A Memoir: Historian and Homosexual: Search for a Postwar Identity: Edited Diaries and Journals

Description

This is a memoir of adolescence and the search for identity. The 1950s with the Cold War, National Service and the persecution of gays was an awkward decade in which to discover life’s purposes. If the author’s education pointed to his becoming an academic historian, an early modernist at school, a medievalist as an undergraduate, a modern Europeanist as a graduate, he was drawn to the alternatives of poet, monk and psychotherapist. It was a peculiarly troubling time in which to resolve a crisis of sexuality and accept a gay identity. He had to cope with his parents’ divorce. At Oxford, after falling foul of the law, he spent time as a mental patient. National Service in the Navy, commissioned as a Midshipman, with its exposure to the Cyprus Emergency and Suez, took him into an entirely different world.