To lift their lives out of the ordinary, a desire the narrator thinks all people entertain, to have something unexpected happen, like the naked Ulysses surprising the maiden Naussica, he and William convince the expatriates to stage a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. In an epilogue, the narrator returns to Corfu to visit Kester Berrick's grave.

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Both novels display Dessaix's mastery of language. Through his narrators Dessaix is able to showcase his interest in a great many topics and especially his love of Chekhov, although the novels are liberally peppered with other literary allusions as well. The novels established Dessaix as a serious voice in gay literature.

Dessaix is also the editor of Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing: An Anthology (1993), and Speaking Their Minds: Intellectuals and Public Culture in Australia (1998). In 1998 he published (and so forth), a collection of short stories, essays, literary criticism, and travel pieces. The book is evocative and provocative and emphasizes the themes he explores in his novels, especially intimacy, art, death, and how to lead a meaningful life.

Dessaix's latest publication Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2005) won the Margaret Scott prize awarded by the University of Tasmania. It records another journey. Here Dessaix retraces the path taken by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Ivan Turgenev as he pursued with unwavering devotion the married opera singer Pauline Viardot. Dessaix also comments on contemporary Russia now overrun with Western corporate culture. As in his other books, in Twilight of Love Dessaix constantly shifts from background and foreground; and like his other books, it is also distinguished by entrancing prose.

Dessaix's writings feature lost, psychologically crippled people who have intimacy problems. They are uncertain if love is even possible. His characters live with the awareness of death and seek to use art and beauty as means of making sense of the meaninglessness of their existence.

Dessaix has been open about his positive HIV-status for the past ten years. He and Timms now reside in Tasmania.

In the past two decades Australia has come to occupy a leading place in gay and lesbian literature, and New Zealand has recently produced some significant gay and lesbian texts.

In its first century of existence, gay male autobiography has become increasingly more open, frank, and unapologetic.

Travel has afforded gays and lesbians both freedom from the restraints of their own cultures and the erotic stimulus of exotic sexual customs and partners.

The acclaimed prose style of travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin, a secretive bisexual, may have been developed as a means of hiding the truth of his sexuality.

In the Divine Comedy Dante treats male homosexuality first as violence against God and then more sympathetically as merely one of the kinds of love.

Acclaimed mystery writer Patricia Highsmith is the author of one explicitly lesbian novel, as well as the popular series featuring the amoral bisexual Tom Ripley.