As I commented on a previous post, Ruth Rendell when she was publicizing one of her final novels, The Child's Child (2012), divulged that she had had a gay cousin who died in 1989 from AIDS complications, to whom she had been very close. He was put through aversion therapy in the 1970s, she told an interviewer, "and it was so horrible he ran away....Of course I knew he was gay. We were great friends as well as cousins."
