The blind man I nursed kept his bombshell past secret. It was only when he made me promise to tell his story after death that I understood the act of bravery that could have seen him locked up for life: CHRISTOPHER STEPHENS

With movie stars including Raquel Welch and Robert Mitchum among his clientele, Roger Butler had no shortage of glamour in his work at a high-end property lettings agency.

But for the shy 22-year-old who had grown up in the sleepy Oxfordshire countryside, the real excitement of living in the London of the 1950s was the chance to explore his homosexuality with encounters that were sometimes as unlikely as they were exciting.

One night, having formed a frustratingly chaste friendship with Bryan, a 19-year-old police constable who was leaving the force to join the RAF, Roger was invited to his farewell drinks in a local pub. Dismayed at saying goodbye to his friend, and nervous at being incongruously included, he drank enough that the next thing he remembered was finding himself in his own bed with one of Bryan’s colleagues, a naked policeman.

Although he described their ‘passionate lovemaking’ as ‘very exciting’, it was not lost on him that his first real sexual encounter and the most illegal thing he had ever done was with a police officer. Homosexuality was then still punishable by a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and he could imagine a ludicrous scene in which his lover jumped out of bed, donned his policeman’s helmet and arrested him for complicity in an act of gross indecency.

The experience had been thrilling, Roger concluded, but it still didn’t mark the breakthrough into the gay world, which he knew must be out there, somewhere. He continued to long for more.

A year later he would find it via a new campaign group fighting to change the law on homosexuality. Its eventual success would owe much to an astonishing act of bravery on his part, only for him to become a long-forgotten hero who could only sit by as others reaped the rewards of the battle he fought.

I knew nothing of any of this when we first met in 2003. I was then a young gay student at Oxford and began visiting his home there each Tuesday evening, reading him the things he had been unable to see since becoming completely blind in his mid-30s.

We formed a close friendship and, when he died, I found a letter in which he left me thousands of pages of his diaries and correspondence and asked me to try to publish them.

Through them I have come to understand the real extent of Roger’s remarkable courage at the dawn of gay liberation.

He was the first man to come out voluntarily, using his own name, to the British public at a time when criminal proceedings against gay men served as one of the few public acknowledgements that they existed.

Aged 17, when he arrived in London in the spring of 1952, he had been rejected from National Service because of the poor eyesight which resulted from glaucoma diagnosed when he was two. This left him wearing ugly metal-framed glasses which had always made him feel like an outsider at his grammar school in Banbury, the market town where his parents had moved to escape the Blitz during the Second World War.

There he recalled having ‘boyish fun’ with a fellow pupil named George and an unrequited ‘first great crush’ on another called Jack, but still remained oblivious to the idea that he might have a particular reason to be frustrated with life in the provinces.

‘I suppose I must have come across the word homosexuality but it had never registered as having any relevance to me. Like road accidents, it was something that happened to other people.’

One Saturday afternoon in 1957, he was browsing bookshops on the Charing Cross Road when, on a table outside one of them, he saw Against the Law, a Penguin paperback by the Daily Mail’s former diplomatic correspondent Peter Wildeblood.

In the summer of 1953, Wildeblood had spent an evening in a beach hut on the shores of the Solent in Hampshire with the aristocrat Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and West Country landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers.

They were joined by two young RAF servicemen who were later granted immunity from prosecution in return for testifying that ‘abandoned behaviour’ had taken place there.

After the three older men were convicted of gross indecency, Wildeblood spent 18 months in prison and following his release he decided he had nothing to lose, laying himself bare in his book and exposing the demeaning and cruel treatment he had received.

Prompted by ‘an unaccountable curiosity,’ Roger bought it for three shillings and sixpence and sat in nearby Leicester Square, tearing through most of it in the next two hours until the strain on his eyes from reading caused him to stop.

‘Its effect on me was electric. Oblivious to the passers by and the continuous traffic, it suddenly dawned on me that everything Wildeblood was saying about himself and homosexuality fitted my situation. It made me spell out unequivocally to myself the uncomfortable truth, “I am a homosexual”.’

This realisation had come at a significant turning point in gay history, with ‘the Montagu affair’, as it became known, persuading many members of the public that the state had overreached itself in what had been the most sensational trial of its kind since that of Oscar Wilde more than 60 years before.

