Memorial by Bryan Washington

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It might be easy to dismiss this as ‘just’ a book about issues – sexuality, race and cultural identities, domestic violence, HIV – and it is all about those things – but it is much richer than that, the exploration of those ‘issues’ flows out of an authentic telling of the relationship, the love story, of Benson and Mike.

It shines an uncomfortable light on the reality of relationships – they are messy things.

That Ben is left hosting Mike’s Mother, Mike’s frosty (homophobic?) Mother, does tilt your sympathy towards him – no relationship is ever really just about two people, we relate in the context of a hinterland of friends and family – for good and ill. But as time goes on you grow to understand Mike’s actions, even if on balance he might still be in the wrong.

There are big questions about trust, and boundaries, and desire, and truth which it inevitably doesn’t answer because they are unanswerable – we exist in the question. And while it is mostly a fairly dark book, I took an affirmation from the darkness – we are not alone in our darkness. Life is hard in a million different ways for different people – we need to hold the light and the dark for one another.

I put one tag in the book, for this quote:

“There’s this phenomenon that you’ll get sometimes – but not too often if you’re lucky – where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that your weren’t expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don’t think he was wrong. You’re destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originates, the fault lines.” (p224)

It touched a nerve because as queer people we live our lives in straight majority spaces that, if we are lucky, are trying hard to be inclusive, and I count myself as lucky that is my reality. But BBC Three’s I Kissed A Boy suddenly mainstreamed (as much as BBC Three can mainstream anything) the power of queer majority spaces. If ever there was a manifesto to get of your phone and get to your nearest gay bar I Kissed A Boy was a roundabout way of saying that.

This plays into the guilt I feel around luxuriating in our time in Gran Canaria each year – because as economically comfortable white men we have easy access to that gay space in ways that so many in the LGBTQ+ community do not. But I take that and channel it so that time is when I recharge giving me the capacity to use my privilege, to use my elbows, to make space for others in the community. Just existing in a straight world is exhausting, and it is worse than it was 10 years ago – we need to take the time to repair ourselves so the fight can go on – we will endure and we will win.