Which of us two?: The story of a love affair

by Colin Spencer

John Tasker and Colin Spencer met in 1957. The two young men, both in their early twenties, both uncertainly poised at the beginning of a career in the world of the arts, had much in common. Yet threatening tensions started to show themselves almost immediately. John was desperate to avoid National Service. Colin, though unwilling to admit or even fully realise it, was fast putting down roots within London's cultural life, where his stories were being published, his drawings sold, and where he was laying the foundations of many friendships. So began a conflict which was to pull them back and forth over the next two years, until John finally boarded ship for Australia and what turned out to be a permanent separation. "Which Of Us Two?" is a collection of the letters the lovers wrote to each other - Colin's were returned to him after John's death - linked by the author's memories of the time, and his attempts, often painfully honest, to make sense with the benefit of hindsight of what was going on between them, and why he let go of such a rare, once-in-a-lifetime relationship.

Genres: Gay

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Author biography:

Colin Spencer was born in London in 1933 and attended Brighton Grammar School and Brighton Art College. From an early age, he was interested in both art and writing and had his first stories published in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22.

Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), and Panic (1971), books that one critic has said ‘revel in the eccentric, the bizarre, and the grotesque’.

A man of many talents, Spencer is also a prolific author of non-fiction books, including gay-interest titles like Homosexuality: A History (1995) and The Gay Kama Sutra (1997) and acclaimed works on food and cooking which led Germaine Greer to call him ‘the greatest living food writer’.

More recently, Spencer has devoted himself to painting and to writing a trilogy of autobiographical works, the first of which, the memoir Backing into Light: My Father’s Son, was published by Quartet in 2013. He lives in East Sussex.

Reviews

[PlusFour · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of letters between Colin Spencer and his sometime boyfriend, with commentary by Colin Spencer. The book is let down by poor formatting and execution: it needed much better editing, and more thoughtful arrangement. Because of the way everything is presented it eventually it became difficult to maintain interest, which is a shame because it's an important record of gay life in the 1950s. Spencer's opinions on sexuality and gender and identity are outdated too.