I think there must have been an enormous number of homosexuals who played the other game, which was to get married and be miserable.

There are people of my generation who say that part of the fun was that it was against the law, that it was so dangerous, that the constant sense of menace added something to it. I’m not sure about that, because your life could be completely destroyed. There were a number of notorious cases in the 1950s when the persecution was at its height, when your life could be completely wrecked. You’d never get another decent job. You were an outcast, and was that a risk worth taking because the frisson of menace added so much to it? No, it wasn’t, but there is a sort of reasonable assumption that if you meet a stranger in circumstances where there are a hundred people stretched along the river, who are all looking for the same thing, it’s sort of unlikely that anything will go wrong.

You could have sex in all sorts of odd places, and I think, at that time, if you… at that time, it was, in a way, easy, because very few people knew about it. Now everybody knows about everything, and I mean if you were standing in a bus queue and you caught the eye of somebody walking towards you and then you turned round to see if he was looking back, and you left the bus queue to go and join him, no one would think anything of it. They wouldn’t recognise the manoeuvre. Nowadays, I think everybody will recognise the manoeuvre. So that privacy lay in ignorance. And lots of people would never believe that you would go into the public lavatories in Harrods and have a quick fuck with somebody from behind the counter. And I’m sure it doesn’t happen now. But then, it did happen. And Harrods was a place where you could, if you felt like having a fuck at three o’clock in the afternoon... pretty well be sure of getting one.

It doesn’t happen in museums and galleries anymore. But wandering around the V&A on a wet Sunday afternoon was a sure way of finding someone to go to bed with.