Thomas Burke (author) - Nonfiction Works

Nonfiction Works

In addition to his autobiographical Nights in Town, Thomas Burke wrote a non-fictional account of Chinatown in his book Out and About. In the chapter entitled "Chinatown Revisited" Burke elaborates on a visit in 1919 to the Limehouse district. While there with a friend, Coburn, Burke discovers that the Limehouse he wrote about in Limehouse Nights has disappeared. He explains that the crime, sex, and violence characteristic of Limehouse has been regulated by the local police. No longer present was the life of the Chinese district that Burke had created. As he notes, "the glamorous shame of Chinatown has departed".

Thomas Burke's later nonfictional works, as analyzed by Matt Houlbrook in Queer London, examine, if only in an indirect way, London's homosexual communities. In 1922, Burke published The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels, part of which describes the male homosexual relationship as existing within the public spaces of the city: "Only in the misty corners of the thickening streets…can attain the solitude they seek…For the young lover…the street is more private than the home.”

In 1937, Burke published For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to all Londoners and London Visitors. Burke's nonfictional account, according to Houlbrook, “offers an ironic—if heavily veiled—indictment of contemporary sexual mores", and again establishes public, rather than private spaces, particularly urinals, as the sites of homosexual desire. By providing a verbal and visual map of London with the locations of urinals clearly marked, Burke “ men’s knowledge of these sexual possibilities” and “ their knowledge of the tactics needed to use these sites safely”. Burke's work as an urban observer thus allows him to map the public world of London’s queer and to reflect upon the extent to which interaction with London's public landmarks engaged homosexual communities in an historical narrative of identity formation.