Morgan, N. (2016). Love Notes to Men Who Don’t Read. London: Limehouse Books. 248 pp.

North Morgan’s (2016) novel Love Notes to Men Who Don’t Read provides a not-so-elaborate, but entirely parodic, examination of affluent, white gay-male life in the metropoles of the Western world. Seeking a tongue-in-cheek response, Morgan begs the reader(s) to open their eyes to the contemptuous nature of those part-time employed, luxury-leaning, circuit-party bound gym bunnies who seem to occupy the spotlight of the gay imaginary. He goes as far as to suggest that the narrator – a laughable and unlikeable hedonist with a penchant for racist, misogynist and xenophobic remarks that debase more than 95% of Western society/ies and, indeed, glorify the Neo-Nazis vision of the ascending Aryan races – might embody the celebrity aspirations of white gay men in the 2010s.

As one reviewer writes, “This book is pessimism branded as brave honesty, but I wonder to what end.” Indeed, to what end does this pacification of gay life serve? To characterise gay life as such – to reprimand the vulgarities of consumerist image(s), which are not specific to gay life, but rather endemic to consumers who choose to participate in image cultures that enable the largely uncritical (and thus unconfronted) discourses about what qualifies as “petty,” “superficial” or “vain” – is to solve nothing and provide no values for growth, emotional and mental support or ideations of healthy futures. In other words, by blowing open the box on the gay elite (which has elsewhere been undertaken with fewer spelling and grammatical errors and greater nuance), Morgan attempts to deepen a conversation about the central ideologies, objects and values of “gay life,” not unlike Alan Downs’s (2005) seductive The Velvet Rage or Matthew Todd’s (2012) “revolutionary clarion” Straight Jacket. We are left with a stark portrait, without hope, a wasteland of the gay male body; to ascertain from the broken pieces with which the narrator ends the limited capacities to imagine that gay life, far from a perpetual cycle of drugs, sex, boredom and social media obsession, might also make room for critical awareness of non-consumer life. In short, the novel ends before it begins. It leaves no room for a future, and because of this, the book loses its critique and its impulse to grow sideways into other ways of living.