"Oscar Wilde" by Richard Elliman

 A definitive biography.

I wanted to read it after watching The Happy Prince, the 2018 film starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde, Colin Morgan as Bosie and Edwin Thomas as Robbie Ross. A great film, with much that is fictional and much that is authentic.

One of the things about biographies is how many celebrated connections a celebrity always seems to have. Wilde's ancestors included Revd Charles Maturin author of Melmoth the Wanderer. His father was a celebrated surgeon; the mastoid is known as ‘Wilde’s incision’. His father's friends included Maria Edgeworth. At Oxford Wilde knew John Ruskin and Walter Pater. A later girlfriend married Bram Stoker. He knew Whistler and Walter Sickert. He helped Lily Langtry enter London society. He met Yeats at the house of William Ernest Henley and Proust in Paris. Even in exile in Paris, after his disgrace, he still rubbed shoulders with Esterhazy, the man who actually did the spying which Dreyfus went to Devil’s Island for.

Much of this biography traces the development of Wilde's art: he went from poetry to novels and then top plays.

• “Though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, with Pater it might have just a touch of evil. ... Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism, as if for him religion became bearable only when it overflowed into excess. Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination. Ruskin invoked disciplined restraint, Pater allowed for a pleasant drift. What Ruskin reviled as vice, Pater caressed as wantonness.” (Ch 2)
• “Pater argued that just as physical life was now known to be a concurrence of forces rather than a group of objects, so the mind must be regarded as a fluid process rather than an adhesion to fixities and definites. William James and Henri Bergson were soon to depict consciousness as a river or stream; for Pater it is, more intensely, a whirlpool. There is nothing ‘but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought’.” (Ch 5)
• “Wilde lingers like Keats over sweets, and like Swinburne over sours.” (Ch 5)
• “His insincerity was the result of his representing difficult hesitations instead of pleasantly easy certainties. His indecency was a calculated risk, to portray his sensuality as frankly he could.” (Ch 5)
• “Wilde said later that he had made literature out of brilliant triviality, but it was triviality of a special kind, subversive of established modes ... destructive of hypocrisy.” (400)

A compelling feature of the Wilde tale is the classic tragedy in which a man, at the height of his success, flies too close to the sun and is destroyed. Wilde first experienced homosexual intercourse when he was 31, seduced by a 17 year old Robbie Ross. “He was not attracted to anal coition, so Ross presumably introduced him to the oral and intercrural intercourse he practised later.” (259) Wilde was already married with two sons. But having first tasted those fruits, Wilde went wild. He began to explore the delights of young rent boys, who often doubled as blackmailers. He and Lord Allfred 'Bosie' Douglas, youngest son of the Marquess of Queensberry, fell in love, though it was never a sexually exclusive relationship and one might wonder whether the utterly selfish Bosie had any real concept of what love involved. “What Douglas called love was the opposite of wishing the beloved well.” (460) When Queensberry became outraged and insulted Wilde, Wilde sued him for libel (the QC against him was Edward Carson with whom he had played on the beach in Ireland when they were little bots). Wilde lost that case, was put on trial for gross indecency twice (because the first trial resulted in a hung jury) and went to jail. He had to live the rest of his life in disgraced exile in France and Italy. 

Wilde was a master of succinctly putting over a point of view:

• Education: “Children should not be drilled in that calendar of infamy, European history, but learn in a workshop how art might offer a new history of the world.” (Ch 6)
• “The essence of good dialogue is interruption.” (Ch 9)
• “A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we feel compelled to alter it every six months.” (Ch 10)
• “Mr Whistler always spelt art, and I believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I’.” (Ch 11)

Other memorable moments included:

• “Man makes an end for himself out of himself: no mend is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.” (Ch 3)
• “Wilde acknowledged a division in himself ... it might be thought that he had a double nature, but he actually claimed to have a triple one” (Ch 5) Catholic, pagan and Freemason.
• “The mitre and the rose come together; Catholicism blends with paganism in the same sense of mutual suffering and sin, with the promise [page break] of eventual unity of being, when opposites will be joined. Insofar as Wilde had a creed, this was it.” (Ch 5)
• “The claims of action over art were challenged by the idea that artistic creation, related to that contemplative life celebrated by Plato, was the highest form of action.” (Ch 12)
• “There was news about the Queensberrys. The Marquess was dying in January 1900 ... his son, Percy, heir to the title, came to see his father, who gathered himself to spit at him.” (542)

This is a thorough and well-written biography; I found it fascinating. If you think Oscar Wilde's story is just about the homosexuality, think again. 

January 2021; 554 pages

This review was written
by the author of 
Motherdarling

"Making Beds in Brothels" by Adam Brock

Following a horrendous childhood, in which he was regularly beaten and possibly sexually abused by his father, a man who exhibited symptoms of mental illness, Adam was raped as a young teenager in a gay bar in Manchester. He became a child prostitute before working as a rent boy in brothels in Amsterdam and London. Somehow he survived. 

In this memoir, Adam reserves his strongest condemnation not for the clients who hired him. “I dislike categorising all those who pay for sex as somehow predatory or deviant; they are drawn from as wide a pool as any other group of humanity.” (C 17) He has compassion even for Mitchell, a long-time friend, who stole from him: “what kind of person steals the crutches from a man with a broken back?” (C 23). He feels that, as a child, he was repeatedly failed by the system. “Three times I went to the austere police station in the centre of Mobberley and reported that my father was abusing me. Three times nothing was done. No social workers were called, no review or check by the police, not a single investigation. All that happened was that each time I was returned to my father, and later received the beatings of my life as a result.” (C 5)

The youth leaders of his gay teenager group encouraged them to go to the bar where he was raped and, later, rented. A teacher refused to discuss his sexuality with him (it was illegal at the time for teachers to 'encourage' homosexuality under section 28 of the Local Government Act). Still well underage, he plied his trade unchallenged: “I regularly worked on the streets, between the age of fourteen and seventeen, and was never once stopped and asked what I was doing by a police officer, not a single time. And I was doing it in broad daylight, in a public area for the entire world to see, often under high spec surveillance cameras.” (C 9) “After escaping my father and moving to Manchester, aged fourteen, I was placed in local authority care with ‘Mad Anne’. Anne had a different man home every other night. Then, at sixteen, there was the city homeless shelter at Downing Street, a square red brick building with dormer roof, long demolished. I was a small, vulnerable kid living with city down and outs; the insane, the hopeless. My abiding memory of that place was simply how scary it was.” (C 13)

Many memoirs suffer from their 'one thing after another' structure (as opposed to novels in which the novelist is able to shape the narrative so that it grows and swells and creates meaning). I didn't notice it so much with this book, perhaps because of the shocking nature of the subject. It isn't strong on the detail of the sex, perhaps because Adam has become a born-again Christian; if you want to know about what goes on between a rentboy and his client I recommend Street Kid by Ned Williams. Both Adam and 'Steven' were sexually abused by their fathers; both identify as gay. Adam has a considerably longer career as a sex worker than 'Steven', perhaps because he spends most of his time in the more controlled environment of the brothel. But he ends up more damaged; 'Steven' starts his narrative with a nostalgic return to the streets and bars where he plied his trade.

