Trysts among the trees

In this current era of identity politics and a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality amongst a younger generation, it’s somewhat surprising to be reminded that there remains one letter in the ever-shifting LGBT acronym that is still considered something of an unspoken taboo: male bisexuality. One only has to count the number of, say, professional sportsmen who admit an attraction to men as well as women to see how far there is still to go.

Luke Turner makes no secret of his bisexuality, and is all the better a person — and a writer — for it. A Methodist minister’s son who came of age in the 1990s when the music of Suede and Pet Shop Boys offered succour, he hit upon an early truth: the queer world appeared to offer little support, while at the same time ‘bisexuals are perceived to be a threat to heteronormative culture, louche, priapic and oversexed, greedy males for whom any hole’s a goal’. To the confused onlooker the bisexual man, Turner quips, ‘seems to be having his cock and eating it’.

From this social displacement grew a furtiveness, much of which is explored in Out of the Woods through Turner’s fascination with Epping Forest, a place rich with myth, fears and family connections. It’s also a book that turns the nature memoir genre upon its head. Those who go down to the woods today expecting bucolic rhapsodies will be jolted by what lies beneath this book’s exterior. Turner writes bravely about crude teenage sexual awakenings ‘on the slimy floors of grotty toilets’, only later realising that he was the victim of predatory pederasts drawn to a pretty boy in a school uniform six or seven years below the then age of consent.