![]() ![]() This was the first that I had read of homosexuals who were real people at a time when I had never knowingly met any gay men. I keep my yellowing disintegrating copy as a talisman. I read it while a sixth former around 1960 and it was a revelation. It was also a key work in my own development. ![]() Although The Charioteer has been criticised by modern gays, it is a pioneering work. Before The Charioteer the only novels dealing head on with homosexuality were The City and the Pillar (1948) by Gore Vidal and works by Isherwood, which covered homosexuality fairly obliquely (in the 1930s). In the McCarthyite US, “perverts” were branded as communists and an executive order from Eisenhower banned gays from federal posts. Nineteen fifty-three was also the year in which John Gielgud was prosecuted for cottaging. It was published between the relaxing attitudes of the early 1940s and the reforming mood of the 1960s in a period of increasing persecution of homosexuals. The Charioteer by Mary Renault, published in 1953, is a gay classic. The Charioteer, by Mary Renault reviewed by Jim Herrick ![]()
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