Walking Contagions by Dale Booton and Isle of Sin by Simon Maddrell

 

Polari brings us these two excellent pamphlets…

Dale Booton exploring the ways HIV stigma has shaped the lives of men who have sex with men over the last 4 decades, how that stigma is still shaping our lives.

It opens with Blood that challenges restrictions on Blood donations, which even in their recent much reduced form still carry a level of stigmatisation.

Encounter in which the line “… | and the next time we see each other your face will be a stubbed toe | beside your friend or your brother or your wife…” particularly caught my attention.

And towards the end U = U the final stanza of which is

“…

because the medicine isn’t just the daily

pill popping it’s the tending of my kempt garden

with the efforts I might call ripe adoration

it’s the knowing that the bud of

the poisoned petals I hold within me

won’t ever bloom.”

In Isle of Sin Simon Maddrell puts a Manx lens on the lives of men who have sex with men, beginning with poems on memory of Dursley McLinden who was the inspiration for the character Ritchie Tozer in It’s A Sin and so thematically very close to Booton, next he recalls the Manx Police’s enforcement of anti-gay laws through active entrapment throughout the 1980s and on into 1990s, and then some found poems in the public political statements of apology that came in 2022 using a similar technique of redactions to that in Erased by James McDermott to highlight the hypocrisy they contained.

This pair are not only tightly crafted works of poetry but also important works of history – the experience of the marginalised is often untold – and so we need these works, just as It’s A Sin was such an important act of telling our history.

There is also a particular intensity as they were both paying attention to decades I have been alive – just how dark the 1980s were in many ways, and as I have explored before when thinking about Tom Allen’s book Shame it is only now that I am beginning to understand how much of this I internalised – I am not of the generation that went to countless AIDS funerals, my peers are living with HIV, living healthy lives with HIV – but so strong was the messaging about AIDS in the 1980s and so weak the messaging continues to be about the medical advances that I was well into my 30s before I broke the mindset that having sex, even with a condom, was playing Russia Roulette – the pleasure in it repaid ten times over by the guilt and fear that would follow.

And Maddrell unsettles form a different space as well – the role of the State and especially the Police marginalising LGBT+ people is not history – we can’t point to inevitable progress – globally things are stalling, falling back – clearly this is framing it as a first world problem but the list of countries that as a gay man I would not be comfortable visiting is growing – and it is really sad that the US is increasingly putting itself on that list, but the real context is that new laws passed in Uganda. For a long time I didn’t want to be an angry Gay, protest was not my thing, as long as I could quietly live my life, be the change I wanted to be, that was enough. And that was the right choice then as I needed to prioritise self-care to get through the day – but now I am in a place where the cost of the protest is bearable and so I can not stay silent.

Burn by Andre Bagoo

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I love Andre’s writing, they impart such a distinctive voice, rooted in their Trinidadian home and yet never parochial- it is a lens through which the universal experiences, of love, of loss, of wrestling with who you are, are shared.

There is a subtle humour that can offer a glimpse of light in the often otherwise dark poems.

A Boy in the City by S Yarberry

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The is a sophistication to this collection drawing on such a range of imagery and ideas to create space to explore queer experience.

Any Dumb Animal by A E Hines

Being Gay is so often so hard that we try to present a relentlessly positive narrative around our experience – there are so many that want to take us down so we can feel that giving any sign of weakness is an admission of defeat. But that is toxic behaviour – and so A E Hines honesty about domestic abuse within a same-sex relationship is so important, and we should cherish that.

In a strong collection I put tags in

Gay Divorce – which using the soak drawer to say so much about relationship

Me Too – recounting a hook up that became a rape, putting into words what many of us have experienced

It times no time at all

How many minutes?

Bohemian Rhapsody, 1991

These are raw emotions – and things are not getting better – in the US they seem to working through the play-book of precursor events to an LGBT+ genocide, I wrestle with the tension of retreating into a Gay bubble and living out there in the ‘real’ world for all the risks that carries.

A E Hines was able to say all these things about intense topics and also write good poems – that is a rare gift.

42 by Lowrey E Gray

 

Having read Wilding of this Hagstone Heart I asked for a copy of this debut collection, and very pleased that I did…

I put tags in

Dystopia Presents which concludes…

…

It’s sad, I suppose, it took a dystopian nightmare,

To appreciate the magic in life everywhere.

But it did. And it has, and from now on we must,

Seek out crackles of laughter no matter how oppressive the dust.

And those hand holding hands that pulled us through the pain,

Let it never take disaster to make us reach out again.

Legacy of Life

The Tooth Fairy

Ruby

She thought she’d rescue that cat -

The one who needed to be safe.

