Quickie with Charlie Porter

Evan: Hi Charlie. So ‘Nova Scotia House’…what the BUTT is this?
Charlie: It’s my new novel. It imagines a contemporary of mine who arrived in London when I arrived in London, with emotional intelligence, by which I mean, had the capacity to say to a guy, ‘I need you to wear a condom.’ I didn’t even have the emotional intelligence to talk to a guy back then.
When did you arrive in London?
I came to London in 1992, when I was 19. I’m 52 this year. I started writing the book in 2020, so I shuffled it back a couple of years. It’s set in a parallel London. I really like speculative fiction and I wanted there to be absolutely no nostalgia in it. In the second chapter, the narrator goes to a party that’s clearly Horse Meat Disco, but it never says so. If you name it, a reader can fill in their own memories and I didn’t want that to happen.
You’ve been writing about fashion for years. Why write a novel now?
I’ve been writing fiction since about 2006. When I wrote my first full draft of a novel, I was talking with a senior figure in publishing who saw the stuff I’d been doing and said,
‘There’s no market for gay fiction.’
Wow.
It was just Oxbridge, Alan Hollinghurst, establishment stuff. And I kind of figured that I’d have to make a name for myself doing non-fiction first.
What was different about writing this book?
My first book, ‘What Artists Wear’, was about me working out if I could write a book. ‘Nova Scotia House’ was – can I write about love? Can I write about sex? Can I write about relationships? Can I write about living? Can I write about dying? I found writing about sex especially fun. Elemental and liberating. The sex becomes more more more as the book goes on…
You write about both good and bad sex. Is one easier than the other?
Good sex is easier to write about because more happens in good sex, whereas for me, bad sex is where nothing is happening. To describe bad sex is to describe nothing.
There are hookups in the book with this corporate gay. I love how the narrator is immediately turned off by the smell of cleaning solution in the elevator and the generic décor in the apartment. I felt like I’d been in that flat before…
Yeah, but then he still tries to make it hot, because, you know, he’s gone through the trouble of going there. He didn’t even pay for the Uber. Then after a period of months, they hook up again and something’s changed with the guy. He’s a bit trimmer and more aware of himself, whereas in the beginning, he was messier. They meet at this version of Horse Meat and the sex is hot, sloppy, more in the moment.
Insecurities get in the way. The second time, the guy keeps saying ‘That was amazing’ after he cums and the narrator is like, ‘That was nothing.’
The thing about sex is that orgasm isn’t the point. Often – in writing about sex – there’s the cliché of crescendo to this moment. That’s bullshit. It’s super heteronormative. Orgasm is the thing if you’re actually breeding. So, in the novel, orgasms just happen.
Did you have any references while writing the sex scenes?
No. My non-fiction books are all about primary sources – I have to see the letter or the document. But there’s so much in queer lives that you can’t research because there’s no documentation or the documentation is homophobic. There’s also no primary source with sex. You can remember sex, you can talk about sex, but there’s no primary source in the moment. To write about sex, you have to write fiction.
The sex scenes in ‘Nova Scotia House’ feel too real not to have first-hand observation.
You know, I didn’t have sex until I was 27. I used to feel humiliation about it. E.M. Forster was even later…
Oh? When you were researching your book ‘Bring No Clothes’ – on the troupe of early twentieth century queer British writers called the Bloomsbury Group – did you unearth many horny details?
Well, throughout Forster’s life, he kept this incredible, secret journal called ‘Sex’. In his eighties, he wrote this extraordinary paragraph where he describes how angry he is at his wasted life. All these opportunities missed. I really feel a connection with that.
Sounds like you’ve made up for lost time though.
Yeah, exactly. (laughs) It’s all good. With Bloomsbury the thing is more, what did sex look like? At Charleston down in Lewes, they have the room of John Maynard Keynes, who was very tall. But his bed is tiny. The floors were squeaky. What did sex look like? Where did it happen? In their Keynes files, the British Library have a catalog for a sex shop on Euston Road in the 1910s which sold things like rubbers, latex sheets, enemas. Very medical fetish stuff. What was he buying there?
We want the dirty details! What turns you on and why?
Psychological connection. Banter from beginning to end.
What about clothing? Are there things that are total turn-ons and turn-offs?
I like crotches. They’re impossible to write about in the Financial Times without sounding like a total pervert, but when a designer gets a crotch right, it’s so hot.
Loose or tight?
A loose crotch can be the promise of what is under there in a super baggy pant, but a great crotch in tight pants leaves nothing to the imagination…
Okay. Fashion deal-breaker?
Nasty cologne.
If you could be anyone for seven minutes, who would you be and why?
Did James Dean and Marlon Brando ever fuck? If so, I’d be James Dean, so I could fuck Marlon Brando.
Hot. How quickly do you fall in love?
Like, nanoseconds.
Anything else you want to share about your novel?
The book is about bottoms. There’s not much fiction that talks about bottoming. I wanted to write a book that says, that’s who these characters are, this is what they do. I think the fashion writer in me was a little bit demure about this stuff.
What changed?
I’m not sure. Maybe because this book is all an internal monologue. If I wrote it in third person, I wouldn’t be able to write about sex. I actually wrote the whole thing longhand to not give myself time to doubt what I was writing. In capital letters, because my handwriting is so shite.
You’re kidding!
Writing is bodily. The brain has to connect to the hand. I grew up baking breads and cakes. It’s like making a cake. Something simple, a Victoria sponge.
Surely something more complicated than a sponge…
It can be, but it needn’t be. You just need to breathe, relax and whatever comes out will come out.
Good advice for aspiring novelists and bottoms.