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Special Section: Creative and Critical Responses to Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction

Too Good for the Gays: Douglas Stuart’s “The Englishman”

Darryl Peers
p. 125-141

Résumés

“Too Good for the Gays” est un essai créatif et critique issu d’un projet en cours intitulé A Fuckable Object. A Fuckable Object est un mémoire critique (terme emprunté à Jill Dolan et Ann Cvetkovich) qui examine le potentiel de l’auteur à baiser ses objets d’étude dans l’acte de les rechercher, et entre en dialogue avec la théorie queer de José Esteban Muñoz et Lauren Berlant. A Fuckable Object compare l’utilisation que font Muñoz et Berlant de « quelque chose » dans leurs principaux ouvrages théoriques afin d’interroger l’indétermination que représente souvent le terme queer dans les contextes académiques et quotidiens. “Too Good for the Gays” fait partie d’une série d’essais qui mobilisent l’analyse textuelle comme méthode de réflexivité critique, où l’auteur étudie un texte qu’il « aime » pour tout d’abord interroger ce qui peut être involontairement caché dans son utilisation familière du verbe « aimer » et réfléchir ensuite à son lien avec la façon dont le queer émerge dans sa pratique critique, esthétique et quotidienne.

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Auteurs étudiés :

Douglas Stuart
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Texte intégral

1I am shit at being gay. It feels nice to say the same of David, the narrator in Douglas Stuart’s short story “The Englishman” (2020). To be shit at being gay is to be legible and acceptable to straight people. Being a shit gay has been not knowing—not wanting to know—the things a queer person ought to know. For the twenty-something student David, being a shit gay is earnestly believing that an advert for a “houseboy” in a gay magazine is an offer of employment to a housekeeping role. For me, it has been to direct my most profound expressions of love toward straight and unavailable men, to believe that loving in this way is a salvation from being gay. It has been to shit on what I have perceived as the less attractive masculinity which legibly gay men embody.

  • 1 The critical reception of Shuggie Bain is mapped thoroughly by Morace. Specific references to Stuar (...)
  • 2 See, for example, Amin, Musser, and Pérez.

2“The Englishman” was printed in the 7th September 2020 edition of The New Yorker, shortly before Stuart’s Booker Prize shortlisting for eventual winner Shuggie Bain. Along with “Found Wanting” (published in The New Yorker in January 2020, shortly before Shuggie Bain’s U.S. release), “The Englishman” is an interesting counterpoint to his well-known novels. Unlike Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, Stuart’s short stories are written in the first-person and their brevity is a reminder that he exerts authorial craft upon his work, in a welcome rejoinder to criticism which has, perhaps unwittingly, suggested the granular and fulsome description in his novels signals that they are autobiographical.1 As scholars have written elsewhere, this narrative tends to be a way in which writers from marginalised backgrounds are depicted as less imaginative than their counterparts whose stories focus on characters aligned with normative expectations.2

  • 3 All quotes from “The Englishman” are from the online version of The New Yorker.

3Set in the 1980s or 90s, “The Englishman” follows David from an island off the West Coast of Scotland, where he lives, to London, where his houseboy job is based. The story charts the fraught summer that he spends working for an English gentleman named William. Tensions arise from their differing expectations of what exactly William has purchased from David in hiring his services as a houseboy, though their personalities hardly mesh either. William is observable as gay by his mannerisms; he is upper-class, a “banker” from the “city” of London, the UK’s economic centre; he is at home in the place most densely populated with queer people in the UK, granting him easier access to knowledge about gay sex and culture.3 David needs to leave his native island for employment, for which part of his payment must involve accommodation; he is not ignorant of his sexuality, yet it is not apparent to look at him because it has rarely benefited him for it to be such. He passes. In short, William is posh and David is not. I was called posh at primary school—by adults (teachers, my parents, friends’ parents) and classmates alike—because, among other reasons, I did not speak Doric (the local dialect), and I liked using words that were perceived to be fancy. In this way, William is someone I’ve been taught to hate. David, on the other hand, is gay in the way I have always hoped I could be. Posh marks the ways in which their respective class backgrounds are intertwined with their relationships to gender. Seeing as I was marked out as posh from a young age, it appears that I am not as similar to David as I’d like to be. I have bits of William in me too. David is the man I could be if I were not me. I love that he exists. I write to understand why I hate and why I love. I write to learn what these feelings are shorthand for.

