As Gay Life Stories makes its way from ‘Ancient Ancestors’ (such as David and Jonathan, Sappho) to the near present (Harvey Milk and others), the reader with less specific investment in the subject may feel that there is both too much and not enough. Each chapter gets about four pages, and it can seem a bit like reading one’s way through a book of entries from the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ‘stories’ follow a pattern, almost to the point of monotony, as the author traces each subject’s family background, acceptance of his/her sexuality, finding of outlets or partners, contribution to fields of activity, oppositions overcome, and so on.

The names may all be known to the cognoscenti. For the rest of us, the usual suspects are rounded up – Oscar Wilde, T.E. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, etc. – but many others will be largely unknown. As to the known, the brief ‘lives’ allotted them add little to public knowledge. Perhaps if Aldrich had spread his net less widely, he might have dealt with his catch in more rewarding detail. It may be that there is nothing new to be said about Wilde, for instance, but, if so, there may not be much point in including him here.

On the basis of what is there, the scope is pretty remarkable. There is a preponderance of European names, but Aldrich also draws on Asian and African exemplars – and a couple of Americans (Walt Whitman, Milk). There are plenty of cross-continental liaisons, Aldrich stressing the exotic element of Western gay attraction to the youth of other races and nations. Naturally, Lawrence of Arabia comes to the fore in this connection, as does Donald Friend, his paedophiliac tendencies tastefully suppressed.

But the book’s scope is not merely geographical. Aldrich instances cross-class partnerships, such as those of author E.M. Forster and his policeman, Bob Buckingham; there is a range of long-standing unions, such as that of novelist Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Valentine Ackland; and any number of other variants include the promiscuous pursuit of sexual gratification (surely not limited to the gay community), ‘virile comradeship’, and spiritual as distinct from carnal friendships.

The range of occupations represented, again reflecting the larger community, embraces Cardinal Newman and the criminal Ronnie Kray at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. Again, though, there are almost too many, and perhaps not enough about any particular one. About either Newman or Kray, for instance, there must be an ampler story to be told, which would contextualise them in time and place, with space for more vivid placing detail.

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait (Face and Mirror), c. 19 

However, if the book reads at times like a directory of famous and less-famous gay lives, it still achieves a unifying effect that derives from the themes that recur over centuries and continents. One of the most striking is the sense of the risks taken in times and communities in which homosexuality was not tolerated, or was in fact illegal. It is impossible not to admire the courage and ingenuity displayed by individuals determined to live their lives according to their natures.

In this matter of risk, perhaps the most striking example is that of gay people acting on their desires under the Nazi régime before and during World War II. Richard Schultz, discreetly supportive of homosexual emancipation, lost his partner in 1944, and took further chances in hiding Jews in his lodgings in the war’s last months. Every movement for such couples was fraught with danger in the climate of Nazi Germany, but, lest we lull ourselves into thinking, well, that was Germany under Hitler, Aldrich also adduces cases of intolerance in the land of the free, the United States of America, under the threat of Senator McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities trials, for example. In relating the story of two journalists, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, living together in 1955, Aldrich reminds us that ‘In the United States of the 1950s – the time of the Cold War, Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts against subversives and the conformism of the Eisenhower presidency – such concerns as Martin and Lyon raised were new and challenging.’ Another instance of intolerance in the United States is the threatening telephone call to author Carson McCullers from a Ku Klux Klansman, warning her that, in the South at least, ‘We don’t like nigger lovers or fairies.’

The motif that often emerges from such examples is that of the ongoing entanglement of sexual mores and political climate – not just in periods of unusually tumultuous events, but more generally in the recurrent exploitation by Western colonialist enterprise in Asia and Africa. The responsibility for theseduction of young people in those continents by sexual predators of whatever persuasion is a theme that peppers these pages, and Aldrich may let Westerners off rather lightly in this matter, even allowing for the legitimately mutual, fruitful friendships and liaisons that sometimes ensued.

This kind of inequity, between representatives of colonial powers and the youth of the countries in which they lived, is but one to which Aldrich draws attention. There are plenty of instances of older men seeking out much younger partners, often attracted by the ‘exoticism’ of the East; of educated middle and upper classes looking for sexual fulfilment among working men (the lesbian relationships, as presented here, tend towards less imbalance in these matters); and of master–student couplings in which the whiff of paedophilia is not far away.

The book’s strength lies in how it situates its ‘lives’ in a range of contexts, most importantly the historical, which enable the reader to place the individuals or partnerships in the wider world. Religion, the arts (exemplars ranging from Michelangelo to Yves Saint Laurent), politics of course (from Frederick the Great through Nazism to late-twentieth century activism), and the armed services: these are some of the contexts that the author canvasses in putting the personal histories before us.

Despite a feeling of too much in too small a space, I would commend the book for its quietly eloquent style, devoid of sensationalism or proselytising. There is a large bibliography but no footnotes, which suggests that the author is aiming at a general rather than an academic readership, and the publishers have done him proud with a profusely illustrated volume that looks so elegant.