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

by David Margolick

Perhaps worst of all, the new chairman of the English department—that is, Burns’s boss—was Norrie Orchard. And the war had only fortified Burns’s old prejudices against him: by serving in the military while the chairman hadn’t—like Frank Sinatra, he had had something wrong with his eardrum—Burns was now even more of a man than Orchard. It didn’t matter that in his letters to MacMackin, Burns was far more “swish” than Orchard ever was. Orchard was the sort of conspicuously effeminate man Burns had disdained in his unit, the old lady type more masculine gay soldiers resented for confirming the straight stereotype of the homosexual. Burns may have distanced himself from Orchard because, on some level, he feared he was so much the same. “To serve in a department headed by his chief abomination must have ignited his war-induced smoldering ire and unconcealed scorn,” Sidney Eaton later wrote. “He returned, then, to a seeming alien community in a bitter mood.”