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Currently reading:
I'm between books, which is rare for me. I'm still "reading," which is to say browsing through, Gordon Westwood's Society and the Homosexual. Apart from the POW-related chapter I posted about a couple of weeks ago, what I'm finding most interesting is how very much more this book, published in 1952, toes the standard homophobic line than does A Minority, published in 1960. Society offers a lot of Freudian explanations, claims that psychotherapy can cure homosexuality in many cases as well as preventing it from developing in teenage boys, and is written in a strongly pathologizing vocabulary. On the other hand, it argues that both societal homophobia and laws against gay sex are illogical, useless, and create suffering, and does try to correct perceptions of gay men as sex fiends, pedophiles, rapists, etc. There's even a moment I'm rather fond of when Westwood notes that when gay men have sex together, there's more foreplay than between straight couples. Nevertheless, Society is much less openly pro-gay than A Minority; I would imagine that the Wolfenden Commission report in 1957, which quickly gained public support from many distinguished intellectuals and politicians for its implementation, and the subsequent activism by the Homosexual Law Reform Society emboldened Westwood.
Just finished:
A Guilty Thing Surprised, No More Dying Then, Murder Being Once Done, and Shake Hands Forever, by Ruth Rendell. I had to skip Some Lie and Some Die because my ebook edition was a wall of text without even paragraph breaks. Anyway, this is a strong run of books, especially No More Dying Then, in which Mike Burden returns to center stage; we see him coping, and often not coping, with grief in the aftermath of his young wife's death from cancer. Throughout these books we also see Wexford growing older, having to deal with his own health problems, and seeing younger men overtake him in rank.
The friendship between Wexford and Burden deepens too, and I'm starting to wonder if Rendell, who doesn't hesitate to write about homoeroticism and homosexuality, it putting in the UST, or perhaps I should call it Unresolved Emotional Tension, on purpose. ( cut as this became rather long )
No More Dying Then and Murder Being Once Done, published in 1971 and 1972 respectively, also feature Rendell's first gay male characters and first positive queer characters of any sort. NMDT's gay man is rather in the Tragic Gay mode, a lonely man who's been pining for years over a straight man who doesn't return his love. But Ivan Teal in MBOD, while stereotypically campy, is intelligent, charming, and has some very pertinent things to say about how unusual it is to meet a "human" policeman after years of being persecuted for his sexuality; Wexford likes him, which is meaningful both for Wexford as a character and as an authorial signal, I think, that we're supposed to like him too. And not, importantly, pity him.
I've also read Wicked Gentlemen, by Ginn Hale. I read this on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
halotolerant's recommendation, having seen it around but having been put off by the "small e-publisher focusing on male/male romance" look of the thing. You know what I mean--the terrible cover and general tackiness. But, well, this is not a book to be judged by its cover, because it's pretty good. It's set in a vaguely-late-Victorian-England with a twist: some generations earlier, all the demons came out of hell, not to conquer the earth but to accept forgiveness and baptism. And there they've remained, becoming a permanent (literal) underclass, denied the right to vote or travel and policed/persecuted by the Inquisition. Our heroes are a demon (they're called Prodigals) and an Inquisitor, natch, and the novel, which is really more like two novellas shoved together, deals with two mysteries they solve together. The romance is handled well in my opinion, present as a strong emotional arc but not taking over the narrative, and the romantic problems are real problems, not contrivances. The biggest flaw for me was that I didn't actually find the demon character all that interesting--he's more of a cliché than Harper (his Inquisitor boyfriend) with standard-issue Tragic Backstory and Angst, and I kind of found myself shipping Harper with his pretty doctor brother-in-law instead. But I liked the book and I'd gladly read a sequel if there were one, in part because I think Hale could do a lot more with this world and these characters than she did in the rather short Wicked Gentlemen. Unfortunately she seems to have moved on to other things.
