Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.
Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.
Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: You were silly like us.
We’re happier when the assholes are villains.
Everybody is Other in Maupin.
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.
Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.
Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college...
A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having such a representative life. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.
Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.
Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?
Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much em...
It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.
An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.
A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other p...
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
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