Vaughan_book

I
Until the successful passage of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, decriminalizing homosexual
acts in private between two men, both of whom had to be 21 or over – a full thirteen years after
the Conservative government had first asked a department committee chaired by John
Wolfenden to give fresh consideration to the law relating to homosexuality and prostitution –
homosexual acts between consenting adults, even in private, had been illegal and were
therefore liable to criminal prosecution. It had taken more than eighty years for section 11 of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, introduced by Henry Labouchère after a series of
tabloid-magnified ‘scandals’, to be abolished. Section 11 prescribed up to two years
imprisonment with or without hard labour for ‘gross indecency between males in public or in
private’. It was this that would be inflicted, for example, with tragic consequences on Oscar
Wilde and, much later, used to persecute the gifted mathematician Alan Turing, driving him to
suicide.
For Vaughan, as for the majority of homosexuals for most of the twentieth century – with the
exception of those at the very top and bottom of the social scale – life was lived between two
worlds: the exterior world of social conventions, heterosexual marriage and procreation, and the
interior world of discreet glances, of furtive and dangerously fraught encounters for sex, of fear
of discovery and shame of prosecution for emotional needs and desires. Of a school-time
friend, Vaughan later recalled: ‘I learnt from him the fear, tension and repression that
surrounded everything to do with sex’ 1 . This is not the place to attempt any deeper analysis of
Vaughan’s persona or psychological make-up in his early years, but while his own occasional
brief reminiscences in his Journal shed light on his shyness and self-doubt, others’ perceptions
of him at this time indicate how he coped, as many closeted homosexuals did then, by
projecting a different, more insouciant persona. He had apparently been lonely, reserved, and
inevitably bullied at his school, and he later wrote that for him his time at Christ’s Hospital
School had merely represented ‘eight years of concrete misery and romantic reveries’, 2 and that
the experience had left him ‘with a lasting fear of hostility in others, a mistrust of strangers, and
a maddening desire at all costs to ingratiate myself and earn the goodwill of everyone, however
much I might secretly dislike and despise them’. 3
Male portrait behind fishing net [PL7]
photographic print on unmarked paper
30.2 x 25.2 cm
Vaughan’s father had abandoned the family when the boy was about eight years old. Vaughan
remained close to his mother, living in the same house until the end of the 1930s. Yorke and
others have wondered whether the disappearance of his father before Vaughan was ten years
old, and the need to protect his overly timid younger brother Richard (known as Dick) in his
early years, may have cast him in the role of a father figure to younger men. 4 With the exception
of the affair he began with Harold Colebrook (whose aunt had the converted railway carriage at
Pagham beach, where most of the photographs in this exhibition were taken) and with whom
he shared many cultural interests, Vaughan was quite openly attracted to younger workingclass
men with a rough edge, such as Len and his brother Stan, the grocer’s boy Percy Farrant,
and in later years, the sometime boxer and small-time criminal Johnny Walsh – all of whom
would at one time also model for him to photograph.
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