In his debut novel, fashion writer Charlie Porter records the queer losses of the 1980s and 1990s without falling into the familiar trap of forgetting that period’s queer joy. Johnny Grant lives in the flat he shared with his lover, Jerry, who died twenty-four years before the novel opens. Framed by the ongoing construction of luxury flats on Johnny’s estate – which will block out the sunlight needed for Jerry’s garden – the novel switches between Johnny’s developing realisation that he has to move and his reflections on the life he and Jerry made together. Flashbacks provide glimpses of their relationship; past and present are woven through with desire, grief and love. 

Porter’s novel is clearly influenced by his work on the clothes and lives of the Bloomsbury Group. The writing is paratactic – ‘here was Jerry my Jerry on a stool spritely as anything that smile those eyes my boy, he said in my ear, my love, and we kissed and kissed, it was my Jerry’ – and paragraphs occasionally span pages. Johnny’s stream-of-consciousness narration is broken up with letters, journal entries and images of banners and the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt. Porter’s fascination with the relationship between living and making is as evident here as in his non-fiction.

Too much recent writing about gay men has focused on suffering, death and loss; Porter’s optimism and the way his narrative opens up to the future are welcome. His effort to both recover gay histories and forge new possibilities can, at points, be overly self-conscious - but the novel is