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Stephen Fry has the kind of effort­less tal­ent that makes me envi­ous. He is a bril­liant actor and come­dian (Black­ad­der; Jeeves and Woos­er; A Bit of Fry and Lau­rie), and fine writer of fic­tion, non-fic­tion, screen­plays and plays (I’m in the mid­dle of his nov­el Mak­ing His­tory). Nat­u­rally, such a per­son would be expect­ed to write an inter­est­ing biog­ra­phy. But I was unpre­pared for the extreme hon­esty and sparkling wit of this book. It’s devot­ed entire­ly to his child­hood and teenage years, always the most inter­est­ing parts of an auto­bi­og­ra­phy, if it is hon­est. His descrip­tion of his first expe­ri­ence of feel­ing love is among the finest I’ve read. His self-eval­u­a­tions strike me as spot-on, his con­fes­sions to mis­deeds are not twist­ed into self-glam­or­iz­ing. The book is absolute­ly engross­ing. For the aspects of human cul­ture that offend him, he reserves a spe­cial, elo­quent anger:

”.…the con­cept that real­ly gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that real­ly spins their mel­on and sick­ens their stom­ach is that most ter­ri­ble and ter­ri­fy­ing of all human notions, love. That one can love anoth­er of the same gen­der, that is what the homo­phobe real­ly can­not stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semi­tones of the word’s full octave. Love as agape, Erosphi­los; love as romance, friend­ship and ado­ra­tion; love as infat­u­a­tion, obses­sion and lust; love as tor­ture, eupho­ria, ecsta­cy and obliv­ion (this is begin­ning to read like a Calvin Klein per­fume cat­a­logue); love as need, pas­sion and desire.”
This is exact­ly the right point to make. The gay-haters are pri­mar­ily haters of love. That is why they can be dri­ven to a fanat­i­cal fren­zy by the sight two men kiss­ing, and why they cam­paign so vig­or­ously against gay mar­ri­ange. In the last analy­sis, it is not reli­gion or tra­di­tion, or even sex­ual prud­ery, that is the source of anti-gay prej­u­dice, but a pro­found men­tal and spir­i­tual ill­ness. If you are not famil­iar with Fry’s com­ic genius, I strong­ly rec­om­mend that you rent or down­load some episodes of A Bit of Fry and Lau­rie. This com­edy sketch show ran to 26 episodes between 1989 and 1995. Fry and Hugh Lau­rie were roo­mates at Cam­bridge, and worked togeth­er in many projects.