Sullivan on The History Boys

The great achievement of the great homosexual creators of the past was their sublimation of excruciating emotional pain into erudition and pedagogy and integrity in the abstract world of vicarious living. You see the emotional wreckage of such a path in Hector's own bloated carcass of a body. The dehumanizing obesity of the character is the outward scar-tissue of inward emotional death. This, I recall, is what society demands I become. This, I recall insisting, I will not become. And I haven't. Neither has a generation. That is our tentative achievement so despised by so many. It is still fragile. It had to survive a plague and may be eclipsed by a looming spasm of religious hatred. But we have proved one thing that is worth proving: Happiness is an option.