Stay at the YMCA

By the start of the twentieth century, the YMCAs had become centres of sex and socialising for queer men in the big American cities. Their central city locations, on-site gymnasiums, promotion of homosocial companionship, and accommodation for transient male workers meant they were ideally – if unofficially – suited for this purpose.

The founders of the YMCA sought to ameliorate the moral dangers facing young men in the cities. These images appeared in New Zealand pamphlets.

But what about in New Zealand? Documentation is sparse, but a series of court files from the late 1950s hints at the story of the Christchurch YMCA. A gym and accommodation building were situated on the corner of Hereford Street and Cambridge Terrace, two blocks east of the YMCA’s current site. Like other hostels and boarding houses, the YMCA catered for some of the many male workers who poured into the cities after the war and needed affordable accommodation. Jim Polson*, nineteen, was an apprentice carpenter who lived in a twin room there for nearly two years. In 1957 he met Bob Murdo,* a twenty-seven-year-old solider who often visited Christchurch while on leave from the Fort Dorset army base in Wellington. The men ‘became friendly’, and they shared Polson’s twin room when Murdo was on his travels. One night they hopped into Polson’s narrow single bed and ‘told yarns’ before getting down to business.

I played with his cock and he played with mine. Then I pushed my cock into his bum. I felt it go right in and [Polson] said he liked what I was doing to him. I ‘came’ inside of him and after I pulled out of him I asked him if he had done it to anyone else and he said that he had only done the silly ones. I am not sure what he meant by that.

They repeated the process when Polson went to visit Murdo in Wellington. The young men went to the pictures to see ‘Pardon My French’, had coffee at the Picasso café in Willis Street, and tried to book into the nearby YMCA. The hostel was full, so they headed off to a Newtown house owned by Murdo’s friends and slept in a double bed there. The next day Murdo returned to work at the army base after giving Polson £5 ($290) to buy an air ticket back to Christchurch.

The Christchurch Y: a gym and meeting room in the building on the left, and the accommodation block on the right.

Some months later, Polson shared a bedroom at the Christchurch YMCA with seventeen-year-old Matthew Arbuckle*, an electrician whose hobbies included tinkering with old cars and reading about the history of Banks Peninsula. They occupied the room for several months. They had anal sex for the first time after ‘talking about sex, or rather we were telling dirty stories’. ‘[Polson] said that I could go up him if I wanted to. He then got some haircream and put some of it on my penis. I had my penis out through the fly of my pyjama pants. I put my penis up his back passage and worked it up and down.’ They tried again another night, after chatting for hours in the canteen and retiring to bed at one in the morning, but with less success. Polson tried to take the active role, but said he ‘could not get it up, and could not get it in’.

Somehow the YMCA Secretary found out about the relationship. He warned Polson that the youths’ fun constituted ‘a criminal offence’, and shifted Arbuckle across the corridor to share a room with a more virtuous young man. ‘I decided to stop this sort of behaviour’, Arbuckle proclaimed. Did the Secretary alert the police? Most American YMCA staff looked the other way when they learned about sex between their residents, and it is not clear what their New Zealand counterparts thought. Police were already keeping an eye on Polson and Arbuckle, local shoplifters and petty thieves, and may have unearthed the lads’ sexual offending when enquiring about other misdemeanours.

The room layout in an American YMCA. The Christchurch hostel had many twin rooms.

When charged, Polson admitted that ‘I have had sexual relations with other boys on other occasions’. He told police about Murdo, so they charged him too. But all three escaped prison or borstal, getting away with fines and probation. Older men were more likely than their younger partners to end up behind bars, but the judge told Murdo that Polson was ‘a young man by no means inexperienced in sexual abnormality and there is no suggestion that you corrupted him’. Arbuckle wasn't innocent either. A local doctor described him as an ‘incompetent youth’ with ‘profound homosexual tendencies’ who ‘stumbled from one escapade to another’.

YMCA facilities illustrated in the pamphlet Men in the Making. 

Christchurch’s YMCA, like its international counterparts, played a role in wider patterns of mobility. Men who lived there met visitors to Christchurch; they chatted in the canteen and enjoyed the privacy of the twin rooms. No doubt other men met in the gym. Bodybuilding ‘was elevated to the level of a moral necessity’ in such Christian settings, and it also ‘heightened same-sex erotic desire’. The YMCA was one of a number of spots in Christchurch’s post-war queer geography: Hagley Park, assorted theatres and coffee shops, the Warners and United Services hotels in the Square, and the British Hotel in Lyttelton.

YMCA hostels were small but significant nodes in expanding national and international networks. Only a few years later, once homosexual communities reached a critical mass, New Zealanders began campaigning for sex between men to be legalised. Eventually, men’s hostel room adventures would be beyond the concern of the law.

* This post draws from restricted archival records so all names have been changed.

Sources

‘Brief History of Y Christchurch’, https://ymcachch.org.nz/history/

Court files from Archives New Zealand.

Chauncey, G. (1995) Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, pp. 155; 158.

Gustav-Wrathall, J.D. (1998) Take the Young Stranger By the Hand: Same-sex Relations and the YMCA, pp. 146; 150; 159.

Lupkin, P. (2010) Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture, p. 163.