Patrick Gale is a British author who was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. As a child, he lived with his family at HMP Isle of Wight; his father was Prison Governor at Camp Hill and his grandfather before him had the same role at Parkhurst.
The story of Gale’s father is a reflection of how life was for LGBTQ+ people in the years prior to 1967, when homosexuality was illegal for men. Shortly after the end of WWII, Gale’s mother found a stack of love letters in her husband’s desk which were from a male friend. She destroyed them for fear of them falling into the wrong hands. Identifying as a gay man himself, Gale later drew on this part of his family history when writing the two-part television drama Man In An Orange Shirt, which aired on BBC in 2017.
A StoneCrabs Theatre Company Project
