"At the End of the Sidewalks" by Baptiste Thery-Guilbert

This is a tender and tragic short novella, set in the south of France, chronicling the terrible pressures placed upon gay teenagers by the expectations of heteronormative society, the transgressive joys of casual sex, but also the beauty of a loving relationship between young friends. 

It starts at the end: “Clément died. A suicide by many hands.” (Age 17; p 10). It then returns to the narrator's passionate affair with Clément, his best friend and fellow school pupil. The narrator also has sex with Blue, an older man who likes the idea of underage boys. There are other gay characters as well, such as Louis, a complex character who dislikes gay men but can't get an erection with a girl and who enjoys being buggered by Djamil, an Arab catholic who can't speak to his mum but goes to confession where he speaks freely about his love-life.

The second part jumps forward two years to the narrator aged 19; he and Clément have broken up. There is a sense of maturity and regret.

What lifts this little novel above most gay fiction is the way the author structures the prose - which is as lean and spare as a waif-like rent-boy - into poetry. Consider this paragraph (Age 17, p 17):

"Djamil knows now

he will never have his fill of pleasure reaped from the bodies

of such giving men."

The writing is never ornate or melodramatic. Even complex human emotions are stripped to their naked essentials:

"When  Djamil gets angry around his mum he tells her to shut her mouth. She wants to listen. 

No matter. What Djamil wants to say no one understands." 

(Age 17, p 18)

The anonymous narrator tells his story mostly in the first person present tense, which creates intense empathy between narrator and reader. However, at times, he slips into the second person, describing himself as 'you', which both doubles down on the empathy and also creates a dissociative feeling of identity, as if the writer can separate his personalities, as we all can to some extent, putting on masks to disguise himself. This technique works well as a metaphor for the need for gay teenagers - before they are 'out', and frequently after - to hide their sexuality in the face of a frequently, sometimes murderously, censorious society. But it also suggests a degree of neurodivergence on the part of the narrator, underlined by the fact that he takes lithium, which is generally prescribed in the UK for bipolar disorder.

This delightful novel has echoes of, for example, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. It also reminded me of the oeuvre of Jean Genet, and some of the books of Andre Gide, such as The Immoralist. The works of William Burroughs (eg The Wild Boys) and John Rechy (eg City of Night) clearly deal with the same subject matter. But what makes this novella unique is its style.

I am blown away by the simple brilliance of this little book. Is there an English translation of Thery-Guilbert's first novel, Pas dire, or his 'distorted mirror sequel' to Sidewalks, Lésions. If so, I want to read them. If not, please may there soon be. 

Selected quotes:

• "In Marseille you deviate from the norm you die. In Marseille domination is a blood sport played in the street with a passing word or look.” (Age 17; p 10)
• “Desire never dies merely clots.” (Age 17; p 14)
• “It's better to be who you are than to play at who you should be.” (Age 17; p 52)
• “On the concrete still hot from the freshly finished day where men come greedy for hope and hungry for a body.” (Age 19; p 76)

May 2026; 97 pages

Originally published by Editions blast in French in 2022

This translation, by Trask Roberts, was published in paperback by Renard Press in 2026

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Satyricon" by Petronius (?)

 The Satyricon is composed of fragments from a much longer Latin work which most scholars think was written by Petronius. It is written in both prose and poetry and seems to be based on the Odyssey, being a comic picaresque following the adventures of a runaway slave called Encolpius (the narrator), his boyfriend young Giton, and his friend (and rival for Giton's affections) Asclytus

Much of the work is lost. The first (incomplete) remaining section seems to be an account of the punishment of Encolpius and Asclytus for having (inadevertently?) seen the secret female rites of Priapus: they are tied up and buggered by a male prostitute. 

The second, and most famous, section involves a dinner hosted by a freed ex-slave turned millionaire called Trimalchio (which includes a story about a man turning into a werewolf). Trimalchio has been seen as the model for Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. This section also influenced Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

They then fall in with a windbag of a poet called Eumolpus and board a boat which they then discover is owned by the slave-owners they are running from; shipwreck is the deus ex machina which gets them out of a very tight situation. 

