An anti-hero of gay liberation: Ronnie Kray’s violent life outside the closet

‘Who’s gonna call Ronnie Kray a poof? People did, and they were killed’: Bad Gays historian Huw Lemmey tells all about the gay Kray twin

Ronnie and Reggie Kray are likely Britain’s most infamous gangsters. The twins terrorised the East End for nearly two decades, dealing in murder, robbery, arson and protection rackets. They were known for their brutality as well as their tailored suits, slicked-back hair and boxing skills.

In the modern day, some remember the Kray twins as larger-than-life folk heroes – complicated figures who looked after their own. Others remember their bloody story with disgust and fascinated horror. Either way, the twins still capture the public imagination. The mythology is always expanding.  

Twins, of course, have differences. Ronnie Kray was largely understood as having more mental health issues and more prone to violence, the brawn behind Reggie’s brains. Unlike Reggie (who was rumoured bisexual), Ronnie was openly gay. His power as a gangster made him untouchable by conventional homophobia. 

The question of the Kray twins’ sexuality has been picked apart over the years by biographers and gossip, but typically as a side note. It is properly explored in the book Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, named after the podcast which birthed it. A collaboration between historians Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays explores notable villains in gay history. 

We interviewed author Huw Lemmey on Ronnie Kray’s life story and what it says about British attitudes towards sexuality and class. 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

What piqued your interest in Ronnie Kray’s life? Was his homosexuality common knowledge at the time? 

If you grew up in England, the Krays are folk heroes of a type or anti-heroes. Growing up I was always aware of them.

Ronnie’s homosexuality was raised as a negative, like his dark story, which in one way is quite problematic, but in another way quite justified because he conducted his sex life very much like he conducted the rest of his life. It involved lots of abuses of power and manipulation and control over other people. 

Why do you think Ronnie’s sexuality is often swept under the rug? 

As he’s become a folk anti-hero, there’s been a sort of whitewashing of his identity. He’s become quite a flat read for a type of heterosexual masculinity about being a working-class tough. And that doesn’t sit so well with people’s contemporary ideas of homosexuality. 

In Bad Gays you explain that Ronnie was openly gay, was that really out of the ordinary at the time? 

Yes and no. After the Second World War, it became a very complicated world for gay people in London. The war was quite a tolerant time for what we call ‘deviant sexualities,’ whereas after there was sort of a desire to bring people back under control, and there was a real fear of homosexuality. 

So there were a lot more prosecutions, but there was a thriving working-class gay subculture in London and East End at the time, especially down in Wapping and near the docks. 

If you were ’cottaging,’ having sex in toilets and picking people up, or visibly queer, then yes, you would be in trouble. But people were conducting discreet gay sex lives and socialising in places that were known to be gay venues. 

What’s interesting about Kray is that his power as a criminal, as a gangster, is what allowed him to act with impunity. He could be a lot more open about it because who’s gonna insult Ronnie Kray? Who’s gonna call Ronnie Kray a poof? People did, and they were killed.

Secondly, the police had bigger issues. They weren’t going to pick up Ronnie Kray for gross indecency because A; it was probably hard to prove because he was doing it behind closed doors, and B, they had a case to build that was much more serious. So they didn’t want to get in the way of that. His criminality is what gave him that power. 

At that time as well in the post-war period, a renewed interest in working-class culture was what gave him real power, which was access to the rich and the famous, and especially to lawmakers and politicians.

Did Ronnie have any longer-term partners? 

Yes, he was called Bobby Buckley. What’s quite interesting about that is, as was common at the time and still exists today, there was a sort of familial relationship between them. So he referred to Buckley as his son and would sign letters ‘your old dad.’

So obviously, the way people organise their sexuality doesn’t necessarily mean anything nefarious. But it explains that the power relationship was between a sort of caregiving older man and a youthful younger guy.

What about his famous friendship with the MP Lord Boothby?

There were a number of homosexual MPs who were not publicly open but their private lives were definitely understood within the culture of the House of Commons. Boothby is one. Henry ‘Chips’ Cannon was another. And Tom Driberg, who was also a friend of Ronnie Kray, was a third. People were having sex in the toilets in the House of Parliament. There was a turning of a blind eye I think is the best way to put it. 

