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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
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Kostya was included in issue 2 of Fourteen Poems and his work really captured my imagination so I was really pleased to read this his debut collection.
The poems engage with his Greece identity and heritage and how being gay shaped his relationship with that identity, how they conflict yet also enrich each other.
I found Tribute of Children powerful, its historical setting able to speak about contemporary experiences of exile and return.
1981 is a subtle poem, it hints at what will come as AIDS engulfs gay men, but not yet – I find being born the year of the first recorded cases unsettling.
marble bf looks back to the world of ancient Greece, what were the understandings of male beauty, what were the understandings male desire for other male bodies, how does that inform our own experiences…
Overall this is a collection that more that lived up to my expectations – smart and creative, skilful and perfectly crafted.
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With an ensemble cast of characters whose lives connect, and repel, in ways that open up questions of identity, of family, of duty, and of what success might mean. So vivid, it is a great skill to have populated a novel with some many “main” characters and have all of them live and breathe in authentic and rounded ways.
The setting of Lagos enriches the narrative, these queer lives rooted in their Nigerian context (even when they are at times lived far from that place) are very different from my own experiences but I am drawn into them, feeling their joy and their pain, without – I hope – being a tourist.
