Reading List

By and large, Gentle Reader, I’ve done pretty well as The Cheerful Fairy. I’ve met my man, and am making plans to be the Forever Fairy, with car payment and in-laws and a goldfish Oh my. Getting here I thoroughly enjoyed everything the Strumpetville had to offer. My eyes were opened but luckily my mind wasn’t closed.

I have a lot of gay friends, and as it turns out (a Christmas party themed post for another time) a huge proportion of the colleagues in my team are gay – 30% or so. Naturally being gay is an automatic get out of my bad books card.

A lot of my friends have been active in gay issues for a long time. Some since university. I of course was somewhat hidden away from such things. I don’t think it even occurred to me back then that there would be such a thing as a LGBT student union rep.

So now I read Pink News and Gay Times and sign online petitions. I am a representative on my workplace’s LGBT network and work to advance or advocate gay issues with my employer.

I still don’t get involved as much as I’d like in gay things – I don’t know gay literature, films, etc very much. Part of me shies away from the very pretty people because I ain’t one of them any more. But that’s no excuse.

So, then, I have developed a small – and will expand – reading list, and viewing list.

My first piece of gay literature, and I use the word literature quite wrongly, was The Captain’s Boy. You can well imagine the content – young insanely good looking aristocrat flees family after being caught rogering the young insanely good looking gardener, gets press-ganged onto a ship of fit and well hung sailors; gets captured by a load of fit and well hung pirates. Eventually he gets captured by the native inhabitants of a tropical island who have a remarkable range of highly man-specific rituals… and so on. I remember the book always equated penis size with virtue. The villain of the book was intimately described in punitive terms!

Moving on up, these are the items on my reading list

·         The Velvet Rage – recommended by a date who became a friend, written by a psychologist about growing up gay in the modern world

·         The Swimming Pool Library – a novel by Alan Hollinghurst

·         The Fluffer – a film about a young guy obsessed with a gay-for-pay porn star. It’s Fella’s ;-)

·         A Beautiful Thing – because it’s great and I haven’t seen it for years

The book I’ve just finished is Twenty 6 by Jonathan Kemp, 26 short sections of prose describing the experience of various sexual or erotic or emotional encounters in a unique combination of graphic and somehow touching terms. He captures those most fleeting moments very well. I recommend it.

Do you have any remmendations? I also recommend this: