Ben Miller

‘I thought,’ White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony (1997), ‘that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the 50s, freed in the 60s, exalted in the 70s, and wiped out in the 80s.’ He was describing, as he always did, the generation of gay men of which he was a part. To his and our luck, he survived, living to be applauded in the 90s, unjustly overlooked in the 00s, and rediscovered in the 10s and the 20s by a new generation of gays for whom prophylactic antiretrovirals have brought back the industrial sexual liberation he wrote about in his novels.

When diva worship turns an artist into an icon, everyone loses.