Rick:

That is a nice, measured review. I think you have been too kind to Tripp,

though. The “recruiting” of historical figures to the homosexualist cause

has been with us at least since my schooldays, when a homosexual

schoolmaster spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to persuade us

that various historical — esp. Lord Kitchener — had been homosexual. (On

my reading of the evidence, it seems much more likely that Kitchener was

simply asexual.) More recently, Louis Crompton, another homosexual

propagandist, has published a book on this theme, which I reviewed a few

months ago for the Claremont Review.

On the topic of men sharing beds: I don’t know how things went over here,

but in England this was commonplace until very recently. I can remember

sharing beds with other guys when a student in the mid-1960s. It was a

matter of convenience; nobody thought there was anything peculiar or

salacious about it.

Further back people were even more blithe. Especially, perhaps, in the USA:

“America in those days was a curiously innocent country. Numbers of men

asked me to explain what it was that Oscar Wilde had done.” —Bertrand

Russell’s Autobiography, vol. 1, p.209. He is speaking of the late 1890s.