JUSTIN DAVID The Pharmacist and NEIL BARTLETT Address Book. Reviewed by Ivan Crozier
Authors Justin David and Neil Bartlett reflect a range of experiences in these stories of gay life in London.
For most of modern literature, the male homosexual is not a happy figure. He is burdened by the stigmata of degeneration; he is corrupting; he is criminal; he is diseased; he is reduced mainly to his sexual encounters, sometimes fuelled with drugs.
Two recent novels from a new press, Inkandescent, have moved well beyond these stereotypical treatments and portray gay lives in much more nuanced ways. Justin David’s The Pharmacist and Neil Bartlett’s Address Book – both set in London at different periods (the early 1990s for David; from 1891 to the present for Bartlett) – provide much broader canvases for exploring homosexual lives in the city, and for using gay life to explore the city itself. Although they are queer novels, the novelty is not so much the sexuality of the protagonists, as the open lives they live.
Justin David’s beautifully written novella The Pharmacist is the story of Billy Monroe, a photographer and painter with a studio in East London at a time when artists could still afford such luxury. He lives with his aspirational boyfriend, Jamie, who is always unavailable because he is working to become a part of the respectable homonormative middle class. Billy’s attention is grabbed by Albert Powers, an attractive old man wearing a cream linen suit and panama hat whom he sees making a drug deal in the Columbia Road flower market.
Look at that, thinks Billy, the flair, the twirl. He loves that the man doesn’t conform to any normal code of behaviour.
It happens that they live in the same block of flats, and they become lovers.
Billy soon finds himself marooned between the old gay world of Albert and the gentrifying London of his vapid boyfriend, Jamie. Albert reads Genet and Proust, speaks Polari (the slang of gays and the theatre world), and has gay pornographic magazines among his coffee table books, which include The Complete Guide to Recreational Psychoactives. Jamie, by contrast, is not that sort of gay. He maintains a good relationship with his family, and wants to buy property and be respectable. It is clear where David’s sympathies lie as he explores Billy’s new world enthusiastically, perhaps even nostalgically.
The book is set at the beginning of the most recent wave of gentrification in East London, when electronic music took hold in the capital and drugs like MDMA became widely used. The experience of being gay in the 1990s was physical – the laws that had made gay sex illegal had been repealed, the psychological construction of homosexual desire (on which so many earlier gay novels focused) was less important than the raw ecstasy of dancing and fucking together, as if to dance was to live. That visceral experience of gayness sets it apart from the other epochs. To be gay after the 1970s is to know how poppers smell. It was to come out of hiding and be seen in the streets. To be gay at this time is also to have lived during the ravages of the HIV epidemic, although this is not focused upon in David’s book, unlike in Bartlett’s work.
David contrasts the hedonistic gayness of Albert with the productive gayness of Jamie. A bildungsroman of what some might see as a path to enlightenment and others to degeneration, The Pharmacist follows Billy’s transition from one world to the other. While his boyfriend is busy, we see Billy masturbating to porn, having backroom sex at a club, and developing a drug habit that has wondrous effects on his painting and creativity.
An older man teaching a younger how to be gay is a well-rehearsed trope in homoerotic relationships. Albert teaches Billy how to take drugs, how to experience ecstasy. He explains to Billy the importance of setting, the risks, the expected sensations of MDMA, and because Albert is a dealer, there is never any question of money or supply. ‘Darling Boy, for every brain cell that has died, a new door has opened to a magical world.’ Billy takes the pill with a Mitsubishi logo, and waits. The effects are explained in ways that will make sense to people who have used the drug. Yet drugs are not always harm-free: Albert mentions wistfully an old flame who smoked so much weed that it ‘took his mind’.
The importance of David’s book lies in the direct way in which he approaches contemporary gay life in London. True to the city, The Pharmacist is much less frenetic than its Parisian counterpart, the recently translated trilogy of novels by Guillaume Dustan. The city, as it has for so many authors, provides the essential backdrop to queer interactions through spaces such as nightclubs, but also through the opportunity to meet other men with shared desires.
Neil Bartlett is well-known as a queer writer and theatre director. His powerful new work Address Book is a series of loosely interlinked stories, each based in a different home in which the author has lived, all of them in London except the last, a story of a commuter based in Worthing who takes the 7.09 to the city. They cover a vast scope of gay urban life, focusing on protagonists of different ages.
A doctor called Andrew recalls his first elaborate sexual encounter, at 15, with a 29-year-old musician called John in Twickenham, a connection which continues periodically for 30 years. A young partier in Clerkenwell waits for Andrew the medical student to pay a nocturnal visit to his flat. The same flat is visited in 1891, where an amateur photographer is in rapture over his beautiful male subject as he produces a banner for a procession of St Peter’s Church in Clerkenwell, the same church where the Italian parents of a lesbian celebrating her wedding in a Hackney Downs tower block had married.
In Camden Road, a young pregnant woman listens to the life story of her neighbour, a young male dancer: his jazz records, the men who visit him, his sexual encounters, the domestic violence he suffers. She does not judge her neighbour for his sexuality:
‘… feelings are feelings … Mind you, you do read such dreadful things about them sometimes, don’t you? About their being arrested, and all that sort of thing.’
A gay pastor from Hammersmith has a difficult day working with refugees in the Harmondsworth Detention Centre, before returning home to his lawyer boyfriend, where he reflects on acceptance and caring for others.
The final, most powerful story, is of Roger, a commuter from Worthing who has recently lost his husband to cancer. Eventually, Roger finds a lover called David, and there is a sense that he can rebuild his life that had been lost in alcoholic freefall since his loss.
These compelling stories seek to show the interconnectedness of gay lives, explored from within marriage and long-term relationships as well as casual affairs and fleeting attractions. There is no stereotypical gay in this book, but rather a multitude of plausible lives. As with The Pharmacist, Address Book explores the changing city, but also the changing acceptance of LGBTQ+ people and relationships. With a rich historical eye, Bartlett examines the ways in which the metropolis harbours those who need it – it is ‘a place of safety, and of refuge’ for the Italian immigrants in Clerkenwell, for the man from Lagos in the detention centre, and also for the gay men who flocked to the city to live with other men like themselves. He does so with beauty and compassion.
The publication of these two works is a landmark in LGBTQ+ publishing. Inkandescent Press was created in 2016 by Justin David and Nathan Evans with the tagline ‘by outsiders, for outsiders’. It provides a platform for both established and emerging authors from the margins, counteracting the market forces that limit the exploration of intersection of class, race and LGBTQ+ issues in most of the big publishing houses. Their recent anthology Mainstream showcases 30 authors writing from the margins. These two wonderful books are at the cutting edge of a literature that was once marginalised, and is now blossoming in the light.
Justin David The Pharmacist Inkandescent 2020 PB 112pp $23.10
Neil Bartlett Address Book Inkandescent 2021 PB 258pp $29.75
Ivan Crozier was a historian of psychiatry at UCL, University of Edinburgh, and University of Sydney. He currently lives in the northern rivers of New South Wales.
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