Exploring the secret geographies of London
Huw Lemmey on his new film, experiencing the city through Grindr and overlapping worlds of spies and gay men
In March 2020, the artist, writer and podcaster Huw Lemmey opened a new issue of his utopian drivel newsletter with these words:
“For the past few weeks I’ve been starting work on a new long-term research project, something that will hopefully end up as a film. It doesn’t have a name yet – it’s all just going into a google drive folder named ‘gay spies’.”
Lemmey did indeed turn ‘gay spies’ into a film (in collaboration with the filmmaker and artist Onyeka Igwe). It’s called Ungentle and it’s currently playing at Studio Voltaire in Clapham. Here’s the trailer:
We went to see the film last week and were completely beguiled. The cinematography is gorgeous and the bitter-sweet narrative (a kind of queer bildungsroman, beautifully narrated by Ben Whishaw with that off-key English charm that he does so well) manages to combine issues of politics, class, espionage and sexual identity in a way that not only avoids cliche but is also poetic and compelling.
But beyond that, Ungentle manages to capture the landscape of London in a way we’ve never really seen before. Yes, there are elements of psychogeography alongside shades of Derek Jarman and Patrick Keiller; but the way Lemmey interknits academic research and real life characters with his very personal topography of the city, creates an almost mythical impression of otherwise familiar landmarks.
When you watch Ungentle you feel like you are reading a version of the city that has been coded and decoded multiple times. As if you are viewing London through a cigarette-scented smokescreen and it is all the more beautiful and compelling for it.
We spoke to Huw over Zoom last week to ask him how the film came about, how the practice of psychogeography can reach beyond the “straight white man’s experience” to create new ways of seeing the city, and how he navigated the overlapping secret cultural geographies of London.
Hi Huw. Before we get into the film we have to ask you the same question we ask everyone, which is ‘What’s your relationship to London?’.
I was born and brought up in South Cumbria, but London was always somewhere I wanted to escape to. I’m one of those people!
I remember coming to London on a school trip as a teenager, staying in a youth hostel, looking out of the top bunk to look at Canary Wharf and being very much like, “I could get out. I could come here and find other freaks and weirdos.”
I moved to London to go to art school when I was 19. I lived in North London, South London and I also lived on a houseboat on the Thames for a while, so I don’t know what side that is. I left about five years ago and I live in Barcelona now.
The genesis of the film came from a walking tour that you did a few years ago, right?
Yeah, Studio Voltaire had a show on by the Australian artist David McDiarmid, called Rainbow Aphorisms. That work is very much about public space and being queer in public space. It comes from Australia and the AIDS crisis in the late 80s and the 90s. Studio Voltaire wanted to do some events that tied into that, but unfortunately the artist died in the 90s. So they asked a bunch of other artists and writers to do things, and asked me if I wanted to do a walking tour.
I had already been looking at these characters from the first half of 20th century who were are all gay men and all spies. I thought that was an interesting coincidence, and so the tour was was very much about psychogeography and being gay in an urban space, which is one of my long term interests.
A couple of years after the walking tour, Studio Voltaire got in touch to ask if I’d like to do another project with them. So I said “Let’s make a film and how about a solo show?”. I did a couple of years of research around it and a lot of visiting the locations. Because the film is really not just about gay spies, but also about Englishness and the relationship between nationalism and landscape and queerness in the city.
You mentioned psychogeography there and I just wanted to dig into that for a second, because the subject of the ‘death of psychogeography’ has come up in our interviews quite a lot, along with this idea that it can create an almost conservative view of cities or that it’s an ‘irrelevant bourgeois phenomenon’.
But, at the same time, there are people taking the idea in some interesting and very relevant directions, and I feel like you are one of those people. So I wanted to ask you how you feel about those criticisms and what your relationship is to the concept of psychogeography.
I think those kinds of criticisms are very valid and I think the criticisms that people like Lauren Elkin are making are interesting as well. Her book about psychogeography is more of a feminist perspective on the subject and that’s important because, like most things, psychogeography tends to default to a position about the straight white man’s experience. But obviously everyone’s response to the city is totally different. For me, that’s what’s exciting about thinking about the city in that way.
