J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself[*] is the simplest, most directly personal report of what it is like to be a homosexual that, to my knowledge, has yet been published. This in itself makes it sufficiently noteworthy. But it also appears in the same year as Philip Roth’s spectacularly popular Portnoy’s Complaint, a collocation which, although fortuitous; adds enormously to its interest. I am not suggesting that the two books, or their authors, have much in common. On the contrary. Mr. Roth is American, Ackerley is English. Mr. Roth’s book is fiction, a work of the imagination; Ackerley’s…