"Do not rise to this man's bait," I told myself while reading Nigel Tart's letter on Joe Orton (Letters, January 24), "he's a provocateur, like Orton himself."

I imagine most letters editors have the name of Edna Welthorpe (a pseudonym Orton used for pranks and hoaxes - Argus letters ed) pinned by their desks as a warning.

Then I noticed the letter was not signed Welthorpe but was on behalf of Brighton and Hove Green Party.

What a lot of shrapnel Mr Tart packed into his missive.

1) A lecture about Orton, he beefs, should have the word "homosexual" prominent in the publicity.

Is this to become invariable so The Importance of Being Earnest has to be advertised as "by Oscar Wilde (homosexual)" on billboards or does it apply only to Orton?

2) Orton's homosexuality needs "spelling out".

Why? He was one of the most flamboyant homosexuals of his day and you never see an article about him that doesn't salivate over seedy details of his life.

3) He was the "greatest LGBT playwright"

after Shakespeare.

Where does that leave Maugham or Rattigan or the sainted Oscar himself? In critical terms, I'd have thought Orton had rather faded.

4) Shakespeare was gay. Well, the editor uses that word in the heading, though Mr Tart doesn't specify which initial out of LGBT applies.

Shakespeare was married, with three children. The evidence of the sonnets is ambiguous. "Lover", for instance, in Elizabethan times could merely mean "friend".

It is not known whether the poems are autobiographical or fictional.

Sodomy then being a capital offence, it was unlikely Shakespeare would publish poems that extolled it. But this kind of revisionism, claiming major cultural figures from the past as gay, is all too common.

5) Anyone who claims Shakespeare was not gay is "homophobic".

No. We are just people who, unlike Mr Tart, prefer historical facts.

6) It's OK to impugn middle-aged, middle-class people.

7) Young LGBT people ought to be taught about Orton in school.

Maybe they are. But with his lifestyle - drugs, rent boys, half his life apparently spent committing indecencies in public urinals, the puerile vandalism of library books, the sordid end - bludgeoned to death by his lover - I'm not sure he's much of a role model.

And I said I wouldn't rise to it.

  • Graham Chainey, Marine Parade, Brighton