“... on 28 February, Vance had shown himself to be aggressive and combative, a populist politician in search of a cause. How interesting it might be for him, then, were he looking for a second target, to begin a campaign against the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, to establish himself as a leader of a more traditional Catholicism, someone longing for the ...”

“... about my health.There were jokes by now: ‘What turns fruits into vegetables?’; ‘What does gay stand for? – Got Aids Yet?’ The sex that had made illness the future became suspect. ‘The problem with sex is I get the feeling that I’m not even supposed to think about it,’ Oscar Moore wrote in his PWA (Person with Aids) column for the ...”

“... Post, the New York Times, or the Toronto Globe and Mail will seize on Panel 688, ‘Lesbian and Gay Studies: Conflicting Desires’, which features as its third speaker Gregory W. Bredbeck of the University of California Riverside and his rousing talk ‘Fuck Your Gender’. If gender-fucking is too heavy there are scores of other papers with which to amaze ...”

“... why beat around the bush?’); and, later, competition with the internet, which allowed readers to search in private for what they wanted. But the central principle of genre fiction didn’t change: people know what they like and will return to it again and again. Even within the doctor-nurse-Arab-sheikh categories, Mills and Boon’s authors were employing a ...”

“... now in his new flat in Muswell Hill. All his victims had been young men he met in the street or in gay pubs. They would come home with him, get drunk, go to bed and wake up dead. There was not much in the way of sex: sometimes Nilsen masturbated over the dead youths; sometimes he lay beside them and played dead, admiring the tableau in a mirror. Later he drew ...”

“... ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his ...”

“... if we grabbed his home computer we’d get a stash of little girl pics,’ Child says. Hawthorn is gay and Child is black, but this isn’t a sign that Ridgway’s version of the Met is politically liberal: their colleagues have the bigoted attitudes more traditionally associated with the police. It’s hard to see these two as heroes – even Child thinks ...”

“... savage punishments – imprisonment, flogging, castration, deportation. For this seventy-year-old gay English reader, Parker (who’s the same age as me) has clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second ...”

“... was to lead them astray, not merely to lead them to bed. ‘I like to think I’m a sort of gay bachelor, Don Juan or Casanova,’ Fiona Pitt-Kethley says at the beginning of her startling account of the sights she saw and the men she laid in the course of two journeys to Italy in search of the lairs of the sibyls and ...”

“... end’. This one has four: ‘There’, ‘But’, ‘For’ and ‘The’ (the novel is a kind of search for the missing grace of god). A few mysterious fragments are spliced in between the main acts, rather like video art installations: The Accidental begins with an account of the narrator’s conception, in a cinema in 1968, intercut with a description of ...”

“... but the borders of Anglicanism are far from settled. Characters go on ‘church-crawls’ in search of the right kind of liturgy, consult Crockford’s Clerical Directory for the lowdown on priests, and take umbrage if the service is too ‘High’ or too ‘Low’. The more secularly minded puzzle over the lingo of the church year, calculating ...”

“... was to build a credible bridge between the divergent milieux. He did a cover photo for the gay S/M porn magazine Drummer, and it was through this far-left-of-centre gig that he discovered some of his first models. Yet he was hardly alone in traversing libidinal frontiers. For example, at virtually the same time as Mapplethorpe’s early ...”

“... the reason for the creation of images of pure, shared, intense, private happiness and the constant search for transcendence, does not rob the poems of their mystery as much as emphasise how artful and trusting in the processes of poetry they are. In My Alexandria, the garden in September is ‘this ordered enactment of desire’: in the first poem in ...”

“... from the US army. Now, in 1944, at the age of 25, he wrote frankly about his experience as a gay man and rejected Macdonald’s advice to publish under a pseudonym. His admission drew much attention, and caused John Crowe Ransom to retract his acceptance of one of Duncan’s poems for the Kenyon Review. The essay was also notable for its earnest protest ...”

“... a question for historians: in recent months, Congress has devoted considerable energy to debating gay marriage, while in the last 13 years the US military has fired 55 of its Arabic speakers for being gay; the most recent was uncovered after investigators asked him if he had ever participated in community theatre.) With the ...”