Love in a Dark Time : And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature

by Colm Toibin

• ISBN13: 9780743229449
• ISBN10: 0743229444
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-08
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

Colm Tóibín knows the languages of the outsider, the secret keeper, the gay man or woman. He knows the covert and overt language of homosexuality in literature. In Love in a Dark Time, he also describes the solace of finding like-minde

Author Biography

Colm Tóibín is the author of four novels: The Blackwater Lightship, The South, The Heather Blazing, and The Story of the Night, which won the 1998 Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay novel and is on the Lambda list of the 100 best gay novels of all time. In 1995, he received the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tóibín also wrote the nonfiction books Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Homage to Barcelona, and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe and is the editor of the Anthology of Irish Literature. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

Roaming the Greenwood

Oscar Wilde: Love in a Dark Time

Roger Casement: Sex, Lies and the Black Diaries

Thomas Mann: Exit Pursued by Biographers

Francis Bacon: The Art of Looking

Elizabeth Bishop: Making the Casual Perfect

James Baldwin: The Flesh and the Devil

Thom Gunn: The Energy of the Present

Pedro Almodóvar: The Laws of Desire

Mark Doty: The Search for Redemption

Good-bye to Catholic Ireland

Acknowledgments

Excerpts

Introduction It was the winter of 1964 in the town of Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland and I was training to be an altar boy. My fellow apprentices and I spent an hour three evenings a week in the vestry of the cathedral learning the intricacies of serving Mass and Benediction. We learned by rote the names of all the vestments the priest wore -- the amice, the alb, the girdle, the stole, the maniple, and the chasuble. We learned how to ring the bell on the altar, first to alert the Mass-goers to the immanence of the Consecration and once more as the Host was raised and the chalice lifted. We learned how to serve the water so the priest could wash his fingers. We learned how to hold the gold plate under the chins of those who came to receive Communion.We were serious and dutiful, knowing that we had been chosen carefully not only because of our families' position in the town but because of something the priests had noticed about us, a lack of a rebellious spirit perhaps, a willingness to bow our heads during religious ceremonies and an ability to go straight home when they were over.After our training sessions we did not go straight home. We went to the chip shop opposite the cathedral, which served hamburgers and fried fish and fried potatoes. There were a few tables at the front, and although we ordered only take-away chips, we liked to sit there. Walking through the streets with the chips somehow did not involve the same pleasure as eating them in the shop. I loved pouring salt over the potatoes and then vinegar and watching the vinegar melt the salt. The fries were always too hot for my delicate altar boy's hands and I liked to sit in the window and let them cool.The two men who ran the chip shop wore white tunics and black-and-white trousers. One of them was thin and dark and very hairy. He always seemed to have a few days' stubble. He could have been Italian, but he was, I knew, from the town. The other had fair hair, was stockier. I watched them as they flung potatoes into the oil, waited for them to cook, and then vigorously fished them from the oil, tossing them into another compartment of the chip-making machinery. They were businesslike, but never friendly. I have no memory of their voices.One evening, the dark one told us that we could no longer sit at the tables. The tables were for people eating meals, he said. Not for take-away customers. When we got our chips, he said, we were to leave. He was firm about this, so there seemed no point in telling him that since the tables were always empty at this time it could hardly matter. It seemed to matter to him. We never sat at the tables again.I have a vague memory of two half-heard snatches of conversation in the subsequent few years. One is my mother talking to someone, I cannot think who it might have been. She is saying that the two men in the chip shop go everywhere together, that she had seen them, or someone had seen them, out for a Sunday drive together. I have no memory of a label being used. She does not say homosexual or queer, or anything like that. But it is clear to me that they are together and it is unusual, and yet she does not seem to disapprove. And later someone visits the house who is a great gossip and always has interesting and accurate information about many things and people in the town. She mentions the couple in the chip shop and uses the wordmisbehavingand says that the police have had to intervene and that the men have been put away. No one else in the room comments.Decades later, I wonder if we learner altar boys were banished from the tables so that the two men on the other side of the counter could guard themselves against suggestions that they were preying on the young. I wonder what pressure they were under in those years, from the town, from the law. (The Victorian laws against homosexual acts between men remained on the Irish statute books until the early 1990s, and were s