“ I tried going to the gay clubs in Glasgow, but I didn’t know anybody, and the clubs become really sexual too quick, and that was too much https://www.hookupdate.net/es/catholicmatch-review/ for me,” he recalls. ? “ I didn’t want to go to one-night-stands, to parts of Glasgow I’ve never seen. Some people to talk to.”
He’s previously explored those feelings – of isolation and dislocation, of the emotional and hormonal questing of teenage years and young adulthood – in two short stories for The New Yorker, both published in 2020.
In Found Wanting, a 17-year-old boy in early-’90s Glasgow, detached from all forms of gay culture, meets a solicitor (who claims to be 38) for sex via the only means available to him: personal ads in the pages of a ? “ youth magazine, a glossy that I devoured because the nights were too quiet and I could not afford the company of a television”. The Englishman chronicles a young man’s journey from the Western Isles to London, to take up a position as a ? “ houseboy” that was advertised in a gay magazine.
That self-hatred instilled an anger in Stuart later, something he sought to rectify in Young Mungo. The author wanted a different life for his own young protagonists, for their connection to be ? “ a very pure thing”.
In the book, James spends time tending to pigeons in a doocot. A gentle, symbolic activity he and Mungo bond over.
“ For me, [James] was this strong, upright, upstanding man, but inside was where all his wonder was,” Stuart says. (He can envision what the character looks like, alluding to, but falling short of naming, a certain sticky-out-eared Scottish model.)
“ It is literally compartmentalised, in cages with a padlock on the door,” he continues, ? “ but he’s conspicuous on the landscape. ” The two share this innocence and naivety, ? “ but they don’t belong in the only place they belong to, and they know it.”
The book is about the impossibility of escape in that way, the constrictions of poverty prohibiting Stuart’s characters from reaching their full potential. It applies to the traditional young lads of the time, who had ? “ that Irvine Welsh thing, the ? ‘ why fucking bother?’ [attitude]”. But it also applies, on a micro level, to the gay characters desperate to flee, yet held back by both poverty and homophobia.
Even after his mother’s death and he advanced towards adulthood, exploring gay life without the pressure of family honour and school bullies still felt stilted
I was born a generation after Stuart, but grew up in a Scottish town 40 minutes east of where he was raised. Our childhoods were different (though my mother died when I was a child, too, albeit of cancer) but the enclaves of poverty were similarly scattered around where I lived. My high school’s catchment area extended to a village with a so-called ? “ millionaires’ row” and a town with such distinct levels of poverty that BBC Scotland made documentaries about it.
“ The thing about these [housing] schemes is that the kids can’t get off them,” Stuart says. He’d managed to make it to college in Galashiels before he’d had the opportunity to explore the middle class world of Glasgow’s West End.
Mungo is this young man coming to terms with his sexuality, but he hasn’t thought about it before because he’s had other things to think about
“ You will know that Glasgow’s an extremely diverse city, Douglas,” he says to me, using my name. It’s something he does naturally in interviews, a reminder that he’s seeking to have a two-sided conversation about what matters to him. ? “ It has real pockets of fancy. I never saw them until I was 19. Part of it was economic, but a big part of it was psychological: why would you ever go to that neighbourhood? Who do you know there?”
