Love, Leda’ follows our misanthropic eponymous lead skirt the streets of Soho, borrowing money off friends, random hookups and traipsing around London with no purpose or goal. There is no direction to Leda’s life beyond the immediate gratification and he’s savvy enough to understand that for himself. In another, he derives an unconcealed pleasure from the pain he causes, even with Vaseline, after which he apologies to the man, a stranger after all, without much gusto. He even emanates a pissy arrogance when walking down the street and when someone bumps into him he indignantly muses “Why don't people look where I'm going?

A lot of the narrative is taken up by long passages where Leda merely pontificates on the meaning of life, coming out with quasi-philosophical lines such as ‘It’s hard for me to believe that I exist and at the same time to accept my delusions’.He tries to find affection among the lonely, sexually frustrated middle-aged men and women who would swap care for the sight and touch of his young body.

This novel is a record of the queer bohemian, underground world at the time in which Hyatt was writing in, and which Hyatt himself circulated in and out of. To me, people spend their whole lives walking around in circles, and when they stop, they talk of the things they would have done had they not done the thing they have done all their lives. Usually a frequenter of the hip coffee bar scene of that era, here Leda takes him to a Lyon’s Corner House and propositions him over a cup of appropriately bittersweet coffee. In another section he reflects how “My own experience tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice.Predating the decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967 and never before published, Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt is a lost gem of urban gay literature. This frankness makes Love, Leda a singular work; a contemporary portrait of working-class gay London in the years running up to decriminalisation that neither flatters nor sensationalises. Its protagonist Leda is regularly amusing and razor sharp, but not necessarily always likeable - he is at times rude and arrogant, living with no fixed address and floating between benefactors.