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Product Description
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.
Amazon Review
Subtitled "A tour around the Gay Ghettos, Queer Spots and Camp Sights of Britain", Paul Burston's Queens' Country mixes travel writing with social observation and thoughts about modern gay male culture. The result is a British equivalent of Edmund White's States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. Starting from South Wales (where Burston grew up) and ending in London (naturally), Queens' Country includes chapters on Manchester, Derbyshire, Edinburgh, Belfast, Essex and Somerset. Not everyone is going to agree with Burston's views on the gay community and the commercial scene, but his writing is always entertaining, even at its most trenchant.
His prose is full of sharp observations and deliciously bitchy asides. He also includes some amusing stories about his own experiences of growing up gay. As well as illuminating his love-hate relationship with the gay scene, these anecdotes give the book an additional, and revealing, dimension. Insisting that there's more to gayness than Gaytime TV, Queens' Country gives a window on a wide variety of urban and rural gay lives, and in doing so amply demonstrates the diversity of British queer life. With its tales of Bristol sex workers and Edinburgh booksellers, it's nothing if not readable. -- Vincent Quinn
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