 

4In another version of this essay, I would analyse the relationship between William and David dispassionately. I would say my life has nothing to do with the objective knowledge which textual analysis can aspire to create. But that would be a lie, an optimism for what my methods can accomplish made cruel by the fact that I do not believe it. I do not wish to oppress my reader with the illusion of a coherent argument over which I have mastery. I do not imagine that I have direct or uncomplicated access to the truth of my feelings, but I can reflect on my experiences of reading and identify those which I have most enjoyed. I investigate my optimism, enjoyment, attachment, or utopia in partnership with the scholars, José Esteban Muñoz and Lauren Berlant, who, via their own writings, have invested my usages of these terms with their own. I can work, in an essay, to make of my enjoyment an edifice which a reader can scrutinise for themselves. My basic contention is that a white boy cannot fall for another white boy, or for a short story about two white boys, without actively participating in the systems of power dispersal that so frequently centre the feelings that white men call love in political and everyday contexts.

  • 4 These paragraphs reference Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, Muñoz’s “something else” (154) and “educated m (...)

5My propensities to love or hate, to enjoy or otherwise, are not choices I make. I contend that in the relational attachments which I describe in these terms there is evidence of the base from which I am building my research. I live in a body and I write from it. That body is marked in particular ways which shape the contours of the life I live and I am not infinitely self-aware of these processes. My biases will be evident to those readers on the sharp end of them; they are inconvenient to whatever progressive credentials I would like my work to have. Nonetheless, I am trying to build love on this base, a love that is more than instinctive feeling, because sometimes instincts which feel like love are something else. I am aiming to practice a love and thus a critical methodology that is desire and self-awareness and nonsovereignty and anti-racism. These are not all instincts. Or if they are, if they ever will be, they are instincts which need to be learned.4

 

6At first, David seems to be an archetypal queer from the countryside, fed up with his parochial home and seeking new experiences in the city. Describing how poorly trees that are planted on their own fare in his home, he says: “My island does not nurture things that stand alone.” While ostensibly speaking about how individual trees are exposed to wind, the abstraction of “things” suggests that David—perhaps on account of his sexuality—considers himself to stand alone on the island. Trees clustered together may shelter each other from the wind’s destructive force; so too, the organisation of the island’s community by presumedly heterosexual conventions seems to shelter those at home in it from the destruction that desire can bring upon a life. In leaving the island, David enacts his queerness as an orientation to the future, a “longing that propels us onward” (Muñoz 1); he is leaving the rural behind and acting on an optimistic belief that queer companionship awaits him elsewhere. Where the island has not nurtured him, he is holding out the hope that there are people in London who will: more experienced men who can show him how to be gay.

7It is my presumption that David, in saying he leaves because he wants “a summer in which to be myself,” means that he wants to be around other men to whom queerness is not a revelation. I have the confidence to say this because my upbringing so echoes his: I, too, grew up in rural Scotland believing that LGBTQ+ people were quaint rarities who lived far away. Imagine my shock when I learned I was one of them! The first time I met a gay man above twenty-five, I could not believe it. It had never occurred to me that I would reach that age or that, if I did, I could be happy. Since then, when I have met older gay men who might be mentors, I have run toward them. I am carrying something—some shame, some need—that I am hopeful they will be able to hold. Most times, I have learned that these older gay men have figured nothing special out. When a younger, single man lavishes them with attention, they hope that this means he loves them. I must own some of the blame for how some of these older men have responded to me as if I am a fuckable object. I have presented myself as such. But I have presented myself that way because I am not stupid: I am lonely, and it has earned me attention.

 

8“The Englishman” is told in the past tense by an older version of David who has, it appears, gone on to understand his sexuality better as he’s aged. He recalls a time that William told him about a former partner who became unwell: “It will be to my eternal shame that I frowned and then asked William what he meant by ‘sick.’” At the time of the memory, David did not know about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and he is not told about it in the story. It is some time after the events narrated, then, that he learns how HIV impacts queer people. Moreover, he has gained so much knowledge that he feels “shame” concerning his ignorance when he was younger. If David’s queerness is, in “The Englishman” and by Muñoz’s account, a utopia on the horizon, a “forward-dawning futurity,” a thing which is as yet formless, then his learning about HIV/AIDS will be part of the “educated mode of desiring” that his queerness is due to become (1). Muñoz says that utopia

permits us to conceptualise new worlds and realities that are not irrevocably constrained by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and institutionalised state homophobia. More important, utopia offers us a critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be. (35)

Muñoz posits that a utopian future need not let the legacy of HIV/AIDS define its possibilities. There is a more hopeful future which the mourning of the present can usher in. Who better to realise this future than a queer man from a small Scottish island who’s never heard of HIV/AIDS, who can’t imagine what “sickness” might be associated with being gay? However, the narrating of David’s “eternal shame” suggests that his ignorance becomes a mourning that is not his own, for people he did not know, but who were like him.

