THREE HIDDEN HISTORIES REVEAL THEIR ENIGMATIC PROTAGONISTS THROUGH SEX, ART AND CROSSDRESSING.

DAYS WITHOUT END By Sebastian Barry

The American Civil War and a gay, cross-dressing soldier seem unlikely subjects for this esteemed Irish novelist, yet Barry has taken them on and triumphed. The book has been highly praised by reviewers and recently scooped the 2017 Costa Book Of The Year Award.

Barry explained recently in an extensive interview in The Guardian that he drew on his own gay son, Toby in f leshing out the sexuality of the main character, John McNulty. “It was more that the book drew it in rather than me putting it in,” Barry says. “I was very impressed by the subtlety, the delicacy and the intricacy of the love between Toby and his boyfriend...”

The unshakeable core of Days Without End is the love between McNulty and Handsome John Cole and everything in that relationship Barry learned from his son. This relationship is so beautifully developed that the reader is irresistibly seduced. However, the book’s other great strength is its narrative voice, which sweeps the reader along from the first chapter on an extraordinary, though harrowing, journey.

Thomas McNulty escapes the great famine in Ireland and survives an unspeakably hellish sea voyage to America, only to be thrown into a fresh hell – the life of a soldier during the Civil War. His one source of comfort and companionship is Handsome John Cole. They encounter one another under a hedge in a downpour and a lifelong bond is born. They find their way to a mining town, Daggsville and answer a saloon’s advertisement for “clean boys”. The work is “just dancing” albeit in women’s clothes. John bristles at the notion but the pay and conditions are too enticing.

For two years they work the saloon, until “the bloom wore off us”. John Cole grew so tall it became impossible to find dresses for him so the pair are obliged to move on. They join up together as soldiers and from this point the backdrop of struggle and hardship takes a bloody and savage turn. Their chief duty involves clearing the West for whites and their regular grisly skirmishes with the Native Americans makes for difficult reading.

Yet from this violence, an unlikely family emerges. In an all-too-brief period of peace, Thomas, John and a young Sioux orphan girl, Winona make a home together in the mid-West. Thomas, once again, adopts female attire for the stage but finds he likes to wear it all the time. He has a maternal relationship with Winona and, given the berdaches in her own people, this crossdressing is not so strange to her. Thomas and John even manage to wed. Recounting the plot may make it sound unlikely, even far-fetched, but reading the novel it is anything but. That is the accomplishment of Sebastian Barry, who has really produced something exceptional and distinctive.

DOWN THE HUME By Peter Polites

Polites came to readers’ attention when he edited the groundbreaking anthology Ornaments From Two Countries: GLBTIQ Stories Of Difference From Western Sydney And Regional NSW in 2013. His first novel, Down The Hume is also set in the western suburbs of Sydney. This immediately gives the book a uniqueness and is a fascinating setting for a gay-themed Sydney novel.

The narrator, Bux is a young Greek-Australian who works as an aged care nursing assistant. He has a boyfriend, Nice Arms Pete – though it might be more accurate to describe him as Pete’s “fuck toy”. They live together in Greenacre, a suburb near Bankstown and Lakemba. Polites knows this particular world intimately. He describes the local “bowlo” where Bux used to work, invaded by pokie machines, “the leagues club with its fake rock three-tiered waterfall that spewed f lames hourly at night,” and the “glammas in Lorna Jane, full face of make-up, living the dream and working off excess pregnancy weight between cigarettes.” Then there’s the “white f light” from the suburb, abandoning it to the “wogs.”

Nice Arms Pete is a devotee of the gym and his body has its share of devotees. Bux is slavishly infatuated with “his rockmelon ass” and the “milk jelly smooth muscle” of his forearms, but is also intensely jealous and suspicious. Pete is subject to roid rage and Bux’s teasing taunts can be met with a fist in the face, though sometimes Pete might dole out a couple of painkillers afterwards to make up for it.

Polites’ writing style is spare and abrupt, littered with abbreviations, pop culture references and occasional fragments of Greek language text, which most readers won’t understand but which the context generally gives the thrust of. It’s an arresting and individual debut that gives voice to a tribe often passed over by Sydney’s inner-city gay elite.

GAY GOTHAM: ART AND UNDERGROUND CULTURE IN NEW YORK By Donald Albrecht

This book has been published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Museum Of The City of New York. However, this is not merely a catalogue of the exhibition but a substantive, illustrated history in its own right, and published in a handsome hardcover coffee table edition by Rizzoli.

More than 200 fascinating and illuminating images are featured – both works of art, such as paintings and photographs, as well as letters, snapshots and ephemera.

There are extensive sections devoted to the likes of George Platt Lynes, Leonard Bernstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring, but there are also fascinating lesser known figures and works of art featured. One is a feature on Charles Demuth and his painting Turkish Bath With Self Portrait (1918), most likely inspired by his visits to the Lafayette Baths, one of a network of baths catering to gay men at that time.

Another section is devoted to the Harlem Spring (1928 to 1932) and the works of artist, writer and actor Richard Bruce Nugent and photographer Carl van Vechten. Although art may predominate, attention is paid to drag culture, sex and cruising, and the nightlife scene, with some phenomenal vintage photographs as illustrations.

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Bux is infatuated by

Pete’s “rockmelon ass” and the “milk jelly smooth muscle” of his forearms.