Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996) was probably the first gay dystopia ever written.

Nevertheless, it is substantially different from other examples of its genre, which depicts various totalitarian regimes that have no respect for history, diversity, social equality, individuality, human rights or civil liberties. Brave New World (1931) depicted a technologically advanced world where genetic caste stratification, recreational drug use, polyamory and ectogenesis are the social order, and heterosexual parenthood and live birth are treated with horror. In 1984 (1948), Winston Smith tries to assert his individuality in a Stalinist future police state, Airstrip One, in a grim world where three different powerblocs- Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia- fight an eternal war -but fails. In Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1986), the future is anti-feminist and set in a fundamentalist religious dictatorship, the Republic of Gilead. Women especially have no human rights in this world, and Offred (the narrator) is kept as a concubine of Fred, a military leader. It’s not gay-friendly, as one can imagine- we’re viewed as “gender traitors” in that world.

British comedian Stephen Fry wrote this first known gay attempt at the subgenre back in the mid-nineties. In it, Michael Young is an academic who encounters an embittered physicist child of Holocaust survivors, who understandably alters history so that Adolf Hitler died in the trenches of World War I. Unfortunately, however, World War II still occurs in that world, and worse, Hitler was replaced by Gloeder, a far more effective and sane leader, whose version of World War II destroyed the Soviet Union and forced the early capitulation of the United Kingdom in 1939, leaving the United States to fight a Cold War against the Nazis, once it disposed of the Japanese on the other side of the Pacific.

 Michael finds himself in this alternate history United States, rather than in Nazi Germany of this timeline. Because the Wolfenden Report and gay liberation never happened in this Nazi-occupied Western Europe, no-one has decriminalised male homosexuality across the Atlantic, and security agencies have clamped down on human rights and civil liberties. When Michael discovers he’s gay, and tells his lover Steve about the decriminalisation of homosexuality, urban gay communities, pride marches and same-sex marriage in our world, to the latter, it sounds like a utopia. Fortunately, Michael and Steve are able to escape back to our world, and its relative freedoms.

Does it work and is it relevant to us? Yes, I believe so. Due to the rise of vicious predatory nationalist regimes across Eastern Europe and elsewhere, lesbians and gay men in such societies have hard lives- I’m writing an article about LGBT life in the former Yugoslavia after the Balkan Wars of the nineties, and it serves as a grim counterpoint to that. This is an unjustly neglected gay classic.

Do read it.

 Stephen Fry: Making History: A Novel: London: Hutchinson: 1996