Charles Mackay's Downfall

Charles Mackay, the man who defined what it meant to be homosexual for New Zealand’s newspaper readers during the 1920s, has been an underappreciated figure in our history until now. Paul Diamond’s new book Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay drags him out of the shadows and puts him firmly under the spotlight. In multi-layered and intricate detail, Downfall recounts the high drama of a shooting, revelations of blackmail, and debates about forbidden sexuality. While searching for traces of the past, Diamond reveals Mackay, one time mayor of Whanganui, to be a complex character whose life was profoundly shaped by local politics and rivalries, familial dissolution and disgrace.

Above: Whanganui during the 1920s.

This is a tale of illicit desire. In 1914 Mackay, who was married, sought a cure for his ‘homo-sexual monomania’. He quietly consulted a taxi driver-turned-metaphysician, who offered his patients a range of autosuggestive therapies and a bit of hypnotism. Still, Mackay was not the only homoerotically inclined man in Whanganui at the time. There was a public culture of sorts: men made one another’s acquaintance on the street corners, in the hotel bars and in Queens Park; a few retired to boarding house bedrooms. Some socialised with the visitors (including Theo Trezise) who arrived in town for the theatre and opera. There are hints that Mackay’s world and this public culture intersected.

In 1920 Mackay shot and wounded the returned soldier D’Arcy Cresswell who encouraged him to display certain ‘qualities in his nature’ when the pair met one evening and inspected ‘The Wrestlers’, a sculpture in the Sargeant Art Gallery. Cresswell subsequently blackmailed Mackay, demanding his resignation from the mayoralty. The motivation of returned soldier Cresswell, who had become aware of his own homosexuality several years earlier, remains murky. All around the country, newspapers reported court proceedings under an attention-grabbing headline: ‘Wanganui Sensation’. In court, Mackay’s lawyer claimed his client ‘suffered from mental strain and this, together with the threat of exposure, unhinged his mind’. Mackay served most of his sentence in Mt Eden prison but he also did time in New Plymouth, the prison designated for the country’s homosexual offenders [see here]. Excerpts from Mackay’s prison correspondence reveals details of his life inside. He taught Esperanto to his fellow inmates and helped them with their writing, but he was an imperfect prisoner with a pugilistic streak. At Mt Eden he hid contraband in the library where he worked, threatened a guard, and fought with another prisoner in the yard during parade.

Left: Mackay during his early years as Mayor; Right: Truth newspaper's sketch of Mackay in court.

Mackay left the country after serving six years of his fifteen-year sentence. Europe was a far cry from provincial New Zealand. For eighteen months he recovered his equilibrium among London’s social occasions, galleries and ballets, and he knew all about the men cruising in Trafalgar Square and St James’s Park where he experienced ‘frank expressions of joy’. Mackay even found a Buckingham Palace guardsman of his own — a ‘bit of scarlet’, in the homosexual argot of the time. These London cruising spots, and the popularity of guardsmen and soldiers, date back to the nineteenth century.

Left: A young Londoner in uniform; Right: A queer bar in Berlin, 1931.

Bustling Berlin, a city with an active homosexual rights movement, must have seemed astonishing to Mackay after his time in Whanganui and years in prison. Men cruised the Tiergarten, Alexanderplatz and Unter den Linden (the boulevard leading to the Brandenburg Gate). Rent boys hung out in the cabarets and bars, cadged cigarettes and arranged assignations. During his five and a half months in the city, Mackay lived on or near Bülowstraße in the homosexual district. He worked as a freelance journalist, and for a while Europe's most sexually liberated city gave him the opportunity to stretch his wings. But Mackay's life came to a sudden, awful end. In 1929, as rioting communist demonstrators clashed with police, a police sniper shot and killed him by mistake.

Above: A Berlin club during the 1920s.

Charles Mackay steps out of the public record like an Oscar Wilde figure of the 1920s, persecuted by polite society, exposed by the press, and locked away in jail. But when he sought out a cure for his ‘homo-sexual obsessions’, he took part in an early version of the conversion therapies banned in New Zealand as recently as 2022. And Mackay’s determination to build a new life for himself, travelling and seeking out fresh opportunities, is a path still trodden by a great many queer people.

Sources:

Newspapers: Grey River Argus, 29 May 1920; Manawatu Times, 18 May 1920.

Beachey, R. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.

Brandl-Beck, D. 'The World's First Gay Travel Guide', in C. Brickell and J. Collard (eds), Queer Objects.

Cook, M. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914.

Diamond, P. Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay.

Gardiner, J. A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover.

Whisnant, C. 'A Peek Inside Berlin's Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It' [view]