Sad to be gay?
From Alistair Cooke
Sir: In scorning the gay rights movement Paul Johnson (And another thing, 17 June) repeats the tired old refrain that homosexuals lead sad lives because of the intolerable burden of their lusts. One of his examples, Kenneth Williams, was certainly a stranger to joy, but there is no lack of heterosexual actors who have led tortured and despairing sex lives. As to the other, A.E. Housman, a brilliant professor of Latin at Cambridge (not Oxford) as well as a famous poet, he may well have been perfectly content to love without sex, like A.C. Benson, Master of Magdalene, Cambridge, and others of that repressed generation. Enoch Powell, one of his students, found himself ‘gripped by the spectacle of the rigorous intellect’ and ‘suppressed emotion’. The DNB tells us that ‘his sensitiveness was indeed acute and made him so reserved that most people found his company difficult’ — clearly not a man ever likely to have found fulfilment in the gay dives of Tangier. Exuberant homosexuals without intellectual complications are not hard to discover. One of Johnson’s favourite diarists, Chips Channon, would help him rethink his bleak and misleading thesis.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
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