Love, Leda

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Leda, like Hyatt, one supposes, lurches from one small pleasure to another without really finding joy in anything – sex is fraught with danger, love is utter disappointment and friendship has a cost of its own. It was an attempt to unstuff the class-bound, moralising culture that had choked British life since the Victorian era, and free people to think, and act, for themselves. 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. That means that with every subscription, we are supporting people in poverty to get back on their own two feet. It could be the zoo or the people, but I’ve never given thought to the matter and I never found pleasure in a zoo in my life.

My own experience,” Leda muses “tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice. The story ends with a dismal trip to the seaside which ultimately confirms Leda’s worst fears about the emptiness of all life.Daniel haunts Leda everywhere he goes, like the spectral threat of harm that followed men like Hyatt everywhere.

His childhood was unhappy and in adulthood he attempted suicide more than once, and was very likely was subjected to ECT.

In the end, Love, Leda is a poet’s novel with its far-flung lyricism and its surprises of precision and revelation. I am without an address so I sit on the floor out of sheer tiredness and join them (the learned ones). I can see my white socks, just below grubby knees, with their rhythmic pattern of holes ascending like the bubbles in lemonade. A must read for anyone with an interest in queer British literature as it offers a near new opinion on an important period in queer history.

At this moment I can hardly understand myself, for I am stimulated by my own emptiness and have no idea how to develop the self in me. 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.He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites. A frank, intimate portrait of a young working-class homosexual struggling to find meaning, work or just a good fuck in London, living between friends’ sofas and dingy bedsits, Love, Leda is a book without contemporaries. This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

One of the commentators in the exhibition suggests that had the novel been published in the author’s lifetime, it could have been remembered as one of the great working-class literature of the time.His selected poems, So Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). He also recounts his obsessive unrequited 'love' for a married straight (and religious) man, whose only interest in the titular pseudonymous Leda is to convert him to Christianity. Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound – a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines. This leaves him adrift and while he certainly possesses a melancholy streak, he also emits catty asides and biting humour along his journey. redis