‘Discreetly explicit’: The production, circulation, and reception of Thomas Burke's 1937 guide to gay London

The 1937 text For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to all Londoners and London Visitors was the first mass-published guide and map of London designed for gay men. Published by Routledge under the pseudonym Paul Pry, the book was written by Thomas Burke, a well-known chronicler of London's underworld. The text's dialogue provides readers with specific geographic clues to locations friendly to queer, anonymous public sex—known as cottaging—across London. The text is complemented by the book's endsheets which contain a map of inner London depicting cottaging locations. While previous scholarship has used the book as an artifact through which to understand the queer geography of interwar London, this paper reconstructs the production, circulation, and reception to this book using archival records previously believed to be lost. Through a framework of queer bibliography and the processual approach to map history, I argue that focusing on the book as a whole (and not just the map endsheets) illustrates how queer networks promoted and gave meaning to both the book and its map. The paper also brings the study of sexuality into the history of cartography, highlighting how these two approaches provide a viable framework for understanding queer geographic media.