9I did not learn about HIV/AIDS until I was David’s age or older. When I did, it seemed to explain some of the fear I felt about sex: the sense that death was somehow risked by the act, the feeling that I would never get to an age where I was happily having it. But I am not ashamed that I did not know. In learning about it since, I have found that stories about the horrific impact of HIV/AIDS tend to centre on, most prominently, 1980s and 90s New York. The impact of HIV/AIDS is felt in other geographies, of course, but those stories are less often told. One of the constraints placed upon our present, that a utopian vision of a world where queerness and HIV/AIDS are uncoupled can help us to critique, is the limitations of stories about HIV/AIDS which, perhaps unknowingly, weaponise grief to continue the centring of some geographies and bodies in queer narratives.

 

10Even as he has aged, David continues to refer to the island he grew up on with the possessive “My.” He says, in the present tense, that it “does not nurture.” He does not say where he is based at the time of writing. In the older David’s eyes, the island is something to which he can claim ownership, but it also continues not to nurture him. The island is his home, but he does not feel at home there. London seems to promise what his home lacks—it will accommodate his queerness—but it is also a place where predatory English gentlemen like William are furnished with comfortable houses and careers.

  • 5 My argument that the practice of queer studies enacts a certain inattention to the ongoing legacies (...)

11London, venerated as it is by its residents (including many of the UK’s publishing houses and cultural institutions) today, is the city from which the British Empire stemmed. Saying that London is better than another town is perhaps a modern iteration of the colonialist idea that the British had a way of life superior to other cultures. David’s wariness in approaching London and the people in it is well-placed. His unease is an acknowledgement of the legacy of violence that unfolds from colonialism, showing its presence in the interpersonal dynamics that seem ordinary or appropriate to a person at home in London. But colonialism extends from Scotland too. David, after all, is still going to London. In doing so, he reveals that his hopes are imbricated with the ways of being modelled in London. There are many other places which he has not considered as a destination, and a failure to consider is so often a readiness to erase, a deathly lack of the willingness to understand.5

 

12Shortly after his arrival at William’s house, it becomes clear that David’s idea of a “houseboy” is misguided. He meets a Portuguese woman who is the house’s actual cleaner. She laughs and shoos him out. When David talks to William and it becomes clear that he has been brought to London to have sex with and provide company for William, David asks, “‘if that is what you were looking for, why didn’t you just write a personal ad?’” William laughs and explains that personal ads don’t work, that boys like David would not reply “‘unless there was money in it.’”

13William explains that the personal ads have only ever yielded anonymous poems and shame-ridden letters from a closeted bishop in York. An open appeal for love or desire is not something to which gay men are attracted to respond. I can understand why. In a contemporary equivalent of the personal ad such as the dating app bio, whether on Hinge or Grindr, I am rarely moved by supposedly forthright declarations of what somebody is “looking for.” I always wonder: How do you know? I think I know what I want—a gay man who in manner and appearance recreates straightness—but how can I want someone who does not want to be themselves? The gay man I am searching for is a man like David, a man who has never had a relationship with another man that can be avowed.

14There is violence in interpretation, in that interpretation is a way of speaking for or making legible. Interpretation is assumption, and assumption is replacing what is unclear or inarticulable with something already known and coherent. When a person interprets their feelings as an expression of a type they are looking for, they assume what that feeling is. Asserting a type is also rejecting many other types. To say, “I am looking for this,” is to say, “I do not want the things I am not looking for.” It is to say, “I do not even want to know what something else is like.”

 

15William shows David a photo album of his previous houseboys: “Halfway through the album I could tell that William had a type. He liked them Northern, scrawny almost; all parsimonious hips and jutting clavicles. He liked them scowling—a little hungry-looking. He liked them Scottish.” How, from photographs alone, can David tell the boys are Scottish? The linkage between slight bodies and Scottishness is a connection that David makes unprompted by William. He expresses an assumption that Scottish boys are not materially able to sate their appetites.

