Obituary: Alan Bray
Alan Bray, who has died aged 53, was a rare combination; a senior civil servant, gay activist and scholar. His book, Homosexuality In Renaissance England, first published in 1982 and still in print, is a classic of meticulous research and independent thinking on the origins of the modern gay identity. It shows how sodomy was regarded in Elizabethan cosmology as a sinful desire to which all men were potentially subject, but that homosexual activity was widely tolerated and had not then come to signify the deviant psychological type it later became.
Alan was brought up, in significant economic hardship, in Hunslet, Leeds, and the death of his mother, when he was 12, affected him deeply; he was vulnerable in relationships and retained an intense privacy, and sometimes loneliness, alongside unfailing tenderness towards his friends.
Educated at Central high school, Leeds, where he met his lifelong friend, Graham Wilson, and Bangor University, he spent a year in an Anglican seminary before building a distinguished career in the Inland Revenue. He worked in Lord Rayner's team at a time of civil service reform. His managerial acumen, and an ability to memorise complex cases, commanded great respect. Before taking early retirement as a principal in 1996, after a serious illness and an HIV diagnosis, he piloted through the highly technical issues surrounding the Lloyds insurance market crisis.
Earlier, in 1984-85, he was awarded a sabbatical at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he wrote The Clandestine Reformer: A Study Of The Rayner Scrutinies (1988).
A creative tension in Alan's life sprang from the radicalism around his sexuality and long-held religious beliefs. He converted to Roman Catholicism in the mid-1980s, and was in communication with the late Cardinal Basil Hume on behalf of the gay Catholic group, Quest.
In the early 1970s, he was involved with the Gay Liberation Front, and with campaigns such as the Gay News Defence Committee, set up in 1977 to fight the blasphemous libel prosecution of Gay News by Mary Whitehouse. After the Guardian published an offensive article about the 1979 Gay Pride march, polite and besuited, he cased the Guardian offices the night before a highly effective zap by 50 members of the Gay Activists Alliance.
Alan saw his work as part of the wider sexual politics movement, and he was a founder member of the Gay History Group. The success of his first book led to greater recognition, and he had two important articles on male friendship published in the History Workshop Journal, of which he was an editor between 1994-97. He became a fellow of Birkbeck College, London, and was invited to give papers at American and Australian universities. His final project, The Friend, is due to be published next year.
This book explores same sex kinship ceremonies and unions that permeated the culture of pre-modern societies. A particular focus is on joint tombs inscribed with declarations of love - the most illustrious being the grave of Cardinal Newman. It was while discovering these burial sites that Alan realised his research was also a personal act of remembrance and mourning for friends lost to Aids.
He is survived by Graham, and by his sister, Jacqueline Smith.
· Alan Bray, civil servant, gay campaigner and historian, born October 13 1948; died November 25 2001