After the obscenity trials and controversies of the interwar period, it is easy to suggest that legal and cultural intolerance of queer lives began to wane in the decades after the Second World War, with even quasi-official support in the Wolfenden Report of 1957. However, the published manifestations of queer identities continued to be constrained by forces other than liberated expression. While recognisably queer characters appeared in fiction with less equivocation, this was frequently in the guise of homosexual relationships that closely mirrored ideals of monogamous heterosexual marriage, in the beautiful and yet restrained fiction of Rodney Garland or James Courage. Even here, such works were not beyond censure, as witnessed by a flyer for Courage’s play Private History, prevented from transferring to the larger theatres of the West End. Simultaneously, the cynical commercial packaging of queerness for readers’ titillation gave birth to whole genres of pulp novels that promised lurid content through their cover art and delivered fearful moral judgments on characters left broken or deranged by their desire.