Customer Reviews
Excellent and highly readable - By: K. Booth, 04 Mar 2007 
This is a thoroughly well researched academic book but you immediately notice how easy it is to read with a perfect balance between precise analysis & accessibility. The book uses numerous personal stories & examples to illustrate the various points & really draws you into the complex lives that were necessary for its subjects & the shadowy world they were forced to inhabit. This book will interest anyone who has even a passing interestin the subject & is well worth reading. It even looks good on your coffee table.
Interesting account of a previous time, but not a light read - By: Phil Clark, 08 Feb 2006 
If you're a gay man livingin Londonin 2006, & you're regularly out on the scene, you have lots of gay friends, you perhaps go on gay holidays, you shop at gay stores, & are out at work, & you are generally proud of yourself ... but you sometimes wonder what life might have been like for your equivalents fifty years ago... then this book might shed some light on that question. Read it & realise how far we have comein that time. Here is a description of the entirely underground, secretive world with which you would have had to engage should you just have wanted to have a drink with like-minded soulsin Londonin the first half of the 20th century. Don't let anyone tell you "things were betterin the old days" because here is definite evidence to the contrary - things were quite obviously very bad indeed at that time for London's gay men, & presumably worsein the provinces.
Don't expect amusing anecdotes though - the tone of the book is somewhat dry, & there are very few illustrations, but this is not meant to be light-hearted reading by any means - more a valid document of a difficult subject.
