Out of print and out of fashion but glorious in his own way!

[Damian]

So often LGBT writers are erased or forgotten. Let me start by recommending we look again at Denton Welch. My friend Tiffany Murray recommended him to me and he was edited, briefly, by the brilliant Diana Athill (now 100 and still going strong!). Denton was mischievous and very unashamed--rare in the 1950s England (though he was quite posh and artsy, which never hurts). Here is what Tiffany has to say about him: 'It begins "One summer, several years before the war began, a young boy of fifteen was staying with his father and two elder brothers at a hotel near the Thames in Surrey." This is a threshold time, before the devastation of war, before the devastation of adulthood. Orvil Pym is the boy, a rough-haired strange boy who takes us on a heightened, sensual journey. There is little plot, simply an artful third person that allows Orvil a direct line, and makes the ordinary astonishing. For Orvil, Peach Melba - the tinned variety- is "like a celluloid cupid doll's behind" and the "diminutive tombstones" of a pet cemetery are like "a giant's dominoes."'

Much of that book is saucy and explicit even by today's standards. It's dated but something about it still speaks loudly. Seek him out and see what you think!