‘My libido’s last hurrah!’

At first sight Gilbert Adair’s new book seems like shameless pornography of a particularly sad and depraved kind, but more charitably and more accurately we discover as we read on that it is the story of an unlikely martyr-hero who risks his life in the cause of militant homosexuality rather than suffer suicidal loneliness. As a youth Gideon occasionally has very mild spasms of lust for boys but is content enough to lie beside a girl, his clumsy fingers inching past the cups of her brassiere to toy with her nipples. Suddenly her record player sings out, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream/ Make him the cutest I’ve ever seen /Give him two lips like rose and clover/Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over.’ The scales fall from Gideon’s eyes. That’s what he wants. But where is this magical ‘him’ to replace the girl beside him whose habit of picking her nose reminds him of a chimney sweep dislodging a particularly stubborn chunk of soot?

After a few unsuccessful attempts to find such a paragon Gideon goes to Paris to teach at a Berlitz which astonishingly turns out to be a nest of gays. He’s overjoyed not just because he theoretically shares their tastes but because he longs to be a member of a set though he knows he isn’t a fully fledged one and so do they. One of them looks like the ideal lover Mr Sandman described, but the nearest Gideon gets to him is helping him squeeze a pimple until it pops. His first pick-up in St Germain-des-Près screams with pain when Gideon, invited to suck ‘it’, accidentally bites instead and is sent packing and told he smells.