy (but I knew I was pretending).

In 20 minutes there was a knock on the door; wrapped in a towel, quivering with excitement, I opened it. A sleek personage in a tail-coat stood there: ‘You are aware, sir, that we have our house-detectives in the hotel…?’ In a panic I pulled a five-pound note out of a pocket and dumbly held it out; he took it and went sleekly. I dashed out of the place, without the divine breakfast I’d been looking forward to.

That was my earliest encounter with the danger of the forbidden; the terror of it darkened my leave, and I didn’t feel safe till I was on the boat again.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Ganymede, Michael Davidson, page-boy

Advent Calendar 6th December 2011: Refusing the sexual advances of grown men

December 6th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

We’re still in 1915, and still on page 71 in Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself. Stationed in Gosport, Davidson was a member of the Naval Club in Portsmouth. From there we get this story:

Very quickly I became aware of a podgy, twinkling Rear-Admiral with a furry beard like Cousin Mostyn’s: a ‘dug-out’ in some Dockyard job. He was always there, and began beaming at me over the top of his newspaper whisky; then he began smiling, and in a day or two asked me to have a drink. Before I knew where I was, I was asked to dine at his house; I felt terribly shy and puzzled, but didn’t dare refuse so grand a person as and Admiral.

I was puzzled again when at his neat little house full of nautical relics he didn’t dump my hat and coat (he opened the door himself) somewhere near the hall, but toddled upstairs with them on his little short legs and hid them in some room. I was introduced to a meek, silent sister; and given a lot of whisky. We had a solemn little dinner, and the admiral made me as tight as a lord; I remember popping in a dutiful ‘sir’ whenever I could.

It was time to depart: the little man bade me come upstairs to get my things – he’d put them in his bedroom. Once inside, he pushed me down on the bed and ‘attempted to commit a certain offence’. As politely as I could, deferentially calling him ‘sir’, I said I was sorry; and managed to skip unsteadily out of the house.

But I thought next day I’d behaved awfully badly, by failing to repay in the way he wanted his kindly hospitality; I feld I’d been so ungracious that I couldn’t show my face in the Naval Club again.

It wasn’t prudery that caused this breach of manners; it was simply that I’ve always flinched from merely thinking erotically about people older than myself. I even feel a certain private embarrassment when my adult friends discuss their sexual doings.

Then, while I was at Bovington, there was the nice, valetudinary aesthete who lived in the Weymouth sea-front hotel where I used to have dinner. He picked me up in the ‘palm court’, among the wicker chairs: some kind of semi-invalid, though quite young; a wan, hushed person in a brown velvet dinner jacket, whose sitting-room upstairs was softly dim and lush with sombre hangings and little dark drawings by, I imagined, disciples of Beardsley. There was a baby-grand; and after we’d dined and he’d given me a whopping balloon of brandy, taking for himself some barley-water, he would murmur: ‘Now I shall play you some purple music’; and I’d swig the brandy while he improvised a pot-pourri of diaphanous melodies.

Then he’d come and sit beside me, putting a hand on my knee. ‘Won’t you please be kind to me?’ he’d whisper, so touchingly; but brutally, I’d move his hand away, and thank him for giving me dinner. How often, since, have I played that sad man’s same role!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

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