What I'm reading next:
More Rendell, possibly another book by Hale. And I've ordered Paul Jackson's One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military During World War Two through Interlibrary Loan and am eagerly awaiting it. It's about the Canadian military, but should be at least indirectly useful to me; there's some stuff about POWs and some about the experiences of Canadian personnel in Britain, which apparently they found to be a wonderland of sexual opportunity. *grins*
I'm between books, which is rare for me. I'm still "reading," which is to say browsing through, Gordon Westwood's Society and the Homosexual. Apart from the POW-related chapter I posted about a couple of weeks ago, what I'm finding most interesting is how very much more this book, published in 1952, toes the standard homophobic line than does A Minority, published in 1960. Society offers a lot of Freudian explanations, claims that psychotherapy can cure homosexuality in many cases as well as preventing it from developing in teenage boys, and is written in a strongly pathologizing vocabulary. On the other hand, it argues that both societal homophobia and laws against gay sex are illogical, useless, and create suffering, and does try to correct perceptions of gay men as sex fiends, pedophiles, rapists, etc. There's even a moment I'm rather fond of when Westwood notes that when gay men have sex together, there's more foreplay than between straight couples. Nevertheless, Society is much less openly pro-gay than A Minority; I would imagine that the Wolfenden Commission report in 1957, which quickly gained public support from many distinguished intellectuals and politicians for its implementation, and the subsequent activism by the Homosexual Law Reform Society emboldened Westwood.
Just finished:
A Guilty Thing Surprised, No More Dying Then, Murder Being Once Done, and Shake Hands Forever, by Ruth Rendell. I had to skip Some Lie and Some Die because my ebook edition was a wall of text without even paragraph breaks. Anyway, this is a strong run of books, especially No More Dying Then, in which Mike Burden returns to center stage; we see him coping, and often not coping, with grief in the aftermath of his young wife's death from cancer. Throughout these books we also see Wexford growing older, having to deal with his own health problems, and seeing younger men overtake him in rank.
The friendship between Wexford and Burden deepens too, and I'm starting to wonder if Rendell, who doesn't hesitate to write about homoeroticism and homosexuality, it putting in the UST, or perhaps I should call it Unresolved Emotional Tension, on purpose. ( cut as this became rather long )
No More Dying Then and Murder Being Once Done, published in 1971 and 1972 respectively, also feature Rendell's first gay male characters and first positive queer characters of any sort. NMDT's gay man is rather in the Tragic Gay mode, a lonely man who's been pining for years over a straight man who doesn't return his love. But Ivan Teal in MBOD, while stereotypically campy, is intelligent, charming, and has some very pertinent things to say about how unusual it is to meet a "human" policeman after years of being persecuted for his sexuality; Wexford likes him, which is meaningful both for Wexford as a character and as an authorial signal, I think, that we're supposed to like him too. And not, importantly, pity him.
I've also read Wicked Gentlemen, by Ginn Hale. I read this on
halotolerant's recommendation, having seen it around but having been put off by the "small e-publisher focusing on male/male romance" look of the thing. You know what I mean--the terrible cover and general tackiness. But, well, this is not a book to be judged by its cover, because it's pretty good. It's set in a vaguely-late-Victorian-England with a twist: some generations earlier, all the demons came out of hell, not to conquer the earth but to accept forgiveness and baptism. And there they've remained, becoming a permanent (literal) underclass, denied the right to vote or travel and policed/persecuted by the Inquisition. Our heroes are a demon (they're called Prodigals) and an Inquisitor, natch, and the novel, which is really more like two novellas shoved together, deals with two mysteries they solve together. The romance is handled well in my opinion, present as a strong emotional arc but not taking over the narrative, and the romantic problems are real problems, not contrivances. The biggest flaw for me was that I didn't actually find the demon character all that interesting--he's more of a cliché than Harper (his Inquisitor boyfriend) with standard-issue Tragic Backstory and Angst, and I kind of found myself shipping Harper with his pretty doctor brother-in-law instead. But I liked the book and I'd gladly read a sequel if there were one, in part because I think Hale could do a lot more with this world and these characters than she did in the rather short Wicked Gentlemen. Unfortunately she seems to have moved on to other things.What I'm reading next:
More Rendell, possibly another book by Hale. And I've ordered Paul Jackson's One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military During World War Two through Interlibrary Loan and am eagerly awaiting it. It's about the Canadian military, but should be at least indirectly useful to me; there's some stuff about POWs and some about the experiences of Canadian personnel in Britain, which apparently they found to be a wonderland of sexual opportunity. *grins*