The last part of the book describes Adam finding God. It makes interesting reading if you are concerned about the Problem of Evil, the idea that God cannot be both omnipotent and good because people suffer: 

• “There seems no need for a fiery hell elsewhere anyway, because many of us already dwell in it” (C 24)
• “there is a causality between God and sinfulness. Not that God inspires sin, but rather that we are of God and the world is of God, and sin happens through the sinner’s own freewill.” (C 24)
• “Sometimes my relationship with God seems to mirror my relationship with my father. Why does the omnipresent Deity, who ultimately oversees everything, allow me to suffer so much? If I deserve it and I’m being punished, are the words we are fed about a compassionate God who is radically forgiving, meaningless, empty promises meant simply to placate us? Presumably you can’t be both loving and drive someone into an early grave.” (C 27)
• “God says, I oversaw your abuse, you inevitably strayed due to the damage and de-normalisation of childhood trauma, now I’m going to punish you, perhaps till the strain becomes too much. But this is okay, this is the way to your redemption.” (C 27)
• “If hell is redemptive, as someone once told me, then it’s a bitter cup for all of us who have already suffered it.” (C 27)

Selected quotes:

• “Mobberley struggles along the bottom of a narrow valley, the town clawing unsuccessfully up the sides of the Pennines. The terrain halts the spread of development and the town remains low, dense and grey” (C 2)
• “It was a tough, unattractive place, hard on the lungs. You tasted the toxins in air, which gave the atmosphere a soupy, viscous quality that caught in the nostrils.” (C 2)
• “he grinds his strong white teeth into my face, pushing my head hard against them.” (C 3)
• “We didn’t learn the normal ways of regulating anger that children do. We didn’t throw tantrums or disobey in the normal way, everything was suppressed for fear of retribution.” (C 3)
• “for all the religion in that house there was an absolute absence of God.” (C 4)
• “He claimed that during the time he spent at his grandparents, he was aware of the dead that his grandmother invoked and that they tormented him in the dark.” (C 4)
• “Sometimes she forgot to fry the eggs, the yolks floating in viscous clear whites on your plate, frying the peas instead and boiling the chips.” (C 7)
• “Why did I keep going back after he had done so much? Because I was lonely. Because there was security in our familiarity. If I’m honest, I had no one else.” (C 7)
• “It may seem unlikely but If you want to know about good and bad people, ask prostitutes. A prostitute who doesn’t develop a nose for people’s hidden character – for what they are not telling you, or what they actually want as opposed to what they are saying they want – isn’t going to survive very long.” (C 10)
• “I once knew a man, a regular in the Old Reform bar in Manchester, who told me he purposefully supplied his lovers with drugs till they eventually become addicted, and then took pleasure in watching their lives fall apart. What he did was promote behaviour that might lead to these young men’s death; playing with their lives. He justified himself by saying that the men deserved it in some way: that they were using him and this was his means of revenge.” (C 10)
• “Both of us had been handed the sticky end of the lollipop and felt the world owed us something but we owed it nothing.” (C 10)
• “The Earl’s Court of my recollection smells of dust, the stink of the cars. Dust clings heavy to the buildings, trees, streets with the tenacity of lint, like static adhered to laundry.” (C 13)
• “Every surface is covered with thrift store tat” (C 13)
• “Her perfume is her most memorable feature. It is mixture of patchouli, cannabis, stale sweat and the yeasty scent of body parts best not thought of; your nose knows of her presence long before your eyes” (C 13)
• “Would I know if I was dead? How do we know which of us are restless spirits that seek to undo what has been done, to untangle the Gordian knot of our lives?” (C 13)
• “One day you are young, the party is in full swing, then you blink, and everyone has left, and you are forty-nine, working reception in a doss house.” (C 13)
• “This was a business where not taking care of the product, in other words ourselves, was counterproductive. If I was going to survive and thrive, I had to take self-care seriously.” (C 15)
• “Commodification of the individual makes it possible to regard ourselves as any other product that is influenced by supply, demand or quantity.” (C 16)
• “I objectified myself as a means of meeting market requirements; I adjusted my appearance and persona.” (C 16)
• “A good scenario could reduce the time of the ‘massage’ considerably, the customer often becoming overwhelmed by the excitement.” (C 16)
• “We were the equivalent of a gourmet hot dog. Street enough to make the men feel as if they were buying into the ghetto fantasy, but without the risk of developing salmonella.” (C 16)
• “When you were in the sex-worker bubble, you ... lived, slept, socialised and worked in a very small area, so it was easier sometimes just to stay in character. The risk is, that you inevitably lose yourself to a greater or lesser degree, when you live a lie over an extended period of time.” (C 16)
• “There is a click and the room is suddenly brightly lit. The glass door in front of us, which initially looked like smoked glass, becomes an impenetrable mirror, through which we can see nothing other than our selves reflected back. In the darkness of the hallway, however, the customer can see each of us clearly under the bright spot-lights. We pull in our stomachs, pout our lips, predicating the duck face of the ubiquitous selfie by decades, as we try to make ourselves irresistible. A few moments pass. There is a sharp tap on the window, and the lights go out.” (C 17)
• “Being the first is almost talismanic, for it means you can relax – anything else will be gravy. Once you have that first client out of the way, everything will be all right. The anxiety is always that you won’t work that day.” (C 17)
• “There is an old saying about prostitutes, two great years, two okay years and two shit years.” ( 21)
• “My needs were always immediate. The immediate need for accommodation, for money or food. I needed drink and drugs to suppress the inevitable anxiety.” (C 21)
• “I needed to polish off entire bottles of neat whiskey to bring myself down from the drugs long enough for a few hours’ sleep.” (C 23)
• “That morning, suffering from drug-induced psychosis and under the impression I was under attack from demons waiting outside my door, that something that I could hear laughing and cajoling me with murderous intent in their voices was about to enter the room and consume me, I defenestrated myself, in spectacular fashion, hurtling myself out of the third story window, and falling in a shower of broken glass. I felt no fear as I flew through the air, toppling towards the concrete below.” (C 23)
• “I was surrounded by voices of the dead who screamed into my ears, arguing whether I should live or die. I swear that, at that point, I felt as if I was overhearing a conversation taking place around me. That these spirits and others would decide my fate.” (C 23)
• “The most painful lesson you will ever learn is to understand that it is you yourself who is often the chief architect of your own misery.” (C 24)
• “Perhaps death has a quota that needs to be met, and my chance survival has put me on death’s list of escapees.” (C 24)
• “for years I had socialised with those who contributed to my exploitation. I saw these men walking down the street and rather than rushing over to them and screaming in their faces, striking them with my fists, I did nothing. I would sit next to them in a bar, and even nod acknowledgement to them. This normalisation now strikes me as perverse and it’s that normalisation that allows it to continue.” (C 25)
• “when you are hopeless you cling to any possibility that life will improve.” (C 27) Except he didn't. At one stage he tried to kill himself.

