Queer Trades, Sex and Society: Male Prostitution and the War on Homosexuality in Interwar Scotland by JeffreyMeek, Routledge, 2023, pp. 1–184, ISBN: 978‐0367683580.

Urban networks of sex work have long preoccupied historians of male homosexuality, yet these histories have most often focused on larger cities. In the British context, London has cast a long shadow. Jeffrey Meek's new book may be seen as part of a broader reaction against this tendency, showing us queer life in modern Britain beyond the capital. This echoes Helen Smith's work on the industrial north of England; Matt Cook and Alison Oram's research as part of the AHRC-funded project Queer beyond London; and Daryl Leeworthy's work on modern Wales. Meek's first book attempted to understand why Scotland's relationship to homosexuality was so distinct in the postwar period. Building on this, Meek takes the story back to the interwar period but focuses more specifically on male prostitution in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It is a pioneering work, revealing new sources that show the colours of queer life in interwar Scotland. At the same time, Queer Trades makes a contribution to the history of sex work and explores its entanglements with queer identity formation. The book consists of four main chapters, all of which draw primarily from legal records. Chapter 1 provides the social and economic contexts for men's engagements with sex work, alongside a consideration of how these men were policed in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Meek finds similarities with sex work in other major metropolises, such as London and New York. Sex workers and their clients met each other in busy thoroughfares, public conveniences and theatres. Cosmetics, camp names and 'effeminate' clothes were used as a means of showing sexual availability. Yet Meek is keen to consider the factors that made Glasgow and Edinburgh exceptional, comparing their social dynamics and the methods of policing that made the two cities distinct. In Chapter 2, Meek presents a case study of the Whitehats gang, who operated in Glasgow in the late 1920s. The chapter considers the 'masquerades' of the Whitehats, and the problems faced by historians who try to understand how their 'effeminate' self-presentations related to their senses of self. It considers the life stories of William Patton – the leader of the gang – and John Smith Townsley. These reveal the deep links between various forms of criminality, such as theft, and the world of the Whitehats. Chapter 3 is the first of two chapters to centre on Edinburgh and the eccentric detective William Merrilees, whose self-proclaimed 'war on homosexuality' in the 1930s targeted the Rosebery Boys – a gang comparable to the Whitehats – and the blackmailer Albert Gow. Unlike the case of the Whitehats, much of the personal correspondence of the Rosebery Boys survives, allowing for a fuller consideration of their emotional lives and identities. Chapter 4 looks to Merrilees' prosecution of Peter Allan Ogg, a businessman in the entertainment industry linked to the queer trades of Edinburgh. Meek uses this case study to demonstrate the tactics of entrapment that the police used and the prominence of soldiers engaging in sex work. The strength of Queer Trades lies in the depth of Meek's research. This consists primarily of Sherriff Court records held by the National Records of Scotland, as well as contextual information from smaller archives and published works. The moving stories Meek has found within these often dispassionate texts demonstrate the complexities of British queer history beyond its habitual locales. It is, meanwhile, only sensible that male homosexual prostitution should be seen within a wider context of urban sex work. Meek's book makes this often-overlooked point well. Particularly useful is Meek's inclusion of 'kept men' within his analysis of queer trade, which allows us to see a complex system that operated not only via the exchange of money. Yet questions remain about how we might relate the cases of Glasgow and Edinburgh to our wider view of the period. As Meek makes clear, the lives we glimpse in these Court records bear striking resemblance to ones lived across Europe and North America in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century. This suggests a simple but profound question: Why were dynamics of queer sex work so similar in cities across the Atlantic in this period? These questions are undoubtedly difficult and draw one back to the foundational work of Jeffrey Weeks and George Chauncey. It may be remarked that such a question is beyond the scope of this study. Yet the very similarities found across these cities suggest that something of the macro may be found in the micro. In other words, Glasgow may be as good a place to start as London, New York or Berlin. Queer Trades misses some of these opportunities to put its case studies into dialogue with major historiographical arguments. A related example comes in its handling of male 'effeminacy' and trans perspectives on this history. Transness lurks behind many of the book's discussions of the possible 'deeper meaning' of cross-dressing, yet it remains mostly unaddressed and under-theorised. Meek proposes caution in attempting to assign modern categories to people in the past. In doing so, he cites the influential theoretical work of Laura Doan. While this queer critical approach is doubtless important, Meek exercises caution rather unevenly. While 'trans' appears in quotation marks (p. 42), 'homosexual' often appears elsewhere without them. The people whose lives we glimpse in Meek's sources are unlikely to have thought of themselves through either paradigm. In regard to two criminals who 'masqueraded' as women in the 1920s, Meek argues that 'there seems no suggestion that either man was choosing to dress as a woman out of a deep-seated discomfort with his gender identity' (p. 37). The problem here is that this anchors transness in gender dysphoria, which is not how trans historians work through their sources. Scholars such as Scott Larson and Jen Manion have done much to put forward a method of trans history that seeks not to find stable trans beings in the past, but rather – by casting light on those who 'transed' gender – to expose the gender system as broadly unstable. Greta LaFleur, meanwhile, conceptualises transness as something that need not be permanent in order to be real. Critical engagement with this literature would have strengthened Meek's analysis of sources that cry out for trans readings. In spite of these shortcomings, Queer Trades marks an important new contribution to the field. Rich in detail and narrative flair, it will stand as a useful text for historians of Scotland and Britain, as well as those interested in wider transnational perspectives on queer sex work.