As Roger recalled: ‘[This was] not least because of this distasteful method employed by the prosecution to obtain convictions.

‘It was also seen to be a deliberately high publicity case as part of an intensive anti-homosexual campaign then being pursued by the police and the Home Secretary.’

Facing a crowd of people as he left court, Peter Wildeblood had feared yet one more indignity. Instead, to his amazement, they had gathered to jeer the police and the witnesses who had spoken against him, and to call words of encouragement to the convicted criminals.

Some of the political elite shared the sentiments of the crowd and this helped push the Conservative government of the time to establish a committee, chaired by Sir John Wolfenden, which subsequently issued a report recommending that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offence’.

This was a stunning proposal from an Establishment body and soon after the report’s publication in September 1957, Roger responded to an advert for volunteers placed by the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS), a campaign group set up to ensure that it became a reality.

Its activities were coordinated by the Honorary Secretary, a middle-aged antiques dealer named Len Smith, from the house in Islington which he shared with his male lover Reiss.

As Roger sat in their sitting room, stuffing envelopes with their printed literature and writing short accompanying notes for individual recipients, the others talked freely about their lovers and the romantic entanglements of their friends. And for the first time, Roger saw two men being affectionate with one another, feeling ‘a physical jolt’ when Len and Reiss kissed.

Through the HLRS, Roger gradually found his way into an underground gay social world but the fun of it all did not distract him from the activism that had led him there. The more he experienced what he called the ‘great age of queerdom’, the more determined he was to change the law that threatened him with arrest with each of his brief encounters with sexual liberation.

In October 1953, there had been a particularly salacious case when the actor John Gielgud was arrested in a public lavatory in Chelsea for ‘persistently importuning’. Able to harness public affection to his advantage, he had continued his showbusiness career despite the negative press, but this was an unusual privilege.

The reality for most men like Roger was that the publication of the Wolfenden Report and the early work of the HLRS had done almost nothing to change the practical implications of being known to be a homosexual, or even of being thought to be one.

These were set out by one witness whose evidence to the Wolfenden Committee revealed that fear of police proceedings had driven five gay men in one rural neighbourhood alone to commit suicide.

In Roger’s mind it did not help that the public faces of the HLRS were concerned heterosexuals who, for all that they were well-meaning, seemed hardly positive about the homosexuals on whose behalf they were campaigning.

When the organisation’s first public meeting took place in Westminster in May 1960, the speakers included a Justice of the Peace, who spoke of how as a mother of two sons, she would be horrified if they were criminalised as a result of having to face this ‘problem’ in their lifetimes.

Then came a psychiatrist and member of the HLRS executive committee, who declared it ‘as absurd to judge all homosexuals by the unstable “Nancy boy”, as to judge all women by prostitutes.’

Irritated by these speeches, Roger realised that, rather than remaining anonymous and pathetic shadows, the best way to compel society to listen to the case for legal change was for homosexuals to become known as real human beings.

For that, they had to be known by name – but he could not see any men who had outed themselves to campaign against anti-gay laws, only those who, like Peter Wildeblood, made public statements only after their sexuality was already a matter of official record.

‘I felt it was time for the cause to move on, for someone to come out of the closet, as it came to be described, and defiantly say… “Here I stand”.’

Three weeks after the Westminster meeting he enlisted the support of two HLRS members who are now even more lost to history than him. All Roger could remember of them was that Raymond Gregson was from Lancashire, ‘a nice, gentle, if somewhat willowy-watery young man’ while Yorkshireman Robert Moorcroft had ‘characteristic grittiness and weather-beaten good looks’.

He added: ‘He had, I think, been married but was no longer.’

What mattered was that they were the only activists who had agreed to go along with his radical plan – and he had asked many.

In the last week of May 1960, the three men met in a cafe on one of the narrow streets behind the Charing Cross Road and signed four copies of a letter Roger had drafted. Each was addressed to the editor of a national publication and began ‘Sir, we are homosexuals...’

Gathered around the café table ‘rather in the manner of an international treaty’, they knew that they were voluntarily exposing themselves to the prospect of persecution as Roger walked hurriedly to a nearby postbox to send the letters immediately to the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian.

