It’s fascinating to read about Dylan Thomas’s trips to New York, especially his last, fatal one. And I mean that without any sort of morbid intent.

He stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, in what has become the gayest neighborhood of the city. The hotel itself was a center of alternative Bohemian life. He hung out at the White Horse Tavern, which became in 1990 the site of one of Queer Nation’s most celebrated actions.

And of course he died at St Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village, suffering from pneumonia.

What gay man of a certain age would not shiver at the symbolism of St Vincent’s and pneumonia? (The hospital became ground zero of the AIDS epidemic.)

But despite knowing all that, I never had an inkling that people questioned his sexual orientation, and apparently for good reason.