Norman Mailer's gay sexual fantasy revealed

London, April 22 : He was famed for being a lady-killer, but Norman Mailer, the late novelist, journalist and playwright had a different side to him - that of a gay lover.

A former mistress of the Pulitzer Prize winning author has revealed that she suspected him of having an affair with a male friend.

Carole Mallory, a former actress and supermodel who had an affair with the six-times married writer for 10 years, saved seven boxes of material she said she collected during Mailer's weekly visits between 1983 to 1992, while he was married to his sixth and last wife.

Mallory recently sold the steamy sex memoirs of Pulitzer-winning author to Harvard University for an undisclosed amount.

She said that she was worried that he might contract Aids and refused to indulge his fantasy of three-way sex with a gay man.

The archives contains a shocking portrait of Mailer's sexual decline from world-class lothario to malfunctioning lover whose soon-to-be-former mistress wrote in her diary: "I feel so good not having sex with him . . . he does sexually to me what he likes done to him." At one point in April 1990, when Mailer was 67 and married to his sixth wife, Norris Church, Mallory worried that her lover of the previous seven years "could get Aids".

Three weeks later, she wrote that Mailer had asked her what other men she would like to sleep with. When she mentioned a man named Paul, Mailer is said to have replied: "He's gay. Why don't we all three f***?"

On October 24, 1990, Mallory scribbled in a black spiral notebook: "I think Rick Stratton is his lover. One of them."

However, Stratton who was a convicted drug dealer who wrote a cult novel, Smack Goddess, based on his own experiences, dismissed the suggestion that his relationship with Mailer was sexual.

"That's an interesting thought, but there's no truth to it. I don't believe there were ever any male lovers in Norman's life at all. I don't think he ever went that way, and certainly not with me," Times Online quoted Stratton, as saying.

ANI