Anthony

Yes, all that is good advice, I think. So many people have tried to distil what makes for good writing and many of them have produced excellent advice. But there isn't any substitute for the spare clarity and directness that marks someone who knows what they want to say - and what they can leave out because it doesn't add to the message. Anthony

Dear Libby, I'm not convinced that the internet has changed things as much as you say. Dickens wrote most of his stories to be published a chapter at a time in weekly or monthly magazines. I would be surprised if he didn't have some readers who told him how they liked it as he went along. I suppose he had to be very confident - but there are still a few people like that about. I think what has changed is the range of subjects that can be covered, the freedom with which they can be treated and the size of audience needed. GA can post stories that get a readership of anything from one up. But serious, yes! and lighthearted and frivolous and heavy too and not a little madness. Helga Meyer brough cloth with her to give away and knew what she intended to do but her audience would have had to be unusually well briefed and given time to prepare their response and maybe that would deter many. All human knowledge is expressed in words and symbols and the process of stringing them together to convey an idea is the same as it has always been. I think more people are doing more writing than ever before and I'm fascinated to see whether the effect is an improvement in the standard. I find a lot shows symptoms of sloppy thought but then a lot always has. How often have you heard of someone making plans for the future (as if they could be for the past)! But you don't have a proof-reader or editor so you forego the early feedback they could give you. I don't think the serial format helps much because unless the author rewrites things what was wrong doesn't get corrected and what could be improved remains potentially better. I can't read serials because I'm so old that I forget what happened last episode and have to read it again. And I've frequently found the episodes appear very irregularly. Thank you for letting me see you thoughts. Have you anything to add? Love, Anthony

I think I've read it before or another like it. I was delighted with it and with the way Aaron dealt with his father. I would have loved to be able to do that but never dared to stand up against my parents - well mainly my father. So I thank you very much for writing and publishing it. Now I'm going to read something else you've written. Love, Anthony

Yes, Minorwaltz, some of the stories are just delicious and I think it is true that real life is rarely quite as the stories paint it. Some are written by old men like me who use writing as a way of venting their unfulfilled desires. But the bad things in the stories are also more lurid than is common in everyday life. I mean the gay-bashing and unprovoked attacks on gay boys (who are always small for their age and so on). Really bad attacks like Matthew Shepherd are rare enough to be headline news. I was lucky in having non-religious parents and living in England which is mostly very laid back about whether you believe or not. I got christened but never went to church. I do think that apart from the religious there is not so much danger to gay people. I only have one friend who is so religious that he seriously tells me he believes I'm going to hell! [because I'm gay you see even though I'm married and faithful and have children and grandchildren!] I never had the courage to come out to my parents. But when I got to university I was able to be myself and to admit to one friend or another that I really liked so and so. And I never was gay-bashed or encountered hatred and I found a lot of sympathetic people (surprisingly many of them were coaches of various sports - maybe this is because such people get to see a lot of some very good-looking people. So don't despair. Find sympathetic people and make lots of friends. Love, Anthony

Yes minorwaltz & lemonpie, even when I was 21 it did seem as if there was no-one and not much prospect of finding one. I was certainly almost in despair about it. All I can say is that the best chance you have is to get to know more people. It doesn't matter what proportion of people are gay. It is plain that to stand the same chance as a straight person of finding a (gay) life partner you would have to know maybe up to ten or twenty times as many people. So when you have choices in your life (maybe most of them after you have finished school) you need to choose to give yourself the chance to meet more people. And actually I don't think I acted like that and suppose many people never have a chance to choose between lots of friends and acquaintances and few. But there is no doubt in my mind that one of the best things anyone ever does to give them a good chance of a partner is go to college. I do think Cia was amazingly lucky but so was I. I was 27 before I met my wife and had been gay almost the whole time since I first had sex and I told her I was mainly gay and yet we still took each other on and that will be 49 years ago in March! So I must be a little bit bi. And Cia is right I think, to say that it doesn't matter what sex your partner is if there is the right kind of spark between you. Love, Anthony

