The ‘Glamour Boys’ might bring to mind a bad David Bowie tribute band, but for gay Labour MP Chris Bryant, they’re a lot more than that.

When it comes to the Glamour Boys, Bryant knows his stuff. He admires and respects them, though certainly doesn’t want to be in their shoes anytime soon.

But the Glamour boys aren’t a bunch of Ziggy Stardust buffs playing in dive bars.

They were a group of brave gay, bisexual and queer MPs and other like-minded lawmakers who warned the UK of the then-emerging threat of Nazi Germany years before World War Two.

At the time, though, people weren’t really big fans of them. Their critics included Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who scathingly called the MPs the ‘Glamour Boys’ in 1938 and threatened them with de-selection.

‘It was a way of suggesting something about them because “glamour” in those days didn’t mean what it does today,’ Bryant tells Metro.co.uk.

‘It meant something bewitching, feminine, wrong, immoral and disturbing.’

In his 2020 book, The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler, Bryant makes one thing clear from the get-go.

‘We would never have gone to war with Hitler, Churchill would never have become prime minister and Nazism would never have been defeated’ if it weren’t for Glamour Boys, the Rhondda MP wrote.

He stresses that Winston Churchill wasn’t the one lone voice in the wilderness as World War Two hurtled towards them.

‘They were courageous,’ Bryant adds. ‘Some had friends who had been imprisoned in Germany. Quite a few had Jewish friends as well.

‘They all knew what was happening in Germany but they were the most resolute opponents of appeasement, accused of being war-mongers by the national newspapers and several were killed in action.’

Who were the Glamour Boys?

Back in the 1920s, Britain was stuffy, to say the least. Being gay was illegal and punishable by hard labour – something that remained the case up until 1967.

Queer culture of any kind was buried deep underground, one of hushed drag balls and bathhouses in London’s West End, coded classified ads and hesitant glances from across the bar.

So wealthy LGBTQ+ Brits went to Berlin, Germany, to be who they are – partly thanks to the city’s rather relaxed law enforcement when it came to Germany’s own anti-gay laws.

Berlin felt carefree to them, a place where LGBTQ+ people could swing by some 100 queer nightclubs, bars and cabaret shows that dotted the city or read queer magazines and watch queer cinema.

But then that all began to change. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 brought an end to the palmy queer culture of the Weimar Republic.

‘You could go to Berlin and pretty do whatever you wanted,’ Bryant says, ‘until Hitler changed all the rules.

The Glamour Boys already had their concerns about Hitler, with some members sounding the alarm as early as 1932, becoming parliamentary rebels for years in the process.

Robert Bernays, a Liberal Party MP and one of the Glamour Boys, returned from Germany in September 1933 disgusted by the Nazi’s increasing hatred for Jews.

‘If this spirit is allowed to continue, it means war in 10 years,’ Bernays wrote in November of that year.

But for many of the Glamour Boys, what was a clear sign of what was to come was the Chancellor’s purge of rivals in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

Who belonged to the Glamour Boys?

Bryant has narrowed down the number of queer MPs in the group to 10:

• Robert Boothby
• Harold Nicolson
• Rob Bernays
• Victor Cazalet
• Harry Crookshank
• Jack Macnamara
• Ronnie Cartland
• Ronnie Tree
• Philip Sassoon
• Tim Thomas. 

Some of the Glamour Boys married women, some were bisexual and others were ‘somewhere in between’.

The bulk of the Glamour Boys was Conservative, though, considering that politics at the time were even more storm-tossed than today, sometimes the MPs sat with the National Labour or National Liberals.

Not all members of the Glamour Boys were gay, though. Bryant notes it can be hard to say with confidence whether someone from nearly a century ago is LGBTQ+, given that historical records can be patchy at best and people, given the anti-LGBTQ+ laws, weren’t too upfront about their identities.

In terms of supporters who weren’t LGBTQ+, the ever-shifting bloc included:

• Harold Macmillan
• Anthony Eden
• Duncan Sandys
• Leo Amery
• Winston Churchill.

Among them was Ernst Röhm, the gay scar-faced leader of the Nazi parliamentary wing, the Sturmabteilung, whom Macnamara had even mixed with at the Eldorado queer nightclub in the past.

Reaction to this in the UK didn’t go how the Glamour Boys might have hoped.

