A BOXFUL OF IDEAS
It’s
not comme il faut to review one’s own
work, but my contribution to this new anthology (their sixth) from Paradise
Press is only a brief piece of Flash Fiction (‘Alice Swings’ – on the ‘B’ theme
of LGBT), so perhaps it’s okay if I only mention it in passing.
An
anthology is like a box of chocolates: they are all perfectly edible but some
are more ‘delicious’ than others. Some have ‘a soft centre’; rather more have a
harder edge (nothing too ‘hard-core’).
Not every-thing here is on a gay theme (don’t be put off: most of it is),
and there is poetry as well as prose. There are several poems by Mike Harth who
died last year, one of the founders of both Paradise Press and its ‘parent’,
the Gay Authors Workshop (which he naughtily mocks in a story called ‘Group
Reading’). Mike’s warmth, his wit and his wisdom are sorely missed by those of
us in GAW who came to know and cherish him.
Jeremy
Kingston contributes some delicious verse (as he always does at GAW meetings)
and a clever story – ‘The Twist of the Vice’ – that revisits Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw from the viewpoint
of one of the children and makes the governess more villain than victim. The
narrator of Les Brookes’s ‘You Farzan, Me Duane’ recalls the summer when he
fell in love with an Iranian boy in his school: this resonated with me! Beth
Lister, another of my GAW favourites, has a story, ‘Dog Minder’s Monday
Morning’, in which an 80-year-old lesbian yearns for a younger lover/companion.
In contrast to this, Alice Wickham’s bitter-toned ‘Love and Hate’ shows a
lesbian relationship that fails to take off.
Psychiatrist
Donald West, GAW’s eminence grise,
contributes an essay called ‘Facing up to Paedophilia’ which invites us to
‘understand’ the mind-set of child-molesters. Our bishops and pastors urge
Christians to hate the sin but love the sinner – something many of us find a
hard pill to swallow where paedophiles are concerned. I was 68 when I met my Iranian partner, who was 35. Had I met him twenty years earlier he would have been 15
(and probably very delectable, like Farzan in the story mentioned above!), so
perhaps I must accept Professor West’s injunction not to be too judgmental.
You
don’t have to be gay to appreciate the myriad pleasures of A Boxful of Ideas, though it helps if you are!
