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?
We’re happier when the assholes are villains.
The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: You were silly like us.
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.
Everybody is Other in Maupin.
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.
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?
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...
A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.
Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.
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...
An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.