"Novelist Philip Hensher will provoke a backlash against homosexuals if he keeps writing such graphic gay sex scenes, says the ex-Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne. A heated exchange between the writers has been running in the letters page of The Spectator since Worsthorne slammed Hensher's latest novel for its "unseemly anatomical accounts" of provincial orgies.
To those who remember Worsthorne's stance on homosexuality in the Eighties, this may come as no surprise. But he insists he is not homophobic, simply that he finds Hensher's sex scenes "hard to believe" and "depressingly impersonal".
"Philip Hensher and Alan Hollinghurst are two of our greatest contemporary writers," he tells me, "and of course I believe in free speech. But reading Hensher's latest novel I was shocked by all the grisly detail. It's completely unnecessary."
Worsthorne adds that far from being anti-gay, he has "spent much of my time in the gay world", and was recently named a gay icon by a magazine. Hensher, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be taking Worsthorne too seriously: "I really don't give a toss," he says.
Via
The Independent On Sunday
Here's Worsthorne's
Spectator piece that started it all;
"...at a time when we are trying to accept homosexuality as ordinary and even cosy, such efforts to stuff filth up our noses are in danger of awaking prejudices that we hoped had been put to sleep for ever."
Crikey! It's like the Torchwood wars for poshos.
Oh, by the way here's Mrs Worst Horn giving a fairly graphic account of gay sexing at his public school;
"A lot of buggery went on..."
Won't somebody please think of the children?????
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