{"product_id":"the-naked-tuck-shop-growing-up-gay-in-the-1950s-9781782227120","title":"The Naked Tuck Shop - Growing up gay in the 1950s","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Naked Tuck Shop is a unique record of a period long before 'gaiety' was legal in any form in the United Kingdom. This memoir of a 1950s grammar-school boy's navigation through his emerging gayness, lifts the lid on his discovery of a vast clandestine world - that stretched from members of parliament to long distance lorry drivers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA chance meeting with two local artists while 'cottaging' provided the springboard to a Soho \u003cem\u003edemimonde \u003c\/em\u003ethat featured Muriel Belcher's Colony Room and a cast of characters that included Francis Bacon, Angus Wilson and Tom Driberg. While his friendship with Dudley, Bishop of Colchester, led to encounters with dodgy clerics and Margery Allingham, the crime writer queen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe author suggests that the 'cottage', long before later legal venues like gay pubs and discos arrived, was the only game in town for an underage provincial teenager. In a contemporary Britain starved of 'public conveniences' it is easy to forget their ubiquity in those times. The late Victorian 'spend a penny' brigade had decreed the building of these municipal marvels throughout the land, and fortunately for him the local worthy burghers had seen to it that Colchester was well endowed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlongside his early adventures in 'queer society' Tim Hughes remembers with affection a group of talented school friends, and how some of them who were also friends of Dorothy, had their lives cut short by the arrival of the gay plague.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHughes, Tim:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Tim Hughes has had a very motley career. After training at LAMDA he worked as a theatre director\/drama teacher and gay journalist first in the UK and then in the USA. He then retrained and worked as a social worker and counsellor at a New York HIV\/AIDS clinic in the early years of the epidemic before retiring and returning to the UK.","brand":"Paragon Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50478085800210,"sku":"9781782227120","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_12c7cba1-c386-4944-b83c-bdedc74a926a.jpg?v=1730282334","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-naked-tuck-shop-growing-up-gay-in-the-1950s-9781782227120","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}