Review of ‘The Gay Divorcee’ by Paul Burston

It is not easy to get a gay novel published. Possibly our most celebrated gay writer, Edmund White, summed up the situation back in 2007: ‘The market is very small. Only 3% of all people are gay and if you take a diminishing dumbed-down reading public to begin with, and say you are only aiming for 3% of that market, that’s awfully small. So gay novels if they are successful sell 5,000 copies.’

Not an easy job then. The trick, perhaps, lies in judicious marketing. As a leading gay journalist in London (founder of ‘Attitude’ magazine and currently Editor of the gay pages in ‘Time Out’), Paul Burston is a master of knowing what this 3% want. His latest novel, ‘The Gay Divorcee’, is a deceptively light hearted critique of the London gay scene, laced with blisteringly witty repartee and timely social comment. It is probably what many gay readers want and also what they need.

‘The Gay Divorcee’ narrates the story of Soho bar owner Phil Davies who is engaged to be ‘married’ to breathtaking rancid queen ‘Fag Ash’ Ashley. The problem is that Phil is still married to Hazel and is blissfully unaware that he has a nineteen year old son from that union. More crucially, Ashley knows nothing about the first wife. The story charts the shenanigans in the tumultuous six months leading up to their impending nuptials and is set against the bitchy, incestuous, often terrifyingly hedonistic gay ghetto.

Burston neither aspires to nor pretends to write gay literary fiction, (he has said that he often finds White’s prose pompous), and if any comparisons are to be drawn with current gay luminaries it would be with Armistead Maupin. He shares the same gift for vivid characterization through snappy dialogue enthused with a heartwarming appreciation of the intricacies of humanity. Central character Phil is every bit as vulnerable, complex and lovable as Maupin’s Michael and Burston’s achievement is to reflect the hopes, dreams and fears of a new gay generation in his struggles.

Maupin chronicled the social and sexual fluxes of San Francisco during the heady days of gay liberation. The darkness of the closet was in the past and AIDS had yet to decimate an entire community. His work was enthused with a real joie de vivre as the characters exalted in different ways to explore their freedom and build novel ways of relating and forging a new queer aesthetic. The backdrop for Burston’s work is entirely different; his characters are often jaded and there is a real sense that the London gay scene has reached the end of the line.

This is unsurprising since Burston has often been critical of the scene. Perhaps his stance is best summed up in an interview with Homovision in which he says that there is more to gay culture than spending the night in ‘a railway arch in Vauxhall.’ The infamous railway arch in question comes in for quite a lot of flack in this novel, along with the GHB overdoses and general decay of beauty and lost opportunities that it seems to represent. There is a sense of nostalgia, rather reminiscent of the world Maupin depicts, as the fragile character Martin remembers a time when men had sex in beds instead of saunas and actually spoke to one another as opposed to gaping at anonymous body parts on Gaydar.

These are issues that mean a lot to Burston – he confronted them unblinkingly in an article in ‘Time Out’ in 2007 entitled ‘London’s gay scene in crisis.’ His achievement in this novel is to package questions that may be unpalatable to many in what appears to be a light, comic read ; the criticism comes in the odd throw away remark and the motif of an anonymous, hysterical ‘Blog’ lampooning the self destructive ‘gay glitterati.’

The book is structured in short, easy to digest chapters and its action is fast paced. The aim is to appeal to the frenetic lives of gay Londoners who can grab a few pages on the tube between work and the next bar or spa where they can then grab the next guy in the sexual McDonalds that is the gay scene. What they may not expect in between is to be subtly questioned about the motives and implications of their behaviour.

We need to find new ways of talking about what is going on in the gay community, only then can problems be addressed and solutions found. Burston is our chief advocate here – he pioneered gay literary saloon Polari and in February his House of Homosexual Culture debated bare back porn at The South Bank Centre. While there is an undeniable sense that London’s scene is struggling in this novel, there is also the suggestion that it can extricate itself from impending catastrophe.

The key to this is communication as this is the only way that the characters fathom out some sort of survival for themselves. Interestingly, the gay action is counterpointed by the staunchly heterosexual conservatism of Wales and the mystery shrouding the Bridgend teenage suicides which no one is discussing. Whether Burston becomes the new Armistead Maupin is yet to be seen. He has, however, nominated himself to be one of the scene’s spokesmen for the noughties. It’s a vital role that may prevent us surrendering to the danger of apathy.