Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone by Jackie Morris

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This is a visually beautiful book – rich with golds and silvers – the text sparingly placed, a handful of short lines on a page – with some much space for the words to breathe.

It is no surprise that Jackie Morris evokes a deep connection to the natural world, an enchantment of it. It provides a grounding in the turbulence of life.

One extract as an example…

Things to do:

Take a stone for a walk.

Take leaves of gold up hill,

release into the wild.

Take leaves of gold to stream,

place in water, watch light,

bring home, dry.

Find the silence in which to

catch the shape of words.

Breathe, and in between, peace.

The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

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The Swimming-Pool Library was published at the height of the AIDS crisis and the same year as Section 28, but is set on the eve of that storm, and through Charles throws you back even further in time. It is an unapologetic account of gay men living sexual lives – for a mainstream novel to tell that story, especially at the moment in time, was powerful and radical. But how it was received in that moment may not be how we (I) receive it now.

It is a story told by privileged white men – they fuck their way through life at Winchester College, life at Oxford, in Charles’ case life as a Colonial administrator, in William’s life a young man with no need of a job. It is a story told by white men about their black lovers. A story told by rich men about their working class lovers. All novels are a story told – we need to acknowledge the status of the story teller – but that is not a reason to “cancel” Hollinghurst – this story is valid but we need to be alert to hear the stories of black men about their lovers, of working class men about their lovers – because those stories are also valid and should also be being heard. We can’t blame Hollinghurt that they are not.

I started to read this on the plane home from Gran Canaria – and the sexual liberation of the early 80s recalled in the book, in the context of PREP and U=U, now feels much more familiar than the context in which it was published. The power of the book is reduced because it is now holding a candle in the light rather than the dark. What seems easy now seemed impossible then. Across the LGBT+ community there is still a need for manifestos of liberation – it is just that rich white men should no longer be the focus of attention.

Club Q by James Davis

 

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I ordered this collection back in October after James was featured in Fourteen Poems, and it arrived while we were away in Gran Canaria. We got home a few days after the shooting at Club Q and this was amongst the post waiting for me. To hear of the shooting while we were within the gay bubble of the Yumbo added to my sense of connection – I had been reflecting on the delight of being within the safe, gay majority, space – the empowerment and contentment it gave – to hear of the violation of another safe space brings all spaces into question – there is that tiny traitorous bit of your brain that think maybe hanging out in such a visible gay space might not be a great plan.

I feel it is really hard to encounter this collection so strongly within the context of the shooting – it should not be defined by someone else’s violence.

Yet the poem titled Club Q begins …

“I stand for quest, which is to say mission,

as in ‘our mission is to provide

a safe space for you to be yourself,’

which is to say ‘it is not always safe

for you to be yourself.’...”

And one of the closing stanzas of the final poem, Between Home and Sexual, is …

“It’s easy to forget

hatred never stops coming for any of us.

But hatred never stops coming for any of us.”

So the themes James engages with speak to the acts of violence that LGBT+ people experience – alive to the hostile world in which we live.

Other poems I particularly connected with were

Bi

part of a sequence responding to the two letter words allowed in Scrabble

Ta

part of the same sequence which in James writes

“Ta, God

for existing and not existing

for being non-binary that way: real and fake, a quantum

for being cooler than religion

for being way cooler than church

...”

Magnavox Opus

about if grandfather’s video tapes – and yet about so much more than that.

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo

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Andre Bagoo is an excellent poet, he writes great short stories, and as an essayist – oh my goodness…

This collection ranges far and wide in terms of subject matter – but always insightful.

To quote one of them …

But let’s say Twain is right and all we do is conform. Can’t conforming still be a form of resistance? Can’t it trigger rebellion? Be it’s own sign of an independent assertion of values?

When Rosa Parks got onto the bus at Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, she didn’t disobey any rules. She conformed to them. The prevailing laws divided the bus into white and black sections. Parks sat in the black section. When the white section filled up, the bus driver attempted to expand the section for whites-only. The law called for “equal but separate accommodations”. It didn’t permit this practice of shifting the goalpost, a practice that had apparently developed over time. Parks stayed in the section designated for her under the law… It was by conforming to a racist law that she asserted her individuality...”(p33)

We all know the story of Rosa Parks – except I had never heard this story of Rosa – and it is so powerful, it is a turning of the oppressors rules against them – you take their power away by playing by their rules.

Later in the collection the long essay The Free Colony asks a really profound question in this paragraph…

Motivating the so-called independence movement of the 1960s and the granting of independence was not the idea of freedom, but of race. Colonial subjects were citizens of the British Empire. They could (and I will argue should) have been fully integrated into Great Britain and given the right to name Her Majesty’s prime minister at the polls. But the idea of black, brown, or yellow bodies from overseas taking root at Westminster; the idea of a society in which a pale class is no longer wholly in control of power had to be avoided at all costs, as remains the case today in Britain, with the fear of the foreign, of the fear, for instance, of Turkey joining the European Union. (p118)

This is the route that France has taken with its overseas departments – but it has not overcome racism in France. Bagoo holds a mirror up to us Brits, and what we see in it is awful. I am not accountable for all the wrongs the British state has done, and yet my comfortable life is in part, possibly in large part, a result of that history.

