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events which drove him away from England in search of what he called “my sexual homeland.” 6 Isherwood and Heinz had been forced to wander through Europe in search of a country where they could settle together, safe from Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals and from his conscription; finally, Heinz was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1937, just inside the German border. When Isherwood at last published this autobiography as
Christopher and His Kind
in 1976, he overnight became a hero of the burgeoning gay liberation movement. The book sold faster than any other he had ever written.
    Isherwood conceded in interviews and letters that he had moved beyond the brute facts in writing
Christopher and His Kind,
because he wanted it to read as a novel rather than a memoir. 7 In earlier works, as the book itself makes clear, he had moved away from facts not only to heighten dramatic effect but also to avoid writing about his homosexuality. But in
Christopher and His Kind
he no longer wished to avoid writing about his homosexuality; on the contrary he wished to tell about it in detail. This new impulse, to reveal rather than to conceal, is a continuation of the impulse according to which he had begun the reconstructed diary in 1971 (indeed,
Christopher and His Kind
incorporates whole passages from the reconstructed diary), and Isherwood’s ability in the 1976 autobiography to deal forthrightly with his sexuality, as the underpinning for the trajectory of his life, grew directly out of the confidential and, as it had once seemed, insignificant work he had already done recapturing his postwar life from 1945 to 1951.
Christopher and His Kind
was a relatively shocking book, even as late as 1976. The reconstructed diary is far more shocking; even now, some passages have been altered or removed to protect the privacy of a few of Isherwood’s friends and acquaintances who are still alive.
    Isherwood’s reconstructed diary is sexually explicit partly because, for the first time ever, it could be. In 1971, seven years after the publication of his assertively homosexual novel
A Single Man
(1964), two years after the Stonewall riot in New York, and well into the cultural and sexual revolution spawned during the 1960s, he was comfortable committing to paper (though not necessarily for publication) details of personal relationships such as he would for years previously either never have written down or otherwise felt compelled to destroy. Since the end of the 1950s, censorship laws in the United States had been gradually relaxed; court decisions had increasingly required the post office to deliver magazines formerly ruled obscene and had permitted publication and sale of books that might once have attracted a ban. Even the Hollywood Code, governing censorship of films, gave way during the 1960s. Although some of the sex acts which Isherwood describes in the reconstructed diary were still widely illegal, he could without much risk of penalty record the true habits and attitudes of the homosexual milieu in which he had long lived in semi-secrecy.
    Lost Years,
the reconstructed diary which began for Isherwood as a task of personal recollection and amusement, can now be seen to have a more general significance as a work of social history. For it aimed to recapture the mood and behavior of a little recognized group which was soon to make itself known to the popular consciousness. Isherwood had studied history with enthusiasm and panache as a schoolboy; later, his revulsion from the dry, academic discipline he encountered at Cambridge propelled him toward literature as if it were an alternative to history, and in his case a mightily preferred one. But his autobiographies, travel books and novels—even the early, most genuinely fictionalized ones—all bear the mark of his historical outlook. He had a journalist’s instinct for knowing where to go and who to observe and talk to, and he rendered his vivid personal