The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life (Hardback) - Hugo Greenhalgh

An utterly unforgettable account of lost gay history based on a set of real diaries, presented by the highly acclaimed journalist Hugo Greenhalgh

'A kaleidoscopic portrait of post-war queer life' Guardian
'Fascinating' The Times
'Absorbing, illuminating, highly entertaining and often very funny' Spectator
'Fabulous' Chris Bryant

FOR NEARLY 60 YEARS Mr George Lucas led a double life. A mild-mannered civil servant by day, by night he was a fixture of London's colourful underground gay scene - a twilight world of petty crime, louche pubs and public toilets. He was also an obsessive diary writer.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr Lucas had a passionate and fraught affair with a rent boy associate of the Kray twins known as Irish Peter, one of many men Mr Lucas paid for sex. Together, Irish Peter and Mr Lucas represent the spectrum of gay criminality prior to the partial decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967.

When Mr Lucas died in 2014, he left his diaries to the journalist Hugo Greenhalgh. The Diaries of Mr Lucas combines Mr Lucas's deliciously indiscreet recollections of a life spent sometimes literally in the shadows with Greenhalgh's commentary - this is gay London like it's never been seen before.

About the Author

Hugo Greenhalgh has been a journalist for more than thirty years. Now a full-time writer, he is the former LGBTQ+ editor of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Before that he worked at the Financial Times. In 2024, he was named an LGBTQ+ trailblazer on the Attitude 101 list. Previously he has been nominated for the European Press Prize, Amnesty International's Media Awards and the GLAAD Media Awards. He is also a former activist. Aged 19, he took the British Government to the European Court of Human Rights over the gay male age of consent in the UK.