The attacks on Alger Hiss came from none other than the future president Richard Nixon, who was hoping to win his first term in the U.S. Senate. Also attacking Hiss was the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose purge of suspected Communists was in full swing, and his lawyer Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man.

The irony that lies behind a fascinating new collection of the two men’s letters, The Luck of Friendship (expertly edited by Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith), is our knowledge that Williams wanted both commercial and literary success.

MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD (1868–1935) was hailed in the press as the “Einstein of Sex” during an American lecture tour in 1930. He was a leader among the pioneering sexologists of the late 19th century, and the first openly homosexual one.

“The bonds between the two friends were so strongly rooted in intellectual, psychological, societal and spiritual affinities that they created together a single life. … Their mu­tuality in living was so authentic that this book should have been a biography of Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, with a subtitle: Inventing a Single Life.”

Two of Voltaire’s best friends were gay, and I have my suspicions about a third, the Marquis d’Argenson, the creator of the Arsenal Library. The three of them were among those he called his “angels,” who helped him to vanquish his enemies. With his trademark tolerance and humanity, Voltaire accepted his gay friends with aplomb, created gay characters who were villainous for other reasons, and lived his final days succored, and loved, by intimate friends who were “anti-physiques.”

What made Kallman a better candidate for Auden’s affections than previous attachments was their shared class origins, Kallman’s precocious intelligence, and his passion for language.