Mesmerising reading. December 2020

Other memoirs and autobiographies 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

"Street Kid: A Rent Boy's Tale" by Ned Williams

This is the memoir of a boy who was abused by his father from the age of six, realised he was gay by the time he was twelve, and started working as a rent boy at the age of fourteen, before retiring at nineteen. Set in the early 1960s, when having gay sex was still illegal, let alone being an underage rent boy, 'Steven' ('Carl' on the 'racks') somehow managed to compartmentalise his life so that his emotionally stunted and controlling mother never found out he was gay (despite a hilarious scene when a dozen of his rentboy colleagues invite themselves to his place for coffee), his schoolfriends never knew he was a rentboy (despite the boys in his class queuing up outside a disused station waiting room for him to give them a blowjob, one by one), his (office) work colleagues never knew he was gay let alone working as a prostitute, his rentboy companions never knew of his gay love life, or that he had fathered a child; in short, huge parts of his life were compartmentalised and secret. 

There are some fantastic characters:

• Andy, the narrator's rent mentor, who is straight with a wife and child but earns money through gay sex
• Jacko who has "an arse like a reservoir"
• Paolo, bitter about new rents on the racks
• Zenda, who read a book once and took his name for it, perhaps the most compassionate of the rents, who becomes impotent, except when he can have sex in a threesome with the narrator
• Lorna the lesbian prostitute with whom he shares a flat
• Larry the drag queen
• Roger who, the narrator discovers after they have shared a bed, likes sweetcorn
• Deaf Joey
• Marti and Matthew
• Mikki
• Brian his school friend who has a girlfriend who won't do oral so would Steve mind ...
• Sophie from work, her uncle Winston who invites Steven into his home to discuss classical music, his gay son Leonard who has sex with Steven, Leonard's sister Tamara with whom Steven has an affair ...
• Alan, the teacher, who organises parties of young men
• Sheba, also from work, desperate to lose her virginity but all her boyfriends want to wait,

There are mind-curling stories about the tricks he turns: the completely black room behind the coffee bar where clients and rents get naked and have orgies, no one knowing who is doing what to whom; the man who likes to be urinated on in the bath; the country house orgies he attends;  the queue of clients in the toilet waiting to take turns buggering the boy in the stalls; the time when he has sex with a girlfriend who uses contraceptive foam which sets and glues them together by their not-so-private parts. It was shocking and disturbing and hilarious by turns.

But in the end it was mostly about a child being paid to be abused by older men. Again and again and again.

Some of the most memorable moments:

