GORDON MERRICK: The Lord Won't Mind
Continuing my
intermittent trawl through the ‘classics’ of gay fiction, I’ve just re-read
this hideously titled novel (I’m tempted to say ‘novelette’, it’s so very gay!) from 1970, which is raunchier
than most of its predecessors and must have seemed fairly ‘hardcore’ in the
70s. There is much sterner stuff out there now, making this more ‘semi-hardcore’ – a bit like Fifty
Shades but minus the spanking and much better written.
Charlie Mills is in
his twenties, gorgeous and talented (and seriously hung) when his grandmother introduces him to Peter, who is a bit
younger, almost as gorgeous but a bit less talented and not (quite) so hung.
They fall into bed and love – in that order. It’s Peter’s gay debut and he
falls heavily. Charlie has been round the block before but doesn’t want to be
thought of us ‘queer’, so their affair doesn't always run smoothly. But, as the songwriters would have us believe, the best part of
breaking up is when you’re making up, so you sort of know where this
boy-gets-boy/boy-loses-boy story is likely to end up. Charlie’s grandma is a
figure out of Wilde; Hattie, the aspiring actress with whom he strays down the
path of bisexuality, is cruelly presented. The New York gays who play
supporting roles are surprisingly similar to today’s big-city queens.
 |
| Gordon Merrick 1916-1988 |
The writing sometimes
evokes Henry James but more often Margaret Mitchell. There are so many
endearments – ‘baby’, ‘darling’, ‘champ’ - that it feels a bit like a Gidget-era script at times. Mostly I
found myself thinking of E.M.Forster’s Maurice
– there’s a lot of intense dialogue about how much in love they are.
Forster would probably not have written a sentence like ‘his whole body was shaken by the spasms of an enormous ejaculation’,
but I could (almost) see Henry James (or do I mean E.L. James?) writing it.
I’ve only just found
out that this is Part One of a 70s trilogy and have ordered the other two
volumes (second-hand). The Lord Won’t
Mind is turgid and occasionally terribly twee, but it’s also touching and
sexy. It must have meant a lot to gay readers in 1970 even if today it reads
like a risqué museum-piece.
