IN MAY OF 1928, Christopher Isherwood made his first trip to Germany. He went as a tourist on a brief visit to the port city of Bremen. Though unremarkable in many respects, this trip would prove to be amazingly generative. For the reading public, the visit was a catalyst that would eventually result in some of the most entertaining writing to come out of the 1930’s.

Despite how trapped I was by the various ideologies of the academy, I was also claiming my gay identity for the first time, and I began to see that I could think for myself, if only a little. I started to feel that Mary Shelley’s epic possessed a better-and by far a gayer-grasp on the supernatural than that of her “superiors.”

WHEN BARRIE AND ROCKLIFF published Gerald Glaskin’s No End To The Way in 1965, it must have raised many eyebrows, not least in the British Home Office. This frank portrayal of a gay relationship between an Australian advertising executive (Ray) and a Dutch barman (Cor) was noteworthy for its absence of the “obligatory” tragic ending by death of the protagonist.

… At a very early age I became aware of what I then considered my “deviant” sexuality. In my mind, it made sense that since people of such conflicting and deep ideological difference could seamlessly consider one another as kin, then wider acculturation of difference in sexuality should certainly follow. …

“Among other common lies, we have the silent lie-the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all … There is no art to a silent lie. It is timid and shabby.” Mark Twain (1882)