Gay Life, Straight Work

Donald West, psychiatrist and criminologist, published a book arguing for tolerance at a time when gays in the UK were social pariahs and legally criminals. Now, over fifty years later, he can write openly as a gay man describing his simultaneous pursuit of a secret, fraught love-life and a precarious professional career. In investigations of the paranormal, researches into the roots of delinquency, studies of sexual crime and of society’s response to sexual abuse, he advances some unpopular ideas. Although influenced by his life among a sexual minority, he tries to reach his objective, evidence-based conclusions. His stories of forced secrecy and threatened exposure reflect difficulties of the past that have not completely disappeared in supposedly more enlightened times.