In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality. - Edmund White

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth.

Fréquenter un écrivain, le connaître de près, dans l'espoir de mieux connaître son oeuvre était un exercice inutile et même destructeur.

For me, as for many kids, words had a magical (and sometimes sexual) aura, and I would look up in my mother’s medical dictionary words such as penis, intercourse, or homosexuality, exciting words no matter how dispiriting the definition, exciting just because they appeared in print.