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Love, Leda

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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.

To come across such a lucid, compelling and tragic time capsule of working class gay life, so well preserved and perfunctoral of modern times, is really quite a marvel. No-one, I think, will read this and believe that it’s a lost literary masterpiece but what is certainly indisputable is that it captures an important social moment and provides a frank and unflinching portrait of gay life in the years immediately before partial legalisation. The novel is written as a first-person narrative, told through the eyes of the titular Leda; a gay, working-class man living in London. Large men are described as 'heavy with living' and elderly bohemians as 'having too many lines on their face to still be alive. Predating the decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967 and never before published, Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt is a lost gem of urban gay literature.First of all, I think the significance of this book as a piece of unarchived queer fiction can't be underplayed. Copies of Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt are exclusively available at Foyles for the first five weeks of the exhibition. The antidote to Leda’s dreary, sometimes chilling travels, which all seem to be directed at running into his unrequited love, is Hyatt’s sobering sense of reality: while it is not a feel-good story, it is a frank, if somewhat stark, exploration of the prejudices and challenges faced by gay men in the 60s and how, even in the midst of that, there are covert delights as Leda moves through London with the deft movements of a secret agent, undercover but in plain sight.

Along the way, he spends some comfortable nights at the home of his friend, Thomas, whose flat he enters through an open window and whose clothes he shares liberally, who gives him money and remonstrates with him on his lifestyle choices, effectively acting as the moral conscience of the times. 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. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession – one which sends him spiralling into self-destruction.The novel takes place over several consecutive days and nights, blurring the lines between each day. It’s own uniqueness is of interest itself, but also refreshing as it unfolds queer identity within a wider narrative of being lost in your twenties in a city. Leda’s sexual encounters tend to be triggered by a wink in a bar, a not-so-casual glance in a public lavatory.

But I can imagine the narrative would receive a complete overhaul in a contemporary creative writing class because it's quite chaotic. Bouncing from job to job, from coffee bar to house party, he spends his days watching the hours pass and waiting for the night to arrive.He picks his way back towards the jukebox, stands looking at it, as though it held the interest of a book. His selected poems, S o Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). The narrative veers from moments of raw emotional confession “Sometimes I find that I am humiliated by myself, and my thoughts get out of hand, becoming absolutely evil, and immediately I am nothing” to frivolous fantasies “during the long time of waiting for the train I appoint myself as Jesse James in full drag waiting for this very train and about to steal all the cash belonging to the G. Love, Leda’ follows our misanthropic eponymous lead skirt the streets of Soho, borrowing money off friends, random hookups and traipsing around London with no purpose or goal. An unearthed treasure of its time, Mark Hyatt’s compelling and emotive novel Love, Leda recounts a whirlwind of intimacies and embodiment, philosophy and humour, in a daring depiction of queer desire, impulse and need, laced through a context of disconnection.

Thus, as a chronicle of what life was like in bohemian '60's Soho London, and its glimpse into the life of an unapologetic and unashamed bisexual, lends it far greater significance than it might otherwise merit on purely literary grounds.

He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites. year-old Leda – it’s the only name we know him by – is a social and sexual vagabond who begs and blags his way from day to day, living off friends, doing the very occasional casual job and drifting into bars and clubs. The brilliant lights down here are not wanted and the big butterflies painted bright yellow are a little out of place, a poor idea of getting back to nature. Phrases like ‘Work is all grief and semi-sweat’ and ‘I tremble and moan, then eat myself away, while the shell of my body is laughing’ lodge themselves in consciousness as the entire point of the novel. It’s thanks to his remarkable frankness that Love, Leda remains fresh, tender, even erotic, some 60 years after it was written.

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