The Light of Day

 I was going to go to the Hay Music concert at the Castle - until I bumped into Tom from Gay-on-Wye, who reminded me that they were also having an event that evening.  

I felt a bit guilty about stopping him to talk, because he was carrying two heavy boxes, and he dropped one of them and broke two bottles of wine that were intended for the evening's event!

Dale, from Clocktower Books, was interviewing the authors of a new book called The Light of Day, which is a biography/memoir of a man called Roger Butler.  In the early days of campaigning for the legalisation of homosexuality, Roger was an ordinary man who took an extraordinary step.  He sent a letter, with two other men, to the papers, signed with his own name, while homosexuality was illegal.  They were risking prison.

It was important that he was an ordinary man - an estate agent from Lewisham - rather than a celebrity, to make the point that gay men were just ordinary people living ordinary lives, and not some weird creatures on the edge of society.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality came in 1967, but by this time Roger had new challenges to face, as he lost his sight.

Much later Christopher Stephens, one of the authors of the book, met Roger - he was one of the students who went to read to him at his home in Oxford.  They became friends, and Roger left his papers to Christopher when he died.  

When Christopher started to go through them to try to make a book out of them, he enlisted the help of Louise Radnofsky, who had also been a student at a different college in Oxford.  

Louise had flown in from Washington DC early that morning and come straight up to Hay with Christopher - she's now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.  Christopher is an academic whose last book was on 4thC church history - so this was a bit of a departure for him.

It was a fascinating evening, and of course I bought the book.