I was thinking about our discussion last night and specifically about the lack of direct talk about sex in "Two People." In "Last Exit to Brooklyn" Hubert Selby Jr. certainly uses frank language about sex (including homosexuality). That book is from the same period and was a success. So, why is it okay for Selby to use it and not Windham? Is it the violence factor in Selby's novel that makes it acceptable to the reading public of the 1960's? Just thought I would throw that out there.
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I agree that the "times" are only a very partial explanation for Windham's reticence. Last Exit to Brooklyn was published a year before Two People, John Rechy's City of Night two years before, and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar a whopping seventeen years before. Their birth years—Windham, 1920; Vidal, 1925; Selby, 1928; Rechy, 1931—are more explanatory, but there again only partially.
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