Mary Renault's The Charioteer is an antidote to shame

I am now a little over 50 years old. During that half century, life for gay men in Britain has changed in ways that I could never have foreseen as a young man. I grew up in a world where the idea of love between two men was, at best, tolerated. For most of the time the subject was ignored. Since then, despite predictable and poisonous outbreaks of homophobia, the courage of activists has ensured that the age of consent is now the same as that for heterosexuals, discrimination in the workplace is outlawed and civil partnerships – more popular than anticipated – are an unexceptional part of our lives. Gay men now stand very nearly equal with their heterosexual brothers before the law.

Gay politics and the tortuous fight for dignity and equality are inextricably linked in my mind to my first reading of Mary Renault. This, I hope, would have pleased her; because, in her quiet way, she played a heroic part in that fight. I arrived to live in London a sheltered, possibly even privileged, young man and, to be frank, the first years were hard. I had little money, I was unsure what career I wanted to pursue and the city, which I have since grown to love, seemed confusing and intimidating. I had long known that I was gay, a fact that didn't seem to bother my family or my friends, something for which I will always be grateful. Although I knew that I was loved I felt unsteady, and this unsteadiness was about to be exacerbated by something that I and so many others could never have anticipated, the arrival and devastating impact of Aids. I remember a friend running into the sitting room of my flat one evening and shakily asking whether I had heard about a new disease that was killing gay men. That is how Aids became defined in the popular consciousness, as a curse with some curious moral agenda: the "gay plague". Faced with the deaths of so many, the only viable and bravest reaction available to the gay community was defiance, a reassertion of their pride.

It was during this time of insecurity, of fear even, when so much physical and psychological damage was done and when so much needed to change, that I picked up my first Mary Renault novel, Fire From Heaven. Renault's telling of the story of Alexander the Great bewitched me. I fell in love with the central character and within months had read all I could find about him. Yet Alexander remained in my mind as Renault had drawn him: he was fabulously good-looking, golden-haired, bright-eyed, quite literally smelling of roses, fearsomely honourable and capable of deep, unwavering love.

Even as I fell under this spell, I knew Renault's portrait was, in large part, fabricated. The cruelties of Alexander's world and the megalomania of the man himself were swept aside, as Renault intended they should be, by a vision of light, heat and physical and spiritual beauty. But there was something of value in this attempt to extract what was pure and fine in classical culture. At a simple, visceral level the picture of handsome men falling in love without guilt or shame was the perfect antidote to life in a city traumatised by the arrival of a hideous disease.

Renault wrote three novels about Alexander the Great and he appears as a shining hope in the final pages of a fourth, The Mask of Apollo. Recreating the ancient world allows Renault the freedom to portray homosexual love as part of the unquestioned order of things, a possibility without judgmental baggage. In contrast, The Charioteer, a novel set during the second world war, presents us with a more unsettling read. Renault cannot avoid confronting the prejudices that any gay man must have encountered during the war years, although she clings magnificently to her vision of a strong, ideal love. Compared to the lighter style of the Alexander trilogy, the language of The Charioteer can seem convoluted as the writer negotiates her way through the psychological intricacies of the protagonist's development.

This intricacy, the care taken, is unsurprising if we consider the world in which Renault was working – that sombre, twilit world of the early 1950s, when so much of homosexual life was threaded through with fear of exposure. It is a small miracle that Renault, described by her biographer Michael Sweetman as a "bookish, suburban girl", should write such an explosive and courageous book and this may be indicative that, perhaps as a result of a catastrophic world war, attitudes were beginning to change.

Not that this change was easy to spot. Renault's American publishers refused to bring out the novel for fear of prosecution and in 1953, the year in which The Charioteer appeared in Britain, President Eisenhower's administration barred homosexuals from federal posts, the link between perceived sexual deviance and treason being an important focus for a new, paranoid orthodoxy. There were worries, too, about the reaction of Renault's readership. She hadn't brought out anything for five years and this story – her first to follow directly the fortunes of gay men – would likely have taken them by surprise. As it happened, these worries were groundless. Indeed, the sympathetic portrayal of homosexual men proved a winning formula and it was one that Renault would use again and again.

