Princes Rd Synagogue c.1968
Yankel
born Toxteth, Liverpool 1920 I wasn’t aware that I was gay, we didn’t know what gayness was but I always knew that I was different. I joined the synagogue choir because I got 15 shillings every 12 weeks which paid for my clothes and when I came out of choir practice, in Park Way at the side of Princes Road, there was a down in the road toilet. Every time I went in there for a pee there’d be someone shaking their tail at me. Eventually I had sex with one of these men, I rather liked it. So that’s how I found out I was gay. At the time I was 13.
There were no clubs in those days, there were no gay bars, so the toilets were the clubs and there were boys from all ages, all different people wanting different things… some for sexual needs, some were lonely. Life was very very hard and people were struggling to find what pleasure they could get so whatever people think about that it’s unwarranted because people do things out of necessity. I, at the time, would have preferred to be in a university, I would like to have gone to a school of art but who told me about them? You’re more likely when you’re poor to find out about cottages than you are universities.
2
Our Story - Liverpool
All the time you realized you were being watched and your friends would tell you, ‘there’s so and so in the corner’, there was like a secret service on how to avoid…(getting arrested)… ‘don’t go here, don’t go there, watch yourself here, keep away from so and so’. It was just as dangerous during the war as any other time. I remember having an appointment to meet somebody in Leicester Square and I was standing on the corner waiting for somebody and suddenly I was surrounded by a dozen policemen who wanted to arrest me, they thought I was soliciting. On the strength of the proof that I was working and wasn’t a rent boy, they let me go. I was never going to make a good soldier. I thought the best thing to do was …they used to call it ‘working your ticket’. When I suggested this to some of the boys they said, ‘You’ll never work your ticket’. ‘I’ve been trying for years’ the sergeant said, so I thought ‘I’ll try it my way.’ I saw a psychiatrist and I told them it wasn’t fair that all these straight men were in danger of being raped by me in the showers and that they should push