Posted by Sterling on 9/4/2012, 22:44:08, in reply to "Re: Nothing like the Sun"
98.71.94.180
I suppose that's because in
: the early 1960s when Burgess was writing homosexuality
: was still too much of a taboo to include anything
: explicit.
No, I don't think so. Truman Capote and Gore Vidal both published explicitly homosexual novels in the 1940s (Other Voices, Other Rooms and The City and the Pillar). Tennessee Williams is full of gay material--some of it coded to be sure, but some explicit (Blanche Dubois' husband, Brick and Skipper "Were you jumping or humping?" ). Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin is about a black homosexual, published in the mid-1950s. Not to mention Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs.
I'm pretty sure that by 1964 Burgess felt comfortable writing about WS's sexuality exactly as he wanted to. In my opinion, any ambiguity mirrors the ambiguity in the sonnets, not contemporary mores.
Message Thread
« Back to index