Show Notes
This episode, Chuck Tingle's Bury Your Gays drags the infamous trope into the light—and gives it teeth. When gay screenwriter Misha refuses to kill off his queer characters for "the algorithm," very literal monsters show up to register their disapproval. We dig into Hollywood's body count, horror as survival, and the refreshingly normal boyfriend keeping it all from full-blown dread. Bring a nightlight and an open heart—you're going to need both.e
More from The Gay Book Club
Xavier C. Barlow was supposed to be the next Sidney Poitier.Instead he's dead, and the man telling his story is the studio fixer who was paid to keep him in the closet. That's There's Only One Sin in Hollywood. Then we jump to 1985 for My Government Means to Kill Me, where 17-year-old Trey Singleton ditches his family's money in Indianapolis, lands in New York andthrows himself into the fight against AIDS. Both are by Rasheed Newson, who was kind enough to answerfive of our questions by voice memo. You'll hear from him all the way through.
Spit is not lube. Nobody has the refractory period of a Norse god. Nobody finishes on a schedule, every time, together. And no one should ever type the words "weeping member."That's just the warm-up. From there: the sex that actually works, the writers who nail it, and a fast run through every trope we love, hate, or can't make up our minds about.
Two gay YA love stories, two boys named Jamie, two very different ends of the world. In Boy Like Me, the world is a 1994 British classroom where Section 28 has banned any mention of gay lives in school, so Jamie's romance unfolds in secret — in notes passed back and forth in the margins of a library book. In All That's Left in the World, the world has literally ended, and Jamie is holed up alone in a cabin when a half-dead boy turns up on his doorstep. They're secretly the same book: two tender boys finding each other when everything says they can't. We also crack open thesequel, The Only Light Left Burning. Boy Like Me by Simon James Green. All That's Left in the World and The Only Light Left Burning by Erik J. Brown.
Two boys, two islands of bad weather, one impossiblequestion: how do you love someone in a language you're not allowed to speak? We pair Oleander — Scarlett Drake'sBookTok-famous Great Expectations dark romance —with Douglas Stuart's literary heartbreaker John of John, andfind the same wound told loud and told quiet.
Two gay novels, two very different escape routes. This week: Edward Cahill's Disorderly Men against Joe Westmoreland's Tramps Like Us. Disorderly Men drops us into early-'60s New York, where a raid on a Greenwich Village bar throws three men — a closeted banker, a professor, and a grocery clerk — into the same paddy wagon and the same impossible question: how much happiness am I allowed? A pre-Stonewall thriller soaked in shame and blackmail. Tramps Like Us takes the other door — Westmoreland's autofictional road trip out of an abusive Kansas City home andinto the hedonistic sprawl of '70s New Orleans and San Francisco, all sex, drugs, and chosen family, right up to the edge of the AIDS crisis. One book about hiding, one about running. We talk about which one wrecked us more.