Has Scottish literature thrown off the shackles of machismo?
Has it finally rid itself of "the Scottish male's abject horror of his own intrinsic self-and-otherness or 'effeminacy'", asks Berthold Schoene in his introduction to Out There. This is the first major collection of queer writing from Scotland since Joseph Mills's Borderline in 2001.
That the question should be posed in such masculine terms doesn't imply myopia on Schoene's part, however, but rather that of the Scottish cultural scene of the last 100 or so years.
It is therefore to the great credit of novelist Zoe Strachan, who has edited this collection, that this sophisticated and mature volume does a great deal more than simply tackle the heterosexual viewpoint that dominates most Scottish literary work, especially in very male-dominated stories.
The short stories, poems and non-fiction collected here all put lesbian women and gay men at the centre of society and the centre of the story. But they do so in such a casual and easeful way that it almost feels as though the centre of society and the centre of the story are a place they have always occupied.
The assertiveness that comes with it, which is suggested by the work here, is to be welcomed, but that things weren't always like this is gently pointed out in two highly effective short stories. In the first, The Man In The Mirror by Damian Barr, a young boy growing up in 1980s urban Scotland tries to hide the fact that he has started shaving, most notably from his suspiciously aggressive stepfather.
In the second, After Ovid, by Ronald Frame, a gay Scotsman in London in the 1960s, when homosexuality was still illegal, is tricked by a police 'sting' operation.
The bridge between the hypocrisy and victimisation of 'then' and the tentative hope of 'later', is built beautifully by Allan Radcliffe's moving short story, Outing, where two gay men who have been a couple for a very long time finally feel comfortable enough to share a kiss in Waverley Station.
They've observed a younger gay couple displaying their affections; why can't they? "All our most intimate moments, the voiced fears, the planning, the arguments and the making up, have taken place behind closed doors."
Similarly, Nicola White's I Live Here Now contrasts a couple comfortable with the open nature of their sexuality, and a single lesbian who still bristles at perceived slights.
The crucial move from that kind of 'later', where public avowal demands real courage, to the 'now' of acceptance, comes from the likes of Kerry Hudson's Grown On This Beach, or Jackie Kay's Grace And Rose. In these tales, 'going public' is handled perfectly by both protagonists and authors. And in Louise Welsh's The Face At The Window, The Wave Of The Hand, the principal character just happens to be a lesbian: so what if she is, it seems to ask.
Whether the poem or the story draws attention to sexuality, as in Toni Davidson's As The Veneer Of Sexuality Begins To Fade, or sees it as incidental, as Welsh's ghost story does, both represent a significant advance.
This is the kind of collection that emphasises the close relationship between society and cultural subject matter: as the former progresses in attitude, so too the latter shifts. What had to be hidden can be more overt.
Shoene highlights Elaine Showalter's "mischievous queering of a Scottish world classic" in her 1991 study Sexual Anarchy, when she read Stevenson's Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde as "'a case study of male hysteria' and a 'fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic'".
Would this be the kind of reading no longer required in today's brave, new, more open world?
John Maley's A Guid Cause is poised and politically articulate, but it also reminds us that struggles will always exist between those who have power and a voice, and those who have neither.
Schoene ends his introduction on a hopeful note about a "brand-new pre-independence Scotland", clearly identifying progress in Scots' attitudes to sexuality and sexualities, with progress in its nation status and the power that such progress can wield.
The writers in this volume maybe do not always link politics and sex in such a clear-cut way as Maley does. But then, they do not always need to; the one very rarely exists without the other.
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