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Clayton Littlewood

Auteur de Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho

2+ oeuvres 35 utilisateurs 3 critiques

Œuvres de Clayton Littlewood

Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho (2008) 25 exemplaires
Goodbye to Soho (2012) 10 exemplaires

Oeuvres associées

Wilde Stories 2014: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction (2014) — Contributeur — 15 exemplaires

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See my review to the follow-up, Goodbye to Soho – much the same applies here.
 
Signalé
dtw42 | Jan 5, 2019 |
By turns funny and achingly sad, filthy and sassy, poignant and nostalgic, Littlewood's delightfully-written journal recounts the struggle to keep his clothes store, Dirty White Boy, afloat through the credit crunch. Along the way we meet all of Soho life as it passes by (and through) the shop: ageing queens, drag artists, prostitutes and their madams, drug addicts, creatives, eccentrics and crooks.
 
Signalé
dtw42 | 1 autre critique | Jan 30, 2015 |
Soho clothes shop manager turned author Clayton Littlewood's second volume of 21st century diaries, after 'Dirty White Boy' a few years ago. This book is a lot more poignant, covering the illness and death of one of his Old Compton Street friends, as well as the passing of unique dandy artist Sebastian Horsley and the closing down of the shop itself. Larger-than-life characters come and go: eccentric customers, lovelorn elderly gay men, priests with a thing for thongs, and not least of all the street's formidable brothel madams.

This is a valuable book for social historians of the future, I feel, as it chronicles a rapidly changing era for both gay men and London. Mainstream Western acceptance of homosexuality has reached the point where straight people (including US presidents) happily campaign for the recognition of gay marriage - less than 50 years since being gay was a jailable offence. Gay men no longer need to find each other in dedicated bars and clubs - the Internet has changed all that. So Mr Littlewood is from one of the last generations of gay men who can remember how hard it was just to BE gay, and how London (and particularly Soho) used to represent British gay life per se.

Soho is changing, too, with the Crossrail development and the late Noughties recession forcing out its quirkier shops, while the more fashionable gay bars tend now to be found in Shoreditch, Vauxhall, Stoke Newington and Hoxton. 'Goodbye To Soho', therefore, says goodbye not just to a district, but to a whole era of old-school gay London life.

Still, some things haven't quite changed. I read somewhere that this book was having trouble getting reviewed because some magazine editors found it "too gay". This is an unhelpful phrase that says more about the person using it than the thing they're describing. Far more useful to say that anyone - however they spend their evenings - who likes reading contemporary diaries will enjoy this entertaining and honest book.
… (plus d'informations)
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Dickon.Edwards | 1 autre critique | Jun 30, 2013 |

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Œuvres
2
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1
Membres
35
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Évaluation
3.8
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3
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