From the mum who thought it worse than a heroin addiction to the stern grandparent who wasn't bothered, coming out as gay can be easy or traumatic. Simon Callow, Stella Duffy, Ben Bradshaw and others tell Holly Williams about the ultimate moment of truth

"Each man kills the thing he loves", wrote Oscar Wilde. "The coward does it with a kiss."

Fassbender's sex advice

A sub-plot to this dramatic week was the lively turf war between the chairmen of the two Commons select committees with an interest in the hacking affair.

In the modern age of phone-tapping and the super-injunction, one wonders what Harry Hodge would have said about the right to privacy.

Shockingly, a straw poll among young authors yielded just two recognitions of Arthur Machen's name in a group of 20.

At the outset, the American academic Deborah Lutz describes the impetus of this book in terms of the following question: "If we could be young sexual innovators and deviants out for action in Victorian London, how might that feel?" A snap response might be that, in terms of English usage, we couldn't possibly feel "out for action", a much more recent coinage. Pleasure Bound moves on to give us snapshots of 19th-century specimens of debauched and sexually outré behaviour – which means, in practice, all the usual suspects. The Pre-Raphaelites, Algernon Swinburne, Henry Spencer Ashbee, Richard Burton, Oscar Wilde are present and incorrect.

It was a balmy evening on 27 September 1894 when two men appeared at the front door of the Albion Hotel in Brighton and asked if they could rent a room. One was a young newspaper seller from Worthing named Alfonso Conway. His companion was Oscar Wilde.