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"a lost figure of queer British poetry"

Dante Silva: The novel's presentation of sexuality is frank, straightforward. Hyatt has few contemporaries here, and still suggests the sex between men to be a common practice, a social relation as complex as any other.

What is the significance of sex in the narrative?

Luke Roberts: Oh! That's a great question. Sex is how Leda navigates the world, gets from A to B. But it's also how Leda escapes the world, or tries to, moving in the first pages beyond the city's boundaries, and then circling back to chronicle the clubs, coffee houses, laundrettes, parks, even bombsites where sex takes place. This is a London still marked by the war and by the greyness and conformity of the long 1950s. But Leda is trouble! It's as if in that opening on Dean Street in Soho, Hyatt sort of cruises the reader, keeps looking back to see if we're following.

What makes the novel truly queer, I think, is that Leda's sexual identity doesn't really coalesce: it's not a given, but rather, as you suggest, it's a highly mediated social relation. And there's a certain economy to that, also. I love the scene in the sheet-metal workshop, which veers between realist descriptions of labor and these wild readings and misreadings in dialogue with the other workers.

Because Hyatt's literacy was so variable, I think the writing of Love, Leda must have been hard work. This is a story Hyatt really wanted and needed to tell. So there's also a sense that he's going to put it all in, go for broke. And of course, even after the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in 1967, actually representing gay sex was still fraught and subject to censorship. As late as 1976, Gay News would be prosecuted for blasphemy (!) for printing a homoerotic poem about Christ.