I guess my interest in it came from having a kind of relationship with the city which is really generative and can have a really strong feminist critique. There’s a book called Rape New York by Jana Leo, which is sort of a psychogeographical book about her own experiences of being victim of a rape in New York and how that sexually violent experience of the city really shapes women’s relationship with it. Obviously, if you read any of the Will Self or Iain Sinclair stuff stuff, they’re saying, “I just went for a walk through London Fields or Hamsptead Heath at midnight to see what it was like”. Great! You can do that, but a lot of women wouldn’t feel safe doing that. So yes, I think those criticisms are really important in shaping how other people write about cities as well.
How does that effect your personal approach to making work that could be termed psychogeographic?
My own approach to it comes from experiencing the relationship between cruising and the city and the relationship between Grindr and the city, these two really contrary ways of looking at the city.
The intellectual history of psychogeography comes from the idea of the flâneur, but there’s also this concurrent stream of the gay man and his experience of the city and people like Rimbaud; and there’s already practises of what you’d call dérive or flâneurship that are just like cruising. You do get a totally different experience of the city through those practices and it has its own history as a sexual geography of London.
If you’re looking looking at London through the lens of a gay man who wants to pick up, there’s a shifting, trackable, mappable history of different types of sexual subcultures and different places. For example, from Victorian times until the 1950s Soho had an identifiable type of man who would cruise there or who would hang out there and then go cruising in different parts. Or you would get what would be called ’rough trade’, the working class men around Trafalgar Square. Military guys and male sex workers around places like Hyde Park. Piccadilly was the cruising area… All these sort of things.
Around the time I did the walking tour I was also really interested in the way one experiences London through Grindr.
Because Grindr is geolocated, when you logon you get this grid of photos of all the guys, organised by who’s closest to you. I was really interested in the idea of doing the equivalent of that William Booth map of poverty of London, but a map of London horniness!
When I lived in Dalston you’d log on and, because the grid is limited to like hundred guys or something, all one hundred men would be within about 300 meters of me. But if I go to my dad’s house in Cumbria, there will be people in Belfast! So we’re talking about a really different reading.
But you also get very different vibes. Obviously in Dalston, you tend to get this real concentration of younger, openly gay, queer, trans… All sorts of different types. But I found it really interesting to go in the daytime to somewhere like the City and see that it has a totally different racial demographic. It tends to be much whiter and the relationship with ’outness’ is totally different. It’s just photos of guys’ torsos, no one is putting their faces on there. London still has these different sexual subcultures according to where you are. So, Clapham is very different to Brixton, and Hampstead is very different again.
That’s my understanding of the sort of sexual psychogeography that I’m interested in and that is one of the big themes of the piece.
It feels like, with Ungentle, you’ve traced that sexual psychogeography alongside the history of espionage and mapped where the two collide.
Well, in some ways Grindr is a form of surveillance software and that was the instigating thought. Then, by going back and looking through historical records and through research and reading books like Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London (which I think is one of the great books about London) I started to get interested in this idea that there was a secret cultural world and a geography around West London.
For example, the way that class functions in the formulation of homosexual identity in England and also the ‘way of being’ that was shared between between gay men and spies at the time. The idea of secrecy and appearing in public as one thing but also being another thing that no one else around you knows about.
Mixed loyalties is another connection. Appearing and performing as loyal to the dominant but limited sexual ideology of the time, but also having a second loyalty.
The last thing is that these places literally overlap. The place where you would be welcomed into the secret service is the Tin and Stone Bridge in St James’s Park. You’d be met there by a guy with handshake and they’d welcome you into the service. Well that spot was the heart of one of the big cruising grounds at the time. So you’re standing on this bridge, waiting for this man to arrive, watching the guys going past to see which might be the right one. It is just like cruising.
And they were always men were they? I can’t imagine the gender equality was great in the spy agencies.
In the 20s and 30s sure. But by the time the Second World War starts, the Special Operations Executive (which is one of the intelligence agencies that I’m looking at) actually had a remarkable amount of high ranking women working within it. The reason why there was such a high degree of tolerance for gay men within those agencies is the same reason that there was a high tolerance for employing women: there wasn’t much space for those sort of moral principles, because the whole point was that you just had to fucking work.