16The Scottish gay, in David’s and perhaps William’s imagination, is not the smug, portly gentleman who keeps a catalogue of his conquests. The Scottish gay has life to be getting on with; his desires do not occupy him to the point that he would place an advert in a magazine. He might respond to the advert, but only because he is ignorant to the queerness codified in it. Life is, for a Scottish gay, the everyday and quotidian environment in which his masculinity is currency. He is not posh. Doing anything that a gay man would do is a suspension of life; it is a kind of death.

17 
If a Scottish gay needs to have sex, he will find it when he has time; he is not desperate enough to unduly alter his life chasing it. The Scottish gay scorns those who cannot control their appetites—the English, the colonialist—in the same way. The Scottish gay is a hypocrite, as his entire way of being is enabled by and complicit with the modes of whiteness and masculinity to which the British colonialist project aspires. The Scottish gay is contrasting himself with the English. He is saying, “I am not like him,” when he is, really, when he and Scottish men before him have contributed to the Empire’s work too.

18He is lean; he will go without that which he desires; he is rough and unhewn. The Englishman, on the other hand, is smug and contented; his appetites are boundless; his life is supported by vague indeterminacies such as “banking” or the “city” which mean little to those born without the means to move freely in those spaces. The Scottish gay is contentedly alone—his distinctness is not blurred by queer community—and he is attractive for his scarcity. For many reasons, a self-aware, out Scottish gay man is more of a miracle than an English one is, so the Scottish gay is more attractive. He is almost too good to be true.

 

  • 6 See Amin’s Disturbing Attachments for a detailed analysis of the ethical bind that pederasty places (...)

19The bond which William seeks with David and the boys from the album could map neatly onto the gay tradition of pederasty, where an older gay man couples with a younger boy. David and I share a sense that this arrangement risks exploitation.6 William’s photo album reveals how the bodies to which he has been drawn are physically manifesting a hunger that he has the material means to remedy. What does it mean that William desires bodies which need something he can give? It is, I think, for William to lack regard for himself. It is for him to know that the kinds of arrangement he seeks are not reciprocal. He is not only a gay man struggling in a homophobic society whose sense of intimacy may have become distorted by loss or harm. He is a man who could know himself better, who, in avoiding frank confrontation with the difficult feelings which drive him to seek affection in this way, makes space for the systemic violences of empire and colonialism to play out through his actions.

  • 7 My orientation of focus toward the “gesture” and the “quotidian” is a methodological cue I take fro (...)

20For example, when David speaks about the island he’s from, William is “feigning interest,” or he asks questions in a way that “made [David] think he wasn’t much interested in the exact answer”—I have experienced a similar disconnect from older gay men when I say something which reveals that I am not a mute, beautiful object, that I hold opinions and views of my own. I pretend that I do not see their eyes glazing over. I imagine that perhaps they are indeed listening. But, as when William eventually calls David’s home a “shithole,” these seemingly insignificant gestures turn out to express that their desire is also a desire to subdue and control.7

21Why have I hoped that one older gay man will be different from the others? What special promise does a bond with a gay man hold that bonds with other people do not? Why am I trying to be a Scottish gay in the first place? If I believe in the attractiveness of the Scottish gay, are my tastes not as likely to cause harm as William’s? Do I not, like David, play the part of myself in the way that I do because I perceive the Englishman as the only worthwhile audience? Need I look anywhere else but at my own body to find the British Empire in one of the forms it takes today?

 

22David’s attempt to play the houseboy is a kind of delaying tactic, a way of maintaining the façade that the relationship between him and William is respectful and contract-based. If David is simply fulfilling an advertised role in a magazine, he is part of the workforce at large. He is an employee, William his employer, and there is nothing unpresentable about their relationship. At first, William is patient. David insists on cooking, but he burns dinner: “[William] reassured me that he was not irritated by the inedible food that had been laid before him.” The food is not so different from David here: a promised, consumable object which turns out to be inedible. Looking at the burnt dinner, William tells David—or, more accurately, he uses the nickname “Casper” in reference to David’s pale skin—he is “not getting it.” William reminds David that he is failing but affirms that he will wait for David to get it, where getting it also refers to getting fucked.

  • 8 See, for example: Rankine’s Just Us for how racist structures manifest in idealisations of blonde h (...)

