DAVID McGILLIVRAY’S VERDICT ON NEW GAY LIT

The book that gossipmongers are obsessed with at the moment (but mostly because we can’t agree whether or not it’s true) is Scotty Bowers’ Full Service (Grove Press, £17.99). Illinois farm boy Scotty claims that, from 1946 to around 1978, he rented himself and his friends to celebrities – mostly gay or bi –  who needed secret sex partners.

With one exception – Greer Garson’s regular co-star Walter Pidgeon, about whom there’s never been a whiff of scandal – there are no surprises here. In fact I’ve “outed” most of Scotty’s clients in QX over the past ten years: Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, etc. etc. Scotty also arranged lesbian dates for Katharine Hepburn and the Duchess of Windsor.

Bisexual himself, he says he had hot sex with Vivien Leigh and was a surrogate father for lesbian friends decades before that term had been invented. Scotty has a distinguished referee, Gore Vidal, who declares on the flyleaf that “Scotty doesn’t lie.” But what’s missing as far as I’m concerned are the little intimate details that might give Scotty’s alleged sex sessions that unmistakeable air of veracity.

Then again Scotty isn’t a writer and he didn’t write a word of this book. He talked for 150 hours and a hack called Lionel Friedberg transcribed the interviews, adding only prosaic facts. (Edith Piaf is described only as “France’s greatest popular singer.”) Consequently Scotty’s list of famous shags starts to get boring. And I never thought I’d say that about a celebrity sex exposé.

 

Sean Wolfe also writes about real people, but in a very different way. In his tenth (and, he promises, his last) collection of erotic short stories, Give It to Me (Kensington, £10.99), Wolfe eroticises men he says he knows.

In a dozen filthy fantasies, we learn a whole lot more about Wolfe than his friends. All twelve tales involve some sort of violence. Thus a businessman keeps a young Asian slave prisoner and invites his friends over to fuck him. Two lovers kidnap a Brazilian footballer and have sex with him until the sports star’s bodyguard arrives.

A recurring character is Miguel, who breaks into a house to rape his victim, then dreams about him, and finally returns to the house for rough sex that this time leads to love. Porn ought to be a healthy escape from the real world and, if this is the kind of one-handed reading that gets you off, I’d say buy it. Wolfe writes from the crotch.

 

On to more reputable material, first a new translation by Jamie McKendrick of Giorgio Bassani’s 1958 novel The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (Penguin, £9.99). Bassani (1916-2000) was an Italian Jew, who was inspired by his early life in Ferrara on the Adriatic coast, while Mussolini was coming to power.

Although straight, Bassani wrote more than once about gay men, possibly because he recognised an affinity. In this book he shows an affectionate respect for a bachelor doctor, he of the classy specs, who’s rumoured to have had discreet affairs with a traffic cop, a doorkeeper and an ex-footballer.

The Fascisti, common enemy of Jews and homos, are represented by Bassani’s straight friend, who woos the doctor, only to beat and rob him. Bassani’s civilised family reassures themselves that Italy won’t go the way of Germany. But part of the power of Bassani’s novel lies in his and our knowledge that history proved otherwise.

 

By coincidence, two current books deal with conflict caused in part by a language barrier. In The Devil’s Wall (Harvard University Press, £25) Mark Cornwall, Professor of Modern European History at Southampton University,  reclaims for LGBT history the little-known story of Heinz Rutha (1897-1937), a German-speaking activist in Czechoslovakia in the years leading up  to World War II.

Rutha was part of the Wandervogel movement, ostensibly an organisation of clean-living lads, but in reality an all-male hothouse which produced a generation of right-wing homosexuals. By 1932 Rutha was having sex with boys at his father’s sawmill. He was poised to become a leading figure in German politics. But he may have been betrayed by Czech cops, who accused him of (illegal) homosexuality. In my view Cornwall was wrong to reveal Rutha’s fate in the first chapter. This ruins the escalating drama of the second half of the book.

 

Philip Hensher, arguably one of the finest gay writers of our time, also deals with cultural difference in his new novel Scenes from Early Life (Fourth Estate, £18.99). He writes convincingly, in the simple English of a boy called Saadi, the son of a Pakistani lawyer, whose mother tongue is Bengali.

Although there are flashbacks, the story’s mostly set in 1971, when Pakistan was in turmoil that resulted in the declaration of the independent Bengali state of Bangla Desh. It’s another period of recent history that few of us know much about. Hensher makes it real and immediate.

The book has been widely praised. It appears to be only me who regrets that Hensher hasn’t told the whole story. Saadi is in fact the human rights lawyer Zaved Mahmood, Hensher’s husband, but he doesn’t even get a mention in the acknowledgments. Read this book and tell me if you don’t think it strange that Saadi makes only the most fleeting reference to the fact that he later married a man.

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