Reading his stuff, maybe one could tell he was gay? A friend's wife was convinced early on, I never really could tell. I know his later books were more fantasy than anything else, which I was not terribly interested in, vs the sci-fi, and horror as my guilty pleasure type reading.
Yeah, I guess it's not immediately obvious that Barker is gay, from some of his fiction!
The best written cosmic horror I’ve ever read is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance.
No, no, I read an interview with Barker where he specifically talked about wanting his protagonist to be someone he would find attractive. I appreciated a lot of design decisions behind Undying.It didn't make me like him any less, and from what people said, it made some of the scenes make more sense. It would be a bummer if that is why he became less popular though. Then again, I never much repeated the thing of him being gay as I never heard it officially. It is cool that you worked on a project with him, did you meet him and everything? Was he a nice person?