Gay jeans and ties
Sir: I must refute David Starkey's assertion that 'many of the dandies . • were gay' ("Tis in ourselves that we are hetero or homo', 18 November). In the 19th century, the golden age of dandyism, the most famous dandies — Brummell, the Prince Regent, Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Dickens, Delacroix, Chopin, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Edward vir, W.B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm among others — were heterosex- ual. Admittedly Byron, a dandy for a while, was bisexual and Brummell himself, the dandy paradigm, seems to have had no real interest in sex at all — he probably found it upset his cravat. But Wilde and his idol Comte Robert de Montesquiou, were unusual in being homosexual dandies.
God knows what brand of jeans, if any, these gentlemen would wear if they were alive today.
Nigel Rodgers 6 Kingsley Mansions, Queen's Club Gardens, London W14
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