A Play About Cottaging, The Victimless 'Crime'

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With a clear departure from other plays that dealt with specific political themes challenging patriarchy, religion and psychiatry this play dealt with sexual conduct between men in a public setting. Cottaging was a risky business because of the danger of police entrapment leading to public exposure in the courts and possible ruin with the loss of friends, family, reputation and jobs. Several gay men from the community had been the victims of police entrapment, arrest and prosecution. The unjustness of being convicted of a 'criminal offence' in which there were no victims and the dangers and pleasures involved in cottaging are the main themes in the play. The play also challenged, in a comedic way, the notion that cottaging was giving respectable homosexuals a bad name with a fantasy piece about an unsuccessful attempt by local authorities to provide purpose built facilities against the tawdriness of decay and rot.

The scenery was designed to resemble the interior of a cottage complete with stained urinals and brick walls and the play opens with men engaging silently in furtive sexual encounters. Ambulance man John Aston, in the next scene, puts up with male chauvinist 'banter' about poofs and women from his workmates who regard him as a 'wibbly wobbly' liberal. He is married with children and later interrogated by the police for cottaging. As a result of public exposure he loses his job, his wife and children. In another scene 'council' people at the entrance and inside a cottage, like canvassers for charitable causes, fail to persuade the inhabitants to improve facilities. They much prefer the atmospherics of a 'forty watt bulb' , peeling walls and the frisson of danger in a comedy of errors where the council people are at first mistaken for the police and later propositioned for sex. A cottager is castigated for bringing left wing politics into the place with the retort that "What I do in bed has nothing to do with whether I vote Conservative or Labour. I've even been to bed with a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain." The courtroom scene is a travesty of justice with the judge clearly biased against the defendant.

The play was a confused mixture of different perspectives on cottaging and the script was obviously the work of several hands. Though there were some very moving speeches in the play from the person caught cottaging and some very good songs it could be argued that the play made light of a serious subject given people's lives were ruined by public exposure and a criminal record. Even so the boat was pushed out by insisting that cottaging was a legitimate activity to engage in and that convictions for gross indecency were cruel and unjust.

Recently after a long campaign the Good Law Project and Terry Stewart, a former member of the Brixton Gay Community, overturned the sentences of thousands of gay men convicted over the years and police records will be removed though unfortunately too late for those that have died.

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