Homosexuality
A bitter sectarian divide: Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart, reviewed
Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize,…
The making of a poet: Mother’s Boy, by Patrick Gale, reviewed
Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…
Gay and abandoned: A Previous Life, by Edmund White, reviewed
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
Have we reached peak human rights?
After the Colston debacle, you might be forgiven for having missed the other legal story that broke this week. The…
Were the Sixties really so liberated?
Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…
Enjoyable in spite of the National's best efforts: Under Milk Wood reviewed
Before the National Theatre produced Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood they had to make a decision. How could they stuff…
Nostalgia for seedy nightclubs reeking of sex and poppers
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
A beastly cold country: Britain in 1962
Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing…
The joy of a cancelled Christmas
Among the greatest bores right now are those friends who insist on telling you, usually as if it’s some kind…
The next generation of gay men will be far more boring
Last week we broadcast my BBC radio Great Lives episode on Kenneth Williams. The effervescent comedian and presenter Tom Allen…
Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…
Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?
People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that…
Guilty pleasures that fail to satisfy: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed
In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing…
Gorgeous and electrifying: And Then We Danced reviewed
The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is…
Pete Buttigieg is a slightly less gay version of Obama
On Valentine’s Day, Mayor Pete and his hus-bear Chasten managed to once again charm absolutely no one, barring a few…
A surefire international hit: Lungs reviewed
No power on earth can stop Lungs from becoming an international hit. Duncan Macmillan’s slick two-handed comedy reunites Matt Smith…
Polari, the secret gay argot, is making a surprising comeback
Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man.…
Naomi Wolf is holed below the waterline
What is it about Naomi Wolf that inspires such venom? Perhaps that she’s American, brash, media-savvy and not averse to…
How long before Baby Sussex slips down the line of succession?
Endangered species The UN claimed a million species of plants and animals could become extinct. If they all died out,…
Love me or go to hell – Tchaikovsky’s message to his public
This is a wonderful and moving book of correspondence and biographical documents promising one Tchaikovsky in its subtitle and introduction,…
They say Enoch Powell had a fine mind. I’m not so sure
Enoch Powell has been in many minds this month. It’s the 50th anniversary of his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech…
Wilfred Owen’s troubling obsession with young boys
This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first…
Cottaging in the age of Grindr
There are nights when, crossing the dark parkland by my house, I see a man beneath a remote streetlamp. He…
The time is right for an Erté revival – a new hero for our gender-anxious times
Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There…
Arabian nights
Recall the media coverage at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, times it by about a thousand, and you…
