Mark Hyatt was a working-class gay poet who received no formal education and attained literacy only in adulthood, and Love, Leda, written in the years preceding the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, is his only novel.

While money plays a major role in the novel (Leda is forever sponging off his friends), the idea of the 9 to 5 grind horrifies him. It’s a diaristic account of a queer working-class drifter who journeys through Soho, sofa-surfing, cruising and getting a bit of work here and there.

The story ends with a dismal trip to the seaside which ultimately confirms Leda’s worst fears about the emptiness of all life. 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. 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”.

Hyatt’s detached style of short sentences and brisk descriptions is sometimes brutal, always unflinching in its honesty and eagerness to drive home the point without doubt.The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission.

I hand him a ten-shilling note, he knocks and the door opens, but it’s on a chain and one can see a man, two inches wide and five feet tall. Set most likely in late 50s or early 60s London, Love Leda inhabits a vivid whirlwind of emotion, place and personality that, given a strong biographical overlap, surely works from a core of personal experience of some kind or another. The display is a series of extracts from the novel, taking in cruising on Dean Street, taking coffee at Lyons, dropping by jazz clubs off Tottenham Court Road, offering a portrait of Leda’s gay working-class Romany life in a Soho of the 1950s and 60s. Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound – a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines.

I am a ghost, drifting around people, looking at their bodies and watching them in their religious acts. Ron is dancing with another young boy who has hair down to his shoulders, swept back from his face like a beautiful Comanche. Having moved to Lancashire with his then boyfriend, Atom, in the mid- to late 60s, he continued writing without much success and eventually killed himself just outside Blackburn in 1972, after the end of his relationship led to a prolonged period of crisis. Had it been longer than its 163 pages, this would have become tedious, and towards the end I was indeed losing both patience and interest - but for the short amount of time it took to read, I am glad I took the journey.

Near the beginning of the book, Leda seemed to me an arrogant little sod who I struggled to understand.Hyatt, era um poeta e prosista de excelente qualidade estética e sua figura era já conhecida em seu período de vida nos circuitos undergrounds e boêmios britânicos dos anos 60 e início dos anos 70; um sujeito talentoso e autodidata que foi muito influenciado positivamente pelas transformações socioculturais e comportamentais dos anos 60. That this book—an unflinching portrait of working-class precarity and queer estrangement, desire, and loneliness—was only published in January this year, 50-odd years after the author's tragic death by suicide, is a testament to the many buried registers of gay life that remain unarchived, unacknowledged, and obscured to this day. The prose itself is erratic and neurotic, like Leda himself; it can sometimes read a bit like “I went here…I went there…I did this…I did that…I thought about God for a bit”, but there are some magnificent lines and it’s an interesting slice of pre-1967 Sexual Offences Act life on the fringes. Liked lots about this, but was very frustrated about the way the middle aged woman's body was described in such a derogative tone and it felt like the male characters had more space for variations within their gender bracket than the female ones.