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The decadent interwar lives of this group of privileged gay and bisexual men promotes mixed feelings – their lives are in certain ways constrained but their money (or that of their friends) allows them to spend time in the relative freedom of Berlin and to keep scandal at bay in ways that their working class contemporaries simply could not.
But Chris Bryant shows how their marginal status, albeit within “the Establishment”, and their first hand experiences of the rise of the Nazis placed them in a position to stand up and push for Great Britain to defend freedoms when so many around them seemed blind to the threat. It is sickening how compromised and complicit large sections of the British ruling elite were with the Nazis, even well into the War itself.
Some of them saw active service, and for some it seems there was a desire, alongside the needs of the Country, to take the opportunity to claim the “manly” identity of solider in contrast to the stigma of being “effeminate” which was at this point interchangeable with being gay.
As the narrative unfolds, Bryant keeps us engaged and one has ever increasing respect for those would put doing the right thing ahead of reputation or personal safety. It runs in a strong contrast to much of what we see from our politicians today...
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