23William’s use of a nickname to which David never agrees is indicative of the way in which he does not see—nor wants to see—David on David’s terms. The nickname, moreover, draws attention to David’s whiteness. The ethnicities of all of William’s boys in the album are not relayed to the reader, but David’s description of them as “Northern” and “Scottish” would suggest that they are white. Casper is the version of David that William would like to exist, the one who understands the rules of the game and plays them. But this fantasy, like Casper, is a ghost. The idealisation of whiteness—even when it is seemingly just a private sexual preference—is a way in which violent histories haunt and continue into the present.8

 

24One night, William calls David to his room. He says, “‘I’ve been very patient. You embarrass me when I have to ask to use something I’ve already paid for.’” At a time when their relationship is at impasse, William seeks to unblock it by directly acknowledging the financial transaction which underpins their connection. Lauren Berlant writes that we can say “nothing about impasses of the political without having an account of the production of the present” (Cruel Optimism 4). If I am saying that David and William’s impasse is no private affair—it is systemic inequities momentarily embodied and recirculated—then it too cannot be accounted for without acknowledging how the present is produced. The present—the London townhouse in which they live, maintained by a Portuguese woman—appears to be peacetime, late twentieth century Britain. This “ordinary” cityscape, paid for in part by the Empire’s slave trade, is only rendered ordinary by an implicit contrast with the “unusual” indigenous settings that have been systematically destroyed by British colonialism.

25When William and David first meet, David notes that “William surveyed me the same way my father looked at sheep at the wool market.” David’s comparison of himself to a sheep at market draws attention to how he is a body from which value will be extracted, a commodity to be appraised. Not only that, he is a sheep that his father “looked at.” The comparison of William to David’s father suggests that David, in coming to London, had hoped to find another role model, another gaze in which he could re-imagine his masculinity. The Scottish gay is loyal to his father before he sells himself to other men.

26There are contradictions in David’s desires: he fears his father but also wants to emulate him; he wants to have a bond with William, but he is afraid of what it may lead to. He may not consent to a relationship, but he does allow a situationship to occur, where the “situation” in that term takes its meaning from Berlant’s prescient definition: a “state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding” (Cruel Optimism 5). David does not leave the moment he finds out that William wants to have sex, nor assert boundaries which might be sustained. It is rarely without cost or difficulty to leave something one has entered, or to affirm boundaries when others do not appear to see the need for them, especially, in this case, given David’s youth relative to William. However, he puts significant effort into being a good houseboy, to clean, to cook, to please William. He feels “special” when William tells him he’s the first forestry student he’s had, and he worries that he’s the “dullest” man William has ever hired. David subscribes to the value system in which this Englishman is esteemed and moneyed enough to own his house in this city built from empire. He buys into the idea that the Englishman should be served.

 

27David’s father does not feature in the action of the story, but he is continually invoked. David notes that William “talked in a light, gossipy manner that would have angered my father.” The drinks William serves are things he would not be given “under my father’s roof,” where he “wouldn’t dare profess a desire for anything foreign.” David anticipates and imagines his father’s reactions to William’s mannerisms or choices of drink. Though he has left the island, David holds onto wisdom that his father once imparted: “[Englishmen] were not to be trusted, my father would tell us, although as to why, he could never quite say.” His scepticism of William’s intentions is pre-ordained; even if William has been seeking to build a respectful and equable friendship with David, David has not been receptive to it. Despite his absence, David behaves as if his father may at any moment materialise.

28To be noticeably gay is to be “lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives” (Muñoz 72-73). That may sound like a good thing, but in David’s case it also means becoming lost to his father, to the island on which he was raised. For him and many other queer people, the world of heterosexual imperatives is the world in which they live. I do not want to be lost to something in which I have to survive, or to someone whom I love.

29I believe this is also why men who do not embody a straight kind of gayness participate in valuing it. I have so frequently found that noticeably gay men suspect that I may be gay and when I confirm it—with a remark about loving Taylor Swift or Heartstopper—they lust after me. I know what I am doing. I deliver a remark or a behaviour that is legible as gay within a context of choices which communicate more conventional masculinity. It’s the fact that I signal my tether to heterosexual imperatives that makes the revelation of gayness enticing. If I were just plain old gay, I would not be as hot. It is because I suggest that I am too good for the gays that they want me. I establish a hierarchy of value in which I ask them to collude. I behave as if I am better, as if what makes them “them” is not also what makes me “me.” I work their internalised homophobia and sexism to my advantage. It is, of course, also mine.

