Chapter One: How I Learned To Love Dan Brown

When people find out what I do for a job they invariably tilt their heads with a wistful, faraway look and say oh, I would just love to work in a bookshop, I’d have so much time to read! Yes you would, in the same way that a neurosurgeon has time to read the latest Peter Carey while slicing open a cerebellum.
The reality is that booksellers have a demanding job that requires constant, laser-like attention. Alphabetisation, price pointing and forced smiling are just some of the complex procedures I have performed over the years. Not to mention holding my tongue when someone wants to purchase Decoding the Da Vinci Code.



Time to read, you ask? I barely have time to write, which is unfortunate considering that between counter shifts I’m also trying to complete my first novel. It’s taken me a few years but hallelujah, Oprah be praised, it’s almost in the bag. A big gay epic that I hope will one day join the pantheon of our most beloved queer authors.
With any luck some tireless Oxford Street bookseller will one day be recommending my novel as part of the Mini Gay Canon, but until then I’ll seek glory with my day job and recommend to you, gentle reader, the five queer books that should be on every pink shelf in the city:

Hallucinating Foucault
As a writer I love books about writers. We’re a self indulgent bunch aren’t we? Patricia Duncker’s first novel charts the sexual and textual obsession of a young Cambridge graduate student for Paul Michel, a famous French author now incarcerated in a mental institution. Think Prison Break meets Proust. The sort of book that provokes the intellect and overpowers the senses.
Where to be seen reading it: the lush grounds of the former Rozelle Hospital.

Tales of the City
For many years I avoided reading this book, only because an ex-boyfriend used to sleep with it under his pillow. Now I can understand his reasoning if not his method. Armistead Maupin’s rollicking San Franciscan saga tracks the lives and loves of a menagerie of memorable misfits that gravitate to 28 Barbary Lane and its dope-growing trans-landlady (gloriously overplayed by Olympia Dukakis in the TV mini-series.)
Where to be seen reading it: in the herb garden of a Newtown sharehouse.

Holding the Man
Is there anyone who didn’t weep buckets when they read the final pages? Tommy Murphy’s genius stage adaptation of Tim Conigrave’s 1995 memoir has reinvented this gay Australian classic for the short attention span of Generation Y. Love in the time of AIDS has never been depicted with more wit or humanity.
Where to be seen reading it: Boy Charlton pool on the last day of summer.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Fact number one: in 1985 this was the first lesbian book I had ever encountered (not including Pippi Longstocking). Fact number two: Jeanette Winterson’s groundbreaking novel was the book that made me want to become a writer. An evangelical mother armed with Pentecostal hymns locks horns with her foundling daughter in a gritty Northern English town. It sounds grim but Winterson’s experimental style is heavenly. (Fact number three: the UK’s largest book chain refused to order any copies until Oranges had won the Whitbread Prize.)
Where to be seen reading it: the front pew on Sunday morning.

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
Whether he’s compiling evidence for Sharon Stone’s madness or dishing about Madonna’s graceless behaviour at Donatella’s shindig, Rupert Everett never fails to astonish with his incisive prose and self-deprecating humour. Even as a child it seems he was a source of mortification and amusement for those around him: after seeing Julie Andrews on the silver screen he donned one of his mother’s skirts and refused to take it off until Mary Poppins claimed him as her daughter.
Where to be seen reading it: by torchlight at the premiere of Madonna’s next flop.