Lord Boothby was always interested in a sort of exciting private life in terms of gambling and parties. And that was a point at which the West End underground and the East End started to mingle a lot more. The Krays had access to that because they had Esmeralda’s Barn, which was a casino they got off  Peter Rachman, the famous slum landlord, by shaking him down. 

That gave them access to West End culture, people from a much higher class. I think that’s how Ronnie and Lord Boothby first met. Ronnie had people who were what they’d call procurers, men who found younger men or maybe even boys for him to have sex with and have parties. And Ronnie then passed that access along. I mean, they were sex trafficking essentially.

Ronnie is quoted as saying ‘I’m not a poof, I’m a homosexual,’ can you shed some light on this attitude? 

Probably until the 1960s, mainstream understanding of homosexuality in the UK would have been this model that emerged in the 19th century called the invert model. ‘Inverts’ were men who had women’s souls trapped in their bodies. And they were seen as sort of poor, sad creatures. 

A lot of the lawmaking from the Victorian time on to the 1960s was based around isolating ‘inverts’ to prevent them from perverting other men, mainly working-class men of ‘low morals’ who could be paid or perverted into sodomy and gay sex.

So the idea that to be a gay man was to be somehow feminine, or a failure, or somehow lesser was extremely common, and of course continues today.

Ronnie understood his sexuality as being this other model of homosexuality, which was the idea of homosexuality being a form of hypermasculinity. You’re so male that you renounce women’s company entirely and you’re not attracted to women, you’re attracted to manliness. That’s also been a common thread going back to the 19th century.

Do you think Lord Boothby would have referred to himself similarly? 

No, because I think that the understanding of homosexuality in England was so based on class lines. The idea of the invert was very much a middle-class model, like Oscar Wilde or E.M. Forster. This slightly dandyish rich man was maybe attracted to ‘real’ working-class men. 

A lot of gay men would renounce the idea of ever wanting to have sex with another person who they regarded as also gay. They were looking for this other, and the other was this hyper-masculinity of working-class life. A lot of the laws were based around stopping those two groups from mixing.

Was Ronnie Kray what we’d understand as a ‘pimp’ for the younger men he introduced to powerful people? 

Well pre-gay liberation in the 1970s, the line between homosexuality and prostitution was much more blurred, and they were seen as related. As part of that class invert model, there were a lot of men who had sex with men who wouldn’t have seen themselves as queer at all. They were just making some money on the side. So prostitution was an inherent part of inter-class homosexual relationships. 

Ronnie himself had a procurer called David Litvinoff. He was known for picking up boys and young men. And he was organising these parties and providing these boys and men to Ronnie. 

It was a prostitution ring and it was possibly a child sex abuse ring as well. That’s the really troubling and interesting issue, which is we don’t really know much about the men who were invited. 

Because of the criminalisation at the time and because of issues around the age of consent, people who were called boys may not be boys as we understand today. They might have been 20-year-old men who willingly were taking part in this, but they might also have been underage boys. 

Because there wasn’t discrimination in law between those two situations when it came to gross indecency. It’s hard to know for sure, but if I was a betting man, I would say that there was probably child sexual abuse and exploitation going on.

What do you think of the claims that Ronnie and Reggie were incestuously involved with each other?

I’ve never come across that claim. I mean, it’s obviously possible, abuse and incest are much more common in society than probably we know or would like to admit.

But at the same time, reading anything about the Krays has to really be taken with a pinch of salt because they self-mythologise so much. The myth around them is full of falsehoods that make them seem more exciting. 

My conclusion from my research is they were two criminals, and one of them had a severe mental illness, and his criminality gave him a space where he could get away with some extremely savage behaviour. He was a really very cruel, violent man who abused a lot of people. But people want to think that there’s something deeper or more interesting behind that, whereas I think they were a product of their time.

To find out more, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History is available for purchase here

If you liked this, read Nancy Kray: surviving the fallout of Britain’s most notorious mobsters