‘That’s just your trouble—you’re too fucking liberal!’
So says the eighteen-year-old character at the centre of a story in my collection All the Young Queers: 16–24 Years, which features nine stories and nine characters—one for each youthful year.
The character, Simon, is gay and says those words to his mother; it is London, the early twenty-first century and, in the absence of any parental outrage over his sexuality, he seeks an alternative rebellion—in submission, in Islam.
As my mother might say, a nice problem to have. And a problem that has only existed in a particular time and place: certain Global North countries, in the last few decades. In other parts of the world, including the Islamic world, homosexuality is punishable by death. And quarter-way into this century, the right is rising across Europe and in the USA: we should never take for granted the freedoms we currently enjoy. Which Simon’s mum—a proud feminist—is at pains to remind him.
In a story set the 1990s, my twenty-year-old character, Graham, must choose to break the law to lose his virginity to another man (the age of consent was still twenty-one); younger LGBTQIA+ generations have been able to grow up without the inhibiting legislation that older generations struggled to overthrow—older men like Joan, the protagonist of One Last Song, my 2024 novella about gay love and liberation in the care home.
My unnamed nineteen-year-old character is—in the present day—exploring fetish on an unnamed app; the ‘daddy’ with whom he’s chatting draws the line at humiliation: he endured daily degradation in the school playground (and in the days of Section 28, no teacher could intervene); the younger man encourages the older to use fetish-play as a way to take ownership of his shame. My twenty-three-year-old character, Adam, seeks release from self-hatred in chemsex, and is then prosecuted for narcotically-facilitated assault, but in the same decade—the second of the twenty-first century—my twenty-four-year-old character, Bryanne, has self-love sufficient to pioneer a non-binary identity. Theyare also funny.
Many of the stories explore serious issues faced by the queer community, but do so using comedy: my twenty-two-year-old character, Steven, finds himself in a blackly-comic situation—in a metrosexual love triangle with another man and a lesbian. Most of the stories are set in the near past, but a few are set in a parallel times and place: twenty-one-year-old Phaeton is protagonist of a fantastical fable about pandemics, and chasing ‘bugs’; seventeen-year-old Daimon is hero of some cautionary science fiction about capitalism, and climate crisis. The environment is important to ALL young humans, and to Jason—the sixteen-year-old who opens the book with an adventure: his first protest.
Protest is important to everyone: without protest, there is no liberation—gay, women’s, trans. As our right to protest comes increasingly under attack, we must fight to protect it, and as the rights of some in our community come unthinkingly under attack, we must fight to protect them: the T in the acronym has always stood for Trans, and we must always stand by them.
All the Young Queers: 16 – 24 Years by Nathan Evans is published by Inkandescent on February 7th to mark LGBTIA+ History Month.
