This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre Pigott Theatre. It will be simultaneously live streamed on the British Library platform. Tickets may be booked either to attend in person (physical) or to watch on our platform (online) either live or within 48 hours on catch up. Viewing links for the online version will be sent out in the confirmation email you receive after booking. Captions are available for our online events and most in person events in the Pigott Theatre. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk

Drawing upon letters, diaries, novels, plays, films, newspaper articles, parliamentary debates, medical journals and police reports, Peter Parker’s book, provides a picture of what life was really like for gay men from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. Although these men faced prosecution in the courts and vilification in the newspapers, they showed extraordinary resilience, and the capital had a lively queer subculture which was reflected in the arts.

Join Neil Bartlett in conversation with Peter Parker as they cover will cover the entire post-war period, with a particular emphasis on the 1960s, with readings from the letters, diaries and other documents. 

Peter Parker is the author of biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, The Old Lie, The Last Veteran, Housman Country and A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners. He edited A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel and Twentieth-Century Writers, is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and contributed essays to Britten's Century and Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read. He has written about people, books, art, architecture and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, and lives in London's East End.

Neil Bartlett has been a leading (if occasionally outrageous) queer culture-maker for nearly forty years. His first books were his ground-breaking re-assessment of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? and his first novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall; his most recent fiction was Address Book , a suite of stories that traces seven interconnected  lives  across  a hundred years of change.


Produced in association with Gay’s The Word.

Supported by the Vogel-Denebeim Family.

Doors and Bar open at 18:00. If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

Half price tickets available for Members, Students, Under 26 and other concession groups. 

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