The Queer Bookshelf: A Reader’s Guide
Author: Layla McCay
ISBN-13: 978-1917189071
Publisher: Scribe
Guideline Price: £14.99
In the author’s note introducing The Queer Bookshelf, Layla McCay outlines the reasoning underlying her use of the term queer. Not every reader will appreciate or approve of the word, she writes, and not every LGBT citizen identifies with it – but the term has journeyed far, and it has “largely been reclaimed from its history as a slur”.
This note is not only an important acknowledgment of the diversities within the reading and LGBT worlds, but also a clear signal that the contents of this book ultimately flow from a sequence of choices: as McCay writes, “perhaps every bookshelf is a self-portrait”.
It’s a significant point, and one that McCay is wise to make clear. The Queer Bookshelf at first glance appears comprehensive, or relatively so: its opening pages look back into the distant past, to writings on sexual diversity in Greece and Rome, Arabia, Mesopotamia, India, and Japan. Later chapters offer surveys of Renaissance and Victorian literature, including readings of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins and others, before the narrative settles into the modern era, into what one senses is more comfortable and familiar ground for McCay.
But at all times, the titles in its pages ought to be regarded as a mere guide, with much omitted. This is by no means a criticism, but rather a caution: it is all too easy for a book like this to be regarded as a comprehensive or encyclopaedic survey, as a step towards the formation of a canon. But canons are by their nature exclusionary: they delete material from the record.
The Irish writers covered here – or not – illustrate this point. The Queer Bookshelf offers useful and gratifying notes on such comparatively neglected writers as John Broderick and Kenneth Martin, as well as established figures including Emma Donoghue and Colm Tóibín. But there are no mentions of, say, Kate O’Brien, John Boyne, Mary Dorcey and Keith Ridgway: of queer Irish writers who have more than earned their place in any survey of LGBT culture – and this same operation of omission is, one must assume, at work throughout the book.
We would be wise, then, to eagerly accept the sustenance offered by The Queer Bookshelf – while always searching elsewhere and hungrily for more.
Neil Hegarty is an author and critic
