Homosexuality

Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In this svelte and sprightly book, Simon Goldhill (himself a Fellow of King’s) traces this tradition over some 140 years, and describes the part it played in the creation of a remarkable, ever evolving community of gay men. He begins his story in 1885 when J.K. Stephen, the future tutor to Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert

James Birch is a somewhat mysterious art dealer and curator, whose first great triumph was mounting a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow in 1988. He wrote a gripping book about that adventure, Bacon in Moscow, and has now written an even more gripping follow-up, about taking Gilbert and George to Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai. Mounting the Moscow exhibition meant getting drunk every night, but Birch carried it off with aplomb Birch was born ‘circa 1956’, according to Wikipedia, and grew up in Primrose Hill, London. Both his parents were artists and also communists, which he claims was not unusual in the 1960s (though I’d say it was, quite). At the

James Baldwin matters. To veteran Baldwin admirers, his renewed prominence comes as a surprise after decades of indifference. This year, in the centenary of his birth in Harlem, Baldwin has seemed to matter more than at any time since his heyday, when he combined the roles of writer and civil rights spokesman. Between 1961 and 1964 he produced three bestselling books – two collections of essays and the novel Another Country – as well as a stylish collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon and a Broadway play. In May 1963, Time put him on its cover (Martin Luther King had to wait until the following January). Life called him ‘the

Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and, even at this short distance, impossible completely to understand, the culture of male homosexuals in London was only partially legalised in 1967. Before that has to be interpreted through material which is intrinsically unsatisfactory. A comparison might be drawn to the textual means historians have of understanding another proscribed culture, the early Christians in Rome.

There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and riddled with suburban self-consciousness – a kind of complicated awareness of his non-posh failings and resulting subtle superiority. He meets another young man – possibly gay – who is posh. An intricate dance ensues of social slip-ups and huge townhouses in Notting Hill, bags of money and country piles. It’s a formula which can be transposed between Edwardian drawing rooms and 1980s parties with only the slightest changes. Sometimes our protagonist is the aristocrat himself; sometimes he even went to Cambridge. He’s always cultured – interested in poetry, theatre and

‘All political careers end in failure,’ said Enoch Powell. Maybe. But just occasionally our imperfect political system throws up someone whose impact on our way of life, for good or ill, outlives them. In a series of elegant essays, Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, examines the careers of six politicians – three from left of centre, three from the right – who, in his view, changed the political weather of modern Britain. Only one, Nigel Farage, is still alive.  First up is Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing firebrand who, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the mighty, vested-interested British Medical Association, presided over the creation of

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and

In 1876, writing to his friend Gertrude Tennant, Gustave Flaubert set down a principle that artists and writers should live by: Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres. (Be regular in your life and ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.) The life of the English poet Thom Gunn had its disciplined aspect (he managed to hold down a job at least), but, overall, it was so dedicated to debauchery and excess that it’sa wonder it lasted as long as it did. The story, told in detail by Michael Nott, makes even

The question ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is not very rational. It might be a little like asking ‘Was Shakespeare a Tory?’. Some of his scenarios might coincide with later developments – Jaques trying to pick up Ganymede in As You Like It (gay), or Ulysses’s speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (Tory). But the historical conditions are not there. No doubt there have been people keen on same-sex relations since the dawn of time. But the possibilities of a social identity embedded in the word ‘gay’ didn’t exist in the 16th century, nor the medical diagnosis from which the word ‘homosexual’ arose. Nor will ‘sodomite’ do. That describes some very

In January 1948, George Lucas, an unremarkable 21-year-old Roman Catholic who had just been demobbed from the Pay Corps, was living unhappily in Romford with his ill-matched parents, who relentlessly taunted him about his homosexuality. He would shortly get a job at the War Office and so embark on a lifetime’s career as a civil servant, commuting to central London every day to work at his desk and spend his evenings in search of sex and companionship, largely among the servicemen who hung around Marble Arch. In later life Lucas would trawl the pubs, streets and urinals of central London, more often than not paying for sex, and always keeping

Telling the story of Sir Roger Casement’s life is a challenge for any biographer. In the land of his birth, he is remembered as a national hero. His remains lie in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin beside the graves of Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. He is there because he was hanged in Pentonville Prison in August 1916 as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. The awkward fact that Casement had become opposed to the Rising and had tried to prevent it does not fit either the heroic Irish narrative of his life or the official English account of the wartime traitor who died on the gallows.

Seventy-three prisoners were condemned to death at the Old Bailey in 1835 at a time when there were more than 200 capital offences on the statute book. Nevertheless, all had their sentences commuted apart from two: James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted of ‘the detestable and abominable crime’ of sodomy. The indictment stated that the accused had been ‘seduced by the instigation of the devil’ ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may forever be associated with Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, but the same reticence was clearly evident in the first half of the century. When in 1828 Sir Robert Peel introduced the Offences Against the

When it comes to Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin is The Man Who Knows Too Much. Since publishing his first biography, 1991’s Behind the Shades, he has become the world’s most committed Dylanologist, doggedly untwining the facts from the artist’s self-serving fictions. When he describes Dylan’s wildly unreliable 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One as ‘all a put-on… all a lie’, he has the receipts. As he never tires of pointing out, scholars and diehards are in his debt, but amassing data from sessions, setlists and now 130 boxes of Dylan’s formerly private papers is not the same as telling a good story. For someone innocently hoping to understand one of the