Culture May 14, 2012

When I was a teenager, I believed, as many have, that I had personally invented homosexuality. This was prior to the gay movement, when there was scant public evidence that being gay existed and, if it did, it was sick. In high school life, the mere suspicion that you were a queer or a fruit or a fag was social death (which is still true in some North American schools today). Once you reached legal drinking age, you could explore a furtive world of gay bars, but they were subject to random reputation-wrecking police raids. If you happened to be