What I'm reading: Gay porn and Barbara Cartland

Gordon Merrick: FORTH INTO LIGHT

 

Originally published in 1974, this concludes the gay trilogy that began with The Lord Won’t Mind. Painter Charlie and art-dealer Peter are spending another summer in their Greek island villa with Martha, by whom they have each fathered a child. Martha is not the only woman in their life: art historian Judy arrives to consult Peter about some paintings that may be fakes. She inspires a heterosexual hiccup in Peter.

The paintings have been bought by celebrated New York author Mike who is on the island visiting his friend George, a not-so-celebrated author with a drinking problem and a rocky marriage. George’s teenage son Jeff thinks he may be gay and develops crushes on Mike and our two heroes (and one of the natives).

Gordon Merrick

Large dollops of sex are duly introduced as Jeff works his way through his crushes. And Peter consummates his heterosexual hiccup with Judy in scenes that veer between Barbara Cartland daintiness – “He opened his mouth, and she gave him hers” - and cinematic hardcore. Charlie is not simply well-hung; his endowment is “prodigious”. Graphic – not to say pornographic – sex is Gordon Merrick’s trademark, though I wonder if gay and straight porn belong in the same book: is there a demand for “bi-porn”? 

Aside from the sex, which comes close to the “classic” turgidity of the Song of the Loon trilogy, the book consists of long – even tedious – conversations about love and fidelity. There’s a “MacGuffin” involving a missing wad of dollars which, with the extended dialogue, has echoes of one of Terence Rattigan stodgier dramas. The debate about the “openness” of many gay relationships is an interesting one, to which Merrick makes a thoughtful contribution. Forth Into Light brings his ultra-erotic trilogy to an uneven climax (if I may use that word).

What I'm streaming: The Plague before this one

IT'S A SIN

(Channel 4/All4)

A series about the early years of the AIDS crisis would be a hard watch at any time; it’s especially tough while we’re locked down because of Covid. Written by Russell T. Davies, who gave us the taboo-breaking Queer As Folk twenty years ago, this series has a similar structure: a group of gay friends sharing their lives – and their beds – as the liberation of the 1960s and 70s turns to ashes with the arrival of HIV.

As he did in Queer As Folk, Davies spares us no detail of the rampant promiscuity that turned HIV into a pandemic. He doesn’t show us the bigotry of Evangelicals (mainly but not exclusively in the US) who saw AIDS as God’s wrath upon the citizens of Sodom, except that maybe the series’ title is nod towards the Fundamentalists.

Olly Alexander and Lydia West as Ritchie and Jill

The ensemble acting is faultless, production values are off the scale, the pop soundtrack perfectly selected. The main character is Ritchie (Olly Alexander), a struggling actor, although the key role is that of Jill (Lydia West), “den-mother” to this camp group who offers strong support as her flatmates fall in love and break up and die.

It’s hardly a spoiler to say that someone will die in each of the five episodes: from pneumocystis, KS lesions, CMV, cancers – the grim toll of diseases that harvested men with compromised immune systems. There was a stand-out episode in LA Law when two parents cut their son off from his lover and all his friends and took him home to die. Russell Davies revisits that storyline in the final heartbreaking part of It’s A Sin.

Many of my generation and the one behind us lost people we loved and people we liked during that terrible decade and a half. The grief of those losses will come gruellingly back to us watching this series. Ultimately, medical breakthroughs and human kindness saw us through the age of AIDS. Inshallah, they will also see us defeat Covid.