JEFFREY WEEKS’S  memoir of gay liberation as it was experienced from 1945 to the present day is an exhilarating, informative — and troubling — account.

Weeks, a sociologist and historian, comes from the first generation of working-class students to benefit from the 1944 Education Act and to get to university from grammar school. His book describes the political and intellectual journey of a gay man from Rhondda in Wales to the middle-class academic milieu of London.

His two-part account — the first half joyful,  the second somewhat horrific — is divided by the shocking suicide of his father in 1976.

 A budding history student, Weeks was already aware of his sexual difference when he was separated from his working-class friends first by attending Porth County Grammar, then by getting into University College London.

The capital offered sexual freedoms through its long-established gay underworld and the explosion of gay-rights activism following the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the founding of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1970, which altered the course of his life.

He captures the excitement of this era for the gay community in London and the importance of GLF’s manifesto realisation that the social determination of gender roles is at the root of what the author calls “gay oppression.”

Weeks went on to  co-edit the journal Gay Left from 1975 to 1980, with the express aim of developing a “Marxist analysis of homosexual oppression” and he continuously uses the words “oppression” and ‘”discrimination” interchangeably, as though they describe the same thing.

But they don’t. For sure, he experienced discrimination in the valleys, but was it oppression? He escaped and, when he returns for his mother’s funeral in 2014 as a married gay man, he experienced no discrimination. But, he writes, the “old school system had savagely declined” into “poverty, sexual abuse, a heavy drug culture, few opportunities and sparse aspirations.” That, surely, is genuine oppression.

During the Miners’  Strike — the critical moment in the economic pulverisation of the valleys — Weeks was absent. He spares only a paragraph for Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), the Young Communist League initiative led by Mark Ashton that created the most progressive change for LGBT people in Weeks’s lifetime when it altered NUM, TUC and Labour Party policy.

But does he care? Weeks escaped and looks back only with nostalgia. He praises Blair’s neoliberal policies because of the minority concessions that sugared the pill and takes exception to Corbyn, whom he dislikes “personally.”

From the start, his advocacy of gay liberation uses the slogan “the personal is political,” and Ashton and LGSM are a great example of how the political can transform the personal. But what effect does the personal have on the political?

In Weeks’s case,  the major factor is the distant relationship he has with his father. He had to escape, he says, a patriarchal community and family for which his father carries the blame.

His father, a skilled mine worker laid off in 1968, was clinically depressed for the last eight years of his life. Rather than identify him as the victim of oppression like many thousands of others, Weeks mistakes him for the individual responsible for his own unhappiness.

He allows the personal to eclipse the political: cutting ties with his father severs class loyalty. This narrative of Oedipal revenge is the subtext of the book and culminates in the shock of his father’s suicide.

But Weeks’s contribution should not be underestimated. His honesty and the wide scope of his thinking remain valuable, for all that it is the tale of the queer boy who abandoned his class.

Published by Parthian, £20.