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“... older to maintain even the semblance of sexual restraint, he ended his days in confinement, where Peter Gay reminds us he once tried to molest his visiting daughter. Gordon’s Austin ought to have anticipated the problems of his marriage. Sue Dickinson had such a terror of childbearing (her sister having died of puerperal fever) that before their ...”

“... in the argument of fashion. At the age of 25 a well-born late-15th-century Venetian male put off gay hose, slashed sleeves and padded waistcoats in favour of a veste. This long black gown would be his regular wear for the rest of his life – unless he gained office, in which case he made official appearances in the same garment in red. If he became Doge he ...”

“... in a public lavatory in Kensington Park, Will saves the life of Charles Nantwich, an 83-year-old gay peer of the realm, ‘the sort of chap who turns up in the lives of other people’. Nantwich is physically frail and prone to ‘blanking’ – sudden mental absences – but he is more purposeful and manipulative than is immediately apparent, and he is ...”

“... a rent boy. Something about his age, something about Blackpool, which has probably the largest gay scene in the North outside Manchester. Christopher’s final circumstances made me think of the abject life of teenage prostitutes – the passivity, the victimhood. I thought I would talk to people in Blackpool’s ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... a little box, of the kind we see today in apothecaries’ shops, painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, stags in harness, and other devices of that sort, light-heartedly invented for the purpose of mirth, as was Silenus himself, the master of good old Bacchus. But ...”

“... Flanagan a fellow student? That George was once married and has children? A few years back, when gay activists were outing closeted gays, an enterprising journalist decided to ‘in’ George and put it about that he lived in the suburbs with a normal family. And yet G–G could be thought of as Britain’s (or the art world’s) most famous ...”

“... may have been a rational response in 1950s North Carolina: Wendell is aware of the prosecution of gay men, of the fact that he and Frank stand to lose a great deal if they are found out. But it’s frustrating that, in the novel, their isolation also has the effect of sealing them off from history. There’s almost no mention of the ferment of the 1970s and ...”

“... Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the ...”

“... in Stern’s generation who had a deep interest in making it in Germany. His exact contemporary, Peter Gay (born Peter Fröhlich), did not return until 1961, when it proved almost unbearable. This too may be a matter of fathers; Peter’s was a lamp wholesaler who had to forge ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the pace is fast, voices are heard before we see their owners or settings, we shift from a gay bar to a movie set to a modest California home; a young man, Scott Thorson, played by Matt Damon, is taken to a Liberace show in Las Vegas, meets the great man backstage and is invited to lunch the next day. Thorson is star struck, dazzled by Liberace’s ...”

“... In fact, many cinemagoers avoided or actively resisted German blandishments. Until Pearl Harbor, Peter Demetz remembers in his occupation memoir, Prague in Danger, cinemas in the city played American musicals, including the Broadway Melody series, to ‘packed houses’ that included the city’s many jazz-obsessed swing kids. In a novel set during the ...”

“... is that the Royal Court’s mission was to challenge a theatrical culture unhealthily dominated by gay men. At their first meeting, the theatre’s director, George Devine, told John Osborne that ‘the blight of buggery ... could be kept down decently by a direct appeal to seriousness and good intentions from his own crack corps of heterosexual ...”

“... Hamilton says, documents ‘“equivocal” enough to have earned for Brooke a small foothold in Gay Studies’. The star turn was a letter first printed in full in Paul Delany’s The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (1987). Writing to James Strachey, Brooke describes some encounters with his fellow Rugbeian Denham ...”