Customer Reviews

The Leather Boys (Gay Mod. Class. S)

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A lesser known novel on Mod culture, Gillian Freeman's The Leather Boys breaks from the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s in the then taboo homosexual relations between teenaged Dick and married too young to an unfaithful wife Reggie.

Both men are trapped in their situations, Dick with his strangers as parents and ailing grandmother, Reggie with his wife Dot who might or might not be pregnant by someone else. This leads them to lives of crime and the love that, at the time, dared not speak its name. Reggie is beaten to death when Dot tips off the ringleader Les that they were going off on their own to rob a cinema. The criminals are punished and Dick rides off at the end on Reggie's motorcycle. Freeman's work predates Brokeback Mountain by forty odd years and the leather associations of 1970s gay culture by a decade. One half expects Dick to scream, "I can't quit you!" as he rides off at the end.

Apparently, this was made into a film much like Colin MacInnes' more famous Mod work Absolute Beginners.

An ear for cockney is necessary to read it, if that makes sense, and it's a quick read if you can find it, albeit a little passe now, but you see that a lot in the books of the period. Transgressions against society MUST be punished, whether it be this work, MacInnes' work or Burgess' work. Reggie dies as much for robbing the cinema as he does for developing feelings for Dick.

And yes, the double entendre is milked in one scene within the text.

Signed,
epsteinsmutha