They then travel to a place called Croton.

It is difficult to judge the literary merit of a work that only exists in fragments. I suspect that much of its fame rests on the fact that the narrator is joyfully gay.

Selected quotes:

• "An adolescent taste is quite worthless." (Puteoli 4)
• "I personally went colder than a winter in Gaul." (Puteoli 19)
• "He pulled the cheeks of our bottoms apart and banged us" (Puteoli 21)
• "So the starry sky turns round like a millstone, always bringing some trouble, and men being born or dying." (Dinner with Trimalchio 39)
• "It's night 'fore y'can turn around. So the best thing's get out of bed and go straight to dinner."  (Dinner with Trimalchio 41)
• "A hot drink's as good as an overcoat."  (Dinner with Trimalchio 41)
• "If you were somewhere else, you'd be talking about the pigs walking round ready-roasted back here."  (Dinner with Trimalchio 45) A version of 'the grass is always greener'

February 2024; 123 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rainbow Milk" by Paul Mendez

Shortlisted for the 2021 debut fiction prize at the British Book Awards.

At the age of nineteen, Jesse, a young black man from Dudley in the UK, is disfellowshipped from the Jehovah's Witnesses for being gay. He moves to London and becomes a drug-fuelled rent boy. This book chronicles his experiences. He is befriended by a supportive network of gay men and women, and people of colour, all struggling against a world they see as controlled by straight white males. 

I presume that this novel is largely autobiographical. This raises a problem for a critic. My comments are not meant to undervalue in any way the reality of the lived-in experiences described. The authenticity of the narrative was often overwhelming. But it seemed to be more of a memoir than a novel.

The main character is defined mostly by his opposition to his context. He is bitter and resentful about his birth mother and white stepfather; he is very angry about the Jehovah's Witnesses and their version of God. He works as a waiter at a posh London restaurant and sees almost all of the diners as spoilt and self-centred; he feels they look down on him or see him as a threat (There are several wonderful pages of hugely realistic dialogue presented as snippets overheard by an overworked waiter which are the best in the book). His customers as a rent boy divide into those who are kind and those who are exploitative. He is angry and bitter, particularly against  white men (the irony being that he is sexually attracted "to lick, suck and fuck white male ass" ). Almost the only positive side to his character is his deep love of and knowledge of music. Unfortunately, since one of my many failings is that I am more or less totally ignorant of any music post-1970, I was unable to appreciate the pages and pages of musical hagiography.

Other characters seemed stereotypical. The gay white poet, published by a gay white contemporary from Cambridge who was easily monied, descending from landed gentry, the pair of them part of the "horrible, toxic, racist, complacent, inbred, white supremacist homosexual world of high poetry" (Brixton, Ch 4) While the author's past is represented by the industrial proletariat, his present and future are worlds where there are few shop assistants or warehouse workers or lorry drivers, or even research scientists and engineers; everyone he knows now is creative or academic. 

The author is very good at capturing the speech patterns of different dialects but too many of the dialogues are dominated by speeches in which the characters represent points of view as if this novel is a sociological essay. These moments undermine the authentic feel of the rest of the novel. Perhaps in the author's world people really do speak so coherently but not in mine.

I felt too often I was being preached at, rather than being captivated by the story.