• “From the age of about six (or it could have been even younger) until just before my teenage years, my father used, or rather, abused his privileged position of trust by ‘having a bit of fun’ with me – at least twice a week. This ‘fun’ never extended much beyond masturbation and oral sex but for a little boy who, even if I do say it myself, was rather sensitive – it was bad enough. He always impressed upon me the importance of not telling anyone else, “Especially your mother. She wouldn’t understand”. Like a fool, I obeyed.” (A very normal childhood)
• “Because it was virtually the only show of affection I ever received from him, I felt honoured and hankered after repeat performances.” (A very normal childhood)
• “I wonder what would have been said had she known how often she’d rushed through the front door and dashed up to use the lavatory, not realising that the last thing to be flushed away was my father’s sperm, dutifully coaxed from his straining penis by her puny little brat of a son.” (A very normal childhood)
• “In the daylight they were dark, claustrophobic, narrow and faintly sinister. At night it could easily have been taken for a landscape created by a modern Bosch or one of the regions through which Virgil guided Dante. The poor lighting made it even more grotesque and disturbing. Crumbling public houses struggled to make ends meet from their limited catchment of locals. Shops were converted into dubious coffee bars. Illegal clubs furtively catered for speciality amusements and existed in the back rooms of private houses. Cellar bars with little or no ventilation, peeling walls and tiny, intimate dance floors. There were bombed churches where only weeds, desperate lovers and the occasional stray cat formed the congregation. These, and other places too numerous to mention, were the markets where anything could be bought by the punter who had the craving and the cash – and sold from a supplier who had the time and inclination to close their sordid little transaction.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “Everywhere one explored, unexpected niches and dead–end tracks honeycombed this small, desolate, self–contained world. The only people to be found were those misfits in society who felt the desire for adventure, danger and solitude. Many tried to find some meaning and outlet for their doleful lives through the bottom of a meths bottle or squirted from the point of a syringe. To parody the old maps – here be meat racks for every form of pleasure, for whatever fantasy a mind could devise – no matter how debauched. It was a depressing stigma on the surface of the city that frequently and unpredictably exploded into crazed violence. But, lest you think there was some sort of inverted romance about the place, I regret to inform you that, in the main, it was merely an irksome wasteland of abandoned buildings which attracted few sightseers and even less attention from ‘Lily Law’, the police. The many ill tended, unlit public toilets erected as monuments to Victorian aspiration had become, instead, nocturnal orgy rooms.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “School teachers became drag queens; men of the cloth became leather submissives; off–duty policemen became happy members of the community which, whilst on duty, they persecuted so vigorously.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “It was romantic – but it was the romance of a consenting pair of sado–masochists.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “I had something for which older men would pay. It had also given me a delicious feeling of power.” (A First, Tentative Step)
• “I had discovered I had a jewel to sell, but I didn’t know the location of the pawnbroker.” (A Semi Regular)
• “There were some clients who enjoyed having a collection of local kids around for a low–key orgy. At these parties, I always half expected to meet some of my school friends, but I never did. The main supply came from either the local grammar school, or the public school that resided in our borough.” (Rates and Brian)
• “The meagre pocket money I received from my parents was still in the area of single figures from the shilling department. The income from my other life amounted to the grand average of about twenty pounds a week, which was, in the late fifties, the wage of a well–paid grown man. It was a size of income, which could have reasonably housed a family of four in some comfort.” (Rates and Brian)
• “My nerves were shaking my guts about like a pair of Jack Russells fighting over a favourite toy.” (Andy)
• “Colour and patterns of paintings held me spellbound and I adored the challenge of trying to recreate the work of the great masters.” (Crisis Time)
• “It was my Pandora’s Box where Degradation rather than Hope was left behind.” (Crisis Time)
• “There was a lot of competition from other rents. I had no idea there were so many boys and young men who were on the game. Many were students who topped up their meagre grants by selling their bodies. It was easier, quicker and far more lucrative than serving bitter coffees in clapped out cafés.” (Crisis Time)
• “Because it was so dark, it was impossible to know who you were feeling, wanking or fucking. The only brief respite from the gloom occurred when the curtain was lifted and the door opened to allow the access or exit of a client. The room was usually packed with sweating bodies and, on especially busy nights, there was a queue in the café itself, waiting for ‘Calcutta’ to empty a little. I dread to think how many arses my young, eager cock stretched. By moving to another part of the room, it was easy to avoid being screwed, although many people tried, Also, if someone was busy working on me, I could easily remove my weapon from the grip of their hands, lips or bottom and make out I was shooting my load in copious quantities, which, of course, I wasn’t. It was fun and quite exciting having to feel for sex. In the dark, heads, and bodies contorted in all sorts of seemingly impossible positions. Hands groped and enjoined with adjacent mini–scenes. There was one time I remember when I had two open mouths on my cock, one on my balls, a couple more tonguing my arse and more who were licking and feeling my body. I must confess, that time, I did come. Well, who wouldn’t?” (‘Alfio’s’)
• “I had no desire or intention of becoming submissive. Andy was more versatile – he didn’t care. I’ve lost count of the number of times our pick–ups played ‘piggy–in–the–middle’. Me shafting and Andy being shafted.” (Four’s Company)
• “His eyes, mongoose like, were mesmerised by my hidden but bulging trouser cobra.” (Prodigal Sons)
• “On a slack night, the evenings produced about five to ten punters. On a busy one, I could get through as many as twenty or thirty.” (Aftermath)
• “I had to wear a jacket, trousers, shirt and tie. Strangely, on the racks, my popularity grew slightly. Don’t ask me why. I had always believed that the punters hungered for the scruffy look – a nice bit of young, rough trade. It’s true, a lot did – but I found there were many who didn’t. The clean–cut look was as much in demand as the ruffian. A youth who looked much younger than his age but dressed to look older was, to many, highly attractive.” (Freedom)
• “Looking about twenty, he was tall, blond and built like the proverbial brick shit house. His light blue, open necked shirt contrasted with and broadcasted a dark, all over tan which could only be associated with an outdoor existence. His tight, bleached out blue jeans showed off his slim waist and muscular thighs to perfection.” (Farmer Joe)
• “He had about him a pure animal physicality that crept out and stalked any viewer's senses.” (Farmer Joe)
• “I've often found that the more butch a guy looks the bitcher he wants to be treated.” (Farmer Joe)
• “He was staring, unseeing at a scrawny Buddleia, which was trying to draw nourishment, from a toppled wall.” (Further Adventures)
• “But, I got into this game for the fun – the excitement – not just the cash.” (Pam)
• “Those guys are in there to buy and be bought. I am here to be bought. You have to accept that.” (Sign Language)
• “He brought in from the freezer two trays of ice cubes. “I want you to make use of these.” Puzzled, I said, “Okay.” He knelt on the floor. I thought a little clarification was needed. “Um, Matthew. I hate to sound completely stupid but – what do I do with them?” He bent over and spread his legs. “Shove ’em, one by one, up where the sun don’t shine – right up inside me.” Luckily, he was facing away so he couldn’t see the horrified look of revulsion that I must have worn. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘this will be a first.’ As he wiggled his posterior in delicious anticipation, he gasped, “I simply adore the coldness. The pressure on my colon slowly being eased as the ice melts is very satisfying. You should try it.” “Thanks, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll give it a miss.” It was strangely phenomenal to observe the cubes being sucked up into his ring. His muscular control to keep the frozen enema inside was admirable. I wondered if Matthew’s little bottom abuse with the ice cold mini–dildo’s was healthy and what internal damage he might be doing to his body in the long term.“ (Marti and Matthew)
• “I was sixteen, a rent boy, unhappy at home and, in many ways, immature.” (Marti Revisited)
• “Even if, as I suspected, my sperm couldn’t be bothered to plunge on and power–swim to Marti’s egg, I was having a lot of fun firing the starting pistol.” (Marti Revisited)
• “Two young lads, who were an affair, broke onto the scene. They were both exhibitionists but they didn’t want anyone else involved in actual physical sex. They offered Tableaux Vivant which entailed them posing, frozen in set pieces of a highly sexual nature so that the clients could get off on the vision the lads created. I suppose you could think of them as performance artists who had become living pornographic photographs. All their ‘pictures’ were highly elaborated and catered to any fantasy their clients desired. Their motto was ‘Look – even closely, but don’t touch.’” (Racking)
• “From that moment on, she grabbed almost every nettle and practically threw herself at anyone and everyone who she believed would score the goal in her hungry net.” (A Pregnant Pause)
• “He leaned forward and whispered something so excitedly and at such a high pitch, it was utterly incoherent except, perhaps, to dolphins, dogs or bats.” (Pop Goes My Weasel)
• “I looked around the room and, apart from my mother, I’d had sex with every single one of them.” (Party Time)
• “The major stumbling block was that we were both a couple of slags and not yet ready for any long term commitment.” (Flat Life)
• “Using all her skills as a woman of the night, she’d done herself up to the nines – actually, it was more to the ninety–nines.” (Shattering My Chains)
• “He was a sweet lad who inhabited the wrong side of dim.” (Three’s Company – or Not)

Is it fact or fiction? It purports to be a memoir and I suspect it is. It has a rambling structure, a sort of picaresque, in which one thing happens after another, to a large cast of characters; most of the stories are unresolved; in short, a typical novel would have been neater and better organised. So I suspect it is true. 

It ought to be dreadful. It is fundamentally about older men abusing a young child. It is about exploitation. The fact that the narrator was lucky and survived the experience, psychologically as well as physically, should not make what happened less dreadful.

But it is well-told. The author is a born raconteur. It is stuffed full of anecdotes and, as listed above, it has a most wonderful cast of characters.

It's a long book but it is worth every moment of the investment. An excellent read. 

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in  this blog may be found here. 

October 2020 

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,

"Sexual Dissidence" by Jonathan Dollimore

 This is a wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence, particularly in regard to homosexuality; the study's principal focus is literature but encompasses inter alia St Augustine the Great and Sigmund Freud.

