English writer ad editor Joseph Randolph (J. R.) Ackerley was BOTD in 1896. Born in London, the son of a fruit merchant and an actress, he was educated at private schools. After failing entrance exams to Cambridge University, he enlisted in the British Army at the outbreak of World War One. He served on the front line at the Somme, sustaining injuries in battle and was imprisoned by German forces in Switzerland. While in prison, he realised his attraction to men and began writing the gay-themed play The Prisoners of War. After the war, he attended Cambridge University and settled in London. In 1923, he served briefly as private secretary to the rampantly homosexual Maharaja of Chatarpur, an experience recounted in his comic novel Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal, published in 1932. The book’s success led to his play being staged, and he worked for the newly-formed British Broadcasting Corporation. In 1935, he was appointed literary area of The Listener, promoting the work of gay writers E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, with whom he formed close friendships. Ackerley lived relatively openly as a gay man, though never found the “Ideal Friend”, devoting himself to his Alsatian Queenie. His platonic love affair was Queenie was captured in his popular 1956 memoir My Dog Tulip. His 1960 novel We Think the World of You documented his troubled affair with a married working-class man, published seven years before the partial legalisation of homosexuality in Britain. He died in 1967, aged 70. His memoir My Father and Myself, published posthumously in 1968, chronicled his father’s secret life with a second family, possible bisexuality and death from tertiary syphilis, and his own penchant for cruising for sex with the Queens Guards. His unpublished biography of Forster was released in 1970, after Forster’s death, confirming Forster’s homosexuality. Largely forgotten during the gay liberation era of the 1970s, interest in his life and work was revived by a 1988 film of We Think the World of You, starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman. The J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography was established in 1982 in his honour. An animated film of My Dog Tulip was released in 2009, including details of Ackerley’s itinerant sex life.