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years immediately following the war, he was portraying the hidden energies and affinities of homosexual men all over the United States who during that period were gathering increasingly in certain, mostly coastal cities as peace and prosperity returned to a country much altered by vast wartime mobilization. This hidden social group, whose consciousness of itself as a group was intensified by the demographic shifts brought about by the war and then extended throughout the 1950s, was to emerge in its own right as a significant force of change in America and in western culture generally during the final third of the twentieth century. Much of this change began in southern California, and Isherwood was living at its source. His personal myth is part of, and in many ways emblematic of, the larger myth of the group to which he belonged; and his reconstruction of his life during the postwar years foretells much of what was to come.
    In
The World in the Evening,
the novel he was working on during the lost years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Isherwood wrote more explicitly and more sympathetically than ever before about homosexual and bisexual characters. And he manipulated his publishers and compromised with convention just enough to succeed in getting into print two unsensational homosexual love scenes and a few somewhat more subversive ideas and psychological insights. The sentiments he recorded in his reconstructed diary in 1971, about his sense of political commitment to queers, were already articulated clearly in
The World in the Evening
by his character Bob Wood, who remarks on joining the army, “I can’t be a C.O. because, if they declared war on queers—tried to round us up and liquidate us, or something—I’d fight. I’d fight till I dropped. I know that. I’d be so mad I wouldn’t even feel scared. . . . So how can I say I’m a pacifist?” 12
    Possibly Isherwood felt emboldened to write more candidly about homosexuals after reading Gore Vidal’s novel
The City and the Pillar
, which Vidal had sent to him in manuscript before its 1948 publication. Three other books which he mentions in the reconstructed diary as having made an even stronger impression on him around the same time, and which have forthright and unsettling passages about homosexuals, were John Home Burns’s
The Gallery
(1947), Calder Willingham’s
End as a Man
(1947), and Willard Motley’s
Knock on Any Door
(1947). 13 American attitudes to homosexuality were changing generally in the postwar period in any case, and 1948 also saw the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s massive volume of research,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
—begun in 1938 and based on countless interviews which suggested that as many as thirty-seven percent of men had at least one homosexual experience after the onset of adolescence.
    Closer to his heart, Isherwood was almost certainly influenced by the defiant personal style of his companion of the late 1940s, the photographer William Caskey, who was fully capable of the sorts of remarks Isherwood put into the mouth of his character Bob Wood. Wood is partly modelled on Isherwood’s later lover and longterm friend Jim Charlton, but Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that, “Bob Wood isn’t a portrait of Jim, however; he is described as a crusader, a potential revolutionary—which Jim certainly wasn’t and isn’t.” 14 Caskey, on the other hand, “declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect—except that you couldn’t imagine him joining any movement.” 15
    Isherwood makes clear in the reconstructed diary how greatly he admired Caskey’s outspokenness about his sexuality. Sometimes Caskey’s belligerence was too abrasive. For instance, he became bitterly angry with the Chilean painter Matta and his wife, when Matta well-meaningly