Growing up in a Saucy Postcard World
The occasional sex scenes in my novels may be explicit, but they aren't gratuitous and titillation is not their main purpose. My characters live in the shadows at the edge of early 20th Century society, for the reader to love or hate as they choose, and sex is a great part of who they are. They will have adventures that are risky, passionate, awkward, sometimes funny, but they will always read as true as fiction allows.
I write what my younger self would have liked to read. When you’re often defined by your sexuality, sex is naturally a great preoccupation. When I used to read about it, I needed the author to tell it like it was - the nuts and bolts, the good and bad. Fiction has the potential to convey the messy, unpredictable, awful, wonderful truth, better than any clinical text book can. I found it no help when it was ‘tastefully’ glossed over with waves crashing against rocks, nor if it sounded like an Olympic achievement I could never hope to emulate. I did not want it liberally sprinkled with ludicrous fruit analogies, or made to sound like some glowing celestial visitation. If I’ve managed to avoid these pitfalls in my own writing, I’ll take some credit, because I was brought up at an awful time as far as sexual attitudes are concerned.
I was in secondary education between 1969 and 1977 and I received no formal sex education from school, nor any from my parents either, although perish the thought of that. Your knowledge, such as it was, was picked from television dramas and sitcoms, films like Confessions of a Window Cleaner, nightclub comedians aired at prime times, and from the myths, legends and fibs told by sundry classmates. It was a time when you would demonstrate your worldliness by sniggering at references to ‘rumpy-pumpy’, ‘how’s your father’, ‘a nice of bit of crackly’ or at the prim dismissal of ‘percyfilth’. This saucy postcard world of ‘phwoor’ and ‘crumpet’ wasn’t niche either, it was the ‘norm’ - and whether you found it funny or not, it demonstrated an unhealthy British attitude to sex. It was summed up quite concisely at the end of the Benny Hill Show, where to the sound of Yakety Sax, old men in baggy underwear, chased scantily clad young girls.
The morally conservative were outraged and protested of course, but they bore a lot of responsibility for this horrible, sniggering vulgarity being most young people’s introduction to sexuality. Their efforts to close the Pandora’s Box they reckoned had been opened by the so-called ‘permissive society’, resulted in puerile smut being its best-known face.
Buying a Book can Change Your Life
I moved to London in 1984, not because I was fleeing an intolerant provincial town, but because I’d always wanted to live in the capital. I may have expected to find it easier to be gay here - but initially the ‘scene’ did not suit me. It seemed my tastes did not coincide with most others. I endured many a miserable night out pretending to be someone I wasn’t, in a lame attempt to fit in. How I despised the emotionless, throbbing Hi-NRG, that was ubiquitous at the time.
My most important refuge during my first decade in the capital, was Gay's the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury. There I was able to buy books that let me in to the hearts and minds of a diverse range of gay men, some of whom had managed to get by without ever cruising a gay bar. For someone to express something I felt, perhaps better than I could myself, was reassuring and exciting. I was not alone. Others were experiencing the same thoughts and feelings, and relief would surge through me like a drug. At a time when I had removed myself from family and friends and was struggling with this sexuality business, books helped me fathom out who I was and who I wanted to be. And some of them were refreshingly explicit, without being ‘smutty’.
When the Conservative government tried to prosecute Gay’s the Word for importing allegedly indecent literature, I made a donation I could ill afford to the defence fund. These books mattered so much to me, and they were under attack. The government tried to use Customs & Excise laws that, unlike the Obscene Publications Act, did not allow any defence of material based on literary or artistic merit. But Gay’s the Word’s defence was robust and well supported, and the malicious charges were dropped.
The shop continues to thrive, selling books that quietly change lives, and probably save a few too.
A Rejection from an Author I had Read
Another reason I write explicitly, is that it is the only strand of my writing for which I have any concrete evidence of my competence.
In 1988, gay publisher Third House was compiling an anthology and I submitted three short stories, unsuccessfully. I wasn’t devastated by the rejection, because it came in a handwritten note I still have, from one of the anthology’s editors, David Rees. He must have known what he was talking about, because he was an award-winning author of children’s fiction, and had written a series of gay-themed novels, most of which I had read and enjoyed.
The letter was completely free of the usual waffle designed to soften the blow and the rejection lay in the first sentence: “I’m very sorry to have to reject these stories because you write well and have a rare gift for the erotic - most stories about sex are very unerotic.” It was gratifying that David thought I was good at this aspect of writing at least, and it took away the sting of rejection. I am not a great lover of awards anyway, but one I certainly wouldn’t want to win is the Literary Review’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’. Many accomplished authors have been nominated for it, so it’s obviously tricky to get the balance right.
He went on to explain why my stories failed, reckoning they simply did not work as short stories. Of one he said… “(it) needs longer treatment; it’s really the beginning of a synopsis of a novel, and an original sort of novel.” I could see straight away that he was right and I found his comments encouraging. Even today, I don’t think I could write an effective short story, which I consider a separate art.
Despite the encouragement, I didn’t submit anything further for another thirty-four years. I never lacked inspiration, but my perspiration was expended on other matters like the day job, and the frantic pursuit of happiness in the places I thought I might find it. I started writing many things, but finished none of them. I never gave up, always believing that one day I would return to it, and at least finish something. My novels Until the Real Thing Comes Along and When Summer is Gone have proved me right.
I have no illusions about being the new Dickens, or even the new David Rees, but I don’t think I could have written these books in 1988. They are unashamedly explicit - but I really have to get out of the habit of feeling the need to warn people about it.
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