by Mark Simpson (Originally appeared in Fall 2018 issue of XY Mag) “WE’RE ON OUR ‘ONEYMOON!” Two teenage working class lads, Matt and Phil, hitching from London to the South Coast, are in the back of a car driven by a middle-aged man with a moustache and a bowtie, who… Read More »‘Oneymoons & Bloody Deviants – How Gay Love Stories Lost Their Way At The Movies
I’ve just finished reading This Small Cloud, a wonderful posthumously published memoir by Harry Daley, a London copper in the early part of the 20th Century. Daley had a weakness, as you do, for young boxers and gangsters. And an intolerance for Mosley’s Blackshirts, whom many of his colleagues sympathised… Read More »Harry Daley: A Beat Poet
Mark Simpson on the almost-forgotten ‘English Whitman’ On his 80th birthday in 1924, five years before his death, the socialist Utopian poet, mystic, activist, homophile, environmentalist, feminist and nudist Edward Carpenter received an album signed by every member of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Cabinet. Glowing tributes appeared in the socialist papers… Read More »Edward Carpenter – The Utopian Uranian