Christopher and His Kind was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1976 and by Methuen in London the same year. Isherwood was seventy-one. The gay liberation movement had changed the landscape, and Isherwood was ready to tell the truth about the period covered in his Berlin fiction.
The book’s opening sentence is famous: “Christopher Isherwood left England on March 14, 1929, at the age of twenty-four. He intended to spend a long visit abroad. Within a few days of his arrival in Berlin he had begun to think of the city as his home. He had found the key to his Berlin existence — it was his sexual orientation.” Isherwood goes on to describe, with the same precision he had applied to Berlin’s political landscape, the sexual landscape: the bars, the baths, the rent boys, the intense emotional relationships that the earlier books had either suppressed or disguised.
The revelation transforms understanding of the Berlin stories. The narrator’s detachment — “I am a camera” — is revealed as not merely an aesthetic choice but a survival strategy: a gay man in the 1930s could not afford to be fully present in his own narrative. The female characters who appeared as love interests in the fiction are revealed as covers for male lovers. Sally Bowles, it turns out, was based on Jean Ross, and Isherwood acknowledges that his portrait was unfair to her in specific ways.
The book is not merely a confession but a political act. By telling the truth about his Berlin years, Isherwood was making an argument about the relationship between sexual repression and literary form — that the closet had deformed not just his life but his art, and that the fiction, for all its brilliance, was built on a lie.
Collecting Christopher and His Kind
First edition (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80
- UK first (Methuen, 1977): $50–$150
- Signed: $200–$500