‘The Führer has started cleaning up’, applauded The Times. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, praised ‘Herr Hitler’ for having ‘saved his country’.

More members of the Glamour Boys began to wake up to the Third Reich soon after. Leicester West MP Harold Nicolson, Bryant says, also ‘had a friend who was present when the Night of the Long Knives took place’.

While Bernays ‘had visited Germany and met with some of the gay men in the Nazi Party who were later executed by Hitler’ that night.

Robert Boothby, the MP for Bristol North, also wrote: ‘The Nazis had been shown up for what they, in fact, were – unscrupulous and bloodthirsty gangsters. In future, they should be treated as such.’

Nazi officials saw being gay as a ‘non-Ayran’ luxury, with members protesting and shutting down queer venues and movie screenings and attacking filmmakers.

The following year, anti-gay laws were made even more draconian. The mere ‘promotion of homosexuality’ was outlawed, and between 1933 and 1945, at least 100,000 gay men were arrested during police raids of clubs and bars.

The MPs reacted with terror to what was happening in Germany, seeing first-hand what many Brits were keen to ignore – the treatment of Jewish and LGBTQ+ people and many other vulnerable groups at the hands of the Nazis.

With all this going on, the Glamour Boys broke ranks over the UK’s policy of appeasement (which meant Britain, fearful of another war, was leaving Hitler to it about expanding German territory).

Soon enough, Hitler was gobbling up land left, right and centre. He entered the Rhineland in 1936 before annexing Austria two years later.

That same year, Macnamara, MP for Chelmsford, received a tour of the Rhineland, a path that had been demilitarised by the Treaty of Versailles.

His guides showed him the concentration camp at Dachau that housed queer people and political prisoners.

‘I have never seen human beings so cowed,’ Macnamara wrote.

Among those detained in Dachau for ‘promoting’ homosexuality’ was Nicolson’s friend, Kurt Wagenseil. Nicolson swung the doors open of the German Embassy and demanded a meeting shortly after.

‘I think for all the (Glamour Boys), there was a personal experience that helped them see close hand what the Nazis were up to,’ Bryant adds.

Chamberlain, in an effort to ward off war, signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, giving Hitler the go-ahead to occupy the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia.

The Glamour Boys weren’t happy about this. For the next two years, the Glamour Boys spoke out against the threat of Nazism in the Whitehall Newsletter, in the House of Commons and beyond.

But many of their pleas – as they had done for years – fell on deaf ears.

Bryant notes in his book that Chamberlain, who led the nation until 1940, had the MPs followed, harassed, spied on and trashed by the press.

In the end, countless queer people would be tagged with pink triangles by the Nazis.

Many were murdered, with 15,000 thrown into concentration camps between 1933 and 1945, by some estimates.

Some died in the camps of exhaustion. Others were castrated and experimented on.

Bryant notes that history has gone to great lengths to remember Churchill as something of a prophet for World War Two. Speaking out throughout the 1930s as a government outcast before his redemption arc ended with him taking No 10.

But history has not afforded the same treatment to the Glamour Boys, Bryant says, even though Churchill teamed up with them to push Chamberlain to take Hitler seriously.

‘They’ve tended to be forgotten,’ Bryant says. ‘We all know about Churchill partly because Churchill got to write history.’

‘For me, it was important shining a light on them,’ he adds, ‘and as a gay man, I wanted people to understand that bravery comes in many different shapes.

‘Some of the bravest people in the 1930s politically and militarily were actually gay men.’

Some of the MPs died serving in the war. They included Bernays, Macnamara, Ronald Cartland, Victor Cazalet and Anthony Muirhead.

Churchill described Cartland, the MP for King’s Norton in Birmingham, as ‘a man of noble spirit who followed his convictions without thought of personal advancement’.

‘At a time when our political life had become feckless and dull he spoke fearlessly for Britain,’ he said.

There are three lessons that can be taken from the Glamour Boys today, Bryant says.

‘First, a strong democracy protects minorities rather than demonises them. Secondly, you can never appease a dictator with territorial ambitions.

‘And a third one. Berlin was the most liberal place in the world in the 19th century for gay men and by 1936, gay men were being sent to concentration camps.

‘You should never presume that the liberties we enjoy today will always be enjoyed forever.’

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