Love, Leda

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The book itself is quite short and just about manages to not overstay its welcome; indeed, I found the majority of it propulsively readable. I look out of the window and see a group of young lads out for a laugh, but the size of the window breaks my view.

But I can imagine the narrative would receive a complete overhaul in a contemporary creative writing class because it's quite chaotic. Hyatt, era um poeta e prosista de excelente qualidade estética e sua figura era já conhecida em seu período de vida nos circuitos undergrounds e boêmios britânicos dos anos 60 e início dos anos 70; um sujeito talentoso e autodidata que foi muito influenciado positivamente pelas transformações socioculturais e comportamentais dos anos 60.He picks his way back towards the jukebox, stands looking at it, as though it held the interest of a book. Colours, the insides of buses, Lyons Corner House (with nan), rapidly cooling, pre-prepared teas and coffees lined up in white, ceramic cups and saucers for convenient service, chatty locals and bomb sites.

Leda rejects conventional notions of morality and refuses to be bound by society’s expectations – qualities that endear him to his friends but which outrage his family. Usually a frequenter of the hip coffee bar scene of that era, here Leda takes him to a Lyon’s Corner House and propositions him over a cup of appropriately bittersweet coffee. And then there is the incessant pining for Daniel, the heterosexual priest with whom he is in love, which is less a plot device than it is a symbolic marker for the social conditions of pre-1967 homosexuals in Britain. One leans against the wall, keeping his arse well gathered in, so that his covered penis catches the point of everyone’s view.

In 1965, any mention of gay sex – not just gay men, but actual gay fucking, with hair and sweat and Vaseline included – would have been shocking for most contemporary readers.