Gay Men in Postwar London

Event information

TICKETS AVAILABLE ON THE DOOR: Bookings can be made until midnight on the night before the event. Even when our online tickets are sold out or have been taken off sale, a limited number of seated and standing tickets will be available on the door. £10 sitting/£5 standing. Payment by cash or QR code only.


“Peter Parker has created a nonfiction collage of gay life in the postwar years, when gay men lived under the threat of bashing, blackmail or police entrapment. John Gielgud was in 1953 fined for “persistently importuning male persons for immoral purposes”. But Parker ensures there is plenty of light as well as dark. He quotes Noël Coward's quip on seeing a cinema poster advertising Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them. 'Why not? Everyone else has.'  ” (The Sunday Times, “50 Best Summer Books”, 2024)

“Quite simply, this book [Peter Parker’s Some Men in London] is a work of genius” (Matthew Parris, The Spectator)


Guest speakers:

Peter Parker is the author of much-praised biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. His other books include The Old Lie, The Last Veteran, Housman Country and A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners. In parallel to his own writing, he edited A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel and Twentieth-Century Writers, and serves as advisory editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Travis Elborough has been described by The Guardian  as “one of the country’s finest pop culture historians.” He's the author of many books, including Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, and The Atlas of Vanishing Places, which won the Edward Stanford Travel Book Award in 2020.