ABSTRACT
I was born in 1927 in the village pub at Laneshaw Bridge on the very edge of the wild moorland which is the Brontë country and I spent my childhood and much of my adult life in the small mining and weaving towns of industrial Lancashire. It was in places like these that the pressures for social and legal conformity bore down most heavily on homosexuals. Whereas in the cities it might be possible-perhaps behind the façade of some ‘gentlemen’s club’—for homosexual men to be themselves, the small towns offered no such refuge.