If you could do the job then they wanted you, and obviously loads of women could do the job and loads of gay men could do the job. Also, there was the nature of the recruitment policies and that issue of class again. They would recruit through friendship groups and those groups tended to be based around elite education, so Oxford and Cambridge. Once they got one person, then he’d say ’I know this other chap who’d be really suitable’, and once you get a couple of gay men in that circle all the people they know are going to be gay men as well. So there were these cycles of recruitment happening through gay social circles. Gay men were massively overly-represented in security services at the time and still are.
I wanted to ask you a little more about some of the London locations that appear in the film. Places like St. Ermin’s Hotel. How did you go about picking which locations you should research and how did you decide which places should feature in the finished film?
There were other places I looked at. Bletchley being the important one because of the link there with with Alan Turing. But that’s a very well told story I think and also, to my mind, politically a very fucked up story as well. There are other places around Baker Street, which is where the SOE headquarters was located for the second half of the Second World War, and there are also lots of Victorian mansion blocks around there that were used as lodgings which is quite interesting. Both my grandparents were SOE and I think my grandmother lived in one of those lodgings.
The ones I chose were the ones which had a very strong link between both cultures and that served the story I was trying to tell. You have to narrow things down into a narrative. The film is like a narrative that tells the story from the perspective of one ageing spy about his entire life story.
Ermin’s is a really good location because it crossed between the two time periods really well. In the 1930s it was a very trendy bar. I think Noel Coward used to play there (who, incidentally, was one of the people who was recruited in the late thirties). And other people went, like Hardy Amies who went on to become the Queen’s couturier, he was the leader of basically the entire Belgian resistance network in the Second World War.
Ermin’s wasn’t a gay bar but it had quite a strong gay clientele and it’s where a lot of people in the security services socialised. The Government Code and Cypher School - what became GCHQ and the one that Alan Turing was part of - that was located on 54 Broadway, which is across from the London Transport headquarters, so that’s just around the corner from Ermin’s. 54 Broadway got turned into one of the first training schools in the very early days of Section D, which became SOE. That was where they used to take people up into the upstairs rooms and teach them hand-hand combat and how to blow up train tracks.
That training school was eventually moved out into Beaulieu country house down in Hampshire, when SOE and a bunch of the other departments were all formalised.
We have to talk about Dolphin Square for a minute, because that’s such a strange and storied London location.
Dolphin square is a really good point where a lot of these stories mix and one of the reason I really wanted to feature it is it’s where where John Vassall was arrested.
Vassall was spy in the 1950s who worked for the British naval attaché in Moscow and was very isolated from the whole social scene of the British diplomatic core because he was gay. He was in the closet obviously, but the whole thing was oriented very much around couples. There was a very conservative sort of social atmosphere where people’s wives would organise stuff and he was locked out of that.
Vassall made friends with a Polish barber I believe called Mikhailsky who worked in the embassy in Moscow in the naval attachés office. He invited Vassall out and he got involved in the Moscow gay scene in 1953-54, which must have been a really interesting scene immediately after the death of Stalin!
He was blackmailed by the KGB after two of their officers jumped out of a wardrobe at an orgy and took a photo of him. So for ten years he was blackmailed, but they paid him really well. When he moved back to London, he was still passing a lot of information to the Soviets and he got a flat on Dolphin Square. In the end, it was actually that flat that was the reason he was caught, because his secretary in the Admiralty realised that there was no way he could afford to live in that flat on his wage.
Also Dolphin Square is just this amazing and very weird building, partly because its serviced apartments are extremely close to Parliament, so there’s a lot of ‘grace and favour’ flats. A guy called Maxwell Knight lived there in the 1920s and 30s. He was this terrible, fascist anti-Semitic, anti-communist who was the founder of MI5 and the reason that the M at MI5 is called M.
He was virulently homophobic but also gay, so there’s a lot of interesting stories around him, like when his lover Joan Miller realised he was having an affair with a bus driver who he’d hired to fix the motorbikes in their barn.
