You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

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The long arc of history and the passage of grief, hurt, cruelty, and shame down the generations make this an ambitious work – the task Damian Barr sets in meeting that ambition is a hard one.

With some spoilers…

The opening account of the British ‘Scorched Earth’ attack on a Boer Farm is horrific because of its claim, orderly, bureaucratic cruelty – this is not the frenzy of battle. And this is followed by the concentration camp – one of the earliest examples of this systematic dehumanising of a population, a people. The treatment of the white Boers is terrible, the were separate black camps where conditions were even worse.

This is history now beyond the reach of living memory, but Damian Barr brings it vividly to us in the stories of individuals, stories of women.

Moving forward in time the focus shifts to lives of black women living under Apartheid, living proud despite the oppression of the State and neglect of men. Complex women, real in their imperfections.

And then on again to Willem, post-Apartheid child, not living up to a step-father’s ideal of masculinity. Sent to a military training camp Willem finds intimacy with Geldenhuys. After attempting to escape, they are put into punishment cell. Willem’s Grandmother comes to the rescue just in time for Willem but too late for Geldenhuys.

The reveal at the end is the camp stood on the land of the farm where we began, run but descendent of the women we followed to the camp. This twists any assumptions we might have been holding about any easy binary between oppressor / oppressed – what went before can not justify what came after – where does reconciliation come, will the cycle of violence ever end?

This is unsettling, appropriately unsettling – and in that I think Damian Barr managed to write something worthy of the memories of those that have suffered across South Africa’s many generations.

How We Named The Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica

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NB: Includes Spoilers…

This novel sets the stories of Daniel and his late namesake Uncle side by side, separated in time yet finding themselves walking different paths. The tales of unfolding understandings of sexuality come to us piece by piece, which feels very authentic to the ways we learn to understand our own sexualities.

The younger Daniel is a student, paired with room mate Sam, they become friends and then even lovers, a blissful first year at University that takes a turn when Sam’s fledgling awareness of his sexuality takes a step back.

An email breaks the news to Daniel that Sam is ending their relationship, ending even their friendship.

A phone call breaks the news to Sam has died in an accident.

Heartbroken Daniel travels to Mexico to spend the summer with family their. During this time he learns move about the Uncle whose name he carries, including eventually that elder Daniel was also Gay.

In Mexico younger Daniel has a fling, but the grief for Sam prevents him being open to it being move, and when he communicates this the response is toxic and coercive.

There are moments when it can feel that this is heavy with the baggage of so many “bury your gays” plots – elder Daniel and Sam both dying young. That would be to miss the point, and the beauty, of this all – love and self-discovery are not always easy, but they are always essential.

I read this on the flight back from REG Conference in Bermuda – there is something intense and claustrophobic that feels suited to encountering this in a single session. Although there is a passage of time, and narratives occurring in different times, younger Daniel’s narration of it all his intense recollection of it.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2026

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I put tags in the following poems:

Anti-Hero by Isabelle Baafi

What I Know by Catherine-Esther Cowie

The World According to Your Mum Doing the Washing by Joshua Idehen

at least by Abeer Ameer

Mary Magdalene by Mae Diansangu

Basquait’s Delusion by Monica Minott

Animals by Theresa Muñoz

Good Friday by Andrés N. Ordorica

Naming the Trees by Ness Owen

The River by Pascale Petit

Toxic Shame in the Church by Brenda Hopkins

The key thing that Brenda Hopkins surfaces within this book is the difference between being ashamed of things you do and being ashamed of things you are.

So much in society, and even more in the church, tells us to be ashamed that we are gay (or LGBT+), in theory love the sinner hate the sin but it rarely comes across like that.

We all do things that we regret, an the shame that comes with that is in part protective, it is a part of learning lessons and not making the same mistakes again.

But when shame becomes attached who you are as a person there is no resolution.

To illustrate this Brenda Hopkins quotes James Alison, who is quoting a hypothetical God

“You are not. I did not create you. I only create heterosexual people. You are a defective heterosexual. Agree to be a defect and I’ll rescue you. But if you claim to be, then your very being is constructed over against me, and you are lost.”

It also made me reflect on my own journey with vocation, after they had stepped away Brenda recounts a conversation “He sighs… ‘no one said it was going to be easy’ … [she replied] ‘I didn’t leave because it was hard. I left because it was unhealthy.’” (p76)

I have many LGBT+ friends that are ordained, that have found ways to go on that journey, and in different ways it will have been really a hard journey for each of them. At times I struggle with that, I stepped away, giving up – I have to remember that for me it had become a toxic process, I was denying who I was, editing myself – and I could not go forward to make profound promises before God that would have been based on a pack of lies.

In naming the shame Brenda disempowers it.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

 

I approached this book very much aware of the fall out from John Boyne’s inclusion in the long list for the 2025 Polari Prize and yet also not wanted to let that colour my reading of this particular book.

I also was lukewarm about the film version of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but again tried to put a pin in that while reading this book.

The opening part is so strong, the intensity of that moment when Catherine, Sean, and Jack are thrown together and then torn apart, it is a brilliant short story – the following 640 pages never really match it – except the part in New York when Cyril and Bastiaan are tending to the needs of those with AIDS until a walk in Central Park ends in violence and death, but again that could work as a standalone short story – there isn’t really any connection between the two. Rather than writing an epic novel it might have been better to have been a collection of short stories – but novels sell and short stories don’t.

By the end of it, if I am honest I just sort of got bored, because after so much drama and so many plot twists the shock value wares thin.

A Life and a Half by Chris Bryant

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Chris Bryant has lived a rich and at times challenging life, while every memoir is an attempt to narrative ones own story I did get a sense that the arch of the perpetual outsider at times rang a little hollow from this public school educated, Oxford graduate, Minister of State.

But the navigation of the Church of England as a gay man was of particular interest for me, Chris Bryant is two decades my senior and in ways the Church of his youth was a more accommodating space than it was for me and definitely than it is today. Yet that accommodation also created the space for inappropriate behaviours and sexual predators – which Chris Bryant acknowledges without casting people as irredeemable.

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr

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This is a a tragedy in the classical sense, a retelling of the lives of Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, which gives us a rounded history of two gay men – the unspoken truth of their relationship.

Much of what Damian Barr writes is his own imaging into the silence and absence, but in doing so he gives us a ‘fiction’ that is more authentic. Robert and Robert were not “just good friends”…

Coming from humble backgrounds their talent took them to the heart of “society”, and yet as artists at the whim of fashion when tastes changed they came crashing down again.

Would their lives have been so chaotic if their love hadn’t been illegal, or would drink have taken over irrespective of society’s attitudes – that is unknowable.