ARTS SPECIAL
from GLORY HOLE to GORY HOLE

certainly doesn’t appear in a very sympathetic light.
“I’m no fan of the late Diana Spencer, either personally or

what she represents. I don’t think her role in the acceptance of HIV/Aids was particularly significant. I think anyone in her position should have done a lot more. I think she did the minimum amount and used it for personal publicity.
“If you were fabulously wealthy and had servants at your beck and call and a lot of your close friends and retainers were gay and there was an illness destroying gay people around you, wouldn’t you go and hold their hands in hospital?

“A lot of other people were doing a great deal in those days and they weren’t doing it for personal glory. Look, what’s influenced the landscape for people with HIV? It’s the new treatments not what Diana did. Do you really think it was Diana’s intervention that made the new drugs available or the support improve for people with HIV? There’s no way we should go belly up and sentimental and see Diana Spencer as some kind of saint on HIV or landmines or anything.
“The mood Diana captured was one of blatant materialism and self-indulgence. It was celebrity obsession, mass hysteria with no cogent or rational thought.”
Most of the other characters in the novel don’t come across very well either.
“The only character in my book who comes out of it as a complete shit is Dorian Gray and he’s a complete psychopath as he is in Wilde’s original as well.”
So, it’s a sex and drugs and rock n’ roll lifestyle in your novel?

Maybe the sex and drugs, but not the rock n’ roll. What my novel does show is the extent to which, in the world of emotions, events are causally related. Gay men in particular were involved with a massive increase in promiscuity followed by a deadly sexually-transmitted epidemic.
“Inevitably both gay men and society in general felt these two things were related but in reality they
probably weren’t. But everyone has to deal with the moral consequences of this.

“Here you have a minority in society defined by a sexual act who have suffered repression. And my book deals with that in a way that a lot of books don’t. I try to confront head on the