![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Nov. 8th, 2012
book finds
Nov. 8th, 2012 10:51 pmI'm half-convinced that certain bookstores are magic: you find in them amazing books that you didn't know you wanted. I've had very good luck with this at Page One Books in Albuquerque (should any of you ever be passing through Albuquerque for some reason). Some months ago I found St. Nazaire Commando, by Stuart Chant-Sempill, an account of his participation in the famous raid and his subsequent time as a POW. (Possibly the best thing, though, is that when googling to find about more about its author, I discovered the story of his brother-in-law Sir Ewan Forbes, 11th Baronet of Craigievar. Female assigned as birth and christened Elizabeth, Sir Ewan became a doctor, began living as a man in 1945, re-registered his birth certificate as male in 1952 [!!!], married a woman the same year, and in 1968 successfully inherited the baronetcy, which legally was restricted to male heirs, despite a legal challenge claiming he was a woman. What I've been able to find out suggests that he may have had an intersex condition that made his legal case a bit easier to argue; nevertheless, I boggle at both his courage and his success.)
Anyway, on yesterday's trip to said bookstore I found a 1959 American edition of Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law. Wildeblood, along with Michael Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, was in a famous 1954 case convicted of homosexual offenses (committed in private with his lover); he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Unlike the other two men, Wildeblood, while denying the specific charges against him, admitted his homosexuality from the witness box and reitered it in Against the Law, which he wrote soon after getting out of prison. Wildeblood later testified before the Wolfenden Committee, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain.
Against the Law is, as you can imagine, ( a very moving book )
Anyway, on yesterday's trip to said bookstore I found a 1959 American edition of Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law. Wildeblood, along with Michael Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, was in a famous 1954 case convicted of homosexual offenses (committed in private with his lover); he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Unlike the other two men, Wildeblood, while denying the specific charges against him, admitted his homosexuality from the witness box and reitered it in Against the Law, which he wrote soon after getting out of prison. Wildeblood later testified before the Wolfenden Committee, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain.
Against the Law is, as you can imagine, ( a very moving book )