She gave the cat a home, a name, a safe place to be.

She took care of kittens,

Who came along too -

Full tummies, warm and adored.

She thought she’d rescued that cat,

But it was she, the cat rescued.

The cat sat on her knee.

She stroked her, talked to her, loved her.

She kept the cat safe.

She was still and peaceful to keep the cat calm.

It was the cat that saved her.

Busted in New York and Other Essays by Darryl Pinckney

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I ordered this having read Pinckney’s novel Black Deutschland, and many of the themes of that work are also central to their essays.

Zadie Smith provides a foreword and addresses the pessimism that many can feel about the situation of black people in America, and wants to recognise the contribution that activism has made so “that the lives we are able to live today, however imperfect, are precisely not the same as they ever were.” Zadie Smith was writing in 2018 and it feels the last 5 years have been characterised by the opposite of progress – George Floyd shone a light on how far from perfect America is. Pinckney explores sexuality alongside ‘blackness’ and LGBT+ rights in America seem to be under active and open attack. That we are in a battle to defend rights that our forefathers, foremothers, and gender-diverse ancestors didn’t dare imagine validates Zadie Smith’s comment – but it is thin comfort. We were watching a programme about Pet Shop Boys at the weekend which included a clip of them playing in Red Square, and I think there was a tear in Neil Tenant's eye as he said he doubts they will ever go to Russia again. People forget how bright the world seemed in that decade between the fall of the Berlin war and 9/11, and so maybe don’t quite see the contrast with how bleak it seemed today.

Pinckney repeated drills into the fact that the identities that define us, that divide us, are largely fictions – “Baldwin stressed that the Negro problem, like whiteness, existed mostly in white minds” (p194). But just because these are essentially figments of the imagination it doesn’t means they lack real power, harmful power.

He touches a nerve when he quotes Margo Jefferson saying “The white world had made the rules that excluded us; now, when it saw fit, it altered those rules to include a few of us.” (p208) The straight world made the rules to exclude us, and has seen fit to include a few of us, many white, middle class, gender conforming, monogamous, ideally male – and ticking many of those boxes it is very tempting to join the club and bring the draw bridge up behind you, or risk ‘others’ rocking the dock and us all getting kicked out. But I am increasingly aware that I need to be using my privilege as an “acceptable” gay to make space for those that are not yet accepted.

Pinckney engages with many voices from the past as dialogue patterns which is a key part of the richness of this collection, but James Baldwin is a someone he engages with, wrestles with, perhaps the most. There is a trio of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin – there was a moment when they were giving their particular expressions of the same struggle and then two of them were dead – we can celebrate Baldwin’s contribution, specific to a moment in history, while being honest about the questions we need to ask now that go beyond what he said then.

The deeper awakening to black experience in America that this collection has given me has been important – I knew the facts but the lived reality was brought uncomfortably close...

A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi

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Mohsin provides an important insight into the experience of being gay and not being “white” - sadly the LGBT+ community is not always good at doing diversity beyond sexuality, and we should be role modelling inclusion!

Mohsin share a heartfelt journey – spoiler alert – which has a happy ending, but there are plenty of hints that is just his good luck and at various points in the journey it was but by the grace of God that suicide or the violence of others did not provide a full stop to the story.

Part Two ending with his coming out to his Dad – and I did weep real tears as he takes us to that moment when you say it out loud despite the consequences – because however bad the consequences of coming out, not coming out is death.

I know how hard it was to come out to my liberal minded parents who had knowingly made a gay man my sister’s godfather – and I just kind of feel silly standing next to what Mohsin faced in his conservative cultural context.

When he talks about that innocent gay child he was before he learnt to be ashamed, the stranger he became to himself, it is so sad, and so relatable – that the ‘real’ you is locked away is a very gay thing, but it is also true across a wide range of experience, shame is not an exclusively queer thing

So I will leave the last words to Mohsin …

“… my eyes fixed on a lone star… I knew that somehow, by living this half-life of mine, I had jettisoned the most important part of me. I had abandoned the little boy I had once been, full of possibility and feeling… Wherever he was now right, it felt like he was looking at that star too… It was painful to reflect on how badly I had treated him, the hatred I had shown him…. Any light in my life came from him. I offered my hand. I would not mistreat him any more. He took it. I told him I was scared too… I guided him out of the dungeon and brought him into the world and set him free. ‘I’m gay’.” (p133)

The Forward Book of Poetry 1998

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I put tabs on the following poems

Insight by C K Williams

How Things Go Wrong A R Ammons

The Angry Black Poet by Benjamin Zephaniah

My copy also has marginalia – some of it correcting typos but some more meaningfully engaging with the texts.