“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

THOSE WORDS, voiced by the narrator of the story Goodbye to Berlin (1939), could just as easily have been spoken by its author, Christopher Isherwood. …

… How dangerous is it to write fiction as if it is a mirror of one’s own life, a reflection of a whole era? White has said that what matters to a writer is truth-and truth, he knows, can sometimes be achieved by mischievous means. Even for a writer who draws his material from a well of his own experiences, art is never autobiographical in a simple, photographic way.

At 63, White has left a trail of books in a range of genres: …

C. A. TRIPP was born in Denton, Texas, a small town not far north of Dallas, on October 4, 1919. His father was an amiable cabinet-making teacher and hardware store proprietor. His mother, the descendant of early settlers, came from a family that owned much of Denton’s real estate and lived in its grandest residence. More temperamental than her husband, a fierce champion of conservative Christian values, she was quick to condemn what she viewed as immorality. In short, Tripp’s mother was a classic Southern-belle enforcer of “good behavior.”

Perhaps, then, it is something of a wonder that her son went on to write a book that turned traditional notions of sexual behavior upside down. …

IT IS OFTEN ASSUMED that same-gender relationships followed a stereotypical pattern and set of protocols in ancient society. In classical Greece this would take the form of pedagogical pederasty associating a man (usually before the age of marriage) and a freeborn boy, while in Rome it would take the form of a merely physical relationship between a Roman citizen and a young slave. However, the texts reveal …

IT MAY SEEM difficult to say anything new and fresh about same-sex desire and love in the ancient Greek and Roman world. After all, the publication of Sir Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in 1978, … was followed by a veritable outpouring of books and articles which continues today. … But, apart from refining what Dover said a quarter-century ago, have any new insights emerged? …

IT SEEMS THE GODS will have their revenge, or at least their ironic outcomes. Thus we owe it to a woman and a lesbian to have written the most authentic and beautiful prose about romantic love between men in all of literature. …