It is not really for the general reader. I was attracted because I had previously read Dollimore's Death which is a brilliantly written and eye-opening book; I struggled with Sexual Dissidence. For example, in the first chapter Dollimore talks about essentialism; I had to look this up. It is the idea that a particular property of something is intrinsic to it. It is of great importance to this book. In terms of homosexuality it is the argument that homosexuality is intrinsic to the identity of a gay person; this is what Andre Gide felt, one of Dollimore's key authors, and it is a common trope that when a homosexual 'comes out' they are discovering a deep identity. But prior to the mid-1850s, homosexuality was regarded as a behaviour, rather than an identity:

• “By the time of Wilde, homosexuality could be regarded as rooted in a person’s identity and as pathologically pervading all aspects of his being.” (C 4); 
• “The word ‘homosexual’ was coined in 1869 ... the nearest concepts to it in early modern English were probably sodomy and buggery ... the sodomite was someone who performed a certain kind of act; no specific identity was attributed to, or assumed by, the sodomite” (C 16)
• “The idea of a God-given nature and destiny had the corollary that nothing so essentially predetermined could or should ever change.” (C 19)
• In the Lady Chatterley trial Lawrence “was defended on the grounds that he had to transgress moral respectability in order to be moral at a deeper, more authentic level dictated by personal conscience.” (C 20)

I can understand why some people prefer an essentialist theory of sexuality but essentialism is more problematic when applied to gender. Many feminists are anti-essentialist and claim that maleness and femaleness are social constructs. These are important philosophical considerations and I was a bit embarrassed not to have known about essentialism ... except that I had but having been trained as a scientist I regard the essentialist/ social constructionist debate as what we call nature/ nurture or genes vs environment.

Nevertheless, the key point here is that I had to look this up to help me understand what seems to be pivotal to Dollimore's argument. There were other parts of the book later on that were equally obscure to me and that I did not bother to look up. So I may have misunderstood what he was saying.

It starts brilliantly, describing an encounter between Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, in which Wilde acted as pander, organising a young flute boy for Gide's sexual pleasure, an incident which changed Gide's life and made him acknowledge his homosexuality (although that is an essentialist interpretation). This encounter with Wilde informs Gide’s The Immoralist. Dollimore's point is that although Gide adopted an essentialist position in regard to his homosexuality, Wilde was fundamentally in favour of an anti-essentialist and transgressive aesthetic. I never really understood the transgressive bit. I think the idea is that transgression provokes a reaction and that this is a force for change: 

• “Inversion is only a stage in a process of resistance whose effects can never be guaranteed and perhaps not even predicted. (In)subordinate inversions, if at all successful, provoke reaction.” (C 4)
• “One of the many reasons why people were terrified by Wilde was because of a perceived connection between his aesthetic transgression and his sexual transgression.” (C 4)

But the way that Dollimore contrasted Wilde and Gide made it appear that he was suggesting that a transgressive approach was the opposite to essentialism, whereas it seems to me that essentialism/social constructionism and conformism (?) /transgression are different dimensions.

Sometimes I felt that Dollimore (in common with many other social scientists) has a tendency to make unevidenced sweeping generalisations:

• “It would be difficult to overestimate the importance in modern Western culture of transgression in the name of an essential self which is the origin and arbiter of the true, the real (and/or natural), and the moral, categories which correspond to the three main domains of knowledge in Western culture: the epistemological, the ontological, and the ethical.” (C 3)
• “Western metaphysics can be represented in terms of three interrelated tenets: teleological development, essence, and universal, the last two being the source of essential and absolute truth respectively.” (C 8)

My favourite bits, I think, were where he hammered home the idea that 'perversion' is a form of 'diversion' or deviation from the 'straight' path; Western ethics then becomes full of contrasts between straight/good and crooked/bad:

• “The pervert deviates from ‘the straight and narrow’ or the ‘straight and true’.” (C 8)
• Evil, for Augustine, is a turning away from God “not because the thing to which it turns is bad, but because the turning is itself perverse.” (C 9)
• Othello described as ‘the extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (1.1.135): “‘extravagant’ condenses deviation, diversion and vagrancy ...OED gives as its first entry, ‘A going out of the usual path, digression. Also, the position or fact of erring from (a prescribed path)’.” (C 10)
• Othello says, of Desdemona ‘Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on, / And turn again.’ (4.1.244-5) (C 10)
• “One way the metaphysic survives in a modern mutation is in the description of the homosexual as ‘bent’ and the heterosexual as ‘straight’” (C 11, fn)
• “A now obsolete sense of ‘diversity’ gives, as one of its meanings, ‘perversity’. Perversity once involved diversity.” (C 13)

Some memorable moments:

• “In 1946 Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; six years later, the year after his death, his entire works were entered in the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.” (C 1)
• “The mythology of the two main kinds of the pre-sexological pervert, the religious heretic and the wayward woman (Satan and Eve respectively), take us to the heart of some awesome contradictions within Christianity, whereby the original pervert is neither Satan nor Eve, but God himself.” (C 2)
• “It is not enough for me to say that it is natural; I maintain that it is good.” (C 3; Quoting Gide in his Journal)
• “Modernism ... is (or was) still preoccupied with the experience of alienation.” (C 4)
• “It is a familiar political move: the benighted past as a scapegoat.” (78)
• “We have become used to thinking of sexuality as an anarchic and hence potentially subversive energy which conservatives want to control, radicals want to liberate.” (C 6)
• “Subversion, and even more transgression, necessarily presuppose the law, but they do not thereby necessarily ratify the law.” (C 6)
• “Containment theory often presupposes ... a criterion of success too total.” (C 6)
• “To recognize that meanings are historically grounded and partly or largely (but never entirely) controlled by powerful interests [page break] is also, usually, to show them incapable of easy alteration.” (C 6)
• “There is rarely a ruling bloc which controls meaning uncontested. As well as being contested by other classes or groups, it will typically also be contested from within.” (C 6)
• “The suspicious thing about the concepts of subversion and resistance ... is that they tend always to turn up where we want to find them, and never where we do not - i.e. in relation to ourselves.” (C 6)
• “The power of domination is also the power to fashion, apparently rationally but usually violently, the more ‘truthful’ narrative.” (C 6)
• “For [St] Augustine, sexual arousal - literally the ‘involuntary’ movement of erection - epitomized fallen human nature out of control with itself.” (C 8)
• “Evil is not a force or entity in its own right; evil should be understood as privation, a lack of good.” (C 9)
• “God, for Augustine, was motiveless in his creation of the world (to attribute motive to God is to compromise his omnipotence.” (C 9)
• “Contradiction ... arises for any monotheistic religion which asserts that God is both perfectly good and unlimited in his power.” (C 9)
• “Evil cannot be allowed to be a ‘positive reality’ ... because this would readmit dualism.” (C 9)
• “Evil is as lack of good as lameness is the lack of ability to walk properly.” (C 9)
• “In older religions the devil and things related to him (e.g. the underground) were the source of life and fertility as well as death and destruction.” (C 9)

Lots of interesting things in this book but, for the general reader, this was hard going.

August 2020; 357 pages

"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

"Rent Boys" by Michel Dorais

This book is based on an academic study of forty young male prostitutes in Quebec and Montreal. The author has also written the equally readable Dead Boys Can't Dance, a study of male homosexuality and suicide.

