British literary publishing appeared to accept and celebrate the proliferation of queer identities from the late 1970s, heightened by the establishment of imprints such as the Gay Men’s Press, but it would be mistaken to depict this era as one of freedom. A startling example is a customs raid on Gay’s the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury, where all foreign texts were seized on suspicion of being obscene, including works by Jean Genet and Djuna Barnes. This section of the exhibition features the very same texts that were held at the time in the University Library, along with ephemera related to the campaign to retrieve the books. W.H. Auden also features here, through a playful and frankly erotic poetic tribute to gay sexual pleasure, published without his permission as The Gobble Poem. While initially affirming his authorship, Auden later repeatedly denied it, a pattern that is counterpoised by his poem ‘Funeral Blues,’ of which Senate House Library holds an original holograph copy. Written as a satire of a non-sexual relationship, it marked a formative mainstream acceptance of love between men within British culture when it featured in Richard Curtis’s film Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994.