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Olly Alexander and Lydia West in the TV series It’s a Sin. Photograph: Ross Ferguson/Channel 4
Olly Alexander and Lydia West in the TV series It’s a Sin. Photograph: Ross Ferguson/Channel 4

Loved It's a Sin? The best books on LGBT+ history

This article is more than 3 years old

From spellbinding love stories to a memoir that shook the British establishment, Michael Cashman shares his favourites, touching on persecution, freedom and friendship

Russell T Davies’s brilliant TV series It’s a Sin has ensured that right on time for LGBT+ history month comes a story of the HIV/Aids pandemic. It is a powerful reminder of hope, loss, abandonment and callous opportunism by the anti-LGBT brigade – including politicians and the media – and of misrepresentation on a gargantuan scale. It also shows how a community fought back against deniers as well as those in power.

But this is not history for those of us who lived through it. I still see the faces of the friends who died, and vividly remember Ian Charleson’s last heroic performance as Hamlet in the final weeks of his life. I still feel the support and love that were shared. Eighteen months before the pandemic I’d been in New York, a centre of the HIV virus, so for a while I waited and observed to see whether I was infected; but I had been lucky.

So, my reading list is dominated by love, loss, diversity and friendship – but above all, by themes of identity. The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara reminds me of that trip to New York; a place of hope and refuge, where everything was possible as long as you had the rent for the landlord and the wit to survive. And how these boys – some transitioning – survive; the love, camaraderie and support is both uplifting and heartbreaking. Heartbreak – yes, I’m a romantic – is also what we get from Tomasz Jedrowski’s exquisite debut novel, Swimming in the Dark. Set in 1980s Poland, this love story captivates and is so beautifully written I return to it again and again.

My obsession with connecting with the rights and the plights of others is reflected in the family memoir East West Street. Written by the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, it takes us back via the Nuremberg trials to Nazi Europe, as he seeks to understand what his relatives went though, uncovering heroism, sacrifices and the terrifyingly ordinary overture to genocide.

From left, Michael Pitt Rivers, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Peter Wildeblood leave court after being found guilty of gross indecency, London, 1954. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Against the Law is Peter Wildeblood’s account of events leading to the 1954 trial in which he was open about his homosexuality and convicted on charges relating to gross indecency between males. I grew up in the 1950s and knew I was “queer” but quickly realised that I had to hide it or face punishment. The scandal shook the establishment and shaped the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, though the arrests would continue.

Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End is a spellbinding tale that warmed, intrigued and moved me – the story of men who dare to love and grow together in a harsh and unforgiving world. To live out one’s true identity strikes at the core of equality and what makes us human. None of us can live on equal terms until we have this freedom and that is clearly seen in Three Women by Lisa Taddeo and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

Finally, I’m alternating between the sad, heroic and emotional: All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks and Matthew Lopez’s breathtaking playscript The Inheritance. Both examine Aids and HIV in the US, highlighting the people at the centre of the crisis who saw such unfathomable cruelty, stigma and discrimination. Coker Burks witnessed the inhumanity first-hand and took action. As in Lopez’s masterly work, we see what happens when we stand in the shoes of the other, when we connect and reach out, making the world better for others and ultimately better for us all.

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