My (highly attenuated) attention was recently directed to an LWT doc from 1981 available on YouTube . It compares the pre-war, pre-gay world of ‘sisters’ (‘musical’ friends you didn’t want to fuck) and ‘trade’ (‘normal’ working class ‘real’ men you really did), with the post-Stonewall, butched-up, Marlborough Man world of… Read More »Back to the Future: Escaping Sexology
It’s LGBT History Month. So I thought I would share with you my hitherto hidden love for my favourite ‘gay’ novel. The Heart In Exile, published in the UK in 1953, by Rodney Garland – real name Adam Martin De Hegedus, an Hungarian émigré. Though as the date and morose… Read More »The Heart in Exile – The Strange Case of the Peculiarly Prescient Pre-Gay Novel
Gibraltar, otherwise known as ‘The Rock’, is the full stop to the sentence of Europe. It has been besieged no less than fourteen times. The Ancients thought it was a pillar holding up the end of the World. In the Middle Ages Jews fled here from the red-hot instruments of… Read More »God Save The Sea Queen: Gibraltar’s Lovely Charlie
Once upon a time the streets of the capital heaved with jolly sailors and guardsmen looking for gentlemen to have fun with. Then gay liberation came along and ruined it for everyone (Independent on Sunday, 11 September 2005) I consider myself something of a traditionalist. I enjoy traditional activities, such… Read More »Trading in the Past: Queer London