Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Art is long and life is short.

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It’s why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.)

A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.