“A Cellarful of Boys”: The Swinging Sixties, Autobiography, and the Other Beatle

Abstract

This article examines Brian Epstein's A Cellarful of Noise (1964) as a distinctly late-Victorian example of life writing that is masking as much as revealing its subject and exposing internalized homophobia in the period between 1957's Wolfenden Report and 1967's Sexual Offences Act in the ostensibly sexually liberated 1960s. The article considers the relationship between early popular music autobiography and celebrity self-promotion, mediated authorship, addiction memoir, and the revelation of the queer gaze in Epstein's account of his first encounter with the Beatles.