It closes in 1980, the last of the gay bars on the island where Market Street meets Turk that had also been home to the College Inn and Pirate’s Den.
Members of the group were also among the first to visit the Dachau concentration camp and “must have noticed the significant number of homosexual prisoners”, Bryant writes in the book.
It was Chamberlain who dubbed the group the “glamour boys”, in a dig at the sexuality of some of their members, and ordered security services to tap their phones.īut in an untold LGBT+ story of World War Two history, Bryant’s book suggests the fact that some of the rebels were gay and bisexual gave them a unique insight.īefore Hitler came to power in the early 1930s, the German capital was a haven for LGBT+ people with members of British high society – including lawmakers – making frequent trips to sample the sexually liberated nightlife. In “The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler”, Bryant tells how the seven or eight gay and bi members of a group of rebels drew the prime minister’s ire.
“The government whips knew how to destroy a person if they wanted to, so going against the tide was really a difficult thing to do,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call from his constituency in south Wales. is part of their courage in this period,” said Bryant, an opposition Labour party member of parliament (MP). LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A group of gay and bisexual British lawmakers were among the first to sound the alarm about Adolf Hitler’s fascist threat, but - dismissed as “glamour boys” and warmongers - their warnings initially fell on deaf ears, according to a new book.Īt a time when gay sex was still illegal in Britain, their decision to break ranks with then prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler in the 1930s was all the more courageous, said the book’s author Chris Bryant.