Every book I read in my youth spoke to my sexuality, because I was straight: Darcy; Heathcliff; the fondue orgy in Asterix in Switzerland – I longed for them all. Later, when things became more romantically interesting, which was the book which spoke to me most strongly? There wasn’t one.
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Haven’t you heard the stories of gardeners who, after a single rose-thorn puncture, lost an arm, or more? It’s not that I hate roses. I will acknowledge that, in certain circumstances—breeze-ruffled in the lilac dusk of a Provençal evening, say, or trained by generations of grateful college servants against honeyed Oxford limestone—a rose can achieve glory: the platonic ideal of flowers.
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