Oh! Colinian, I thought it was the chinese that went sideways. Love, Anthony

Cia, You wrote: "It's all good as long as it's legal" What's legality got to do with it? The law is an ass and no-one of any sense obeys it because it's the law. Just look at the law-makers! (If you can bear it.) When I was a sexually active gay man all homosexual acts were punishable by law and imprisonment was quite common. How can anyone think the law is always right: you might as well use the bible or the koran as a guide to morality. Like most recent presidents morality is a concept that they don't understand. Love, Anthony

Dear Aximili, You wrote: I think that coming out in school can be liberating. Staying in the closet all those years, I think I was at least safe from disease, but it was five years of pure loneliness. In a way, I got used to it. That rings peals of bells with me. From puberty what confronted me was a sexual desert extending into my twenties and my wife and I both felt the same about that and so tried to alleviate it for our children. We allowed them to bring partners home (to bed) from the age of sixteen. It would have been earlier but under our antiquated laws we could have lost control of them if we had explicitly allowed sex when they were younger. Like you I was deeply closeted at university. Unfortunately I fell in love with a straight guy in my first term and spent a lot of time longing and trying to get over the longing. So I thought very few people knew. Then, one day in my third year I was approached in the quad by a beautiful black man called Rex Nettleford who I had scarcely spoken to before. He simply said "Would you like to sleep with a black man; I've got a friend coming to stay who would like some company." I was gobsmacked. How could he know I would be up for that? I perhaps ought to say that I was athletic, rowed in the first eight and not the least bit artistic or effeminate. So I was probably ostrich like; the only one who couldn't see I was hiding from everyone in plain view. Last year I tried to get in touch with Rex again. The day after I emailed him there was a full page obituary in the Guardian. As they say 'the past is a different country'. I read Colinian's remark that UC Berkeley has 36000 students (can I really remember that right?). When I was at Oxford there were 5000 in the whole university and only 200 in my college. Oh and BTW I did (of course) accept Rexes offer. And at the last college gaudy (old boys dinner) I went round asking people whether they knew I was gay when we had been there together and I don't remember anyone I asked saying 'yes'. I guess that Rex had a good gaydar - he was, I think, president of the university ballet club! Love, Anthony

Dear me, I'm way out of your league. I haven't ever listened to anything you could call pop and really very little jazz. I've spent more hours listening to Scarlatti sonatas this year than any other composer (Scott Ross's recording of all 555 of them!), but I'll listen with pleasure to some 17th C most 18th & 19th C and a little 20th C classical music. For me it's Bach, Haydn, Scarlatti, Mozart & contemporaries, Beethoven, Schubert and (believe it or not) Stravinsky (or their like). Anthony

Well! I'm surprised that you are all so definite about it. I don't think I would cavil at hairy or hairless; if I like the person (or more, if I love them) then I take what comes (joke) naturally. I discovered over 40 years ago that it was a waste of time to shave every morning. I haven't shaved since except that I *did* shave my pubes to see what it was like. Sylvia didn't like it so that's out. Trimming pubes is well worth doing if, like me (when I used them) condoms tended to roll up a turn or two and pull on pubic hair very uncomfortably. Has anyone else found that? Anthony

Dear Rad, I'm most grateful. It's the one I was looking for and your link works. Thank you very much. Anthony

I read a story somewhere and have been trying to find it. It's been bothering me for several days. Can anyone help? The story is about a boy who sees a flash in the sky and goes out in the middle of the night to investigate and finds a strange object in the woods behind his house. An alien crawls out of it and telepathically begs for sanctuary in the boy's head and he agrees. The alien shares his head and learns how to be there without upsetting the boy's own thoughts and helps him with various problems. The it points out something the boy hadn't realised - that the boy is gay - which freaks the boy out. Then the alien gets rescued and the pain the boy feels when his longtime companion is gone is hard to bear. Anthony

I'm having a wonderful time reading. Thank you all. One thing I've found several authors do is to use Hehe to indicate when the subkect finds something funny or wants something to be taken ironically. I think that it really is an inadequate way to say something; it's a sort of shorthand for what ought to be explained. When I try to think what the author meant I sometimes can put other words in place of Hehehe but sometimes I can't and sometimes I think that it would just be better left out. Does anyone else feel like this? Anthony