It’s the same the whole world over

One has to ask the question: is this, intrinsically, an interesting subject? Personally, I would say not. Homosexual-ity, fairly clearly, is a genetic or innate human variation, comparable to left-handedness and probably occurring, like left-handedness, in about 5-10 per cent of humanity. That is, rationally speaking, about the limit of its intellectual interest: and who on earth, even left-handed people, would read a history of left-handedness?

Of course, for various other reasons, homosexuality does acquire a sort of social history, because it was rarely allowed to rest as simply a biological variation, but was turned into a sin, a disease or a crime by society at large. Now that nobody much cares any longer, or nobody that one would want to have dinner with, I admit that the whole subject is pleasantly sinking into the complete dullness it surely deserves.

It must be confessed that, since I fell into the habit of bringing my boyfriend along to book launches, where he proves a great favourite with publicity ladies, publishers have long thought that I would be absolutely fascinated to read a novel about homosexuality, or a history of homosexuality, and I am generally too polite to disenchant them. But, in the end, this is a mildly interesting social fact, among many others, and it takes more than most writers think to turn it into an interesting book.

Graham Robb, that excellent biographer of Victor Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, has written just such an interesting book, which is about as much as one can bear to hear about the subject. It is funny, enterprisingly researched, and undertaken with few apparent preconceptions. Best of all, it makes it absolutely clear that the subject here comprises the responses of heterosexuals and homosexuals to the homosexual condition, and not the condition itself.