 

30When William refers to David as “something I’ve already paid for,” David reacts by observing: “I sensed my father’s face settling over my own. I was surely glowering.” For David to be like his father is for him to feel “nothing” toward the Englishman. It is for David to reject the sexual part of himself that his father does not want to see, to take the “gay” out of Scottish gay, to disown the curiosity which led him to this place. David left the island imagining he might find a queer father figure in London. Instead, his blood father’s face settles over his own: he sees, by glowering, in the way that he imagines his father would see. The use of “settling” hints at the undercurrent of settler colonialism in white paternal bonds: the attitudes which justified the European settling of indigenous land in centuries past find their present form in the lessons of manhood passed from father to son.

31While William has desired David in ways that may have felt objectifying, he has facilitated an environment in which David can actually be gay. Under William’s roof, David can express desires for foreign things, and he can speak in light and gossipy ways should he please. Spending time with William, for David, is spending time as an openly gay man. William notices that he desires, that he is fully human, in a way that people at home do not. If there is any power in being a Scottish gay, it is only insofar as one exerts power over a presumedly English, less masculine audience. Power can sometimes feel like joy. The joy of finding that the effeminate, posh, English gays who I had been taught to hate were real, human, and provided social environments in which I could safely show other sides of myself, came with the choice of whether to accept or sublimate that joy.

 

32David does not seek William to help him have sexual discoveries. He describes his sexual experiences on the island:

I am not a prude. I have gone with men when the opportunity came up—because on the island the opportunity so rarely did. I have allowed minicab drivers to put their mouths on me when I pretended not to have the fare. I once fucked a lorry driver on the Barra ferry even though it was bitterly cold in the back of his refrigerated truck, and it stunk of thawing cod. A creeler’s son from Uist would lie with me on the Sabbath, but only if I wore my sister’s jumper, and pulled it up over my face as though I’d been caught undressing.
I could stomach feeling dominated, powerless in a sexual situation—but I didn’t like to feel bought. I didn’t want to feel owned.

David may not be familiar with gay culture but, despite having no-one to guide him, he has been alerted to opportunities to have sex. These are furtive encounters, perhaps, but in the cases of the minicab drivers and the creeler’s son they are premeditated and, presumedly, repeated. They are more than opportunities that “came up,” as he would like to have us believe; they are opportunities for which he has prepared. He has pretended not to have fares as a safe means of scoping someone out. He has worn his sister’s jumper for the creeler’s son. Having sex with men has required forethought, carefulness and, to some extent, knowledge of his own desires.

  • 9 See Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection for a critical interrogation of how the history of enslavement h (...)

33David articulates the difference between being a bottom and wanting to be owned. His language, where to be “bought” or “owned” is figurative, signals his distance from those humans for whom being bought and owned has been a reality for them or their relatives.9 With a thought for the history of enslavement, he might be slower to link ownership to masculinity and being owned to effeminacy. David does not suggest he has enjoyed being submissive: he has “stomached” it. If he were to enjoy it too much, this would be to lose himself to the heterosexual imperatives of his father. I presume that the men with whom David has sex—with the exception of the lorry driver—have been more steadfast than him in rejecting the submissive role. Rarity of opportunity has made David desperate, willing to fuck in a freezing cold truck and bottom if necessary. This I understand. I may take some joy from being the Scottish gay, of acting as if I’m too good for the meat market in which gay relationships typically seem to operate, but I also spend much time desiring. There are joys I forgo. But I am also desperate for them.

 

34On one occasion, David becomes aroused by images from William’s photo album and some combination of his horniness and a sense of owing it leads him to allow William to suck him off. He describes it:

If it was to happen, then he would not take it from me. I placed my hands on William’s head, guiding his rhythm. The blanket wrapped around his skull and I held him tight. My thumbs found his eye sockets. I hated the sound of his greed.

David refuses to play the submissive role he has occupied with other men. He drives his thumbs into William’s eyes as if to assert his dominant role. He covers William with a blanket, recreating the creeler’s son’s tactic of getting him to put his sister’s jumper over his head. They keep the photo album in a place where David can see it instead of William. In these ways, they displace the sexual act from their own bodies. David’s arousal by the album suggests that he is attracted to the same kinds of bodies as William, his hatred of William’s greed perhaps a hate for his own.