On the death of Jews by Nadine Fresco

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Nadine Fresco is telling the story of a collection of photographs and most importantly the story of the picture seen in those photographs.

These eight photographs show a group of Jews in the moments before and after their murders, on the shore near the city of Liepaja, part of the Holocaust.

This therefore is a story of the mass murder of the Holocaust, but also of the individual murders of the Holocaust. We need to tell both those stories.

That there are photographs of such a shocking event is a window into minds of those carrying out the killings – we now live in an age of constant image making, the 1940s were not like that. Yet the fact that the Nazis repeatedly issued order prohibiting the photographing of these acts of extermination points to a reality that those involved somehow couldn’t resist recording the events. In at least one of this group of photographs the women are posed, moments before they are killing, moments in which they clearly knew their fate, they are made to stand in line, in underwear, a moment of utter humiliation and yet there they stand with a certain dignity.

The photographs, after the war, were used by various people in their retelling of the Holocaust, but often they were attributed to the wrong location – they became an archetype rather than a record of a specific event. And Nadine Fresco explores how this dynamic of dislocation is troubling. It acts as another layer of the stripping of the humanity and individuality of those capture in the photos, those shot on that beach.

A key part of the book is therefore the reclaiming of the specificity of the event show – even if it is not possible to put names to the faces shown it is possible to give an account to that group of Jews, killed over 3 days in December 1941.

In naming the victims of the Holocaust there is a reclaiming of their humanity. And this is such an important thing, especially as we get further and further away and the last of the direct witnesses are no longer with us – we need to hold the reality, the particularity, of this crime sharp in our minds – keep the fact that the systematic killing of millions of people could be so easily normalised as the warning against all those that peddle the idea that “truth” is subjective...

All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

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This is an exceptional work which is touches you deeply through the honesty and openness Seán offers us.

I read it as I was finishing reading the Alcuin Club book about Dean Dwelly of Liverpool and so the open scene of Seán cruising in the grounds of Liverpool Cathedral created an interesting connection.

Within the account of his relationship with Elias and with Elias depression he unpacks the particular mental health burden that so many LGBT+ people carry as a result of living is a hostile straight world.

He reflects early on about visit to sexual health clinic, and the sharing of sexual history “I was anxious, full of shame, always expecting the worst… [but] in that strip-lit hospital room, my history was not mine at all. Like a river, spreading through its bends and tributaries… seeping from one man into the warm body of another, then being carried off into the daily life of the world, barely noticed.” (p9) There is something in this connectivity, found often in brief and anonymous encounters that can be validating, especially when so much else in life invalidates you.

Talking about Gerard Manley Hopkins, and how he turned to his poetry after learning of the loss of friend Jack, despite the century of so between them he sees that there is still “this procession of men, walking beside me, people I knew and loved being added to it, and, one by one, their lights were being put out. In their midst, I felt my own light flickering, too.” (p31) This undertone of sadness builds.

As he becomes estranged for the Catholic Church reflects that “I felt a deep schism opening between myself and the people and institutions I had loved. But as the rift widened over time, I began to feel more free. The ties between myself and my world, the ones that had held me down, were being cut. My body and my queerness and my life became inseparable. Through that splitting away, I felt myself becoming irrevocably and radically whole.” (p130) That leaving the Church is a life enriching experience is such a sad thing – one I wish wasn’t true but all too often is.

I found his description of a time when he was struggling, “My mind was knotted and unclear. I couldn’t tell whether it was an absence of thoughts, or too many thoughts at once.” (p153) really resonated with my own experience.

And then turning more directly to the impact of growing up gay in a straight, and largely unwelcoming world he touches so many nerves – he says “Lying is something I had become good at with practice. Before I came out, it was so deeply integral to the way I lived my life that it was hard, afterwards, to unpick which parts of myself were armour and which parts of myself were real.” (p184) I think this is also something that can link to neurodiversity – you spend so much time masking that you no longer know what the unmasked “you” is actually like.

I really identified with the experience that “At that time there were no other gay people (that I knew of) in my school of over 2,000 students. Clearly, there were…” but he could see past their carefully constructed facades. (p189) – a few via Facebook contact etc I now know are gay, were gay, but that lack of visibility is something I hope has changed in many places since our days at school.

And of course one of the big changes that allowed that to happen is the repeal of Section 28 - Seán addresses the impact of the silence on LGBT+ issues it created saying “What I was left with was this unsettling feeling that we didn’t exist, or there were so few of us I’d never find another person like me. I knew I didn’t exist alone – there were the men I met, after all – but I existed alone among the people I knew, the people I loved.” (p198)

There is a sense of the loneliness of growing up gay that I identified with – the ways that this becomes internalised and then jumps out at you in later life when you are not expecting to be ambushed is a real challenge. Although this is a very different book from Tom Allen’s No Shame there is at the core of both the same constriction on young gay/LGBT+ people – things are better now, but better doesn’t always mean good – being less bad is progress but not a success.

Overall it renewed my sense of commitment to living visibly, to doing all I can to ensure those growing up today have positive role models, that they know whether you are you are not alone.