My brief career as a homosexualist

Homosexuality was illegal in England when I was at school, and I wasn’t aware of anybody who was gay (a word for homosexual that has a longer history but began to be widely used only in the 70s and 80s). I do remember fancying Stubbings, but that’s when he was convincingly playing a woman in a school play. Looking back, I still can’t identify any of the 90 boys in my year as gay, but some must have been. My first encounter with a definite homosexual was at Edinburgh University, where I encountered an art student who displayed his homosexuality flamboyantly. He was a clothes designer and wore gold clothes and high heels. He was, it was said, a lover of the composer Peter Maxwell Davies. In 1972 I shared a flat with him, and he had a large room that he decorated in Elizabethan style while I slept in a windowless cupboard. He said that I could share his bed at any time, but I wasn’t tempted. My short spell as a homosexualist (a word I associate with Auberon Waugh’s hilarious but…