The Leather Boys
Gillian Freeman, originally published under the pseudonym Eliot George
275 pages • Anthony Blond • 1961 [PB]
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Titles can lead-in or mislead. The Leather Boys, as titles go, is redolent of a mid-sixties Warhol yawnfest or one of Kenneth Anger’s impenetrable, terrifying underground cinematic assaults. It even suggests a debt to Tom of Finland. But it’s as British as a barm cake. The Leather Boys is a 1961 London pulp novel by Gillian Freeman, and later made into a New Wave Brit flick in 1963 by the aptly named Sidney Furie. It is about two late-teen, working-class, south London ton-up biker boys who find themselves surprised, unnerved & ultimately confused to discover they’re in love with each other.
I became a fan of the film as a teenager, discovering it late one night on BBC2, back in the days when terrestrial television cared to bring great cinema to the masses. This was long before I became a swallow-tattooed card-carrying Smiths fan (St Morrissey is a huge, huge fan of this peon to proley poof passion) but it somehow seemed to reflect my feelings far greater than Queer as Folk, which was in full swing at the time and being lauded as a realistic a representation of gay life as we’d ever seen. Well … maybe it was, maybe it did reflect a certain reality. But not mine.
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Categories: Classic: Books
- Published:
- March 12, 2010 – 13:05
- Author:
- By Christopher Brocklebank
The Happy Island
Dawn Powell
275 pages • Steerforth • 1938, 1998 [PB]
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Dawn Powell is a unique voice in American literature and one of its finest satirists. Whilst her contemporaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, were writing tracts about the perils of the new post-war America, in which men were men, women were women, and most of them hypocrites, Powell wrote about “the way we live now” without the need to wrap her stories in social and moral packaging. Her literary heritage is not that of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe, but Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Honore Balzac, and finally Gaius Petronius, author of the Satyricon. In The Happy Island, Powell set out to write what she called a story about “the bachelors of New York in the Satyricon style”.
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Categories: Classic: Books
Tagged: dawn powell, ernest hemingway, evelyn waugh, prudence bly, satyricon, sinclair lewis, the happy island
- Published:
- March 8, 2010 – 13:46
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
212 pages • Ward, Lock, and Company • 1891
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Categories: Classic: Books
Tagged: edward carpenter, em forster, oscar wilde, picture of dorian gray, shakespeare
- Published:
- October 3, 2009 – 17:38
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
- Published:
- August 15, 2009 – 16:02
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
- Published:
- July 4, 2009 – 16:17
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
Maurice
EM Forster
198 pages • Penguin • 1971
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Categories: Classic: Books
Tagged: arctic summer, candis cayne, city and the pillar, dirty sexy money, em forster, giovanni's room, gore vidal, howards end, james baldwin, longest journey, maurice, passage to india, polari, where angels fear to tread
- Published:
- July 4, 2009 – 16:13
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
324 pages • McClelland and Stewart • 1985
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Categories: Classic: Books
Tagged: arthur c clarke award for science fiction, handmaid's tale, margaret atwood
- Published:
- May 9, 2009 – 16:00
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
Boating for Beginners
Jeanette Winterson
188 pages • Minerva • 1985
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Categories: Classic: Books
- Published:
- March 26, 2009 – 15:20
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
- Published:
- February 16, 2009 – 13:04
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
- Published:
- December 3, 2008 – 13:44
- Author:
- By Christopher Bryant
