Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

by David Margolick

A letter to MacMackin suggested how he’d sobered up. Suddenly, it was no longer “Dear Giaour”† or “Mon très cher Priapus,” but “Dear David.” Then he went on to lecture MacMackin on the various foibles of dreadfuls, whom he now—and for the first (and only) time in their correspondence—called “homosexuals.” Speaking of the army of belles that Plato suggests in the Phaedo,‡ Konrad Heiden§ has a stinging sentence to the effect that the 20th century homosexual is rarely completely honest with himself. Even if he ever arrives at the point of accepting his bias as merely an incident in his personality, he sets up all sorts of pitiful little compensations. Camping is after all the essence of the tragic spirit contorted into a leer no Greek mask ever knew. He sets up for himself a tinseled world that has nothing to do with any reality, believes himself a golden and divine spirit, gifted beyond other men, and frequently goes over into the realm of art, which soothes the feminine ganglia in him. Unless he has a first-rate mind, merciless self-appraisal, and honesty too large to force his world on a larger one he becomes an artist as warped as his own psyche; and you get ugliness, negation, and nonessentials substituted for the blood of great art. In Sodome et Gomorrhe,‖ he went on, “Miss Proust” had also exposed the dishonesty of modern homosexuals. “It was a pose which used to irk me in you,” he scolded. (Only once before had he shared his ambivalence about gay culture with MacMacki...