I have no hesitation in recommending Roger Lancaster’s landmark work of popular ethnography The Struggle To Be Gay In Mexico, For Example (University of California Press, £25, 2024) which is the very best analysis I have encountered of gay men’s lives, and the class character of the society that shapes and constrains them. 

Over four decades he revisits Mexican cities which allows him not only to observe the complete trajectory of life stories but also the history within which they unfold; the economic and ideological forces that hold sway and within which the destiny of gay men floats like a marker buoy. He traces the history from the Mexican revolution onwards and the book is a useful roadmap of the path from socialism to neoliberalism. “Diversity,” he says, “is neoliberalism with a human face.” A gay identity emerges that most of the population simply can’t afford. 

A mixture of storytelling, ethnography, historical summary and razor-sharp class-conscious critique, this book stands out as a paradigm. You just wish someone would bring this kind of writerly panache, analysis and attention to the struggle to be gay in Scotland, for example.

My musical highlight was undoubtedly the 40th anniversary performance of Scottish Circus, the avant-garde composition for six folk musicians commissioned by Eddie McGuire and created by John Cage in 1984. His idea was to allow six instrumentalists to do their own thing separately, but at the same time and with pauses, for 30 minutes, and also to wander as they wish through the performing space. The moments in which the music overlaps are purely fortuitous and entirely ephemeral — this can only happen once. 

It sounds like a recipe for cacophany and disaster but for the 200 or so people assembled for the free event at the Fruitmarket Gallery’s festival of contemporary music in Edinburgh, the experience was quite the opposite — teasing and endlessly fascinating. It was, for sure, folk music of the highest quality but stripped of anything repetitive and predictable, and the meaning of which belonged entirely in the now (not the past) and was made by the audience (not the composer). 

To this pair of ears it seemed as though I were in a space ship orbiting the Earth and tuning into its soul music on a radio whose frequencies overlapped. At one moment a virtuoso improvisation on cello encountered the frantic heartbeat of tabla drum percussion and we seemed to be tracking over the eastern Mediterranean, over Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and Syria, and tuning into the music of grief itself, incomplete and infinite, but also marvellously specific. An astonishing marriage of the traditional and the modern.

And the most fascinating nugget of the year uncovered in these pages came when Paul Farmer (formerly of A39 theatre) interviewed Dave Rogers, co-founder and director of Banner Theatre on their 50th anniversary. This was cause for celebration, but the fascination was Rogers’s own sense of origins: “Really important for us,” he said, “was a resolution in the TUC that the trade union movement be radically involved in culture.” 

This uniquely far-sighted and historic achievement was Motion 42 of the 1960 TUC conference, that was immediately picked up by the playwright Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 initiative, touring new plays to working-class communities, and, of course, all the radical theatre that followed, be that A39, Banner, 7:84 or many others. We want to know more about the influence of that motion and to invite all comers to contribute to telling its history. And all, of course, with an eye towards wondering how such a TUC motion might be formulated today.