Homosexuality
The scourge of the sensitivity reader
A comparatively new figure with no accredited expertise now dictates to literary agents, senior editors and award-winning authors
The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history
Signing his real name (a brave decision for a homosexual in 1960), Roger Butler sparked a good deal of discussion on a ‘shunned topic’, which eventually led to a change in the law
Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?
The young are too busy enjoying themselves, the middle-aged are loath to initiate it and the elderly themselves can’t always take part, but it’s a subject sorely in need of public discourse
The weirdness of the pre-Beatles pop world
As his mental health declined, the record producer Joe Meek grew increasingly fascinated by the other-worldly, communing in graveyards with Buddy Holly and the Pharaoh Ramses the Great
The queer traditions of King’s College, Cambridge
Simon Goldhill describes how intimate friendships between students and teachers were actively encouraged, with the college providing a refuge for gay men and helping them define their sexuality
Red-letter days for Gilbert & George
After a successful show in Moscow in 1990, the odd couple went on to even greater triumph in China three years later, as the long-suffering curator of both exhibitions describes
Exquisite: Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed
The Invention of Love opens with death. Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman starts on the banks of the Styx,…
Why does James Baldwin matter so much now?
The rise of Queer Studies and Black Lives Matter has led to renewed interest in Baldwin – who was exasperated in life with being categorised by colour or as ‘gay’
Guadagnino is a true master of erotic desire: Queer reviewed
Queer, which is based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, is the latest film directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call…
The demonising of homosexuals in post-war Britain
The tabloids in particular stirred up fear and distrust with lurid stories of orgies, prostitution, drug-taking, political corruption, sinister concealment and susceptibility to blackmail
Familiar scenarios: Our Evenings, by Alan Hollinghurst, reviewed
There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and…
The Christian view of sex contains multitudes
Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book…
Six politicians who shaped modern Britain
The members of Vernon Bogdanor’s select gathering may not always have succeeded in their aims, but by sticking their heads above the parapet they made the political weather
Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?
Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English
Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp
Rescuing the composer from his tortured image, Simon Morrison presents him as a sort of Till Eulenspiegel character, laughing and pranking his way through life
The C of E needs to talk about sex
My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants…
Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn
Even the most liberal-minded reader might be surprised by the amount of crack cocaine, LSD, alcohol and casual sex the poet indulged over the course of 50 years
The clue to Shakespeare’s sexuality lies in the sonnets
They are quite unlike any other sonnet sequence of the time and seem to be a kind of personal statement – written by a man with undeniable feelings for another man
The heyday of the gay guardsmen
In 1943 the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor placed an advertisement in Exchange & Mart offering a pair of trooper’s breeches…
More Mr Pooter than Joe Orton: George Lucas’s gay life in London
Beginning in 1948, Lucas kept a diary chronicling 60 highly promiscuous years – though ‘my great desideratum has always been sympathy and affection’
Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang
Executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, he was absent from Dublin at the time of the doomed insurrection – and actually tried to prevent it
Victims of a cruel prejudice: the last two men to be executed for sodomy in England
Chris Bryant describes in painful detail how James Pratt and John Smith, working-class men from the Midlands, fell foul of the ‘bloodthirsty English justice system’ in 1835
The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends
In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis
Gentle genius
Dissatisfied with his unfinished epic, the dying Vergil called for his scrolls to be burned, but was fortunately overruled by the Emperor Augustus
Germ of an idea
Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene,…
