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A compulsive, disturbingly relevant, twisty and powerful psychological, social-media thriller ... NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'Brilliantly twisty. I loved it' Lisa Jewell 'Another dark banger from the Orenda Books stable ... A brilliant, twisty cat-and-mouse book about fandom and obsession' Erin Kelly 'Effortlessly readable, intensely chilling. That ending floored me' Chris Whitaker ***LONGLISTED for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize*** ___________________ Tom is a successful author, but he's struggling to finish his novel. His main distraction is an online admirer, Evie, who simply won't leave him alone. Evie is smart, well read and unstable; she lives with her father and her social-media frien...
'Witty, intelligent and very, very funny . . . it deserves a wide readership' Time Out Martin is kind, decent and good-looking. And look where it's got him. His boyfriend of four years has run off with a male prostitute. His friends John and Caroline are no help - John prefers infamy to sympathy and Caroline is too busy trying to work out if her wonderful, sensitive boyfriend is a closet case. And to top it all, Martin's hippie father turns up to stay, wearing his 'Proud to be an Embarrassing Parent' badge. To escape, Martin jumps head first into hedonism, throwing himself into the gay club scene, a world of drugs and muscles, hard bodies and harder music. Meanwhile Caroline is learning that being Shameless has its price, and so does she . . . How long can they keep up with the lifestyle? And can they find the man of their dreams when sex has become a substitute for love, and pleasure is measured in beats per minute...?
Brilliantly funny, heart-warming and filled with bittersweet observations, The Gay Divorcee is a hugely entertaining tale of love, marriage and the lies that happen in between. Phil Davies should be happy. He has a flourishing bar in the heart of Soho and in six months he will be marrying Ashley, the man he adores (even if his nickname is 'The Incredible Sulk'). In short - he's living every gay man's dream. There's just one problem: Phil has been married before, seventeen years ago. To a woman. In fact, technically Phil and Hazel are still married. And what Phil doesn't know yet is that Hazel has a seventeen-year-old son. But that's all about to change . . .
It's here and it's queer - popular culture inhabits all our lives, whether it comes in the form of movies or magazines, TV or shopping. A Queer Romance brings together critics, writers and artists to debate the possibilites of popular culture for lesbians and gay men. In a collection that is in-yer-face but never out-to-lunch, the contributors variously revisit debates about the gaze to provide a new theory of Queer viewing; discuss texts coded as queer - from lesbian vampires to Hollywood's use of gay codes in mainstream films such as Top Gun and Black Widow; consider the sexual and cultural narratives at play in the world of home shopping catalogues; explore the pleasures and perils of gay cultural production, from the radically queer film-making of Monika Treut to the wild world of homocore fanzines, and address the possibilities of texts claiming to be for the gay spectator - from pornography `by women, for women and about women' to `Out' TV. The contributors to A Queer Romance don't all agree but, taken together, the collection argues strongly that everyone can have their queer moments.
Tony used to be a winner: five consecutive Top Ten hits, a haircut that was imitated by every Top of the Pops fan, and a coke habit that was little short of legendary. Of course this was back in the 80s, when Tony was part of pop duo A Boy and His Diva, singers of the synth-pop classic 'Lovers and Losers'. In 1984 they were the biggest band in Britain. That is before Katrina, the other half of the duo, had her heart broken and the friendship was destroyed. Now in his forties, missing his fame and his hairline, Tony has signed up for a new reality TV show called The Clink. This could be the ideal opportunity to relaunch the band and revive his comatose career. There's just one problem: Tony and Katrina haven't spoken in years. Meanwhile, Katrina is busy arranging a funeral for a cherished friend, and coping with his estranged mother. When Tony knocks on her door, his arrival reopens old wounds and raises some very uncomfortable questions. Paul Burston's third novel is a wise, witty and evocative novel about the decade of excess, and its many legacies - New Romantics, gender benders, electro-pop and AIDS.
Activist. Journalist. Survivor. One man's journey from prejudice to Pride. Paul Burston wasn't always the iconic voice of LGBTQ+ London that he is today. Paul came out in the mid-1980s, when 'gay' still felt like a dirty word, especially in the small Welsh town where he grew up. He moved to London hoping for a happier life, only to watch in horror as his new-found community was decimated by AIDS. But even in the depths of his grief, Paul vowed never to stop fighting back on behalf of his young friends whose lives were cut tragically short. It's a promise he's kept to this day. As an activist he stormed the House of Commons during the debate over the age of consent. As a journalist he spoke u...
Originally published: London: The British Museum Press, 2013.
This lively collection of essays and articles tests the boundaries and sensitivities of so-called 'gay culture'. Time Out's Gay Editor, and former Consultant Editor at Attitude, takes an incisive, often 'irresponsible' look at gay men's attitudes to themselves, each other, and the icons that matter to them.
The gay community'. For years Paul Burston has heard talk of this fabled people, whose votes are wooed by politicians, whose pink pounds are courted by advertising executives and whose alternative lifestyle is derided by defenders of family values. But he's never been quite sure who they were. So he decided to set off and try to find them for himself. His travels around gay Britain take in a wide cross-section of people and places, from his own childhood in South Wales to middle-aged gay men enjoying a beach party in Bromley, from the gay couple running their own massage parlour in Bristol to gay Young Conservatives in Derbyshire. Along the way, he comments on the hotly debated gay issues of the day; cappuccino-culture consumerism and community politics; the age of consent and the narcissistic preoccupation with youth; backrooms in bars and gay loft conversions. Witty, irreverent and fiercely intelligent, QUEENS' COUNTRY presents the rich diversity - and occasional cultural poverty - of the forces shaping gay life in modern Britain.
In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers,...