"It's not possible to please everyone, and it can be unwise even to try, but I found on reading Mark Lilly's letter (18 February) that I felt a sort of commitment to cheering him up. Anyone who has so resentfully treasured one of my frivolous notes from the dear dead days of twenty years ago, and who keeps it by him in a gazelle-infested exile at the University of Tunis, is entitled to such consolation as I can afford.
His case against me is one of latent and blatant homophobia, of the sort that if directed at another target might be 'denounced with vigour and might well have led to criminal proceedings or civil litigation'. By happy chance, I can refer him to a recent 'outing', conducted by Alexander Cockburn in the tabloid New York Press of the first week of February: 'Many's the time male friends have had to push Hitchens's mouth, fragrant with martinis, away, as, amid the welcomes and goodbyes, he seeks their cheek or lips.' Some good critics regard this as one of Cockburn's more polished pieces, especially dealing as it does with the absolute and inflexible requirement never to rat on an old pal. I offer it, though, as an example of a badge of supposed shame that one may wear with pride.
I was at first puzzled by Lilly's other faded but faithfully-preserved clipping, wherein he quotes Julian Barnes, then in his TV critic period, from October 1984. Apparently 'Hitchens's homophobic outbursts led Julian Barnes to say that "you'd certainly need a lot of karma not to reach for your baseball bat"' after my appearance on the tiny screen. A quick call to Julian and the fount of memory was unsealed. I had done a chat-show with Norman Mailer, after the incautious publication of his book Tough Guys Don't Dance. And I had ragged him a bit about his literary obsession with the occasions of sodomy, to say nothing of his then-interest in the karmic. 'I was,' recalled Barnes, 'sort of handing the baseball bat to Mailer.' This same notion had in fact occurred to Mailer himself. After the show, he berated me, and inscribed his copy of Tough Guys with an admonition to 'see what I say about you'. Nor had I long to wait. In a lengthy interview with the Face he attributed his bad notices to the fact that the London literary racket was run by a daisy-chain of queens, led by Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I composed, but did not eventually send, a letter to the Face protesting that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton.)
Mailer and I have since made it up. So could one leave it like this? I would never persecute or deride Lilly, and he in return should drop his lugubrious demand that gay-teasers should be prosecuted. Also, he might bear in mind our relative advantages. He lives in Tunis. I live in sodding Washington DC. Was it so kind of him to rub this in? Need he have reminded me of the time when I could dash off a mocking letter to the likes of himself, and had not reached the state of decrepitude when only women would even consider going to bed with me?
Christopher Hitchens Washington DC" -------------------- I just saw Angela Davis speak for the first time, on CSPAN. She was impressive and inspiring.
Peter