Selected quotes:

• "I don’t know this about England when I did back in Jamaica, but they have this whole spread, thick like lard pon bread, of people who can’t read, can’t talk good, scratch themselves up like dog with flea, don’t understand a thing about life outside their own head, but think they can call me nigger, darkie, coon, gorilla, tell me to go back to my own country where I belong and stop steal their sunlight – I don’t have enough back in the jungle?" (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• ‘I don’t want to get better at suffering, Norman. I want to be happy."  (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• "I don’t like this world. I can’t go to church when God make me humiliate so"  (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• "Two evangelists, both mic’ed up, competed with each other over dub basslines at the station’s mouth." (Great Bridge August 2, 2002, Ch 1)
• "Johnny was scrubbing his cup as if an alien’s tongue had rimmed it" (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He recognised that if he was a tall, blond white boy, everything would have been different." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He had thought of himself as a blond white boy all his life. He’d never thought of himself as a black boy, or compared himself to other black people." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He knew he would have to spend the rest of his life convincing people that he wasn’t too black." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "‘So you’m part o’ the furniture, then?’ ‘The squashy old sofa. Or the vintage slot machine, take your pick,’" (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 1)
• "Jesse realised he’d spent much of his life learning what it was to be a black man from white men. You’re like a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 2)
• "The bright morning, even if it wasn’t sunny, pursued him like paparazzi." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 3)
• "Graham wasn’t even really a football fan anyway, which put him in a minority of one among the Brothers of the congregation, who, even while they quoted scriptures warning against idolatry, were openly worshipful of the Baggies’ Number 9." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 3)
• "His smile had the capacity to convey every intention and emotion, and had faded slightly, transmitting concern." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch1)
• "He had never prayed, anyway, not really. He said words in his head but could not believe he was speaking to a real being, who was actively listening. As far as he was concerned, a conversation had to be between at least two voices; otherwise he was talking to himself, and he was not mad." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch1)
• "He’d found someone who could love him, whom he’d be willingly led by if he was blind." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch4)

A fascinating, bitter, portrayal of a segment of contemporary London life. August 2021

At one stage Mendez references, as novels portraying black life in England in the middle to later part of the twentieth century, Small Island by Andrea Levy and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon. Both these work better as novels. He also references the unutterably superb Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which is about a young man whose upbringing conflicts with his homosexual desires. 

Autobiographes of rent boys reviewed in this blog include:

• Making Beds in Brothels by Adam Brock
• Street Kid: A Rent Boy's Tale by Ned Williams

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Less" by Andrew Sean Greer

 Arthur Less is a not-terribly-successful gay novelist. One ex-boyfriend is a famous poet, another ex-boyfriend is Freddy, the son of the Carlos who has been a frenemy of Arthur's all these years. Invited to Freddy's wedding to another man, Arthur decides the only way to avoid accepting is to be out of the country so he strings together a series of minor literary offers into a world tour: an interview in New York, a lecture in Mexico, a prize event in  Italy and so on. His experience are comic and tragic and most of all they are absurd (he is almost late to interview a more famous novelist because the clock in the hotel lobby isn't working and the publicist assumes Arthur is a woman; the novelist repeatedly vomits because of food poisoning etc). 

It is a gentle, rambling picaresque with some poignant observations on life from the perspective of a gay man growing old without a partner and some moments which prompted a chuckle (which is rather more than most 'comic' novels elicit from me). It is sweet and kind and amusing but, as is the common fault of picaresques, there is little structure and no drive: it is difficult to see that we are going anywhere until the last section, rather rapidly, attempts to make sense of it all. Otherwise, the most interesting thing about the book is that it occasionally lapses into the narrator talking directly to the reader; the mystery of the narrator's identity is not revealed until the end.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2018

There are some magical lines:

• "As he waits, around and around the room circles a young woman in a brown wool dress, a species of tweed humming-bird, pollinating first this group of tourists and then that one." (Less at First)
• "It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well." (Less at First)
• "There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very long road ... to your final place of rest. He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men." (Less Mexican)
• "The cruel checkmate logic of conversation" (Less French)
• "Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that's a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it's a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they're a triumph. Is this night a failure because it's going to end in an hour?" (Less Moroccan)
• "People use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old." (Less Moroccan)
• "We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings." (Less Moroccan)
• "With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining." (Less Indian)
• "By now he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost." (Less At Last).