Dolphin Square was the headquarters of MI5 for little while in the 1930s when it was first built and there’s also a lot of references to it in spy literature. I think spy literature is very important in understanding the creation of the spy, and also British masculinity throughout 20th century. For example, one of John le Carre’s characters lives in Dolphin Square and he’s a gay communist.
The photography in the film is beautiful. How did you set out to capture those locations? Was there a specific aesthetic you were aiming for?
While we were making the film this idea of binary relationships between things kept coming up. Insides and outsides, urban and rural, loyalty and treachery. So the whole thing hopefully has this tension between those opposing aspects.
One of the other things we really wanted to capture was this sort of ideological sincerity that drifts into pragmatic treachery later on. The hopefulness of a lot of those early spies and double agents like the Cambridge Five drifting into a lack of belief and eventually a tragic end. That is what John le Carré was so good at I think: you get trapped in these little networks of pragmatism and it becomes a job really.
What we’re trying to capture, especially early on in the film, is this vision of Englishness in a landscape that was tied to a sort of homosexuality that was a very thrilling, passionate form of sexual identity. As the film goes on it becomes more more claustrophobic and intense. We did a lot of shots of the city, especially from the inside, looking out. A lot shots through windows, a lot of shots looking up to windows.
Another big influence was the already understood aesthetics of spy films and thrillers. We were really influenced by the ’79 BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy. Personally I’m very influenced by Alan Clarke and that generation of filmmakers who captured the kind of action that’s normally depicted in Hollywood in very flashy ways in a much more mundane way.
The other two big influences on me would be Jarman, because of his attempts to address the sexual hypocrisy of English society; and Patrick Keiller. I think Keiller is the one that people will look at and say ’Oh, it’s Keiller-esque’. I think part of that is that it’s a film that’s about the landscape of London, so it’s almost impossible not to. But our director of photography was amazing, so hopefully there’s a lot of other things going on. But I do think his films on London are incredible.
You’re writing a book which covers some of the same themes as Ungentle. How is that going to expand on what the film explores?
The film is a fictional telling that’s drawing a lot of influence from the real life stories that I’ve been researching. But there’s just so much more in those real life stories. So the book is going to be based on a lot of the historical research and trying to make the argument that the development of the gay identity in the UK and the development of the idea of the spy in the UK are intrinsically linked.
It will put it into a wider historical context around the idea of sedition and homosexuality and how they were tied together. That emerges in the aftermath of the Second World War with McCarthyism in the US, and there’s a thing called the Lavender Scare that happened before the Red Scare, where McCarthy used gays as a laboratory to test techniques he would go on to use against the Left. That leads to the idea of the homosexual in American imagination being tied very closely to the idea of sedition and the idea of gays being a threat to society. That’s exported to the UK in the late 1950s and into 1960s, something that’s not helped by the fact that a lot of spies were gay! Burgess and Maclean were gay. Tom Driberg, who was long suspected as being the fourth man in the Cambridge Five, was gay. The actual fourth man, Anthony Blunt was also gay.
The book tries to tie all these things together and is more of a literary analysis of how the gay identity is created. Obviously both of these thing all come back down to class in British society and the influence of Oxbridge and especially Cambridge in the 1930s.
The idea of the left-wing, intellectual, elitist snob queer really emerges in 1920s and 30s and people like Auden and Isherwood cemented it in the public imagination when it turned out that Burgess and Maclean were both part of that same social circle.
Before you go I have to say how great it is that you have Ben Whishaw narrating the film. It ties it in so nicely to the Bond mythology, which wasn’t exactly known for its queer representation until Whishaw got cast and almost snuck it in there.
Ben also did a BBC miniseries back in 2015, that was based on Gareth Williams, the MI6 agent that who was found locked in a bag in his flat in Pimlico.
It’s a fucking weird series actually, I don’t think it would get made today. It’s pretty experimental. I started watching that because I was writing a book about chemsex and it’s about chemsex as well. It’s also got Jim Broadbent in it, who plays an elderly gay spy in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there.
As well as writing his weekly newsletter, utopian drivel, Huw co-presents the Bad Gays podcast and is the author of three books, including Bad Gays, A Homosexual History and Unknown Language.
Huw is reprising his walking tour for Studio Voltaire on 15 October. Tickets are available here.
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