Naked Civil Servant: Queer Sex, Catholicism and Conformism in the Post-War London Diaries of George Lucas

Abstract The minutely documented diaries of an ‘everyman’ such as George Lucas enable us to view the complex pleasures and challenging realities of the post-war 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 idolization 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, helping us to view other such unglamorous queer lives with greater empathy.