Penzance (novel)

Congratulations on Issue #3. The interactive features are a plus. Page 43 contains a link to the novel Penzance. I only meant to take a quick look, but it sucked me in and I have already read the first six chapters. I don't want to give away the plot, but the narrator had a sexual relationship with a man from about age 8 to 11. It had a big impact on him, and a lot of the book (so far, 65 pages into a 256 page book) is his reflections on those years, from his current perspective as a married adult with kids of his own. How the boys I hung out with 40 years ago would feel today about what went on between us is something I think about a lot. While in most ways the relationship described in the novel is unlike what I had with my YFs, the effort to show this perspective is something rarely found (at least aside from a few mainstream novels that take the position the boy involved was, in spirit if not in fact, being raped). It's refreshing but also scary in its own way. One feature of the novel struck me as odd, though perhaps it reflects only the British setting. The narrator consistently refers to his AF only by his surname. I would think that if you are having sex almost daily for years, as it appears they were, you would get on a first name basis, at least eventually. Certainly my YFs in the 1980s called me by my first name. On the other hand, when the detectives got involved and questioned them, they used my surname (I have tape recordings of the interviews somewhere; they are required to share their evidence). Since in many cases the intervention of the police meant the end of my contact with those boys, maybe that is how they remember me now. hugzu ;-p