Reading good books is like making love. Reading bad ones is like masturbating. I’ve just read three good ones, one of which got on my nerves because it was about a homosexualist, as opposed to a homosexual. Which in fact was what the other two were about. Now if someone had suggested to me long ago that I would be reading three books about three men who preferred their own sex, I’d have said they’d been puffing on the magic dragon, but that’s neither here nor there. I was curious to read about James Lees-Milne (by Michael Bloch) because, although I never met him, I knew and know some of his so-called straight friends. The other two are the biography of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, and of John Cheever, by Blake Bailey. But let’s start with Lees-Milne. The homosexualist.
Lees-Milne was — like the other two subjects — bisexual, but unlike the other two had no children.
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