What is Richard Dawkins' sexual orientation?

Answer 1

Richard Dawkins in heterosexual - having been married more than once. He has one daughter.

Christy Hitchens & Richard have a lot in common and someday we will read about Dick and his time at university.

Hitch never made a secret of the fact that his bisexuality continued well into his university years. In this honesty, he was so unlike a number of the male characters in Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child," who - having settled into conventional heterosexuality and parenthood - went to great lengths to conceal their youthful affairs with the doomed queer poet at the center of the story.

In his memoir, Hitch, in describing his sexual encounters with young men while a penniless and militantly left-wing student at Oxford, relates how he'd frequently be invited by wealthy and attractive young men, often right-wingers, to lavish dinner parties with good food and even better wine and spirits and would often accept, knowing that he would have to "sing for his supper" - a euphemism that should be understood as not merely being entertaining but as "putting out."

Hitch wrote that "now and then, even though I was by then fixed on the pursuit of young women, a mild and mildly enjoyable relapse would occur and I suppose I can claim this… of two young men who became members of Margaret Thatcher's government."

This offhand mention made headlines when "Hitch 22" was published in the UK.

"So who WERE the two Tory ministers who had gay flings with Christopher Hitchens at Oxford?" screamed the headline on the Daily Mail, the right-wing tabloid that is the world's third-largest English language newspaper. It went on to quote Oxford contemporaries of Hitch's as saying "He had a reputation for being AC/ DC and, although a Trot, he was fancied by quite a few gay Tories and moved in those circles."

While the Mail interviewed a number of senior Tories whom they considered possible candidates, and who acknowledged that Hitch was "sexy and charming" to men as well as women, they could get none of them to admit to any carnal knowledge of the inimitable memoirist.

In my view, Hitch was queer in several ways - both in the Merriam-Webster definitions of the word as "eccentric," "unusual," "unique" (he certainly was "sui generis") and in the sense that he "got" us in a way that few non-gay writers ever have.

Just dip into Hitch's massive essay collection, "Arguably," published last year by Hachette Book Group's Twelve collection. It's a terrific reminder of the erudition and range of which Hitch was capable and of his great gifted pen. There's a lot about homosexuals and homosexuality in many of the assembled articles - just look at his devastating readings of that old closet case Somerset Maugham, or his send-up of the ex-bugger Stephen Spender, who went to great lengths to expunge his youthful homoerotic poetry from later editions of his collected poems and rewrote other poems to remove lines betraying his attractions to boys. Hitch neatly dispatches Spender, who began as a Communist and ended up editing a CIA front magazine called Encounter as a somewhat reactionary curmudgeon, by quoting this devastating limerick:

Then up spake the bold Stephen Spender

"you may think my conscience is tender

You might think my heart

Was my sensitive part -

But you should see my poor old pudenda."