PRIDE 2024: Some Men in London: Peter Parker and Martin Moriarty

In the 1940s, it was believed that homosexuality had been becoming more widespread in the aftermath of war. A moral panic ensued, centred around London as the place to which gay men gravitated.

In a major new anthology, Peter Parker explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they were well-known figures such as John Gielgud, ‘Chips’ Channon and E.M. Forster, or living lives of quiet – or occasionally rowdy – anonymity in pubs, clubs, more public places of assignation, or at home. It is rich with letters, diaries, psychological textbooks, novels, films, plays and police records, covering a wide range of viewpoints, from those who deplored homosexuality to those who campaigned for its decriminalisation.

This first volume, from 1945 to 1959, details a community forced to live at constant risk of blackmail or Pr*son. Yet it also shows a thriving and joyous subculture, one that enriched a mainstream culture often ignorant of its debt to gay creators. Some Men In London is a testament to queer life, which was always much more complex than newspapers, governments and the Metropolitan Police Force imagined.

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.

Martin Moriarty is a Hackney-based writer-performer whose work combines personal biography, community history and queer archive to challenge contemporary capitalist culture.

His solo show, Virginia Woolf’s Dog Training Academy, which premiered at Camden People’s Theatre in January, celebrates the life of his Collie-Lab cross Lucky (RIP) through a series of lessons in the art of disobedience from dog-loving queer writers of the 20th century.

He is currently developing a new show in which queer Irish rebel Roger Casement (executed by the British for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising) returns from the dead to help liberate us all from the burden of our histories.

The event will be held in the shop’s basement, which sadly due to the architectural limitations of the building is without wheelchair access. The space is accessed via stairs with a handrail on the left side.

A gender neutral toilet is available on the shop’s ground floor, which is upstairs from the event space.

To ensure there is space for you at the event, we strongly recommend booking tickets in advance via Eventbrite. All ticket types offer general admission and unreserved seating.

Solidarity: Paying a little extra helps to fund our concessionary tickets (£8)

Standard: Our standard ticket rate (£6)

Concession: For those on a low income (£4)

Host or Publisher Pages of Hackney