Join us at Mostly Books on Friday 7th June at 6.30pm as we celebrate Pride Month with a Queer Writers’ Panel, chaired by author Laura Kay (Wild Things). On the panel are Jaiming Tang (Cinema Love), Luke Turner (Men at War), and Neil Blackmore (Radical Love).

Cinema Love

For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meagre existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented The Workers’ Cinema: a theatre where gay men cruised for love.

While classic war films played, Old Second and his fellow countrymen found intimacy in the privacy of The Workers’ Cinema’s screening rooms. Elsewhere, in the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men – guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when secrets are unveiled, they set in motion a series of haunting events that propel Old Second and Bao Mei towards an uncertain future in America.

Spanning three timelines – post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York – Cinema Love is a tender epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden and frustrated relationships as they grapple with the past and their unspoken desires.

Men At War

As a child, Luke Turner was obsessed with the Second World War. Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war.

In Men at War, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to recognise men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men – including those in his own family – Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life. There are conscientious objectors, a bisexual Commando, a pacifist poet who flew for Bomber Command, a transgender RAF pilot, a soldier who suffered in Japanese POW camps and later in life became an LGBT+ activist, and those who simply did what they could just to survive and return home to a complicated peace.

By exploring a wartime experience that embraces sex, lust and the body as much as tactics and weaponry, Turner argues that the only way we can really understand the Second World War is to get to grips with the complexity of the lives and identities of those who fought and endured it.

Radical Love

London, 1809. By day, minister John Church preaches to a congregation of commonfolk in Southwark. By night, he is drawn to the secretive, alluring world of a molly house on Vere Street. There, ordinary men reinvent themselves as outrageous queens, lads on the make flirt with labourers and princes alike, and John finds himself ordaining marriages between men. When he meets the unworldly and free-thinking Ned, one of a group of African abolitionists who attend his chapel, John falls in love with Ned’s tender nature and discovers how quickly desire can turn to obsession.

Based on the true story of one of the most important events in queer history, Radical Love is a sensuous and prescient story about gender and sexuality, and how the most vulnerable survive in dangerous times.