Perhaps a little superficial but cute and clever. April 2021; 261 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The City and the Pillar" by Gore Vidal

 Chapter One starts with Jim Willard, sitting at a table in a bar, alone, and getting drunk. This is the frame. Chapter 2 is the start of the narrative making this a story within a story, explaining what has brought Jim to this position.

Jim is gay. It is pre-war Virginia and homosexuality is so repressed that, Jim doesn't even known that he is gay; all he understands is that he fancies his friend Bob. After a weekend being boys at a log cabin in the wilderness, Bob leaves town to go to sea and Jim soon follows, searching for the man he loves. But he can't find him so he begins an extraordinary Odyssey, starting as a sailor and then becoming a tennis pro in Hollywood, slowly entering the homosexual world, becoming the kept boy of an acto and then meeting a writer, joining the army and then going to New York. Always aware that whatever impulse he has, it has to be kept secret, except from the other initiates in this sub-culture. And always searching for love, his first love, in the person of Bob Ford.

It is a simply told narrative, carefully glossing over the sex (it was published in 1948). It broke literary ground and almost made Gore Vidal unpublishable; it was read with appreciation by Thomas Mann. There are moments when it falters: for example, there is a professor and a writer at a 'faggot party' discussing homosexuality in what strays from being the sort of conversation you might have at a party into a written academic debate. But mostly it is on the money.

Of course it helps that the protagonist Jim is incredibly innocent to the point of stupidity and so all-American (a very good looking tennis professional); it means that he can be educated by the more experienced homosexuals he meets; it makes him a sort of blank sheet everyman who can be shaped by experience. The innocence and the repression are also representative of the time. But the theme of the young American boy struggling to accept himself as a homosexual is very much better done by James Baldwin in Giovanni's Room. But that was written in 1956 and (probably necessarily) set in Paris. As for John Rechy's City of Night, the fictionalised memoirs of a frent boy, that was publsihed in 1963. It was a steep trajectory and it still took years. The City and the Pillar paved the way and for that it should be celebrated.

The City is, I suppose, Sodom, one of the Cities of the Plain in Genesis, and refers to Jim's experiences in LA and NY, and the Pillar refers to the pillar of salt that Lot's wife turned into because she looked back when she fled from Sodom and, I think, refers to the final terrible scene.

It is a little dated in its use of words which might give offence nowadays.

Some great moments:

• "It makes a man so horny he could lay a mule, if it would just stand still." (2.3) Terrible foreshadowing.
• "He realized it would be a difficult matter to live in a world of men and women without participating in their ancient and necessary duet." (3.2)
• "You're not like the rest of us who want a mirror." (5.1)
• "Tag ends of scripts tended to work their way into his conversation." (5.1)
• "Primitives don't seem to mind what they do if it's fun." (5.2)
• "If a man wants to be accepted by a barracks, he must listen to a great deal of talk about a very few subjects, and he must accept as a law of nature that, whenever a point is made, it will be repeated a hundred times, often in the same words, rather like part-singing." (7.2)
• "I have such hopes for the afterlife. I see it as a riot of color! And all the angels will look like marines. Too gay!" (9.1)
• "Trade was regarded with great suspicion; in fact, it was a part of the homosexual credo that this year's trade is next year's competition." (9.1)
• "At his feet the water rose and fell slowly, gently, like the breathing is some vast monster." (11) 
• "The purpose of rivers is to flow into the sea." (11)

A ground-breaking novel. September 2020; 186 pages

Also written by Vidal and reviewed in this blog: Kalki

Vidal also wrote some classics of American fiction such as Burr, and Lincoln,

"A Boy's Own Story" by Edmund White

Six episodes in the growing-up of a homosexual. 'Cornholing' a younger boy, working for money to hire a rentboy, living in a hotel with mother and sister, having oral sex at summer camp, adoring the most popular boy at middle school, and seducing and betraying a teacher at boarding school.

