Historians of male homosexuality in Britain have become increasingly concerned, in recent years, with the ways in which sexualities intersected with the material environment and spatial practices in the past. Frank Mort's work on the role of the Wolfenden Committee in mapping the sexual geography of 1950s’ London and Matt Cook's recent study of male homosexuality in London in the two decades following the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act have demonstrated the valuable insights that can be gained in histories of sexuality by paying attention to the geography of cultural practices. Matt Houlbrook's Queer London applies this spatial approach to early twentieth-century London, arguing that male “sexual practices and identities do not just take place in the city; they are shaped and sustained by the physical and cultural forms of modern urban life just as they in turn shape that life” (4).

Queer London is organized into four parts, examining “Policing,” “Places,” “People,” and “Politics.” In part 1, Houlbrook explores the ways in which queer male practices were regulated and policed. In setting out the legal framework regulating male homosexuality in public and private, he notes the ways in which the impact of the law was mitigated and shaped by the operational practices of the police. Houlbrook demonstrates that policing in this period was idiosyncratic and contingent, focusing on specific public sites, such as parks and urinals, and specific individuals, such as the visibly “deviant” quean, while rendering almost invisible the private domain of the home.

In part 2, Houlbrook maps out some of the key sites of queer London's sexual geography. Four chapters exploring sites of public sex, the commercial venues of pubs and clubs, the baths, and residential space represent major new research from which a picture emerges of a vibrant queer social scene in early twentieth-century London. Chapter 2 argues that sexual encounters in the street, park, and urinals did not simply represent isolated opportunities for sexual contact but, through repeated patterns of behavior, forged a unique sense of affirmation and belonging to a wider fraternity of queer men. While the sites of public sex were continually vulnerable to plainclothes operations by the police, commercial venues offered a degree of security in addition to wider opportunities for sociability. One of the many strengths of this book is the careful attention paid to the nuances of class, and chapter 3 demonstrates the ways in which London's commercial scene was fractured along class lines. Houlbrook argues that middle- and upper-class men utilized the privileges of bourgeois masculinity to meet in respectable venues such as the Trocadero's Long Bar, while working-class men inhabited the more openly “cruisy” environment of the pub. Class and financial constraints were equally central to men's use of the baths and residential space, and chapter 4 examines the uniquely safe and open environment offered by private baths for queer sociability and sexual encounters.

In part 3, Houlbrook adds a further dimension to his sexual geography of queer London, through an analysis of the identities assumed and performed by metropolitan queer men. Exploiting the flexibility afforded by a queer approach to male same-sex desire, Houlbrook peoples his queer London with a range of distinct and contingent “queer” figures. Beginning with the most visible embodiment of the interwar queer scene, chapter 6 explores the appearance and world of the “West End Poof.” Here, the cultural connections between sexuality and gender in interwar Britain are analyzed, suggesting that a conscious appropriation of “femininity,” expressed through makeup, colorful clothing, and camp, enabled the working-class quean to express a clearly recognized queer identity. While the visibly deviant figure of the quean attracted both open hostility and amused tolerance from the wider community in which he moved, his masculine counterpart was more closely integrated into working-class culture. In chapter 7, Houlbrook argues that notions of working-class masculinity in the early decades of the twentieth century were sufficiently flexible to enable workingmen to engage in sexual activity with other men without calling their status as “normal” men into question. The critical issue, Houlbrook suggests, was men's ability to demonstrate their toughness and refusal to submit to other men, exemplified through taking an “active” role in sex and through the exchange of sex for commercial reward. However, by the 1950s, these possibilities were increasingly restricted by a narrowing definition of working-class masculinity and the growing influence of middle-class models of homosexuality based on intimate relationships in the private sphere.

The trend toward privatization is a central theme in Queer London, explored in depth in part 4, through a focus on politics and public representations of male same-sex desire. Houlbrook argues that, while a vibrant and visible queer scene existed at the heart of metropolitan life in the interwar years, by the end of his period, queer commercial venues had been driven to the margins of the West End; the flamboyant figure of the West End Poof had been replaced by the conventional and largely invisible figure of the homosexual; and the array of opportunities for public sociability and sexual encounter represented by the park, urinal, and public bath had given way to a more domesticated pattern of homosexual life. Queer London thus challenges the conventional narrative of increasingly liberalization and tolerance culminating in the permissive moment of the 1960s, demonstrating instead that the “liberalization” of the legal situation embodied in the Wolfenden reforms represented the limited success of middle-class, privatized notions of the “respectable homosexual” at the expense of an explicit rejection of visible, public, and working-class queer identities and practices.

Queer London is a meticulously researched book, based on a rich body of source material that ranges from court registers and police records to an array of personal testimonies and contemporary guides, including “For Your Convenience,” the first guide to cottages, complete with a map of the sites of urinals across London, published in 1937. Both in its careful mapping of a, hitherto unacknowledged, vibrant queer scene in London in the interwar period, and in its reconfiguring of conventional narratives of twentieth-century homosexuality, it is a groundbreaking book.