David McGillivray’s verdict on new gay lit…
This event made the world sit up and take notice of AIDS. But, as Shilts points out, “On the day the world learned that Rock Hudson was stricken, some 12,000 Americans were already dead or dying.” Shilts is one of many who blames the US Government for ignoring the “gay plague”. What would have been its reaction if the victims had been, say, Americans of Norwegian descent or tennis players?
But he’s also scrupulously objective, also noting that newspapers and TV stations were reluctant to address AIDS, that gay bath-houses did little to promote safer sex and, in the early days at least, some gay men didn’t want to practice it. People seemed indifferent to the crisis. In 1982 a weekend fund-raiser organised by the new Gay Men’s Health Crisis raised all of $124. This is a shocking book but a deeply moving one as well. Shilts himself died of AIDS in 1994.
There’s probably no better example of chalk and cheese than Randy Shilts and Louie Spence. Spence isn’t a writer and he knows it. He admits
He seems only to have had two boyfriends in all his 42 years and he’s currently married to the second of them. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that, although he comes across just as unbearable as he is on TV (he loves Lycra and used to spend three hours doing his hair), Spence is also rather lovably insouciant and completely sincere.
A gay scene-stealer from the age of five (he claims), he went to stage school with Naomi Campbell, danced in a couple of West End musicals and then toured with Take That and The Spice Girls. He was a receptionist at the Pineapple Dance Studios when he met the TV producer who made him infamous. Spence has the knack of making a quite unremarkable life sound absolutely fabulous.
Modelling leads the now 17-year-old Simon to the Piccadilly meat rack and then a Fagin-style pimp. (There’s no hard and fast evidence but the story doesn’t seem to be set in the present day). Simon wants to make enough money to take Jimmy to see the Grand Canyon before he goes blind. The author never makes Simon sound 17. But there’s a suspenseful climax and a fairy-tale ending if you like that sort of thing.
I was one of those who didn’t much like Jonathan Kemp’s first novel, London Triptych. But a lot of other people did. Kemp has bounced back
26 (Myriad, £9.99) consists of 26 sexual vignettes corresponding in some way (don’t ask me) with the letters of the alphabet. “If sexuality has a voice”, Kemp declares, “it has yet to find it.” He tries, sometimes successfully, to express the almost inexpressible energy that passes between men on Hampstead Heath, in a sub-dom relationship, and in other mostly anonymous encounters.
But writing floridly about sex is a risky business. To some the line, “From your cock is released a flock of snow-white doves”, will be Byron. But others will be nominating Kemp for next year’s Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. His book will again divide opinion.