There are three things that lift this book high into the stratosphere of literary greats. First there are the character portraits. White describes his mother and father and teachers and fellow students and all the other characters with enormous sympathy, chronicling their strengths and weaknesses, charting their complexities, and never ever descending into caricature. The father, for example, is a businessman who can't quite fit in'to the local social scene, who is easily hurt and a bit of a sissy, but who can talk baseball and do manly things such as building steps, who owns the speedboat but isn't at ease with it because he can't swim. He works all night and sleeps all day. He thinks 'love' is a word to be used by women, men 'like'. He has sex with one of his workers and then dismisses her but when his maid needs help he rushes to assist.

• “We were both afraid of the water, he because he couldn't swim, I because I was afraid of everything.”
• “He throbbed with the pressure to contend, to be noticed, to be right, to win, to make others bend to his will.”
• “Naive and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor.”
• “My mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up.”
• “I, who thought only of survival, had no interest in philosophical questions. The proximate ones were enough to obsess me, not as things I choose to contemplate, but as decisions rushing up at me as out of oncoming traffic. These were the things I thought about: Am I boring Tommy? Mill he mind if I rest my elbow on his shoulder? Should I powder my white bucks or keep the scuff marks? How low should I let my jeans ride?”
• “There was nothing about this actor that couldn't be read from the top balcony.”

The second feature of this book is the insight it offers into the human condition. Some of this is from the perspective of a boy who will grow up gay in a society that considers homosexuality as a disease, a weakness, a failing: “I never doubted that homosexuality was a sickness. In fact, I took it as a measure of how unsparingly objective I was that I could contemplate this very sickness.” But other aspects are more general comments on life:

• “He hadn’t invented another life; this one seemed good enough.”
• “I feel sorry for a man who never wanted to go to bed with his father; when the father dies, how can his ghost get warm except in a posthumous embrace? For that matter, how does the survivor get warm?” 
• “The price of freedom - total solitude - seemed more than I could possibly pay.”
• “That was the secret of the imagination - its creations were feeble only to the maker but stronger than life itself to the observer.”
• “All of our daddy's dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly.”
• “Busoni once said he prized the most those empty passages composers make up to get from one ‘good part’ to another. He said such workmanlike but minor transitions reveal more about a composer - the actual vernacular of his imagination - then the deliberately bravura moments.”
• “Someone who seemed not at all eager to confide in me or seek my friendship or even comments, as though he recognised that this life, at least, was worth enduring only if it remained unexamined.”
• “She taught me that the loneliness I felt like a bad burn could be soothed. I most certainly had been lonely. I had ached and writhed with loneliness, twisting around and smearing it on me as though it were a tissue of shame pouring out of my body: shameful, familiar, the fell of shame.”
• “Under my sister's tutelage I learnt that love or at least friendship must be coaxed, that there are skills ( listening, smiling, remembering, flattering) that lure it closer.”
• “When I was growing up I had never glimpsed the underbrush of kid society that lay just behind the topiary of the classroom. .... Nor did I suspect some kids saw each other every day after school, saw and saw each other strolling under a shifting leaf spray of social life and sexual shadows.”
• “Except when he sang. Then he was free, that is, constrained by the ceremony of performance, the fiction that the entertainer is alone, that he is expressing grief or joy to himself alone.”
• “If the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him.”
• “We were Shadows, like the dead after Orpheus passes them on his way through the Underworld, after this living man vanishes and the last sound of his music is lost to the incoming silence. All my life I've made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely too.”
• “Because I loved her she was opaque to me.”
• “The world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, ... they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners ... All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard.”
• “‘Just because you feel something is no reason to act on it’, the priest said. ‘Americans hold up their feelings as though they were ... dispensations’.”

But the feature of this book that simply blew my mind away was the description. White's descriptions of sex and fearlessly honest and yet not in the least tacky. His descriptions of the world are lush and gorgeous and yet precise, like a Caravaggio.

