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“... frank and factual as I can make it’ – and attained heroic stature among the newly militant gay community, particularly strong on the West Coast of America. In the Huntington’s otherwise extensive press release there was no reference to Isherwood’s being gay, or to the left-wing politics of his early years. In ...”

“... which is very much more compelling than any secret that might be unearthed by a pseudo-Freudian search of her own experiences for a key to the morbid world portrayed in her fiction. The greatest challenge for a Freudian reading of Highsmith lies elsewhere: to explain how writing for her was literally what Lacan would have called her sinthome, or the ...”

“... deep are often to be found barrelling down the A354 to Weymouth, from where they can set out in search of that mixture of boyish thrills and lost time that lies under the waves of the English Channel. The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in ...”

“... Peppard is on a mission to gain Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). In the original novella, a gay writer enjoys a friendship with a kooky girl while knowing she is likely soon to vanish. But a bad adaptation won’t tarnish a book and won’t in any case be blamed on the author. Published nearly a decade before Harper Lee with some trepidation sent Go Set ...”

“... with ‘A Simple Tale’) verge on the baroque. Their self-revising clauses, their self-conscious search for the right word, would be excessive were they not so well suited to their protagonists: graduate students reflecting on their childhoods and literature professors slowly going mad. In The Emperor’s Children Messud experiments with new forms. Like the ...”

“... jokes about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton administration (‘sex between two bushes’) and gay marriage. In some respects, his humour is surprisingly cynical. In one skit, he pretends to be president (‘If maybe Schwarzenegger, why not Smirnoff?’), and invites the audience to ask him questions in a fake press conference. A woman earnestly ...”

“... Stone abhorred adjectives like “sacred” and “blessed”, yet even he was obliged to search for a word that speared this core of peacefulness.’ ‘Speared’ here gives a disturbing notion of what one would want to do with words, and with a core of peacefulness: and both in this story and a few others the seeking-out of violence in the language ...”

“... that fired up the Republican base, were content to forge alliances with pro-lifers and anti-gay activists in exchange for corporate-friendly legislation and judicial appointees who would slowly chip away at the regulatory state. For their part, conservative evangelicals were happy to preach a Jesus who widened the eye of the needle so that every camel ...”

“... visitors – pleasure-seekers ranging from fictional characters like Wharton’s to real-life gay men and lesbians – have represented Rome as a Mecca of frankness and tolerance, a release from their homeland’s sexual Babbitry. But that is only part of the story. Because Rome has invigorated still other Americans with its reminders of ancient glory and ...”

“... setting to the Aids-ravaged New York of 1991, where Dan, now a spoiled priest, is exploring his gay proclivities while protesting his straightness. The climate of the times is evoked with brutal brilliance: mothers on the subway who spot your purple bruises and snatch up their children, your neighbours using a Kleenex to press the elevator ...”

“... drifters and ski bums, she was introduced to the delights of opiate cough mixture, and began her search for altered states, expanded consciousness and occasional oblivion. Yet earlier, there had been another, more fateful encounter with a patent medicine. At the house of a friend, Shoe had spotted a tin of Andrew’s Liver Salts. The slogan ‘For Inner ...”

“... the murder of a 12-year-old girl whose body was left at the edge of Knocknaree woods. His search for the killer gets tangled up with his own past: twenty years earlier, when he was 12, his two best friends went missing in the same woods. He had been with them and was found covered in blood, with no memory of what had happened. In The Likeness, the ...”

“... But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been going since she was a child star in National Velvet and where she liked to order caviar and chocolate-covered ...”

“... this, because it is a view from the outside, is offered up with an apology. When he interviewed ‘gay people and haemophiliacs and others who have been most affected by Aids in this country, I usually felt I was selling them short.’ You cannot easily put art about Aids in the art-only box: it is part of a dialogue, between those who have the disease and ...”

“... when later investigators failed to replicate the results. A famous example is Dean Hamer’s ‘gay gene’, announced with much fanfare in 1993, when his group found an association in 40 families between a marker on the X chromosome and male homosexuality. Because of the high political stakes and levels of public interest, Hamer’s results immediately hit ...”