PAUL BURSTON is one Britain’s best-known gay writers and the host of London’s award-winning LGBT literary salon Polari. His latest novel, The Black Path, is a psychological thriller about love and lies, obsession and betrayal.
You were a founding editor of Attitude,what was the magazine like in those early days?
They were exciting times. We attracted some top-name journalists and secured the best interviews. Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote for us and we interviewed everyone from Pedro Almodóvar to Neil Tennant, who came out in our pages. We received a letter from a female fan insisting that we’d twisted Neil’s words and that he wasn’t really gay at all. But thanks to that interview, Attitude became the go-to magazine for celebrities keen to cultivate a gay fan base or tell the world that they were gay.