Giving Homosexuality a Bad Name

That’s Christopher Hitchens, who’s got a memoir coming out—one must hawk, after all, mustn’t one?—and has let it be known that when he was a young Communist-manqué studying at Oxford his sexual predilections ran to the seamy. He thinks he’ll sell books by disclosing in advance affairs with two men who went on to work for Margaret Thatcher. Maybe so, but does anyone really care who some old Tory buggers loved in their youth? And while we’re at it, could there even be an Oxford minus the buggery? No, the Hitchens sordidness lies in the insinuating, flirtatious use he is making right now of the insinuating, flirtatious bisexuality he apparently practiced back then, in his salad days as an idolizer of Che Guevara and a boy on the make. Says a man who knew him when:

I always thought that Hitchens was someone who, like a lot of people when they are handsome in youth, spent a lot of time looking in the mirror and admiring himself. That is the vein through which he drew nourishment through his life.

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford. Alas for Mr. Hitchens, the “languorous charms” he could once upon a time deploy against the objects of his desire, male and female, are no more; he’s a Dorian-Gray picture of his former self invoking the memory of it all to sell books this time around, and he’s given it—and himself—a very bad name indeed.