It wasn't even like that. There were occasional outbursts of persecution, but most people didn't care much. Oscar Wilde was as close to openly gay as it was possible to be and very few people really cared much about it. It's possible people even just viewed it as something he was pretending to be just to shock people. Specifically, the not terribly literate Marquess of Queensberry called him a "posing Somdomite [sic]" in the famous calling card the libel suit was about (yes that is the Marquess of Queensberry who the boxing rules are named after and he was a rather pugilistic guy Wilde would have been better off avoiding).
One of the most notorious pick-up areas was the promenades of the Empire theatre. At that time the Empire Theatre had no dividing wall between the seats and the bar behind, and you were free to move between the two at will during the show - next time you hear someone complaining about kids eating popcorn noisily at the cinema and how it used to be different, tell them that:
In the 1890s the Empire in Leicester Square was justly famous as a Variety and Musical Hall theatre especially for its spectacular ballet productions and its ‘Living Pictures’ – frozen-moment representations of well-known paintings or other familiar scenes where seemingly half-naked young men and women stood very very still.
In reality, the dominant attraction, and to what Wilde was probably referring, was the Empire’s second-tier promenade. This was an area behind the dress circle, where you could still see the stage if you wanted to, but was essentially a pick up joint for high class prostitutes. The theatre charged half a crown (12 1/2p) for a rover ticket that gave you licence to enjoy the promenade. There was room to wander around but there were also comfortable seats and what was called an ‘American Bar’ serving one shilling cocktails such as the ‘Bosom Caresser’ and the ‘Corpse Reviver’.
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When the Empire Theatre management put up canvas screens to hide the auditorium from the Promenade they were quickly torn down by a rioting audience. They were egged on by the young Sandhurst cadet Winston Churchill who wrote to his brother:
Did you see the papers about the riot at the Empire last Saturday? It was I who led the rioters – and made a speech to the crowd – “Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!”.
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At a cheaper price of only one shilling the Empire Theatre’s first tier promenade was said to be THE gay pick-up location in the whole of London. A letter to the council dated 15 October 1894, just six weeks after Mrs Chant’s visit to the theatre, described the rough ejection of a man from the shilling promenade by Robert Ahern, the front of house manager. The letter writer described the man who was thrown out “as a ‘sodomite’ as were perhaps half the occupants of that promenade, that it was the only venue for people of this kind, and that he ‘could lay his hands on 200 sods every night in the week if he liked.”
Source - A fasdinating story that runs from Churchill and Wilde through Nazimova, Fred Astaire and the Prince of Wales to a hundred year old poof painting in his garden in West Sussex.