The 3 most common arenas for male prostitution are street hustling, stripping and escorting. On average they were twenty when they started sex work. Nearly half said they were gay, the others were more or less evenly divided between heterosexual and bisexual. On average in North America one in 6 boys are victims of child sexual abuse but over half the prostitutes reported such. Many were unsuccessfully fostered or adopted because of unstable family backgrounds. The vast number were ill educated, only 5% attending university and none graduating. Most or all of their clients were male although sometimes they had threesomes.

There are four groups of people involved: prostitutes, clients, entrepreneurs (eg owners of clubs etc, pornographers, drug dealers, hoteliers etc) and judges. The book also categorises the rentboys themselves into four types:

• Outcasts: often younger men, usually destitute, often runaways from difficult childhoods and nearly always addicted to a substance; they are living from day to day, usually street hustling. These boys have very low self-esteem: "I see myself as a garbage can that's been soiled, washed, bleached, but it's still dirty" (p 37)
• The Part-Timers are often heterosexual men who are using sex work to supplement their income; they often have a family  from whom they keep this work entirely separate. They usually work in the 'higher status' stripping or escorting and they almost always insist on safe sex.
• The Insiders grew up in the sex trade, often having a parent who was a prostitute. Thus, sex work is normal and it gives them a sense of belonging: "the street is yours, it's your playground, it's a part of your life." (p 41)
• For the Liberationists "prostitution is a way of living out fantasies, exploring new experiences and partners, and profiting from those discoveries." (p 41) But they may become disillusioned: "We're paid for dreams, and we wind up living in a world of dreams." (p 42)

• "rent boys are seeking adventure and, especially, ready cash, but they find themselves in an activity in which idealism and disillusion lock horns. Though they may lack the features and physique of cult film idols, they have learned to act as if they possessed them. In fact, the male prostitution market is a universe shot through with illusions. Fantasy reigns supreme, whether deliberately cultivated by sex workers in order to entice their clients or projected by clients onto the young men whose services they hire." (p viii)
• "Prior to the emergence of the homosexual/ heterosexual dichotomy in the public mind, male-to-male relations were, as in antiquity, considered acceptable from the vantage point of the active partner." (p 15)
• "Poor youths, finding themselves unemployed and destitute or simply unable to find female partners, have willingly prostituted themselves to men." (p 16)
• "Intimacy and virility are what the client requires ... hence the young hunk, muscles rippling from bodybuilding, heterosexual in appearance even though he has sex with other men." (p 21)
• "everyone is involved in watching each other. Sex workers have to attract clients ... they keep a low profile with respect to police or local residents. Clients clearly put a premium on discretion." (p 23)
• "All forms of sex work - street hustling, stripping, escorting - are trades learned by contact or apprenticeship with more experienced individuals, for example family members, peers, or clients" (p 26)
• "Clients are brutal with me at times, especially the big tough ones. They get violent when I suck them off. They hold my head and jam their dick down my throat until I choke. When I have anal sex, some of them try to hurt me on purpose, as if they wanted to bust me open." (p 27)
• "Street hustlers ... are easily identifiable ... by the way they lope along the sidewalk trying to entice potential clients: 'It's all in the body, the attitude, the posture, especially the look in your eye,' ... For others, the clothing and what it suggests count for a good deal." (pp 27 - 28)
• "Mutual masturbation costs less than oral sex, which costs less than anal sex or 'extras' such as sadomasochistic relations." (p 28)
• "You have to have short hair, wear nice clothes, be really clean, and sit there like you're part of the furniture." (p 29)
• "make sure the client undresses first, so as to examine his body ... ask the client to put the money on the night table in advance so as to avoid any misunderstandings." (p 29)
• "Strippers are paid a minimal base wage for their stage show and earn extra income by offering various services. ... First the stripper begins to undress to rhythmic music, baring his torso or somewhat more. He then performs a slower, more lascivious dance to a ballad, undressing completely or almost." (p 29)
• "Surveillance is claimed to be vigilant so as to prevent acts such as genital fondling or fellatio that are illegal in public, but the reality is that the darkness of the room, the amounts of money changing hands, and the guards arbitrary judgement militate in favour of more relaxed enforcement." (p 30)
• "No stripper will say he turns tricks, not even me, and I do. Nobody wants to be taken for a hustler. The guys want to preserve their male image." (p 31)
• "It is no exaggeration to say that strippers watch their clients as much as their clients watch them. Most strippers consider their own attractiveness to be a function of their gaze as well as their physique." (pp 32 - 33)
• "The merciless reality of the male prostitution market dictates that popularity waxes and wanes as a function of ephemeral traits such as youth, beauty, and physical fitness. Therefore, mobility tends to be downward with age." (p 35)
• "If you want to hustle, you can't love yourself. It looks like an exchange of services, but basically what you are is a garbage can for society ... You're immediately overcome by drugs, violence, rejection - it all comes with the territory. It's inseparable from prostitution." (p 45)
• "No employer acknowledges their experience as having any value; on the contrary, most perceive it as something negative, degrading and contemptible. Where the job market is concerned, these men are usually better off keeping their past a secret." (p 86)
• "even those who had ceased their sex-work activities remained in or on the periphery of prostitution." (p 87)
• "Sex work ... offers no easy exit." (p 87)

This is a fascinating study of a hidden world and it is extremely well-written. March 2017; 100 pages

"The Sins of Jack Saul" by Glenn Chandler

John Saul, aka Jack, aka Dublin Jack, was a blond, beautiful and stunningly well endowed young man who became a rent boy. This is his biography.

 He started part-time as a young boy, walking out with soldiers in Dublin in the 1870s when sodomy but not homosexuality was illegal. High profile friends got him a respectable job in service with a Dublin doctor. But he was caught in what appears to have been an attempted burglary. He was acquitted (it seems that the people he stole from were unwilling to come forward, perhaps because they had had sex with him) but lost his job and his good name so went to London where he became, like so many runaways since, a rent boy in Piccadilly Circus.

He was obviously rather good at his trade.

Early in his career he attracted the attention of a pornographer who persuaded him to write a 'memoir'. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain became notorious. The British Library copy is the only remnant of the 250 strong first edition although it has since been republished.

Shortly afterwards he was taken back to Dublin to testify against two former customers who were accused of sodomy. His evidence was never used, probably because it related to encounters prior to the time frame of the charges. But the 'Dublin felonies' became a major scandal in the aftermath of the Phoenix Park murders.

He returned to London and resumed his profession. By now homosexual relations had been made illegal. One day he attracted Lord Euston (I was at school with a later Lord Euston) and brought him back to the male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street where he worked. Other famous people using the brothel (if not Jack) included Lord Arthur Somerset, Equerry of the Prince of Wales, and a banker whose family bank later became Barclays. Royalty knew these people and there are persistent rumours that Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales who later became Edward VII, famed dissolute and one of the many Ripper suspects, attended the brothel. As well as Jack and a number of professional 'Mary-Anns' there were some part timers who worked as telegraph boys at the Post Office. One of these was caught and confessed; Inspector Abbeline (of the Ripper murders) investigated but his superiors refused to bring prosecutions (too many important clients), a paper found out and published names, Lord Arthur Somerset fled abroad (and lived out the rest of his days in exile in the south of France) and Lord Euston sued for libel. The only person prepared to testify against his noble lordship was Jack Saul. The Cleveland Street case became a cause celeb.