As in other stories about a young man's sentimental education, the reader is asked to bear witness to the pursuit and definition of an individual, workable moral code. But this cannot be done without acknowledging, however delicately, the opinions of a wider world. There are plenty of sharply written portraits – a proselytising old lady, the hero Laurie's pompous new stepfather – that give some indication as to how others may see and judge homosexuality. There is also a sad and uncomfortable scene where Laurie comforts a young boy and is suddenly acutely aware that his actions may be misinterpreted – a situation that rings true for many men today. Despite Renault's writing one particularly fine speech of passionate justification, there are moments when she allows Laurie to reveal himself to be, if not prejudiced, then at least censorious. Even though the legal implications of a homosexual life are barely mentioned, the careful writing and the opaque nature of some of the arguments are symptomatic of a degree of conflict.

The most memorable display of unease is when Laurie analyses his fellow guests, all gay men, at a clandestine party: "They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his … They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb."

This may or may not refer specifically to homosexuality, but it is a passage that rings with the harsh certainty of youth. Like many gay men Laurie dislikes the idea of being defined principally by his sexuality. For him, being classified as "queer" is not liberating but restrictive. As he says, it's about "shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with". He needs to find his own way. As Laurie puts it, he wants to be "loyal to his humanity".

In truth, many of the men whom Laurie meets at the party – one of the central set-pieces of the novel – are unattractive. This quality is exacerbated by their high theatrical mode of speech, including infantilising nicknames, and conversation that is necessarily coded and often arch. There is also an attempted suicide, a crude and manipulative grab for attention, which could be interpreted by an unsympathetic reader as a wearying reassertion that gay men are unhappy. What saves the party, for us and for Laurie, is the arrival of Ralph Lanyon.

Ralph is, at first glance, another Alexander – or at least that is how Laurie sees him. He has the same fair hair, piercing eyes and athletic physique. When we first meet them together, at school, classical associations are already a fundamental part of their emotional vocabulary. Talking to Ralph, Laurie becomes dizzy with the possibility of experiencing what he has only read about: "He was lifted into a kind of exalted dream, part loyalty, part hero-worship, all romance. Half-remembered images moved in it, the tents of Troy, the columns of Athens, David waiting in an olive grove for the sound of Jonathan's bow."

But if Ralph is Alexander, then he is an Alexander darkened and hardened by the realities of war. Even at school, there is a hint of something less than ideal: in Renault's tart description, the 19-year-old Ralph has "the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic". There seems little compensating glory in Ralph's life. It is no accident that Renault sets her story in the aftermath of the heroic scramble of Dunkirk, or that we spend much of our time with Laurie in a hospital ward, a world Renault knew well. She had been a nurse herself and had tended soldiers evacuated from France.

Here is the aftermath of war, dreary and painful. Despite the appearance of conscientious objectors as hospital orderlies there is precious little talk of heroism or even moral justification. The time Laurie spends in hospital is time spent in acknowledging and accepting hurt. In one marvellous passage, Renault writes: "With a poignancy he had never felt during the half-stupefying agony on the beach, he was beset by a terrible consciousness of the world's ever-renewed, ever-varied, never-dying pain."

It is Ralph, wounded, but still possessed of a steely, private self-discipline, who transforms Laurie's half-drugged, unfocused life. He teaches Laurie about the response to pain and imperfection, the ever-shifting pattern of regret, compassion and forgiveness. It is through the force of his will that he not only opens Laurie's eyes to the muddied world around him but also to the inevitable progress of their mutual love. After all, Laurie spends most of the book in love with someone else, and whether he and Andrew, one of the orderlies and a gentle soul, are a match for Ralph's single-mindedness is a question that provides the central thrust of the story. We can only hope that emotional upheaval will lead to a peaceful resolution.

Just before he leaves school, Ralph hands Laurie a book, Plato's Phaedrus. Laurie keeps it close during the war and the book, now battered and bloodied, is with him in hospital. It features a charioteer who drives an unstable team of two horses – one black and scruffy, the other fine and white – and this image of conflict and possible resolution resonates in Laurie's mind throughout his story. At the time of his giving Phaedrus to Laurie, Ralph dismisses it as "just a nice idea" and warns him that it might "give him illusions". This is disingenuous, or perhaps, since the emotional temperature is high at this point, Ralph is avoiding inappropriate intimacy. The fact is that works of classical culture have always been more than "a nice idea", and for gay men of a certain period, class and education they had a particular significance. They provided guidance and comfort in an essentially hostile world, and this book is a testament to that. It is, in its way, a historical gay document. Writing within an intellectual and emotional landscape, the details of which are now fading, Renault wrote a powerful memorial to those gay men for whom the study of classical literature was an essential means to an examined and happy life.

Mary Renault's The Charioteer has just been reissued by Virago.