Andrew Salkey and the Queer Diasporic

Chapter 3 discusses Andrew Salkey’s novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) in the context of postwar British immigration and Wolfenden-era discourses surrounding homosexuality. The chapter places Salkey’s novel alongside British postwar documents in the new field of Race Relations, in RAF and War Office files, in the papers of London East End Councillor Edith Ramsay, and in the unedited sound recordings of the Hall Carpenter Gay and Lesbian Oral History archive housed at the British Library. Collectively these archival documents destabilize the task of finding the “gay black subject” in a way remarkably similar to Salkey’s thwarted and thwarting novelistic hero.