Robert Hutton
London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1958.

The pseudonymous autobiography of Horace Charles Forbes Cheston, published under the name Robert Hutton shortly after the release of the Wolfenden Report. Written at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised and taboo, Of Those Alone offers an unusually candid account of Cheston’s sexual and emotional life. Moving between Paris, California, New York, and the South of France before returning to England, he recounts his affairs, his ill-fated marriage to an American woman, and his descent into alcoholism, concluding with redemption through Alcoholics Anonymous, an organisation he later helped to establish in Britain. One of the earliest openly homosexual autobiographies of the postwar period, it precedes the more widely known works of the 1960s gay liberation era and is quite likely the first memoir of a gay alcoholic writer.