...one more thing before we drop Australia as a topic. Coincidentally, after sending that Austrlian images posting, I was in a bookshop and picked up a copy of Flaws In The Glass, the memoirs of Patrick White, the Australian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of course, I knew he was gay and had a relationship of over 40 years, till he died, with his partner, Amnoly Lascaris, but for some reason I'd got the idea that he was deeply repressed about it and refused to talk about it, and after he died Lascaris burned all his papers so it would never come out.

But the memoirs show absolutely the opposite. White is quite open about discussing his homosexuality, and his relationship with Lascaris, and he seems to have absolutely no hang ups or conflicts about it. Of course, he's doing the writing here, so maybe he did and isn't saying, but its really quite moving the way he talks about Lascaris and the strength of their partnership in such an easy way.

Its made me wonder about his books - are there any gay themes in them? I've only read The Tree Of Man, and some short stories, and that was ages ago so I can't remember anything. Also, was he really this open about his sexuality in the 40s and 50s, and how did Australian society and the cultural scene deal with it? I seem to remember reading that White was quite detested by much of the Australian cultural mafia - is this true and did his sexuality have anything to do with it?

-Vikram

PS: White has also set me thinking about gay trivia in general. There must have been other Nobel laureates who were gay, even if not as open about it as White. Thomas Mann is obviously one - with Death In Venice as the proof. Who else? And outside literature? John Nash, who won the Economics Prize was bisexual and one of the reasons why he suffered from mental problems for many years (after doing the work in game theory for which he was to win the prize many years later) is supposed to have been his arrest in California for 'lewd behavious in a toilet' and his subsequent expulsion from the RAND Corporation because of that. (Nash's sad story is very well told in Sylvia Naser's recent biography, "A Beautiful Mind".) Any others? 

On Patrick White, I think he was widely known to be gay, and his relationship with Manoly was also widely known. I don't think his difficult relationship with the 'arts mafia' as you call it was because he was gay, many of them are also gay. It was more because he was actually a very difficult man, with an extremely acerbic tongue, sudden changes of mood, and at time cruelly vindictive. I think you can see quite a bit of that in Flaws in the Glass. There is a very good authorised biography of him written by another gay writer.

-Quentin

-- Compiled by Vikram
Uploaded on 08-Feb-2002