Tag: gay history

So I’ve been round and about trying to bring Eight Acts to the attention of a few more potential readers this week. It came out in March 2021 and I really didn’t do much to launch it, so it’s sat there quietly and people haven’t really known it exists.

It’s a companion novella to Taking Stock and like Taking Stock it doesn’t have any paranormal shenanigans, it’s a straightforward historical gay romance. However, it’s set in 1967–the year the UK’s Sexual Offences Act was amended to decriminalise consenting homosexual sex between two men over twenty one, in private. My Mama, that bastion of English greatness, doesn’t believe anything before the first world war is history. So for her, it’s a contemporary.

For me, both books are historical (Taking Stock is set in 1972), partly because they are set fifty(ish) years ago and partly because society has changed so much since then. Not only the law with the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act; but how we live generally in the UK. I was born in 1970 and the things I remember from my childhood in the 70’s and 80’s are so different now.

It was a time of the Cold War, public phone-boxes; buying your shopping with cash and being more worried what people thought about you. Your immediate community was very important. Versus today when we have East and West Europe unified, the internet and mobile phones that give us the possibility of wider communities, and a more relaxed attitude to non-traditional genders and relationships. Just for starters.

Memories of the second world war were still very fresh…the young people who’d been on the front line were in their forties and fifties and in middle management and positions of authority. Rationing had only ended fifteen years earlier, in 1954. The generation that had fought in the trenches in the first world war were retired and retiring. A good proportion of people had been born whilst Victoria was still queen.

Social change doesn’t come about quickly. It happens slowly and gradually, almost unnoticed if you’re living it. And every single generation ever has bemoaned that things aren’t as good now as they were when their grandparents were young–see Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, writing in the sixth century AD as an example.

My personal opinion is that it isn’t possible to say when something becomes ‘history’. There’s no precise cut-off. I suppose you could probably say as a rule of thumb that it begins to happen when less than half the population remember it as lived experience. But it depends how different things were too.

The 1960s and how different life was then means that I’m happy for both these books to go into the historical category. I’ve got a page on the website citing the resources I used writing the books, with links to some interesting YouTube videos of personal recollections of gay life at the time and about Polari, the ‘secret language’ of gay men in the twentieth century in Britain, that enabled them to talk about sensitive subjects in public without outing themselves.