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I fell in love with twentieth queer century lit a number of years in the past, and now I eagerly hunt down all of the queer books I can from 40, 50, 60, 100 years in the past. It’s led me to a few of my favourite novels ever (I’m you, Alexis). Love, Leda is one other one. This “forgotten” novel was written by queer poet Mark Hyatt within the Nineteen Sixties. Most of Hyatt’s work was printed posthumously within the late Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, however this manuscript was not found till the 2020s. The guide features a unbelievable intro by Huw Lemmy, and a considerate afterward by Luke Roberts, who edited the manuscript, which supplies extra context about Hyatt’s life and the guide itself.
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Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt
This vibrant, humorous, poignant romp of a novel follows 20-year-old Leda, a working-class homosexual man, as he wanders London over the course of every week or so. He bounces round from job to job, membership to membership, man to man. He’s wildly alive and unrepentant about it — flirty and flippant one second, weighed down by loneliness and cynicism the following. The novel, like Leda, refuses to stick to any anticipated narrative. Leda is just not consumed by disgrace over being homosexual, however he’s not precisely blissful, both. He’s younger, alone, indignant, carefree, damage, irresponsible, struggling, exhausted, contemplative.
I liked this guide for for the best way it so fantastically illuminates each the fabric world (streets, cash, cups of espresso, the subway) and Leda’s interior world. However it’s additionally an unimaginable — and heartbreaking — piece of queer historical past. It made me suppose loads about what will get printed and what will get misplaced. It incorporates a number of graphic intercourse scenes, and it’s additionally decidedly working-class. It’s nothing in any respect like The Charioteer, printed within the UK in 1953, which I additionally liked. The Charioteer is undeniably homosexual, but it surely’s additionally undeniably higher class. It’s a novel constructed of silences, subtext, euphemisms.
Love, Leda, in distinction, is refreshing in its bluntness, in Leda’s refusal to cover from himself, even when it will be simpler or much less painful. I felt a little bit bit bereft, studying it, questioning what number of different novels like this have been written and misplaced, as a result of they — and their authors — didn’t conform to some normal of “acceptable.” I’m so glad this guide has lastly been printed, and, on the identical time, its publication appears like a portal right into a thousand invisible archives I’ll by no means see.
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I additionally had the sensation, studying it, that I felt studying Lou Sullivan’s diaries: what a present, and the way desperately I’d somewhat the creator of the present was nonetheless right here as an alternative, that the present needn’t have been given this manner.
