There is a notable and obvious overlap in Orwell’s notebook between many of 1940s London’s prominent gay, Jewish and anti-colonial public figures and the accused “cryptos.” Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook. Jews are clearly labeled (“Polish Jew,” “English Jew,” “Jewess”) whilst others were mislabeled (“Charlie Chaplin — Jewish?”). The African-American bass singer and future civil rights activist Paul Robeson finds himself in Orwell’s list with the note “very anti-white,” whilst the half-Jewish poet Stephen Spender is damned as a “sentimental sympathiser… tendency towards homosexuality.”
It’ll always be funny that the dude who wrote something like 1984 was such an eager proto-McCarthyite snitch for the propaganda unit of the British Foreign Office.