Jeremy Trafford proposes a solution to the world population problem: 'There should be loudspeaker vans touring areas of high population proclaiming the glories of homosexuality! Look, I'm only half joking. The massive population increase is one of the world's most pressing problems. There are limited resources and wars will be fought in the future for possession of rivers and fertile stretches of land. If more people were allowed to follow their true, homosexual natures, then that would be of great benefit to mankind.'
I've come to interview him in his slightly Bohemian Earls Court flat about his first novel (Ophelia, House of Stratus £9.99) but for the moment he has more pressing things on his mind.
He has been watching the news and the issue of Clause 28 is being dragged out yet again by the Conservative leadership candidates.
'You can't change people's sexuality by promoting it, any more than you can change the colour of their eyes,' says Trafford, slamming off the tv. 'If you could there would be no gay women or men at all because heterosexuality is promoted every single day by religious sects, in countless books, movies and tv shows. But what you can do is allow people to be themselves.'
After ten minutes in this vein, he has yet to offer me a chair or, indeed, given me a chance to take my jacket off. He sits on the arm of one sofa, I sit on the arm of another. Clearly he considers what he has to say too important for the comfort of a relaxing position.
Trafford is passionate about the issue because homophobia has played a decisive role in his life. He's as coy about his age as a veteran porno star, but it could be that he is nudging sixty. When he was a young man, homosexuality was firmly outlawed.
'Listen! When I was twenty you could be imprisoned for two years for having sex with another man! Can you imagine? The sheer absurdity of it all!' His voice mellifluous as a cello, he speaks rapidly; but, nevertheless, each sentence is exquisitely formed: the grammar as impeccable as you would expect from one who read English and Philosophy at Cambridge in the middle of the last century. But he is no dry academician. Indeed, he has something of a pirate air about him. Tall, well-built and with a glorious beard one can imagine him commanding a crew of desperadoes on a galleon in the Caribbean circa 1756. This confident figure, though, is only recently acquired. Speaking of his youth, he suddenly becomes truly angry: 'Even now, when I think about it I am incandescent with rage.'
He believed that being homosexual was deeply wrong: 'I was profoundly ashamed that I should have found other men desirable.' He sought psychiatric help and even considered aversion therapy at a leading mental hospital. It says something of the era that psychiatrists were willing to offer such treatment. The years of his youth, he says, were utterly wasted: 'It wasn't until my thirties that I came to accept my homosexuality. I even got married, because I thought that that might effect a 'cure.' It didn't. And I caused my wife great unhappiness. I loved her, of course I did. But not sexually. That's why homophobia and laws like clause 28 are so wicked - they don't merely affect gay women and men.'
With this statement he becomes silent and I take the opportunity to suggest we sit down properly.
I set up my tape recorder. My main purpose, after all, is to discuss his novel. Ophelia is a prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet: 'What inspired you to write it?'
'And of course even famous people were silent about their being gay!' Trafford is not about to be deflected. 'E.M. Forster! Why didn't he speak in his later years? What would they have done? Locked up this Grand Old Man of English letters? W.H. Auden, D.H. Lawrence, Benjamin Britten . . . All deafeningly silent. And Hemingway obviously had a gay side to his nature. As did Tolstoy . . . '
Good grief! Is Trafford going to out the whole of the literary and artistic canon of the past one hundred years?
'And we all know that Shakespeare was bisexual!'
Of the past four hundred years.
One can be facetious, but of course Jeremy Trafford is right. Until incredibly recently in the West gays and lesbians have lived in silence and terror. I ask him why he thinks this is.
'It's quite simple,' he explains. 'The three dominant religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - grew from the ideas of obscure desert tribes who, because of their personal and political circumstances, needed to maintain high fertility rates. They needed children. But nowadays it makes no sense to apply the ethics of a desert community on modern contemporary civilization. It's just bad luck, really. Had it not been for politics, we might just as easily have inherited the more enlightened beliefs of ancient Greece or Rome. Of course one must live by a moral code, but people should be more questioning.'
It's at this point that Trafford segues quite naturally into talking about his book, and I begin to understand that all that he has said before serves as an indispensable introduction.
'People generally blindly accept what is written down. They don't question Shakespeare's portrayal of Ophelia, which is actually very sketchy. She goes mad in the play. But why? What has led her to this point? Shakespeare gives us no real insight into her character and one of the purposes of my book is to fill in the blanks.
'It's a story of relationships. Most especially between Hamlet and Ophelia, between Hamlet and his father and between Man and whatever people may think of as their idea of God. Perhaps the central focus of the novel is Ophelia's love for two people - Svendborg and Hamlet. And then we have Hamlet, who is in love with Ophelia against his father's wishes. So one strand of the book is about Authority and the questioning of Authority. Obedience to the prevailing moral code versus the rights of the individual.'
Trafford gives an outline of the story which is dramatic and compelling (see review on this page.).
There are no specifically gay characters, but one can see nevertheless how the personae are informed by Trafford's personal experiences.
When he has finished, Trafford seems momentarily exhausted and tired. Publication of this book, he tells me, has been a huge effort. There were more than a few rejection slips. Publishers, notoriously, have a taste for firm, young skin and while Trafford may be 'comparatively young' (as his unlikely but nevertheless good friend Lord Longford - then well into his nineties - once called him) he is not the nubile twenty-something more frequently adopted by publishing houses as their Next Big Thing. But, in the end, talent will out. The book is at last now in the shops. Hopefully, a producer will pick it up and notice its undoubted filmic possibilities. In the meantime, though, there can be no rest. The official launch is imminent and Trafford has to write out the hundred plus invitations. Then there is a speaker to invite and more publicity to be arranged.
'You will come, won't you?' he says, hastily scribbling my name down on an elegant card. Of course I'll be there. As I hope to be for the launch of his next two books (already promised from House of Stratus.) And after that who knows what? One thing is for certain: of Jeremy Trafford we have only just heard the beginning.