• “Squeals, breathing, a tussle. then release, followed by the sound of two boys just being.” 
• “His breath smelled of milk. His hands and feet were cold. ... His back and chest and legs were silky and hairless ... A thin layer of baby fat still formed a pad under his skin. Beneath the fat I could feel the hard, rounded muscles.” 
• “That such a tough, muscled little guy, whose words were so flat and eyes so without depth or humour, could be so richly taken - oh, he felt good. ... Here he was, pushing this tendoned, shifting pleasure back into me, the fine hair on his neck damp with sweat just above the hollows the sculptor had pressed with his thumbs into the clay.”
• “The night, intent seamstress, fed the fabric of water under the needle of our hull, steadily, firmly, except the boat wasn't stitching the water together but ripping it apart into long white shreds.”
• “A world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings.”
• “One opulent drop of water rolled down his high, compact chest into the hollow between his nipples, the right one still small and white from the cold, the left fuller and just beginning to color. The other drops were not so heavy; studying his body impressionistically with light, they didn't move; they slowly evaporated.”
• “As the sun, like life returning to a body, stole over the world, the beam from my father's flashlight grew less and less distinct until it had been absorbed in the clarity of something that was new yet again.”
• “I looked up at a face sprouting brunet sideburns that swerved inward like cheese knives toward his mouth and stopped just below his ginger mustaches. The eyes, small and black, had been moistened genially by the beers he'd drunk.”
• “As the bottle slowly empties, its brown liquid, like kerosene fuel in a lamp, radiates, in words and more words, the intense heat of despair.”
• “Folk songs in need of a pitch pipe.”
• “The sound of a voice choking on its own phlegm.”
• “The path I took girdled the hills that rimmed the lake; at one point it dipped and crossed a bog that looked solid and dry, planted innocently in grasses, but that slurped voluptuously under my shoes.”
• “The sun solemnly withdrew into its tent of cloud, disappointed with the world.”
• “ I could see Tom’s muscles like forked lightning on his taut stomach; here was this boy so handsome and free and well liked and here were we flanking him, looking up at him, at the torso flowering out of the humble calyx of his jeans.”
• “Mr Beattie was brushing his right hand back and forth over his crew cut. He seemed to be concentrating on this job, getting the feel of those soft quills against his palm.”

This is writing as appetising and fulfilling as a carefully crafted meal at a top-class restaurant. I am in awe of someone who can write so beautifully. Wow!

February 2019; 218 pages

"Beautiful people" by Simon Doonan

A memoir previously published as 'Nasty'.

Doonan was born in 1952 in Reading; his childhood was spent in poverty in one of the grimmest and most joyless decades in recent history. Child care was in the local orphanage. Family life was spent in the company of schizophrenic truth-telling granny who, when Simon was five, told him there was no Santa Claus and that he would one day die, schizophrenic Uncle Ken and a weird assortment of lodgers including blind Phyllis whose skull Simon fractured.

And he was gay.

This story veers between the bleakness of his childhood surroundings and the camp fabulosity of his later life living with an assortment of men including drag queen Biddie. The characters are unbelievably brilliant and the descriptions original and exact. This is the observational comedy of an accomplished stand up comedian (he is a window display designed). It reads like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals on speed.

There are some haunting moments:

• Trying to flee from justice by running, in platform heels, across Blackpool's sandy beach
• Being arrested for drunk-driving while wearing bondage gear by two LA cops who couldn't stop giggling
• Teddy's birthday
• Butlins: holiday camp.
• Blind Aunt Phyllis
• His boyfriend dying from AIDS

A few of the ab fab darling lines:

