Joe Orton was thirty-four, one of the most celebrated comic playwrights in Britain, and making regular trips from his Islington flat to the public toilet under the railway bridge at Holloway Road. Cottaging in London’s public lavatories was not unusual behaviour for a gay man in 1967, but writing it all down was. His diaries, published in 1986, remain one of the most candid account of gay urban life in 1960s London: the social geography of a city that criminalised homosexuality until July...
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