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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.
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This is a fascinating window into a moment in time, it feels very remote and yet the 1990s are well within my own lived experience. It points to the ebbs and flows of progress.
Is the social action and community groups that created the context for the Lesbian Line a thing of the past – has the hyper-connectivity of the internet liberated or entrapped us? Once the internet arrived it is remarkable how quickly the phone-lines faded.
As well as recounting the stories of the callers and the phone-line volunteers from the log-books Lovatt tells a wider story of the interactions and the conflicts within the Gay, then Gay and Lesbian, LGB, and eventually LGBT+ liberation movement within London, and more broadly the stories of LGBT+ people in the UK in the 1990s.
While that wider context is useful, I perhaps felt the balance could have been more focused on those directly connected with the Lesbian Line.
That there was a need for a Lesbian phone line (in fact more than one phone line) distinct from those catering to the whole LGBT+ community reflects the predominance of gay men within the community and ways in which the experiences of gay (white) men were not particular relevant or useful to Lesbian callers. At times this is something we shy away from, there is a desire to put the emphasis on the collective LGBT+ experience. But doing so tends to privilege the gay (white & able-bodied & middle-class) male experience and silence all other expressions of queer identity.
The stories from the log-books are funny, heart-warming, heart-rending, and at times troubling – the volunteers did not always deal with the calls / callers well. Lovatt identities a consistent failure of the volunteers to know what to do in response to trans and non-white callers – something that needs to be named honestly whilst not diminishing the great service those same volunteers gave, the radical stand that being part of a lesbian support network was, the transformation and validation it brought to many lives.
Reflecting on the imperfectness of the Lesbian Line and the women that answered it, Lovatt sees the messiness as important because “Acknowledging this mess allows us to resist simplistic understandings of objects and people and hold two contradictory states at once. The useful in/stability of the archive collapses the binary between perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, between order and mess. It allows us to see that there are bad gays and terrible lesbians. That ordinary people are capable of harm to one person and kindness to another. That not every phone call can be an answer to a problem. Mess is real, mess challenges us to unpick the sanctioned, sanitised narrative and root about in the fragments for the difficult and uncomfortable truths that help us understand our past.”(p207)
Lovatt also reflects on the importance of telling queer histories, writing that “When I came out, I had only scraps of gay and lesbian history. Everything I knew had been dragged together piecemeal… so much of it I had stumbled over by chance.” (p178) Even with the greater visibility we have today, we live surrounded by straight people and their stories and their histories, and this is partly why I find myself really only reading queer stories these days, I have to quietly admit I am not that interested in the lives of straight people, I have had my fill of those stories already.
The importance of our stories and histories must never be underestimated, and when we hear that book bans are rising in this country we need to resist and tell of our history all the louder.
And finally, this line spoke to me “I find myself these days thinking of my gender more as a habit than an identity.” (p123) even if I am not sure how exactly it sits with me.
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This is a powerful piece of writing, capturing the sense of loneliness as its twists and turns around its character’s lives.
It reminded my of the works of Cynan Jones, there is something almost claustrophobic about how close you come to the characters, a tension that holds you uncomfortably and irresistibly.
That Jordan and Davie have a past, a past that Davie remembers and Jordan does not, a past in which Davie was cruel to Jordan, frames their growing relationship – how can it last, how can it be real while this secret lurks beneath? A question that remains unanswered…
In their encounter with each other they seem to find the space to reconcile themselves to their lives – just the wrong side of middle age and somewhat a drift, without the reference points of heterosexual norms to measure success is this perhaps a common part of the gay experience?
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Across these essays Gary Indiana ranges freely, commenting on films and books as well as the state of the (US) nation.
At times it is a little depressing when you realise some of the commentary of the ills of a society that oppresses its people is decades old and yet could have been written yesterday – where do we go for hope when it feels that conflict and division are the only points of continuity left?
Many of the works review were unfamiliar to me but for the most part the richness of the essays made them engaging even without the knowledge of the specific reference point.
In an age of social media and sound bites who is writing essays, who are reading essays, today – the space to develop a thought, to offer context, connections, nuance are all sadly missed.
I put one tag in (a 1993 essay on Daniel Schmid’s La Paloma) “I like Daniel Schmid’s idea that we are all private radio stations transmitting on our own frequencies, sometimes audible to each other, sometimes not. Personally, few blue-ribbon cultural products occupy my consciousness with anything like the force of my own imagination or experience, and those that do… seldom belong to the upper reaches of any established cannon… there exists [no] legitimate authority to declare one thing ‘major’ and another ‘minor’. In the end we have only our experiences and we feel them with the particularity of monadic creatures.” (p310)
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I got this out the Library after seeing it reviewed in Somewhere For Us and it wasn’t until I opened it to read on the plane that I realised this is the third part of a trilogy – but I dived in anyway and I think the book still worked without having read to earlier parts to the trilogy.
This historical fantasy is not really a genre that I would normally go for, but I allowed myself to be emersed in this world.
A world dominated by women, focused on a Queen and her female warrior lover – there are a few male characters but their roles are only are the margins of the story.
The setting is vaguely medieval – there is lots of sword fighting but at times guns and early canons appear.
The backdrop is a mix of revolution and colonial politics, and some of that creaked a bit.
The story flows from moments of myths and spells, to really graphic violence, to intense love making, and back again without really pausing for breath.
At times it is heavy with detail and I often found myself speed reading and even skipping pages as there was so much scene setting that did little to advance the plot – at close to 600 pages of small print I think you could have trimmed it by at least a third without losing anything of substance.
Based on events from 1939 and written in 1988 but only published in 2020 when it finally resonated it is a window on our relationship with the state as much as anything else.
A scientist working of an plague vaccine (is this work in preparation for the state using the plague as a weapon?) becomes infected. Summons to Moscow, unable to refuse the summons, he travels on a train spreading the infection. Once in Moscow he is visibly ill, and the secret police with brutal efficiency find and isolate the contacts – and the plague is contained, only 3 people die as a result.
The question I think this put before us is the authoritarian state was effective in stopping this plague so does that become a justification for state control – however if we use COVID as a worked example it shows we see a range of responses, some democracies dealt with it well, some authoritarian states didn’t.
One of the best things about this book is that it doesn’t try to answer the questions – they hang in the air, between the lines, we have the fact of the situation but we have to make our own moral judgements
In these poems Ben plays with the astronomical to speak about humanity, about loneliness, love, and sometimes I think just about the stars.
I am a big fan of Ben Kline’s work and I think he speaks such deep truth and authenticity.
