Let all the people who think queer culture began with Stonewall try to explain why it was easier for a gay first novel to be reviewed in Time magazine in 1952 than it is today. Sixty years ago the critic wrote of Angus Wilson's main character:
"Bernard Sands, it turns out, is a homosexual and almost proud of it. Though his deviation has come as a late discovery, it suits his Gide-like view of himself as an "anarchic humanist." Living by the code that "happiness should be respected in any guise," he has little use for conventional notions of good & evil. Yet compared with the moral termites around him, he seems a fair sort."
Yet at his death at 77 in 1991, by which time he had written fifty books, had been knighted, and was called "one of four or five great English postwar writers" (with Murdoch, Lessing, Greene, and Golding), the NYT obituary completely degayed his life and his work. A good place to start is the gay-inclusive family romp Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Co-workers at the British Museum after WWII, Wilson and Tony Garrett, sixteen years his junior, were companions for forty-six years.
Anyone currently following Stephen McCauley on his exquisite Zola
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