For Your Convenience

Book excerpt: A facsimile guide to the Gents Loos of London published originally in 1937 by Routledge. Hailed as the first queer city guide, For Your Convenience was first published in 1937. Ostensibly a guide to where a gentleman may find 'relief' in the metropolis after 'three cups of tea', for those 'in-the-know' the information held between its pages offers a much more tantalizing prospect. Now faithfully reproduced for the first time in over eighty years, this fascinating book works as both a wry and playful slice of social history as well as a fascinating insight into the perils and pleasures of a most specific activity for men who loved men. The book could be read at as an entertaining guide to London's public conveniences but yet to our more sceptical eye it is patently a guide to where men could meet like-minded men in an era when homosexuality was illegal. It remains a classic whether taken at face value or not.