Christopher and His Kind

Blurb

Christopher and His Kind is a memoir by Christopher Isherwood, published in 1976 and covering the actual events and experiences of his life between 1929 and 1939, including his years in Berlin, the source of inspiration for some of his most famous novels, such as Goodbye to Berlin.
Isherwood decided late in his life that he had a moral obligation to renounce the self-censorship that marked his early novels, specifically the excision of any hint of his homosexuality. Accordingly, in Christopher and His Kind he recounts his experiences as a young gay man enticed by the liberated atmosphere of Weimar Berlin into a quest for sexual and intellectual emancipation, and argues that his homosexuality, far from a marginal private shame to be suppressed, was a central element in his human and creative development, an identity he cherished and shared with many others, with whom he felt a special kinship. This remarkably candid autobiography was, in Isherwood's view, the way to discharge the obligation he felt due to "his kind", and thus make his own contribution to the cause of gay liberation.