One can only wonder what effect Mark Hyatt’s only known novel, Love, Leda, would have had on British culture had it found a publisher and reached bookshop shelves when it was written, in the middle of the 1960s. 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. It might well have been explosive and remembered as one of the great works of working-class literature of the time alongside works by authors and playwrights such as Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney or Bill Naughton. But instead it is passed down to us as an orphan, a great lost work, a time capsule.
In grand historical terms, the 1960s were a great turning point for British society. Between 1964 and 1970 a Labour government undertook sweeping reforms to domestic social legislation, transforming the face of the country in an attempt to produce, in the words of the reforming home secretary Roy Jenkins, “a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society”. New acts of parliament changed the laws on divorce and abortion, and made contraception available on the NHS; attempts were made to address racism and discrimination through a series of race relations acts; capital and corporal punishment were abolished, and strict censorship laws were chipped away at or overturned. Love, Leda was written in that strange thawing of the sexual permafrost that came between the 1957 Wolfenden report, with its recommendation to partially decriminalise sex between men, and its implementation in the Sexual Offences Act some 10 years later.
