Censorship: Still a burning issue

[LostInTime]

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After the Lady Chatterley trial, the floodgates formally opened - but the creative well dried up. In fast-buck mass culture, the "sexual intercourse" that began for Philip Larkin "in 1963" soon felt more like a cheap trick than a new dawn. Only among gay authors in the West did written sex hang on to its edge of danger and defiance - from Edmund White in the US and Reinaldo Arenas in Cuba to Jean Genet in France. The Old Bailey conviction of Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1967 (overturned after an appeal led by John Mortimer) surely bucked the Sixties liberal trend because of the gay and transsexual milieu of much of Selby's novel. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, James Kirkup's poem for Gay News - in which a Roman soldier erotically contemplates the crucified Jesus - brought the laws of blasphemous libel out of their ancient mothballs. That case, too, resulted in a conviction.