Aids
The rise and fall of Tammy Faye
Robert Gore-Langton explores the remarkable life of televangelist Tammy Faye, and its descent into chaos
A well-meaning but dull Official History: Olivier's Normal Heart reviewed
The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time…
Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
What the fight against HIV can teach us about defeating Covid-19
In the eighties, we were warned to beware an easily spread, deadly virus. The government’s ominous HIV adverts told us…
Nostalgia for seedy nightclubs reeking of sex and poppers
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
You'll wish you were gay: Channel 4's It's a Sin reviewed
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that…
The Inheritance isn’t theatre — it’s mesmerically boring TV
Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven comedy with a complex back narrative. Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend…
‘Living with’ is now a thing – usually followed by something nasty like Alzheimer’s
I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease,…
Vital signs
Exhibit A. It is 1958 and you are barrelling down a dual carriageway; the 70 mph limit is still eight…
One night in the backwoods
The man I met in the moose-hunters' bar, and what happened between us
Robert Mapplethorpe: bad boy with a camera
Robert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn…
Why won’t our condom-obsessed NHS back this wonder drug?
A new drug could reduce new infections to zero – so why hasn’t the NHS backed it yet?
The trials of living with a High Court judge
This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s…
An epic study of trauma and friendship in the age of self-invention
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
Spectator letters: Housing associations fight back; and more world-wrecking British graduates
What we’re building Sir: I was surprised and frustrated to read Ross Clark’s piece on housing associations in last week’s…
A sombre Irish family saga — that glows in the dark
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…
My Night With Reg at the Apollo Theatre reviewed: a great play that will go under without an interval
Gay plays crowd the theatrical canon. There are the necessary enigmas of Noël Coward, like The Vortex or Design For…
Norman Mailer’s wife comes out of the shadows
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading…
Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special
‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different…
Spectator letters: Why Aids is still a threat, elephants are altruistic, and crime has gone online
Aids is still deadly Sir: Dr Pemberton (‘Life after Aids’, 19 April) subscribes to the now prevalent view that we have…
As a doctor, I’d rather have HIV than diabetes
In the West, the deadliest thing about HIV may now be the stigma
Please stop trying to raise my awareness
Once, campaigners and charities tried to fight social evils. Now they just tell us about them
Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects…
Dallas Buyers Club - Matthew McConaughey gives the best performance of anyone's career
Although you’ll have heard that Dallas Buyers Club is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career, I…
Are events in Last Tango in Halifax too bad to be true?
Does love run out when life runs out? Or does it intensify, touching and changing all around it? Two series…
