San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself continually going to marvellous orgies where I meet unbelievably sexy people… I dropped acid for Christmas Day… had sex for SIX HOURS… Then to New York, which I’ve never enjoyed so much… Some of the people I met introduced me to cocaine (one of the people was a singer for a pop group called Looking Glass), and that is a fine drug… Life is such fun here… I had an extraordinary three-way with two guys I met in a bar… I am really pretty happy… I’ve been doing a lot of nice acid this year… It was absolutely brilliant — a five-way on my 64th birthday. Age is apparently exactly the same as youth… I can hardly imagine a life more to my taste than mine.
Reading The Letters of Thom Gunn in locked-down London — the rain pummelling the windows, my children interrupting me every few pages with another querulous demand or howling grievance — I did sometimes wonder if I was wringing the absolute maximum amount of pleasure from my own life.
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