For me, as a child and a teenager, books had the power to expand my sense of what was possible: they took me far outside the narrow confines of suburban London and my fundamentalist Christian family. I certainly took values from them. For instance, the story of Beowulf made a huge impression on me; I decided that the important thing was not survival, but always fighting back, however terrifying one's adversary. But when the values expressed in books didn't make sense in terms of my own experience, I rejected them. In my early teens I enjoyed John Buchan's adventure stories. But I rejected the explicit anti-semitism in some of those stories; growing up in north-west London, I came into contact with Jewish people all the time. My closest friend at school was half Jewish. Buchan's anti-semitism didn't even make me angry (though it does now); I dismissed it as simply stupid.

I was an angry, rebellious kid; one of my strengths, as I now think. At twelve I was arguing with my father over his sexist attitudes, which for him were enjoined by the Bible. Again, I think the deciding factor for me was that male superiority didn't make sense in terms of my own experience. I knew I was cleverer and more capable than most of the males I encountered!

I have no doubt that having a bolshie, critical outlook helped me survive the experience of recognising that I was gay, in what was then a pretty hostile cultural environment. Books helped; oddly enough, the passage from Sword at Sunset you cite was one of the first positive depictions of a gay relationship that I ever met with. This was back when I was about thirteen. I didn't begin to identify as gay until several years later.

On the other hand, coming out as gay reinforced my sense of being an outsider, made me more inclined to identify with outsiders and outsider figures, and more inclined to be critical of conventional social values and sceptical about what I was told by those who claimed to be authorities.