‘A great lost work’: Love, Leda’s candid tale of 1960s gay life is a touching time capsule

One can only wonder what effect Mark Hyatt’s only known novel, Love, Leda, would have had on British culture had it found a publisher and reached bookshop shelves when it was written, in the middle of the 1960s. A frank, intimate portrait of a young working-class homosexual struggling to find meaning, work or just a good fuck in London, living between friends’ sofas and dingy bedsits, Love, Leda is a book without contemporaries. It might well have been explosive and remembered as one of the great works of working-class literature of the time alongside works by authors and playwrights such as Alan

Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney or Bill Naughton. But instead it is passed down to us as an orphan, a great lost work, a time capsule.

In grand historical terms, the 1960s were a great turning point for British society. Between 1964 and 1970 a Labour government undertook sweeping reforms to domestic social legislation, transforming the face of the country in an attempt to produce, in the words of the reforming home secretary Roy Jenkins, “a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society”. New acts of parliament changed the laws on divorce and abortion, and made contraception available on the NHS; attempts were made to address racism and discrimination through a series of race relations acts; capital and corporal punishment were abolished, and strict censorship laws were chipped away at or overturned. Love, Leda was written in that strange thawing of the sexual permafrost that came between the 1957 Wolfenden report, with its recommendation to partially decriminalise sex between men, and its implementation in the Sexual Offences Act some 10 years later.

In retrospect, these changes in the relationship between state and citizen were transformative. It was an attempt to unstuff the class-bound, moralising culture that had choked British life since the Victorian era, and free people to think, and act, for themselves. For many social conservatives on the left and the right, that was the start of the rot. Yet for those living through it, change was stuttering, sometimes piecemeal, and the consequences of liberalisation were neither inevitable nor predictable. The miserable, stuffy greyness of Britain, the twitching curtains and tutting old ladies on damp double deckers, the bigoted policemen and the weak, milky cups of tea – these are the things that define the world Leda inhabits, one that seemed like it could go on for ever.

The novel’s protagonist, Leda, is sick of all this an he’s looking for something else. He tries to find culture and conversation around the emerging trendy coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho, but instead finds only poseurs and beatniks, straight middle-class students who call themselves existentialists but seem scared by Leda’s own hopeless embrace of life. He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites. He tries to find work washing dishes or as a sheet metal worker, but it bores him. He tries to find affection among the lonely, sexually frustrated middle-aged men and women who would swap care for the sight and touch of his young body. And he tries to draw love from the most barren of places: a straight man.

In 1965, any mention of gay sex – not just gay men, but actual gay fuck