Scottish Fiction's Queer Communities

chapter 9 From Subtext to Gaytext? Scottish Fiction’s Queer Communities Carole Jones Abstract This chapter examines representations of queer groups in Scottish fiction to investi- gate whether the concept of community engaged with in these texts succeeds in pro- ducing a radical imagining of what Iris Marion Young calls an ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ that resists the emerging homonormativity of gay identity. Keywords Queer – homosexuality – gay – community – Scottish fiction – drag queen – identity – homonormativity – Ali Smith – Luke Sutherland This chapter explores the presence of gay communities in Scottish fiction. Though a relatively recent phenomenon, these representations are ambivalent towards closed or strictly bounded social groupings and identities, and illus- trate uncertainties for queer people arising from the concept of community. In the early days of gay liberation, community delineated a liberatory alternative space to counter the often violent exclusions enacted by family, kinship, nation and other social formations. However, the interpellation to identity of such communities inevitably produces its own constraints and limitations, con- structing closures as well as opportunities for relations. This tension between the individual and community has vivid moments of expression in Scottish gay fictional representation as we move from the subterfuge of the queer-inflected characters in the early twentieth century, through the closeted mid-century, to a gradual but sometimes playfully carnivalesque coming out in the last few decades. The envisioning of queer communities remains ambivalent, present- ing rebellious resistance to the heteronormative mainstream as well as what we can term a homonormative embrace of mainstream values. This chapter surveys selected queer Scottish fiction texts with regard to these tensions and examines the evidence they provide for a radical imagining or queering of gay © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�745�_0�� <UN> 180 Jones communities to set against an emerging Western conservative homonationalist agenda.1 I will begin by investigating the queer Scottish context and the signifi- cance of community as it emerges in gay rights discourses. I will then turn to the literary contexts, beginning by highlighting some of the queering characters of early twentieth-century Scottish fiction and moving on to examine con- trasting representations of gay community in contemporary texts, concluding with readings of two innovative narratives, Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy and Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy. Christopher Whyte’s 1998 novel The Gay Decameron references the parame- ters for a nationalist debate. At its close a group of gay men, who have just spent the evening, and the novel, having dinner together, speculate on their place in the wider community: ‘You know, I was listening to a programme on the radio this morning – yesterday morning, I mean – about gay adoption, and a woman actually used the phrase “host community”’. ‘As if we were immigrants, and could be deported’, said Andrew. ‘Where do they think we arrived from?’ Nicol said. ‘That’s the dream, isn’t it?’ said Ramon. ‘A world without homosexuals’. ‘A country without jessies’, said Andrew. ‘A denellified Scotland’.2 This notion of homosexuals as outsiders, parasites, and alien to the nation’s story presents a familiar attitude, until fairly recently, of the wider community, but also of queer individuals themselves. Scottish queers have frequently expressed not feeling part of that national narrative, in their memoirs as well as in their fiction, a consciousness they associate with homosexuality but also specifically with the Scottish context. As Bob Cant has expressed it, ‘[t]he difficulty there is in Scotland about words […;] there weren’t words that you could use to talk about your sexuality’.3 1 See Jasbir K. Puar on the emergence of national homosexuality or homonationalism in relation to the post 9/11 us context: ‘some homosexual subjects are complicit with heterosexual nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them […;] the war on terror has rehabilitated some – clearly not all or most – lesbians, gays, and queers to u.s. national citizenship within a spatial-temporal domain I am invoking as “homonationalism”’. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 4, 38. These political tendencies can also be seen in Right and Far-right European politics, for example in the figure of Pym Fortuyn in the Netherlands, assassinated in 2002. 2 Christopher Whyte, The Gay Decameron (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), p. 344. 3 Bob Cant, contributor to the Remember When oral history project, quoted in Rainbow City: Stories from Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Edinburgh, ed. by Ellen Galford and Ken Wilson (Edinburgh: Word Power, 2006), p. 19. <UN>.

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