There is a slight difficulty in knowing what moral stance to take. On the one hand the prevailing view today is that homosexuality should never have been made illegal. And today sex workers are thought to be victims rather than corrupters. So it becomes necessary to disapprove of their clients. But these men were homosexuals finding love where they could. So it becomes difficult to tell a story of good versus bad.

Chandler can be witty. I particularly liked the way he takes the rise from some of the euphemisms of the time, for example the idea that gay men are necessarily musical ("All of the witnesses seemed to be of a musical bent with good singing voices. They certainly used them."). My favourite line is the rent boy on the witness stand who testified "he had obliged Cornwall reluctantly and was disgusted, though he had gone back to his house to be disgusted on two further occasions" (p 103).

This was a fascinating account of male prostitution in Victorian London told by a man who can tell a good story and keep you interested. February 2017; 282 pages

"Sex, Literature and Censorship" by Jonathan Dollimore

This is not a book I would normally have read except that I had previously read Dollimore's Death, desire and loss in Western culture and loved it. This is a little more academic and challenging for a person like myself who has never studied Gender let alone Queer Studies but Dollimore is a brilliant writer and some of his observations are even more acute and mind-transforming that in that previous book.

His thesis in this book seems to be that we censor too much although the brilliance and scope of his analyses diluted the message for me. He makes three key points:

• Art is inherently and intentionally dangerous: artists want to change the world and it is disingenuous to argue that a work of art only has power as a work of art. "Human desire will not be contained by safe and reassuring narratives ... desire is perversely dangerous and often the more seductive for being so." (p 73)
• The world has been changed. "The increase in gay and bisexual people in more liberal climates isn't just a consequence of those who are 'already gay' and bisexual coming out; it's also because many more people are exploring homosexuality who otherwise wouldn't have." (p 102) 
• There is a fundamental tension in society between society's needs and the individual's desires: "The daemonic ... is powerfully expressed in some of the great mythic oppositions in western culture, including the Greek one between Apollo and Dionysus [he references Medea by Euripedes] , the Renaissance ones between reason and passion, culture and nature, and most recently, Freud's account of human history as the unending antagonism between civilization and instinct." (p 73) It seems unlikely that "liberated desire would, as it were, civilize itself." (p 78)

So censorship, a feature of all societies throughout history, is perhaps essential. The question then becomes at which point on the slippery slope do we draw a line? He doesn't seem to have an answer to this. What he does do is point out that our responses (often in terms of revulsion and hatred) to the inherent dangers of desire are culturally conditioned and he gives compelling examples of that conditioning. For example:

• "In Ancient Greece the love which a man felt for a boy would disappear abruptly when body hair appeared ... in Greece they were disgusted by men loving boys who were too old, while today most people are disgusted by men who love them too young" (pp 54 - 55)
• "Forbidden knowledge has always been a feature of human cultures ... Against that, the breaking of the injunction has been regarded as necessary for progress and liberation ... Straddling that opposition are some of the great transgressive figures of myth and literature, including Prometheus, Faust/us, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and of course Adam and Eve." (p 89)
• Too clever by half? "Nordau's notion of the 'higher degenerate', an individual who is dangerously brilliant because endowed with an intelligence which has evolved too far and at the expense of the ethical faculty" (p 115)

Along the way he is fascinating about many other topics, listed in no particular order below:

Bisexuality
He starts by observing that bisexuality has caused significant problems for homosexuals and it seems to be because of the human tendency to dichotomise: "our current obsessive binary division between heterosexual and homosexual: the classification of people according to the sex/ gender of their partners, or desired partners." (pp 17 - 18). He cites his own experience as a gay man, a pioneer in Queer Studies, who found himself having a sexual relationship with a woman and being condemned by some who even accused him of being gay for his career: "but then I thought, hang on: actually any guy who could spend his life being fucked from pillow to bedpost by other guys ... deserved to have a fabulous career." (p 23)  Gay people in the past, he says, has "theorized the bisexual as the biggest hypocrite of all in the sex arena, a bullshitter, a hedge-sitter, someone who wanted the best of all worlds without committing to any" (p 23) But "it was useful to ... see the judgemental sexual politicians either silenced or having to retool. (That's an unfortunate metaphor, but one which, on quick reflection, I think I'll keep.) (p 23) [You see, he can write beautifully!]

Desire
But he must also consider the "much older idea of desire as inherently dangerous and always potentially disruptive" (p 18).

"Our desire, in all its perversity, is drawn to the very exclusions which constitute it." (p 26)

"There are homoerotic texts which convey even more acutely what it is to have one's identity wrecked by desire" eg Giovanni's Room and Death in Venice. (p 35)

Desire is linked to disgust: Andre Gide (author of The Immoralist), in his autobiography, sees a little Arab lad being fucked by his friend and experiences revulsion, disgust.

Identity
And we must take on the concept of "identity: the source of an essential, authentic selfhood for which we must be prepared to fight and suffer." (p 19)

"An individual identity is composite, a partial organization, more or less complex, and based in part on exclusion" (p 82)

Miscellaneous
"Notoriously in human history, those who have made progress have wanted to deny the same rights to others." (pp 24 - 25)

"Of the vulnerable groups censors have obsessed about the most - women, the lower classes, and children - the first two have been emancipated, but not children, or even adolescents." (p 157)

"Evil is not some-thing, but a turning-away from God, a perverse regression back to originary nothingness." (p 83)

"The extreme contradiction in the anti-homosexual position ... : on the one hand homosexuality is so self-evidently 'hideous', 'loathsome', a 'degeneracy', a 'degradation', a 'debasement' ... that nay right-thinking and healthy person would avoid it like the plague. On the other hand it has this extraordinary capacity to seduce precisely the 'healthy', right-minded boy or girl; to devastate the entire younger generation, in fact." (p 100)

"To be human is to be profoundly non-natural. A child dies: we never forget, and if we loved that child we maybe never recover. And yet nothing is more natural than for an organism to die in infancy. ... Human culture involves an attitude to nature which mixes repression, defiance and forgetting ... all of which are the condition of love." (p 69)

"The Christian god, unlike his predecessors, does not desire. He is complete, wanting and lacking nothing. He absolutely does not desire because to desire is an imperfection and a limitation inseparable from mortality. Being perfect, the Christian god doesn't desire, but then he doesn't laugh, either." (p 77)

"Corrupted reason was capable of an intensity of evil unknown to the non-rational or irrational. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." (p 80); ref Angelo in Measure for Measure: it is the virgin Isabella for whom he self-destructively lusts

A brilliant book. December 2016; 171 pages

"Death, desire and loss in Western culture" by Jonathan Dollimore

Dollimore's thesis is that, in western culture (and beyond?) eroticism is fundamentally bound up with the death wish. His starting point is a novel about a gay man who enjoys unsafe sex, contracts HIV, and then deliberately spreads it. Homosexuality, says Dollimore "is seen as death-driven, death-desiring and thereby death-dealing." (p xi). But this is not a modern phenomenon; for Dollimore it is intrinsic to western culture.

