James Baldwin, by Christopher Bryant.

To celebrate LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari is publishing a daily series of LGBT Heroes, selected by the magazine’s team of writers and special contributors.

“Baldwin argued that representations of homosexuality in the contemporary novel were not about love but the fear of sex between me: ‘A novel instantly demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labelled’.”

[rating=4]
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.