At last. World's most apt critic for the material, Colm Tóibín reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle] about queer Irish rebel Roger Casement and he brings a slicing clarity to the gay question:
"Vargas Llosa’s views on what are known as the Black Diaries do more damage to the novel, however, than his heavy-handed treatment of Casement’s Irish dreams and his German sojourn does.
"In his careful appendix to the diaries Séamus O Síocháin writes:
If one accepts the existing evidence from outside the diaries for Casement’s homosexuality … if one accepts that the type of homosexual lifestyle depicted in the diaries conforms to what today is a recognisable variant; and if one accepts that Casement directed his moral wrath not at sexual behaviour but at individuals or institutions he considered to be oppressive of individuals or communities, then we begin to see many of the references to Casement’s ‘dividedness’ in a new light. Claims that the author of the diaries is ‘subhuman’, ‘moronic’, ‘schizoid’, can then be seen for what they are: reflections of the moral positions of those making the judgments rather than of Casement’s morality.
"Vargas Llosa strongly believes that Casement was ‘divided’, his body ‘sometimes at odds with values he espoused’. He is, of course, entitled to take whatever moral position on Casement’s sexual activities he wishes to take; if he wants to read the entries in the Black Diaries as ‘noxious obscenities’ then he is free to do so. But the idea that Casement wrote the entries ‘but did not live them, at least not integrally, that there is in them a good deal of exaggeration and fiction, that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn’t’ does not stand up to much scrutiny. More important, it means that Vargas Llosa as a novelist is writing about a reduced fictional figure. In his version of the story the Casement travelling in the Congo and the Putumayo is a great humanitarian, a man filled with zeal, with deep and horrified concern, a more passionate and effective Kofi Annan. In most of the narrative, Casement is not only simplified, which any novelist has a right to do with a figure from history, but he is simple, not of much interest – which is a different matter.
"Were the diary entries written about things that didn’t happen, but belonged instead in the realm of the wishful, then they would surely have a much greater erotic charge than the scribbled notes that Casement wrote. Most of the entries merely record the transaction, sometimes with a reference to the size of the companion’s penis, the amount of money paid and the location where the sex took place. Sometimes there is another cryptic comment; occasionally an entry is entirely cryptic. Vargas Llosa’s question in his epilogue about the possibility of these notes having been ‘falsified’ is hardly worth asking. O Síocháin, having considered all the evidence, concludes that ‘the various pieces of evidence, positive and negative, suggest that the Black Diaries are the work of Roger Casement’ and could not have been forged."
earned a passionate following in 2009 with acclaim from Edmund White, 
but now is celebrated as 
(1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, 
(1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his autobiography, 
(1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with the concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide had also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and she burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.
gains traction in its second half with the crash of an F-105 near Wheelus Air Base five miles east of Tripoli in June 1967. The pilot, a married major, attempted an unauthorized loop and instead hit the sand. The wreck underscores the anxieties of the closeted narrator, Captain Joe Harding, 26, who comes to believe the accident was a suicide and the major intended for his wingman, who may have been going down on him, to go down with him. The very distraught lieutenant survives, yet rather than accept help from someone "like us," he threatens to expose "Captain Cocksucker" to the base's ranking, already suspicious homophobes. The novel links Harding's fear of being outed with his fear of intimacy, all the way back to his abusive father. By that point, he's juggling three suitors: the bald, "muscular pug" Major Hal Denman, 35, who limits their encounters to rubdowns and handjobs; the far more flexible, and needy, nurse Duane Hayes, also 35, who takes him to an all-male sex party and wants to settle down; and Cotton Boardman the puppyish, Shakespeare-quoting, high school tennis star who says he's "seventeen, AAALLL-most." Women in minor roles, Cotton's mother who is the U.S. ambassador, and a straight black nurse, Merlene Williams, are nicely sketched. Mackle, a USAF vet once stationed at Wheelus in the 1960s, keeps his eye trained on the many intrigues at the base and opts not to explore any possible parallels of closeted life and/or secret subcultures in Tripoli. The Libyan characters are an undelineated chauffeur and a one-dimensional blackmailing murderer. Lethe Press classifies the novel as "gay romance" so the hopeful ending is assured. Check out his previous books, 
and 
, released to acclaim in the UK four years ago and finally pubbing here at the end of the month. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to Oxford. See 59 of his images 
, those ubitiquous YouTube videos for the It Gets Better campaign which is 
]], and bullying is the troubled heart of Glen Retief's new autobiography 
[[
, this coming October they'll release 
by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.
