Transvestism, Pantomime and Striptease
TLS September 25 2009 from Allan Massie's review of John Carey's William Golding: The Man who wrote "Lord of the Flies" : The victim in Rites of Passage is the young clergyman Colley, who takes to his bed and apparently dies of shame after participating in a drunken homosexual incident on the lower deck. Some of Golding's friends believed that he had homosexual tendencies himself, and after a dream in which he had dressed up in his mother's clothes Golding wrote in his notebooks: "I pretend to be immune to such bent delights as homosexuality and transvestism, but my dreams won't let me get away with standard attitudes about myself." He dreamed of making love to two of his Oxford contemporaries and of being invited by a small Ethiopian boy "to bugger him". He declined the invitation "with a gloomy sense that he has missed the only thing the place has to offer". Such dreams represented his unconscious self, and he denied an...