Australia's First Gay Novel

Abstract

Gay sex in Amsterdam. Censorship in Australia. The story behind Australia's first overtly gay Australian novel 'No End to the Way' is remarkable. Published by Barrie & Rockliff of London in 1965, it remained in print for 20 years. Yet it was knocked back when first submitted in 1961 and again when resubmitted in May 1962 as the second part of a trilogy, 'O Love, O Loneliness'. John Bunting, the publisher's editor, described the book as unpublishable. The author was greatly disappointed. The book is credited to Neville Jackson, a pseudonym chosen by Gerald Marcus Glaskin, a Perth boy who served in both the RAN and the RAAF during World War II. By 1965 Glaskin, then in his early forties, had already written six other novels and a work of non-fiction about Northern Australia, though none of them concerned homosexuality. During the 1950s, he lived in Singapore. He became a full-time writer in 1958. In mid-1961, he moved to Amsterdam where he met the budding couturier Edgar Vos in a gay bar and began living with him at P.C. Hoofstraat 134. Today, number 134 houses a branch of Cartier but in the early 1960s it contained apartments and Vos's business, Novelette.