NOT ALL good poets are good readers, the way Thom was. Before him, the only poets I'd heard read were Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. Frost was very old and very dry; Dylan Thomas was sober, I think. Since then, I've heard many poets read and Thom was the best. Not that he was an actor; in fact, he didn't like actors reading poetry, too much feeling. What made him so good was his sense of urgency. He needed you to listen and understand what he was saying.

One of the first things I did at Cambridge, when I arrived there in September 1952, was read a poem by Thom. I'd never heard of him, of course, but in Varsity, the student newspaper, there was a profile of him, written by Karl Miller, and with it, his picture and his latest poem, “The Beach Head.” I read it all the way through even though I hadn't finished unpacking; I hadn't met my supervisor and I didn't know what classes I'd be taking. I hadn't even begun to think of myself as gay.

I had no idea that “The Beach Head” was about Tony White, who was playing Cyrano in the first production of the season at the ADC (a club that I would shortly join), but I recognized the feeling and as it turned out, it was a gay feeling, from a man about another man. Was it that that watered the seed?

I was twenty-one when Thom and I met, he was twenty-three. He knew he was gay, I was finally acknowledging it. Neither of us had been in love before, certainly not with a man. We felt lucky, grateful to have found each other. It was a very intense, profound, life-changing, wonderful time. I vaguely remembered Plato's split soul theory, man is destined to search for his other half, and I knew I'd found mine. On one of the three Fantasy pamphlets Thom gave me was the inscription, “Mike, all I ever wanted.”

That we were very different people never occurred to us. Thom was a brilliant student. He'd gotten a First, the highest grade Cambridge awarded. He'd already written some of the poems that would be printed in the Fantasy pamphlet and later in . He wanted to be a poet and he was a poet. I, on the