Thom Gunn, one of the most honest commentators about gay life and Aids who died last month, has left behind a considerable body of work worthy of revisiting.
Gunn wrote over 40 volumes of poetry and in 1976 addressed his homosexuality
directly in ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’, named after the pub on
Hampstead Heath behind which the gay cruisers have prowled in all weathers
for generations.
As a chronicler of the Aids epidemic and an observer of alternative lifestyles, Gunn will be remembered with personal affection and lauded for his honesty, even if it was inconvenient or shocking to some.
In 1992, he published ‘The Man with Night Sweats’ about the flourishing gay scene of San Francisco, the growth of the counterculture on the city’s Castro Street and as a tribute to his friends dying from Aids.
In his later poems, Gunn describes himself as a “survivor” of “what has happened between the sheets or on the streets.”
Earlier in his career in the 1950s, he was adopted by the English poetry movement of Phillip Larkin et al. but Gunn was more at home among Californian bikers and gay bars. He was in the right place at the right time as part of a thriving literary scene of rock music, gay liberation, drug-induced euphoria and opposition to the Vietnam war. But it was his adoption of free verse rather than formal poetic structure which most shocked and appalled his more conservative critics.
Gunn met his life-long partner, American Mike Kitay, at Trinity College Cambridge. He moved to California and taught at Berkeley where he proceeded to shock the literary and academic establishment. Gunn died of a heart attack in May, aged 64, at his San Francisco home. He once famously commented: “My weakness is that I like shocking people. I like loud music, bars and boisterous men.” Who doesn’t? MJF
Abstract and expressionist artist John Trevor has shunned the formality of a conventional gallery, to hold his debut exhibition in a West End club.
John, who has lived with HIV for 18 years, began painting as therapy after
being told he had six months to live, back in the eighties.
“ As a pastime it is hard to beat, the sense of satisfaction and achievement from creating something unique is a real therapy,” he told PN.
Ten per cent of sales proceeds on the night will be donated to the St Stephen’s Volunteers who support people with HIV in hospitals around London.
Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel ‘The Line of Beauty’ is set among shallow and corrupt Tories of the Thatcherite 1980s.
But after the sexy heights of his 1988 hit novel ‘The Swimming-Pool
Library’, set in languid homoerotic school days at Winchester College,
the latest book is a disappointing mish-mash of snobbery, mannered literary
pretension and stodgy prose.
I read the first three hundred pages wishing something would happen as
the sly protagonist don, just down from Oxford, secretes himself in an aristocratic
family in Notting Hill.
One wonders why so many English novelists are obsessed with trying to recreate
the world of Brideshead Revisited. Hollinghurst has taken the novel back
from the mean streets to the country house party.
It is only when Tory corruption and Aids rear their ugly heads that the novel gains momentum and direction. But even here, we are left with the sense nothing really matters. Lovers die, he dances with Thatcher and the ignorant snob world implodes but he doesn’t give a damn for anyone, so why should we? Hollinghurst has little new to say in this novel which is more about style than content.
He is undoubtedly skilled at dissecting the vapid snobbery of the English
upper classes, but here he wastes it. As a novel, ‘The Line of Beauty’ is
dated. As an Aids novel, it doesn’t seem to give a shit and as a book
of beauty, it has none and precious little soul to boot.
I can only hope Mr Hollinghurst will in future expend his skill, on something
of more consequence. MJF
Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Line of Beauty’: Picador Books £16.99.
Fans of crime fiction can now dip into a two-part thriller based in Denver’s
gay community where a serial killer called the Butcher stalks the city’s
cruising grounds and bathhouses. The lead characters, Tony, who is living
with HIV and his lover Guy, are ultimately and inevitably drawn into the
killer’s sights. The Hunt: Echoes from the Dark Part I and The Hunt
Part 2: Winter in July, by Antonio Marquez can be ordered from the print-on-demand
publishing company 1stBooks. A portion of sale proceeds go to Broadway Care/Equity
Fights Aids. www.1stBooks.com