35Once David cums, he admits that he does not like William “like that.” William says he could tell David felt that way “within the first four minutes” of their meeting weeks prior. However, despite them both claiming to have known of their lack of chemistry, David’s orgasm is a point of culmination without which their tensions are not resolved. Is David’s confession that he does not like William an expression of post-orgasm shame, which may not be to do with William, and is William’s response a self-defence mechanism, a way of mitigating the hurt of this revelation by pretending that it is not a revelation at all? Why does David find sex with William less tolerable than the minicab drivers he has “allowed” to put mouths on him before? They decide that David will leave London later that same night, long before he had been due to go. What knowledge has David’s orgasm brought to the surface and whose is it?

36David’s past tense narration gives us the story he would like to tell many years later. David and William’s relationship may break down because of something fundamentally unequal and exploitative about their relationship, on which David’s orgasm offers him a moment of clarity, or the orgasm is a joy salvaged from the wreckage of their bond with what power he has. It might break down because David cannot bear the prospect of a gay life lived openly like William’s, or because William rejects the implicit offer of a desexualised friendship that David makes when saying he doesn’t like William “like that,” which implies that David may like William “like this,” if not as a sexual partner. David’s orgasm crystallises their situationship as an impasse, though I do not know why. Orgasms have put an end to my own delusions of where a relationship may be leading. In the orgasm can be the knowledge that an indefinable something has taken shape. It is over, or it ought to be.

 

37When they part at the train station, William predicts that David will, like the other boys, “‘come back, sooner or later. It just depends how long you can put up with the shitholes you call home.’” I do not imagine that David’s life will be happy when he gets back to the island—he will have the same problems as before—but the affection William has offered David has implicitly demanded that David hate his home or imagine himself better than it. This leaves me with a question of Muñoz’s utopian model. If queerness is something or somewhere else, what am I meant to do with the history and the homeland that I inherit? What am I meant to do with the place that has offered me a form of love which I am yet to experience from queer people? Sometimes chosen families put given families to shame, but sometimes chosen families decide not to choose you anymore.

  • 10 Jackson’s Becoming Human offers a thorough conceptual framework that critiques definitions of the h (...)

38William makes one last offer: “‘I can bleat like a sheep—I mean, if that’s what you prefer?’” This is a reference to the joke that people from rural areas are sheep-shaggers, usually made by people who perceive themselves to live somewhere more urban and thus advanced. It is also a throwback to David’s arrival, when he felt like a sheep being appraised. Now, on leaving, William offers to be the sheep. The issue is less who is the sheep but rather that their dynamic seems to require one or other of them to occupy that position. The issue might be the very definition of human that enables both to be such no matter the irreconcilable differences between them, while an animal is invoked as the thing so different that neither of them could actually be it, but which they might be figuratively, if they allowed the other to objectify them.10

 

39David accepts a cashmere jumper as William’s parting gift. On the train from London to Edinburgh, it sits on the luggage rack above him. At Edinburgh, he leaves it behind, explaining: “I would never be able to justify the extravagance of it to my father.” David has rejected William and, along with it, the idea that he could conduct himself in a way that is legibly gay. He imagines his father’s way of perceiving him as somehow safer. Leaving the jumper behind may feel like a symbolic act of self-affirmation, but it could also have kept him warm against the wind that comes for standalone trees on the island. The “myself” that David wanted to be during his summer is, following his trip to London, being defined in opposition to David rather than his father. However, as William is the only representative of uncloseted gayness in his life, David risks identifying himself in opposition to the very parts of himself he has become so used to hiding. However, the fact that a thing needs to be hidden is incontrovertible evidence that it is there, like it or not.

40In the orgasm he has with William, David’s queerness reaches a horizon toward which it has been orientated since the beginning of summer. His reaching toward the future is laden with the baggage of the conditions which produce his present: his own upbringing in which his father has held influence, and the colonial history that inflects the culture within which he and William interact. How does David get to queerness if he is stuck at an impasse named the “Scottish gay”? Where will he find the knowledge that one exploitative man, if that is what William was, or one bond that brought forth unbearable feelings, if that is what they were, does not mean a lifetime of denying yourself opportunities to love?