• “She sneezed and her dentures flew out. They hit the kitchen door with a sharp clack! and then rattled sideways across the linoleum floor like a fleeing crustacean.” (p 1) 
• “In Reading, our industrial hometown, there was no shortage of dreary here and nows.” (p 6)
• “From an early age, I was excessively focused on obtaining the freedom which comes with having a bit of extra cash in my pocket, and was prepared to do whatever it took to get it.” (p 9)
• “we were suffering from a unique mixture of high and low self-esteem.” (p 16)
• “She was not one of the Beautiful People. She was one of the unsavory people.” (p 24) 
• “Edvard Grieg’s ominous, throbbing anthem ... gave our morning gatherings a distinct feeling of impending folkloric genocide.” (p 40)
• “The message was simple: the more grim life is, the more character building will be it effect.” (p 40)
• “Entering a room as if one was entering a room was so much more amusing and exhilarating than just entering a room.” (p 86)
• “We had so much more fun because we were behaving as if we were having fun.” (p 86)
• “life is a stage set, a really tacky, faded stage set.” (p 92)
• “our house resembled a crack den a full fifteen years before the advent of crack.” (p 136)
• “‘Scrape’ is the accumulated, lard-infused, crunchy material which coagulates in the frying pan during the course of cooking other items.” (p 149)
• “Being incarcerated is such a vile experience that it is impossible to understand the whole concept of career criminals.” (p 209)
• “There is no such thing as a young fart.” (p 264)

December 2017; 284 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dead Boys Can't Dance" by Michel Dorais

Written by the man who also wrote Rent Boys, this is a sociological inquiry to understand why the rate of suicide amongst homosexual male youths is sixteen (sixteen!) times higher than for their heterosexual counterparts.

He suggests that there are two scenarios for gay boys: they can be identified as gay early on by other people because of their behaviours. One respondent stated: "At the age of six, I was being called a fag. I was already the school fag. Others therefore knew what I was before I did." (p 33) Others come out or are outed when they are older.

Dorais identifies four "adaptive scenarios in response to rejection" (p 37):

• "The Perfect Boy wishes to live up to expectations ... he will not reveal his homosexuality to others ... his great fear is the anticipated embarrassing event that will compromise him." (pp 37 - 38) For Jean-Francois this happened when his mum read his diary. His parents ostracised him. "They no longer celebrated his birthday." Wow! That's rejection! (p 39) The Perfect Boy scenario tends to end in one of two tragic ways: "The young man reveals his homosexuality and the responses are disbelief, followed by the general dismay of all around him. He is perceived as a traitor and also as an intruder who has been lying about his real desires. He feels, with reason, that he is not understood, and that he is being judged and rejected." (p 40) Alternatively "Instead of revealing his homosexuality, the young male attempts suicide so that he will take his secret with him and hide forever the desires perceived to be so shameful." (p 40)
• "The Token Fag ... pegged as homosexual at an early age ... the object of ridicule, harassment, and psychological and/or physical violence. Given the inaction of adults when faced with his abuse, he feels powerless in these situations, and he will sometimes consider his fate to be sealed." (p 41) One said "I wanted to be between the paint and the wall because I wanted to be invisible." (p 41)
• "The Chameleon's varies from being one who pretends to be and at other times is an imposter. ... This situation reaches crisis levels when he no longer wants to be a part of the masquerade that is suffocating him. ... Arriving at a balance between his secret inner life and his everyday life is difficult for him, and the older he gets, the more he fails to see how to escape the situation ... I felt that I was human garbage because I was gay. ... I was a monster, someone who should not exist: human garbage." (pp 44 - 45)
• The Rebel rejects homophobia and develops a resistance but in one case the rebellion led to drug addiction.

There are some telling insights:

• "Claude found himself on the street with only the clothes he was wearing ... It was therefore in silence, destitution and solitude that he began to cope with family rejection." (pp 52 - 53)
• "My mother, I saw her as a saint. ... When I told her I was questioning the possibility of being gay, she said: 'You better leave now. I don't ever want to see you again.' It's not easy at sixteen to find yourself alone and having to somehow survive. I will always remember that." (p 55) 
• "I slept in saunas and under balconies." (p 66)
• "My parents were fervent believers. ... God rejected and hated gays. A god of love, so it seems." (p 69)
• "It would seem that compatibility is impossible between religious beliefs and homosexuality for those interviewed young men who described themselves as believers, or as having been so. The journey to acceptance of being gay must pass through religious rejection, they say." (p 69)
• "Being treated as a fag is the worst thing that could happen to a boy's status as a male." (p 79)
• "To flourish, human beings must perceive themselves to be part of a whole greater than self." (p 87)
• "Suicide is a final solution to a temporary problem" (p 105)

Ways in which gay men can be resilient (p 85):

• "A healthy determination to criticize and contradict the opinions of others ... I have the right to be different"
• "A sense of humour when facing adversity ... a creativity that permits one to dream as a way of compensating for reality"
• "Well-established significant relationships"
• "The awareness or even the celebration of one's potential in spite of degradation by others."

