In 1994, Hugo Greenhalgh was a researcher on a television documentary about the history of male sex workers and their clients. Dispatched to interview George Leo John Lucas, a 68-year-old retired civil servant, and a loyalty-card-worthy frequenter of London’s bygone “meatracks”, Greenhalgh arrives at a dishevelled Clapham flat that makes Miss Havisham’s Satis House resemble a Barratt show home. The reeking Lucas emerges from the detritus in a torn suit, looking “as if he’d risen from the grave”. What catches the young man’s eye even as he holds his nose is an entire wall of diaries: a volume a year since 1948.
These turn out to comprise an unparalleled document of an ordinary gay man (rather than a Kenneth Williams or a Joe Orton) eking out his life. The Britain he inhabits staggers its way from an easy-come, easy-go tolerance of queerness during the war years, to an ice age of bigotry scarcely tempered by the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales in 1967. Through it all, Lucas calmly goes about his business: working at the Board of Trade by day, out on the gay scene at night, picking up labourers, guardsmen and gangsters – some paid for, others won fair – nursing assorted crushes and grudges, then cataloguing it all once his bed has gone cold.