The daily newspapers refused to publish the letter but it appeared in both the New Statesman and the Spectator, the latter only after its political correspondent Bernard Levin had sent Roger a telegram to make absolutely sure that it was genuine and that the signatories wished it to be published.

Finally, the public were seeing homosexuals who had not been dragged into their view, but who stepped up, freely, calmly and confidently, to claim the name and, in doing so, quietly started a revolution.

If Roger’s family or colleagues saw the letter, they didn’t mention it to him, and no policeman came knocking. Instead Roger could sit in his flat and read the flurry of reactions that he had provoked. Responses were printed for an entire month in the Spectator, while the New Statesman featured debate about the letter for a further month after that.

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As Roger had hoped, there was now a very real current running through the ensuing printed correspondence that addressed him, Raymond and Robert specifically when they were talking about homosexuals.

He believed that society would benefit from understanding that gay people are everywhere and contributing to it; and that change would come when people came to understand homosexuals as ordinary people, part of ordinary life, doing ordinary things.

He was right but, by the time the law was finally changed in 1967, and the HLRS invited Roger to a party to celebrate, he couldn’t bring himself to enter the spirit of the gathering, struggling as he was with the progression of his glaucoma.

Two failed operations, one in 1965 and another a year later, had left him completely blind and, as he became pre-occupied with surviving in a world not designed for sightless people, he gradually became just one more person who used to be involved in the HLRS.

His employers guaranteed him a job for life, and cheered him when he managed his first commute into work with the help of his Alsatian guide dog — a bitch whose name, he had been startled to learn, was Gay.

But by 1970 he realised that he could no longer cope with working and living in London. He quit his job – and managed to win a place to read history at Balliol College.

Despite the inadequate nature of the books available in Braille he still secured a degree, which enabled him to find work as a private tutor.

Although this gave him an income for the next 30 years, becoming blind seemed to have robbed Roger of the freedom to enjoy any of the legal changes that he had helped bring about.

In all his time at the heart of the gay scene in London, he had never entered into anything like a meaningful relationship and in Oxford he fared no better, save for episodes like a brief, highly charged encounter with a college porter shortly after he began his studies.

Finally it seemed that the last piece of the puzzle had presented itself: a boyfriend named Luke. A college friend who had travelled abroad after finishing at Balliol, he turned up on his doorstep one winter, trying to work out what to do next and Roger invited him to move in.

Soon their lives fell into a rhythm around each other, with Luke taking temporary work on a building site, leaving the house just before nine each morning and returning around six, when Roger would pour drinks.

Roger found himself waiting for that moment every day ‘for the only time in my life counting the hours until I would hear his key in the lock and feel the comfort of knowing he was back. On the face of it, we might have been made for each other’.

There was only one flaw. Luke did not see the relationship in the same way that Roger did and would not allow it to become physical. When he eventually moved up North to take a teaching job, the scar he left was lasting and over the decades Roger was left wondering whether he was simply unlovable.

‘It’s rather humiliating never to have been wanted in the fullest sense, never to have been the exclusive object of anyone’s concern let alone desire,’ he wrote. ‘It’s depressing that I shall go to my grave without ever having known the joy of a completely fulfilling relationship.’

For a good deal of time after his death, I’d believed that I was just one more disappointment. During my time at Oxford, he often asked me to read him his typed reminiscences and musings about his life and I see now that he wanted to show me who he really was.

In knowing him, I came to understand him, and also to love him. And while I had my own life to live and could never become the kind of ‘lover and life’s companion’ he clearly hoped I might be, he wrote that meeting me had been ‘the greatest joy of this late phase of my life’.

He believed I was his final ‘flook’ — his word for a gift bestowed upon him by some external force — but this underestimated his own role in creating the circumstances that brought us together.

I first cycled to his house in 2003 because I’d been asked to by someone I’d met at a gathering of gay men, part of the queer community who had welcomed me so warmly when I’d come up to Oxford in 2000.

And this was only possible because I could arrive at university and live openly as a homosexual. That I was able to do so was, in no small part, because the young Roger Butler had once dropped a letter in a postbox on the Charing Cross Road – a letter that changed everything.

Adapted from The Light of Day by Christopher Stephens & Louise Radnofsky (Headline Press, £20). © Christopher Stephens and Louise Radnofsky 2025. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 05/06/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.