A fascinating book. May 2017; 114 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Ticket that Exploded" by William Burroughs

Again Burroughs uses the cut-up technique to scatter images of gay sex, hanging, drug addiction, poverty, warfare, telepathy, and insect and crustacean life through what you might call a plot. Again we meet some of his favourite characters, including Carl, and Agent Lee.

For several pages the cut-up technique involves cutting out a few words of the lyrics of a variety of love songs, some inevitably used more than once, and splicing them together. This causes some interesting curious such as "Got you under my skin on my mind." (p 35) and I suspect there are some who will celebrate the postmodern irony that makes love look so repetitive and yet so unique at the same time ... or is it trying to tell us that the creative process is merely remixing and that originality is dead? Hmmm.

"(ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentacles of verbal diarrhea)" (p22). Quite.

The plot seems to revolve around the potential of tape recordings played in some sort of synchrony to cause people to hang themselves but it is also mixed up with an intergalactic virus that seems to take the form of street boys. Or have I got that wrong? It was difficult to work out what was going on and even harder to care.

Despite Burroughs being an American author Agent Lee meets 'Genial' a drug addicted gay assassin, in Boots the Chemist in Piccadilly London; Boots of Piccadilly was famous in the 1960s as being the all-night chemist where addicts could fulfil their scripts; I wonder if it still is?

More than with any other Burroughs book (the others I have linked to from this post are quite good) the reader needs to tolerate a certain amount of being taken for a ride for the occasional nuggets of poetic beauty: either a perfect phrase, or an interesting idea, or a wonderful image:

• "it was across the table raw and bloody as a fresh used knife." (p 1)
• "who am I to be critical few things in my own past I'd just as soon forget." (p 2); Burroughs has a nice way of subverting grammar while leaving the sense entirely clear
• "Winds of time" (p 5)
• "The two beings twisted free of human coordinates" (p 6)
• "You can run a government without police if your conditioning program is tight enough but you can't run a government without bull shit." (p 15)
• "The dreamer with dirty cheeks" (p 52)
• "These our actors bid you peaceful opaqueness in this monument of tiredness." (p 135)
• "John stood there with a cup of coffee late morning sunlight in his eyes." (p 143)

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

April 2017; 168 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Cam boy" by J Matt

This is the "debut memoir by Webcam Performer". Joseph Matthew ? is gay, welsh, and someone who had enjoyed displaying his nakedness to strangers over the internet from the age of 12. This memoir explains how he got into camming.

He went to London to live with his boyfriend but Christos gambled. Then he lived with drug dealer Nick; Joey was Nick's mule and also began taking lots of drugs; to fund his habit he became a rent boy travelling to strange houses to have sex with paying strangers. In order to escape his addiction he went home. He decided to earn money by live sex performances on Cam websites. He earned £1.50 the first night but now earns perhaps £500 per week, performing in a shed at the bottom of his parents' garden. He  appeared in a BBCTV documentary which you can see on YouTube here.

Although this answered many of my questions about the mechanics of web cam work I still don't really understand what it feels like to expose yourself nightly to strangers and, at their request, thrust vegetables into your anus.

JMatt93 suggests that constructing an alter ego may be one way in which he has done this. He calls JMatt "the Hyde to my Jekyll" and fears that "the bigger J Matt grows, the smaller Joseph becomes". After all, "Freedom in this world ... is when you're not wearing a microphone pack."

A factually fascinating book. March 2017; 179 pages

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed on this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God