VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

Monday, April 20, 0:15:40 [ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, [5], 6, 7, 8 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 19:14:45 10/24/07 Wed
Author: pamelalass
Subject: WOW. Melva, thank you so much for taking the time to share these thoughtful comments. I hope you will also thank whoever your friend 'in the know' is. I think you are right that there are nuances to the physical intimacy depicted in the book, as varying expressions of desire/passion/love, that may not be as clear or obvious to most of us in the conversation here. >>>>
In reply to: MelvaT 's message, "This quote was twisting my mind so much I had to talk to someone in the 'know' before I could play today. Here's how the differences were explained to me. >>>>" on 16:43:26 10/24/07 Wed

This is by no means to suggest that there is some kind of monolithic gay cultural sensibility, or that you have to be gay to write a good gay character, and I hope I will not offend anyone by confessing that I have had a similar impulse since reading BOTB. I asked one of my dearest friends, who is gay, to read it and tell me what he thinks, not just of the sex, or the affair with Percy, but also about John's impossible love, and whether he thinks John is an interesting gay character - - too unbelievable? or too stereotypical? or not "too" anything but just right? etc. Well, that would have been nice, perhaps, but he couldn't get past something in the first few chapters about Percy's eyelashes fluttering, and said it was all just "too bodice-ripper without any actual bodices." Which struck me as too bad, since I thought the sex scenes were fairly straightforward (eye-opening for me, but not purply prose-y at all!), and I don't think my friend has ever actually read a bodice-ripper, but I thought he might actually find this book interesting. Darn. He never wants to read anything fun. I told him he had to at least read the love scenes, he said he would and I haven't heard from him on it since. I think if he'd found anything particularly outlandish (*g*) - - to his sensibilities - - he'd have said something, as usually he is unable to resist chaffing me about whatever my current literary enthusiasm is (he laughed REALLY hard when I had to confess that the book is special to me because of the LOL boards, and the acknowledgments, and that I go by "pamelalass" here...). But he's been busy watching the Red Sox, so maybe in a week or so we'll all have caught up on our sleep enough for me to bug him about it.

The other thing I really wanted to get some perspective on was the piece about Jamie's revulsion for John's homosexuality. I've been thinking perhaps it is just a matter of the different times we live in, but I think it would be hard for a man today not to feel a lot of anger about being spurned by someone in the way Jamie spurns John, and then, adding insult to injury, to be reviled and held up as a pederast. John seems to accept that Jamie's feelings are both "the way of the world", and an expression of his personal faith/ethics/etc. It's probably just that we're talking about the 18th century, and straight people had no notion of needing to present themselves as "tolerant", while gay people had no expectation of being met with anything other than revulsion, frequently in tandem with criminal charges. But I still think John is so "in love" with Jamie as a man of honor and inner beauty, that he lets him off the hook for his hostility and alienation, talking about Jamie's severance of the friendship at Ardsmuir with regret, but not with rancor. It's as if he doesn't think he deserves Jamie's company or friendship either; he enjoyed it while he had it, but he lives knowing, and accepting, that to reveal himself is to be reviled.

One might think he'd expect better from the object of his great unrequited love - - precisely because one of the reasons he finds Jamie so worthy of his love is his admiration for Jamie's innate sense that every man should be accorded respect, dignity, and humanity - - even if John doesn't expect better from the rest of the world, even his own family, but that's part of the whole paradox of this convoluted friendship. Did he in fact expect "better" when he went to talk to Jamie about Percy in the stableyard? It makes me think that part of his devotion to Bree is that while he doesn't expect it, he actually gets treated with equanimity and respect by her, even if he doesn't know exactly why her response to his openness is so different from everyone else in 1770's polite society.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:



[ Contact Forum Admin ]



Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.