A Vibrant 20th Century Queer Read Undiscovered Until Recently
I fell in love with 20th queer century lit a few years ago, and now I eagerly seek out all the queer books I can from 40, 50, 60, 100 years ago. It’s led me to some of my favorite novels ever (I’m looking at you, Alexis). Love, Leda is another one. This “forgotten” novel was written by queer poet Mark Hyatt in the 1960s. Most of Hyatt’s work was published posthumously in the late 1970s and 1980s, but this manuscript was not discovered until the 2020s. The book includes a fantastic intro by Huw Lemmy, and a thoughtful afterward by Luke Roberts, who edited the manuscript, which gives more context about Hyatt’s life and the book itself.
Level up your reading life while you support an independent media resource! Become an All Access member and explore our full library of exclusive bonus content and community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!
Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt
This vibrant, funny, poignant romp of a novel follows 20-year-old Leda, a working-class gay man, as he wanders London over the course of a week or so. He bounces around from job to job, club to club, man to man. He’s wildly alive and unrepentant about it — flirty and flippant one moment, weighed down by loneliness and cynicism the next. The novel, like Leda, refuses to adhere to any expected narrative. Leda is not consumed by shame over being gay, but he’s not exactly happy, either. He is young, alone, angry, carefree, hurt, irresponsible, struggling, exhausted, contemplative.
I loved this book for for the way it so beautifully illuminates both the material world (streets, money, cups of coffee, the subway) and Leda’s inner world. But it’s also an incredible — and heartbreaking — piece of queer history. It made me think a lot about what gets published and what gets lost. It contains several graphic sex scenes, and it’s also decidedly working-class. It’s nothing at all like The Charioteer, published in the UK in 1953, which I also loved. The Charioteer is undeniably gay, but it’s also undeniably upper class. It’s a novel built of silences, subtext, euphemisms.
Love, Leda, in contrast, is refreshing in its bluntness, in Leda’s refusal to hide from himself, even when it would be easier or less painful. I felt a little bit bereft, reading it, wondering how many other novels like this were written and lost, because they — and their authors — did not conform to some standard of “acceptable.” I’m so glad this book has finally been published, and, at the same time, its publication feels like a portal into a thousand invisible archives I’ll never see.
I also had the feeling, reading it, that I felt reading Lou Sullivan’s diaries: what a gift, and how desperately I’d rather the author of the gift was still here instead, that the gift need not have been given this way.
