Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?

The first gay marriage will be conducted this Easter, and those who still object to the idea find themselves in a minority. The majority, according to polls, can’t see what all the fuss is about.

How far we have travelled in a relatively short period of time. Until 1967, the punishment for homosexuality was a year in prison, or chemical castration, which was the option taken by Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker. At least he has now been posthumously pardoned, so that’s OK.

Extreme though attitudes to homosexuality have been in the past, I don’t think that, as a subject, it ever had the status of a taboo, not properly. Consider the way that, long before the new spirit of tolerance emerged, novelists were able to write about it without censure. Explorations ranged from the subtle, such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, to the overt, such as E.M.