Western culture has always thrived on dualities and one of the most significant is that between "the world of appearances, the domain of unreality, deception, loss, transience and death" and "an ultimate, changeless reality ... said to be the source of the absolute, as distinct from relative, truth, and even of eternal life." (p xiii) eg the world of the Platonic ideal. Dollimore points out that Socrates committed suicide; later on he contracts the artistic Platonic love which the protagonist of Death and Venice believes in to the catastrophe when he falls in love with the smile of a boy.

He makes the point that carpe diem is over-optimistic since "time and change, driving us towards a horizon of oblivion, make it hard to seize anything, let alone the day." [My favourite version of carpe diem appeared as the name of a bar in Sorrento; presumably they believed that alcoholic stupor improves productivity.]


Greek love
"Male sexuality is especially and inherently insecure, always haunted by the prospect of failure and humiliation ('a flop is a flop'), and even when apparently successful it is inherently mutable, going from erection through orgasm to detumescence" (p xxv)

"The Greeks revered youthful beauty" (p 16) and mourned its passing even more than they mourned death: "To die young in battle weas not only to be immortalized as a hero, it was also to escape the decline and decay of old age." (pp 17 - 17)

"The Sirens are said to sing from within a flowering meadow [a Greek word also used for female genitalia]" (p 18) and seduce sailors with the "mortal (sexual?) desire for immortality. But these mouldering remains tell us that this overwhelming desire leads not to an exalted, immortalizing death ... but precisely to a death of the kind which the Greeks feared most: without funeral. without tomb, and rotting anonymously on the shore, indistinguishable from the other corpses in the pile." (p 19)

"For Lucretius ... sexual desire in the male is compared to dying, or at least injury, and warfare ... blood spurts out towards the source of the blow, and the enemy who delivered it, if he is fighting at close quarters, is bespattered by the crimson stream" (p 22)

The Bible is an early source of the idea that "death and loss simultaneously drive and frustrate desire" (p xix) since Adam and Eve's discovery of sex led directly to the loss of Eden and their condemnation to death. Ecclesiastes (which derives from "the so-called wisdom movement of the Near East; p 39) goes on about vanity which comes from the Hebrew word for "vapour - that which is unsubstantial, momentary and profitless, fleeting as a breath, and amounting to nothing." (p 36) Human life is like a shadow.  "It is as if an inscrutable God has deliberately created a universe devoid of himself; one in which there is no discernible moral law, and where eternity is ultimately the darkness of death and, more immediately, the permanent, restless yet monotonous movement of inanimate nature, whose immense scale only emphasises the brevity and insubstantiality of human life" (p 39)

Shakespeare
Dollimore asks whether Romeo had a death wish; certainly in Romeo and Juliet "an adult fantasy about adolescent desire ... adolescent sexuality contains a powerful erotic charge for the adult, regardless of sexual orientation" (p 109)the star-crossed lovers mingle sex with death. And Shakespeare makes Hamlet suggest that death is a "'consummation' ... the word is precisely significant, meaning both satisfying climax and being consumed or vanished into nothing" (p xxi). And in Measure for Measure Claudio is condemned to death for promiscuity.

More recently, Bataille said that "Eroticism is inseparable from repugnance ... this is not simply danger ... excessive horror paralyses desire ... What most repulses us is putrefaction" (p 253); "It is the fragrance of death which gives sexuality all its power." (p 254)

His analysis of the homoerotic Death in Venice is excellent: Thomas Mann the author had in later years become more and more aware of his attraction to male beauty, including his own son in swimming trunks. Aschenbach is Mann, trying to rationalize his passion in terms "by comparing the latter's physical beauty with his own art. Nature, like the artist, works with discipline and precision to create perfect form, and the boy's beauty is the physical counterpart of the spiritual beauty which is the artist's province. In pursuit of this idea, Aschenbach invokes its Platonic origins." (p 281) But the plague raging in Venice "works as a metaphor for the resurgence of the primeval in and through the decadent, and homosexual desire is its trigger." (p 290) And "Decadence was always there; Tadzio radiates a beauty which is said to be noble, and austere, yet almost immediately he is observed to have unhealthy teeth. ... Aschenbach reflects that the boy will not live to grow old ... the decadent and perhaps vengeful pleasure of realizing that the object of his desire will succumb to an inherent degeneracy." (p 289)

Not just sex and death
Dollimore is good about things other than just (?) death and sex. He tells us that "Thomas Browne speaks of the importance of knowing oneself but also of the difficulty of doing so." (p 84); that "Augustine [in the Confessions] suggests how individualism was from the beginning energized by an inner dynamic of loss, conflict, doubt, absence and lack, and how this feeds into our culture's obsession with control and expansion - the sense that the identity of everything, from self to nation, is under centrifugal and potentially disintegrative pressures which have to be rigorously controlled. This is a kind of control that is always exceeding and breaking down the very order it restlessly quests for, and is forever establishing its own rationale even as it undermines it."; and that "David Hume reconceptualized the self as completely mutable and entirely the prisoner of time. Even the meditation upon the self is pointless, according to Hume, since the kid of self which meditation presupposed is non-existent. ... during introspection one's attention is always caught up in the transient, fleeting impressions of consciousness itself. ... we are 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement' ... There is absolutely nothing within us that remains unalterably the same through flux and change - certainly not a soul, and not even an unchanging self. Nor does the mind have an unchanging nature or essence; it too is essentially discontinuous. We are nothing more than the movement and flux of consciousness." (p 93) [This made me think of Andy Clark's, Surfing Uncertainty]

Baudrillard sees "culture as a macro-conspiracy conducted by an insidious ideological prime-mover whose agency is always invisibly at work (rather like God)." (p 124)

"It is a function of myth ... to provide a disguised or obscure expression of what can no longer be said openly. Typically, the expression will conform to socially acceptable conventions - here, in the romance, chivalry is the convention - in order to explore an antisocial content." (p 65)

The lumpenproletariat are "not a class so much as a motley, uprooted and, in many instances, itinerant mass of people"; Marx included among them "decayed roues, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, beggars ... 'scum, offal, refuse of all classes'" (pp 215 - 216)

A fascinating and beautifully written book. October 2016; 327 pages