Alan Hollinghurst:Gay Homosexuality and the Intimacies of Culture and History

This article focuses on how Hollinghurst brings to light a buried history of gay London from the Romans to the 1950’s, its writers and musicians, from Shakespeare to Pope, Wilde to James, Forster and Britten to Firbank focussing mainly on the lives of gay men before the gay liberation movement both in London and the colonies of Great Britain. The article also analyses contemporary gay life. The issues about class, family, social politics and sexuality in the 80’s era London exploring related themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness, wealth, drugs and the emerging AIDS crisis which forms a central backdrop of modern gay culture. Hollinghurst talks about a vision of politics that asserts the interlocking of public and private spheres, the politics of identity that conceptualizes individual and collective identity not only as a basis for political organisation but also as a site of political activism itself. He offers a pro-sex promotion of transgressive sexual practices to a foundational tenet of identity politics wherein the personal is political. With this link between the pro-sexuality movement and identity politics, Hollinghurst examines the political and material effects to construct radical sexual politics through his characters and his novels. The article aims at studying gay male homosexuality in the characters of Hollinghurst and the relations that are structured through culture and society that evolves and orients them.