Family Pride

If you were gay and born in the 1950s, as I was, your teenage years were likely spent ferreting out books that spoke to your suppressed longings. Of course, there were more texts with homosexual undertones and overtones than I ever realized back then. But they didn’t line the shelves of the local library in the small Okanagan Valley town where I grew up. Neither could they be found in the nearby bookstore, which mostly featured a sanitized assortment of cookbooks and religious tomes.

Even when I did stumble across something interesting, I didn’t always grasp exactly what I was reading. Oscar Wilde was famously homosexual, but I didn’t make the connection with Dorian Gray — although he seemed like boyfriend material. Similarly, I was only vaguely aware of what was going on in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (I wish Tom Ford’s excellent movie adaptation had been available then). A knowing older friend once recommended Brideshead Revisited, but...