Keele Research Repository

The minutely documented diaries of an ‘everyman’ such as George Lucas enable us to view the complex pleasures and challenging realities of the postwar queer quotidian in remarkable detail. A sample of the years after 1957, when Lucas was aged in his thirties, suggests that more attention needs to be paid to age-differential relationships and to the problematic aspects of the sexual idolisation of young men. Lucas’s respectably boring career and Catholic faith can, however, be understood as having provided the stability on which his emotional survival depended. Other such unglamorous queer lives can now be viewed with greater empathy.