Survivors and Thrivers

Sitting down in a series of interviews with 27 men aged between 74 and 95, David Gould discovered lives - now rapidly being lost to history - that were lived under the shadow of homophobic prejudice. Their stories reveal how these men made sense of their lives and desires, how they responded to social expectations around family and marriage, and found sex at a time when it was proscribed by law, condemned by society, and luridly sensationalised by the media. Many of them suffered terribly, but what also emerged are stories of resilience, sometimes joy, and the foundations of our contemporary communities.