indie’s Reviews > Against the Law > Status Update

"The reporter always gets the blame, but the real culprits are the proprietors and editors who relentlessly pursue the trivial and the sordid, while protesting that they are shocked by what they have to print."

"Fortunately for them, most of the reporters I knew were not frustrated writers swimming against the tide; they were workmen who happened to use words instead of nuts and bolts or bricks."

"It was a strange land in which to begin one’s adult life; a vast, hot and ugly country which seemed to tolerate its inhabitants, black and white, merely as an elephant tolerates flies."

"There were plenty of boys who fitted the description. I used to watch them rowing on the river, handsome, muscular and slightly dim, as unapproachable as gods. I would run to hold their boats as they embarked, hoping that one of them would speak to me. But it was quite impossible."

"Everywhere he goes, he sees other men like himself, forbidden by the law to give any physical expression to their desires. It is not surprising that he should seek a partner among them, so that together they may build a shelter against the hostile world."

"If it was possible for me to become like them I should do so; and nothing would be easier for me than to assume a superficial normality, get married and perhaps have a family. This would, however, be at best dishonest, because I should be running away from my own problem, and at worst it would be cruel, because I should run the risk of making two people unhappy instead of one."

"I do not pity myself, and I do not ask for pity. If there is bitterness in this book, I hope it will be the bitterness of medicine, not of poison."

"‘I did not believe such things could happen in England,’ Wildeblood writes, ‘until they happened to me.’"

"Against the Law is, itself, a leading witness in gay history."

"This is a book that leaves a scar on the memory."