“... 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 ...”

“... or weakness of the will, becomes the province of medicine, then of biology, and at present we search for inherited genetic tendencies. A similar story can be told in the search for the criminal personality. These reflections on the classification of people are a species of nominalism. But traditional nominalism is ...”

“... similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better with the world round about us, you are likely to find ...”

“... Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror America, pursued kinky gay sex, impulsive violence, ‘names of poisons, names of/handguns’, ‘street names and place names’ and ‘clothes clinging/nipple to groin’. The long or awkward lines and blocks of prose poetry – less Louise Glück (who picked the book for the ...”

“... frank and factual as I can make it’ – and attained heroic stature among the newly militant gay community, particularly strong on the West Coast of America. In the Huntington’s otherwise extensive press release there was no reference to Isherwood’s being gay, or to the left-wing politics of his early years. In ...”

“... which is very much more compelling than any secret that might be unearthed by a pseudo-Freudian search of her own experiences for a key to the morbid world portrayed in her fiction. The greatest challenge for a Freudian reading of Highsmith lies elsewhere: to explain how writing for her was literally what Lacan would have called her sinthome, or the ...”

“... deep are often to be found barrelling down the A354 to Weymouth, from where they can set out in search of that mixture of boyish thrills and lost time that lies under the waves of the English Channel. The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in ...”

“... Peppard is on a mission to gain Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). In the original novella, a gay writer enjoys a friendship with a kooky girl while knowing she is likely soon to vanish. But a bad adaptation won’t tarnish a book and won’t in any case be blamed on the author. Published nearly a decade before Harper Lee with some trepidation sent Go Set ...”

“... jokes about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton administration (‘sex between two bushes’) and gay marriage. In some respects, his humour is surprisingly cynical. In one skit, he pretends to be president (‘If maybe Schwarzenegger, why not Smirnoff?’), and invites the audience to ask him questions in a fake press conference. A woman earnestly ...”

“... with ‘A Simple Tale’) verge on the baroque. Their self-revising clauses, their self-conscious search for the right word, would be excessive were they not so well suited to their protagonists: graduate students reflecting on their childhoods and literature professors slowly going mad. In The Emperor’s Children Messud experiments with new forms. Like the ...”

“... visitors – pleasure-seekers ranging from fictional characters like Wharton’s to real-life gay men and lesbians – have represented Rome as a Mecca of frankness and tolerance, a release from their homeland’s sexual Babbitry. But that is only part of the story. Because Rome has invigorated still other Americans with its reminders of ancient glory and ...”

“... Stone abhorred adjectives like “sacred” and “blessed”, yet even he was obliged to search for a word that speared this core of peacefulness.’ ‘Speared’ here gives a disturbing notion of what one would want to do with words, and with a core of peacefulness: and both in this story and a few others the seeking-out of violence in the language ...”

“... that fired up the Republican base, were content to forge alliances with pro-lifers and anti-gay activists in exchange for corporate-friendly legislation and judicial appointees who would slowly chip away at the regulatory state. For their part, conservative evangelicals were happy to preach a Jesus who widened the eye of the needle so that every camel ...”

“... setting to the Aids-ravaged New York of 1991, where Dan, now a spoiled priest, is exploring his gay proclivities while protesting his straightness. The climate of the times is evoked with brutal brilliance: mothers on the subway who spot your purple bruises and snatch up their children, your neighbours using a Kleenex to press the elevator ...”