41I am not certain that people can help the bodies they reward with expressions of desire, or, if they are researchers, the subjects which they are drawn to study. When Muñoz speaks of an “educated mode of desiring,” I do not believe he imagines that David, for instance, could learn to desire William, or that something learned on his journey will prevent him from finding the creeler’s son attractive when he gets back. Rather, an educated desire is perhaps the question of how one acts in light of their desires and aversions. To say that systemic inequities stemming from colonialist histories have shaped the pressures placed upon David’s desires is not to say he is doomed to reproduce them. It’s to say that what he calls love can be violence to himself and others, but that also what he calls love, built upon, will turn the pain that violence has engendered into something else.

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Bibliographie

Amin, Kadji. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. Print.

Amin, Kadji, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez. “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and Violences of the Social.” ASAP/Journal 2.2 (2017): 227-39. Print.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham: Duke UP, 2022. Print.

Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Print.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Print.

Delgado, Michael. “Coming of Age.” Literary Review 490 (2020): n. pag. Web. 22 Sept. 2024.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP, 2018. Print.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019. Print.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York UP, 2020. Print.

Mahn, Churnjeet. “The Uses of Queer Scottish Form.” Scottish Literary Review 16.1 (2024): 79-96. Print.

Morace, Robert. “Historicizing Shuggie Bain’s Reception.” The Bottle Imp, Supplement 8B, 2022. N. pag. Web. 20 September 2024.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.

Penney, James. After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics. London: Pluto P, 2014. Print.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. 2007. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. Print.

Rankine, Claudia. Just Us: An American Conversation. London: Allen Lane, 2020. Print.

Sharpe, Christina. Ordinary Notes. London: Daunt, 2023. Print.

Stuart, Douglas. “Douglas Stuart on Shuggie Bain and his tough start.” Interview by Simon Hattenstone. The Guardian 2 Apr. 2022. N. pag. Web. 22 Sept. 2024.

Stuart, Douglas. “The Englishman.” The New Yorker 7 Sept. 2020. N. pag. Web. 29 June 2023.

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Notes

1 The critical reception of Shuggie Bain is mapped thoroughly by Morace. Specific references to Stuart’s writing as “autobiographical” include Delgado’s “Coming of Age” and Hattenstone’s 2022 interview with Stuart.

2 See, for example, Amin, Musser, and Pérez.

3 All quotes from “The Englishman” are from the online version of The New Yorker.

4 These paragraphs reference Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, Muñoz’s “something else” (154) and “educated mode of desiring” (1) as found in Cruising Utopia, Berlant and Edelman’s “nonsovereignty” (vii-viii) as found in Sex, or the Unbearable, and Berlant’s “inconvenience” as described in On the Inconvenience of Other People.

5 My argument that the practice of queer studies enacts a certain inattention to the ongoing legacies of colonial violence is largely influenced by Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages. My thoughts are further shaped by Penney, Gopinath, and Hartman, among others. There is opportunity for further reckoning with the relation between colonialism and queer studies in a UK and specifically Scottish context, a vein of enquiry examined by Mahn and which I plan to investigate in future research.

6 See Amin’s Disturbing Attachments for a detailed analysis of the ethical bind that pederasty places upon some queer scholarship.

7 My orientation of focus toward the “gesture” and the “quotidian” is a methodological cue I take from Muñoz.

8 See, for example: Rankine’s Just Us for how racist structures manifest in idealisations of blonde hair; Hartman’s Wayward Lives for how racism biases a seemingly objective archive; and Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes for how racism appears in aesthetic choices of writers and artists. I do not cite these thinkers to indicate confluence or interchangeability between their positions, nor as an exhaustive list of writing on this subject.

9 See Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection for a critical interrogation of how the history of enslavement has shaped liberal understandings of “agency,” “will,” and “individuality.”

10 Jackson’s Becoming Human offers a thorough conceptual framework that critiques definitions of the human in connection with nonhuman, animal, and critical race studies.

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Darryl Peers, « Too Good for the Gays: Douglas Stuart’s “The Englishman” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 83 | 2024, 125-141.

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Darryl Peers, « Too Good for the Gays: Douglas Stuart’s “The Englishman” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 83 | Autumn 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 22 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4524

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Auteur

Darryl Peers



Darryl Peers is a writer from Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He received an AHRC studentship to undertake his doctoral research at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he is writing his first novel and a memoir. He is the co-editor of the “Queer Form in Scottish Writing,” a special issue of the Scottish Literary Review (2024). His research is forthcoming in Ali Smith: Critical Essays and The Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and Simon Fraser University. He was a columnist for The Press & Journal and his short fiction has appeared in publications such as The Suburban Review and American Literary Review.

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