David McGillivray’s verdict on new gay lit…
Four new books seem to encapsulate almost the whole of gay life – high and low, young and old, good and bad. Goodbye to Soho (DWB Press, £10.99), Clayton Littlewood’s sequel to Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho, brings the story of his ill-fated menswear shop up to date. (Dirty White Boy was on the Soho corner where Fifty & Dean now stands). Over a two year period, during which business went from bad to worse, manager Littlewood watched the ebb and flow of London’s so-called Dirty Square Mile and wrote down his observations. They’re enough to put you off writing your own autobiography because Littlewood’s life is so interesting. Or is it just that he makes it sound so interesting? One minute it’s like a French farce, the next he’s dealing with the realities of unsafe sex. He mixes with everyone from Leslie the old queen and Angie the transsexual to Carlos Acosta and Sebastian Horsley. If you think you know Soho, here it is in a new light.
Like Littlewood’s book, Born This Way (Quirk Books, £9.99) is based on a blog. Paul Vitagliano asks LGBT people to share their memories of self-awareness and coming out. The stories are all unashamedly positive, and so this prettily coloured little book is one to keep by you when you’re having a bad day. “I can’t think of any people I’ve known who’ve said their life got worse after coming out”, declares Barney. “If only I could go back and tell the young me not to worry so much about what everyone else thinks about him”, says Bill. It’s all so inspiring that it wouldn’t surprise me if you went to Vitagliano’s site (www.borngaybornthisway.blogspot.co.uk) to add your own childhood pic and essay. What’s astounding about the contributors is the number that claim they knew they were “different” from a very young age. As if to prove it, there are a lot of photos of boys aged five or six – or even younger – posing in frocks and fairy costumes. Dennis, the 3-year-old on the book cover with his hands on his hips, grew up to reveal, “I’m proud to say that my picture was so incredibly gay that it actually inspired Paul V. to create his blog and now this book.” It provides compelling evidence that we didn’t choose to be gay. We were indeed born this way.
Robin Newbold isn’t the first travel writer to use his experiences to flesh out novels. In his second, Bloody Summer (Wilkinson House, £11.99), his characters follow his own path to Barcelona and Hong Kong. But first and foremost this is a devastating exploration of sexual jealousy. A pity that it’s set in 1997 and that the constant references to Britpop are soon going to be incomprehensible. Adam is the gay member of a student flat share in Hampstead. His flatmates, Bill and Sarah, are partners and Sarah’s pregnant. The focus is on Adam and his compulsive and unfulfilling cruising, carried out because of his apparently unrequited love for Bill. Adam becomes so Machiavellian in his attempts to break up Bill and Sarah’s relationship that only tragedy can ensue. This is far from being a feelgood book about gay love, in fact every character is hateful in some respect. But Newbold writes about the dark side of desire with horrible clarity; and when Adam does the spur-of-the-moment deed that changes his life forever, it’s hard to suppress a shudder.
Bisexuality is one of the themes of Bloody Summer and with Ronald Wright’s memoir, Sir Gay (Revelation Press, £9.99), we learn more about the real thing. Wright is another of those people you’ve never heard of who’s nevertheless had a glittering life mixing with the high and the mighty, the great and the good, in his case Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and a lot more. Along the way he’s been an artist, an artists’ model, a gay magazine editor and a live sex show performer. The title of one of his chapters, “Sex, Sex and Yet More Sex”, sums up the most indulgent part of his life. But he was also an early convert to spiritualism and seems eventually to have forsaken earthly pleasure for more supernatural pursuits. Unless you’re a fellow traveller, these make the final third of Wright’s book almost unreadable. But Psychic News gave him a good review, so I won’t enlarge. As far as gay historians are concerned, Wright’s value as a chronicler lies in his memories of the London gay scene before decriminalisation. After leaving school at 14, he got a job in a drawing office, but was more interested in sketching movie stars, some of whom he met. He seems always to have been proud of his physique (as his nude photos attest, he’s a big boy) and also to have wanted sex with men. But his partners tended to be “straight” and warned him of the dangers of being labelled “one of those.” Wright is himself bisexual. Despite the fact that he looks like Rolf Harris’ gay twin brother, he claims to have had a nine year relationship with a woman. His more recent activities – involving automatic writing, healing and channelling a Prince of Persia – cry out for an editor. But they also indicate a colourful, bohemian eccentric I’d love to meet.
