Pink Print

You’re not hidden in the gay section. In fact, I couldn’t find you at all in Prowler. Though all the books contain a large gay component. Was it a conscious decision to avoid being pigeonholed as a ‘gay writer’?

No, I come and go in Prowler. It’s always really exciting when you find me in Prowler. But no, it’s not a conscious decision. It took me a while to work out how I wanted to write about being gay. A friend of mine came in to Gay’s The Word bookshop, just after I’d published a big heterosexual novel and asked for my books. And Jimmy [McSweeny, owner] camply said, “We only stock Philip’s gay novels. We don’t stock his heterosexual novels.” I felt very guilty after that. So, I went away and wrote a big gay novel.

There must be pros and cons to being a writer accepted by the mainstream. 

Am I a mainstream writer?

Well, you have a huge gay following, but with me it’s all my straight female friends who are talking about Philip Hensher. 

I don’t think I’ve got a following. I don’t think people go, “Oh, I’ve got to buy the new Philip Hensher… I really enjoyed the last one.” If they do that, they are going to be very taken aback. You know, there’s a long novel about growing up in Sheffield for twenty years. And then there’s a scandalous sex and abduction drama with some gay sex in the middle, and then there’s a story about a war in Bangladesh. And now there’s something different.

I hope that people like me, and recognize something of their own experience when they read a book by me. But, of course, like most writers, I want to be read by as many sorts of people as possible. I’m very lucky. I’ve never toned down what I wrote about. With King of the Badgers there was a bit of an issue.

With the publishers?

No. Journalists. There was an exchange in The Spectator with Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. I thought it was funny at first because he wrote this piece saying, ‘I read this. It was unbelievably disgusting. I’m so shocked and appalled.’ And I was like “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He’d said that I’d written a novel set in a Cornish Village. So, I wrote back and said, “I’d be dead in a ditch before I wrote a novel set in a Cornish Village. My novel is set in Devon!” But then it kind of escalated, and finally he owned up that it was because someone once tried to bugger him when he was in the army. I probably lost a few readers with that one. But it’s fine.

You write big books, don’t you? 

[Laughs] I’m sorry. I know. I’m sorry.

If one ever wanted to go a bit Kenneth Halliwell on your boyfriend, you could bludgeon him with The Emperors Waltz. It’s huge!

[Laughs] It almost always starts as a small idea. This new one… I knew it was going to be a reasonable size once I knew there was more than one story in it. The gay bookshop – that’s been in my mind for absolutely years. I’ve been thinking about the Bauhaus as well for a long time. And I thought, perhaps we ought to compare them, somehow, just the way that outsiders have these fervent ideas and then they somehow spread into the mainstream, despite all difficulties. Then, I was getting very hot under the collar about those fucking Christians going on about gays and all the rest of it. So I thought, I know what would really annoy them… a novel that compares early Christians to radical gays in the seventies. So then the novel came together.

The bears, in King of the Badgers – the contrast between the community of ‘curtain twitchers’ and the gay party boys provided much humor. Where did you get them from?

Oh… wishful thinking. It wasn’t really my experience. There’s a bit about clubbing that was more me. But a friend of mine said to me, “You know there are gay bears in Topsham and they do have sex parties.” And I said, “I had no idea.”

How do you feel about audience engagement via social media?

It’s good, actually. I like the way that you can see a book and then you can see if the author is on Twitter and you can just send them a tweet. For some reason, a lot of people read a novel and they think, “This is my opportunity to tell the author that I don’t really like his work.” And it’s quite good to be able to tweet, “Oh, just fuck off!” [Laughs]