The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Breathing Lessons
By Andy Sinclair
Esplanade Books, 2015
Four stars

Andy Sinclair is an elegant writer. Terse, wry, clean. There is a strong visual quality to it, almost cinematic in the clarity of his imagery, but without excess or melodrama. The quality of his writing pulled me along through the many shortish chapters in this shortish book. That said, the structure of the book left me feeling confused and disoriented. There were moments when I wondered if this was in fact a series of parallel vignettes of different people’s lives. Not fully chronological, and with no apparent effort made to help the reader get a grip on the kaleidoscopic nature of Henry Moss’s life; I suspect that Andy Sinclair did this on purpose. The disorientation I felt at the end might well be meant to echo that which Henry Moss himself feels. If so, well done.

But what a feckless, aimless, pointless kind of life. What am I supposed to make of it?

The hard truth is that, when I read, I want to like the book (emotional) as well as enjoy it (intellectual). I enjoyed this, because of Sinclair’s skill, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like Henry Moss or his fragmented, anomie-soaked life. I kept hoping I would, but I never managed to generate any real sympathy for or emotional connection to Moss. Maybe that was intentional, too. Maybe it’s just that I’m too old to have patience with purely literary pleasure.

“We are all adults, I am thinking. We can do what we want and we don’t need to justify anything to anybody.”

“I’ve always believed that you should kiss and sleep with whomever you want, whenever you want.”

Consider these two quotations I pulled from the book. For me, they embody the tone of the narrative mosaic, and seem to reflect the only real philosophical perspective that Henry Moss can lay claim to. The unfortunate result is that, for me, Henry Moss’s life reads like a promotion for gay conversion therapy. If that’s being gay, why would anyone want it? Is all that sex worth the emptiness?

I assume that if the author is not young enough to be my child, he must at least be nearly a generation younger than I am. AIDS is present in only the most marginal way, indicating that the author (and therefore Henry Moss) didn’t live through the 1980s the way my generation did. That is, surviving it. There isn’t any fear in Henry’s life; no legal consequences to being gay. The values inherent in those two citations above are, I’m afraid, the fault of my generation. The first seems to be the war cry of the millennials, a blow-by of the boomers rejecting their parents’ values in the 1960s. The second resonates with the lessons I was taught when I came out at 20 in 1975. My generation of gay folk fought and marched and lifted our voices to win our people the freedom to abandon all thought of emotional or physical consequences in our quest for sex. We all said it was about civil rights, but we knew what we really wanted. Didn’t we?

By the end of the book I felt that Henry Moss’s mess of a life was my fault. And perhaps it is, indirectly.

There is some indication in Henry’s story that straight people aren’t like gay people, in that they don’t share that all-in ability to seek sex for sex’s sake. If that’s true, then that freedom seems to be something of a booby prize, since it appears to come with a complete inability to maintain any sort of healthy long-term relationship.

As you can see, this book made me think. A lot. It made me look back over my own very different life as a gay man these past 42 years. It made me question the very roots of gay liberation, if Henry Moss is any measure of the result. It made me unhappy.

I know I’m wrong to generalize Henry Moss into a representative of all gay and bisexual men two generations after Stonewall. But it is difficult not to, since Henry Moss and his brethren are, historically, my children, and Andy Sinclair’s book makes me feel that I’ve somehow failed them.

As coach Sharpe says at the end: “I wouldn’t want to see a man waste his life being sad, Moss.”

Neither would I.