Hollinghurst, Alan. The Swimming-Pool Library. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Halfway through this novel—first one by Hollinghurst, who won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for the extraordinarily good The Line of Beauty—an aging weightlifter named Bill, who helps coach adolescent boys in the art of boxing, has this exchange with Alastair, one of his top fighters:

[Alastair] said to Bill: 'I got to go see my girlfriend.'

Bill grinned at him wretchedly. 'Don't do anything I wouldn't do,' he said. (162)

This is an enormously funny joke when you know that Bill is quite closeted and in love with sprting young gents just like Alastair. His message might as well have been: "Don't even touch her."

There's tons of men lusting after adolescents in this novel, and to call the thing pedophilia seems off, somehow. It's like there are pedophiles, who seem to get off on the age difference and power dynamic therein, and there are gay men who admire the bodies and innocence of post-pubescent boys. God, even typing it out sounds dangerous. Here are two lines of defense I'm going to attempt:

1. Straight men do this too in ways our culture not only accepts but kind of also congratulates. When the Olsen twins hosted SNL, there was this whole joke in their opening monologue about how their 18th birthday was this-many days away, because then of course the unquestioned lust American men have had for these teens would finally be "okay".
2. This exchange, just a few pages after the above, between Will (25), the novel's narrator, and his current bedmate Phil (himself 17/18).

   'Are you into kids?' Phil asked.
   'I'm into you, darling.'
   [. . .]
   'No, I think kids can be quite something. After fourteen or so. I mean I wouldn't touch them when they were really small...' [Phil said.]
   'No—but a little chap who's already got a big donger on him gets a hard-on all the time, doesn't know what to do with this thing that's taking over his life—that's quite something, as you say.'

This book is unabashed in the ways it discusses the erotic power of teen boys, but maybe what I'm trying to say is I wasn't taken as aback by it as I was by its other obsession: black men. I won't go all into it, but the things the narrator says about how a certain character was "a marvellous black" really stopped me for a second.

Psychoanalyze at will.

The only other thing I'll mention about this book—which is total gay fantasy, seeing as how it was written in the thick of the AIDS crisis and seems to take place in the mid-Seventies, so any kind of sex is had without any kind of forethought—is that it's completely devoid of women. At one point, the narrator's sister is heard over the phone, but when she says she'll be leaving at once to come pick up her son, she sends her husband instead. Most scenes that don't take place in Will's flat take place at the men's-only club he's a member of, or gay bars. They even go to the opera, he and his friend James, and what opera do they see? Billy Budd, itself devoid of women.

It would seem to me damn near impossible to write a 336-page novel without a single woman in it, but Hollinghurst has done it. Talk about gay fantasy....