By Garth Greenwell
I spent a long weekend in Sofia many years ago. I was there for a work event, the sort of thing where you get one night outside a hotel conference room to explore the city.
All of us went to the one gay bar in all Sofia. I say that knowing it can't be true. Like synagogues, even the smallest capital must have two. The one you go to and the one you would never step foot in again. Margaret Cho once claimed there's only one gay bar in all of Scotland, a place in Edinburgh called CC Blooms. Being Scottish I can attest this is very much not true; there are plenty of gay bars in Scotland. Although it would probably be better if most burned down; they’re all pretty awful. Not the physical buildings of course, it’s the people who go there. Again, being Scottish and having trawled my ass up and down every single gay bar in the country, I can say that. Take a straw poll of the trade in CC Blooms. Dollars to doughnuts at least half won’t have the foggiest that’s the name of the character Bette Midler played in Beaches. And yes, that is the gayest thing you’ve ever heard in your life. See Cho, Margaret, Notorious CHO for what she actually thought it should be called.
Anyway, I was in the one gay bar in all of Sofia when I realised just how painfully dull the city is. Not just dull, soul destroying. It's a million miles from anywhere, surrounded by mountains and it wasn't even bombed or occupied during the war. Like the city just sat out a great chunk of the 20th century and went straight from Ottoman occupation to Communist dictatorship to whatever Garth Greenwell set foot in.
At the one gay bar in all Sofia, sans drag shows, talent shows, strippers or anything else which makes a provincial place like that even remotely interesting, a young twink latched onto me. He was Bulgarian handsome. That is, blond and twinkish and keen, but probably wouldn't get very far in the far more competitive Eastern European markets of Prague or even Budapest. But the lad was cute and into me and that's about all the standards I had back then. Afterwards, he talked to me like I was his only possible ticket out of a soon to be liquefied ghetto. He needed an exit from Sofia, anyone would do, for any reason at all. But his English wasn't great and while an EU passport theoretically provides for freedom of movement, it's easier said than done, especially for a cute-by-Bulgarian standards young man.
That might have been about the most interesting thing to happen to the gay community in Sofia since Garth Greenwell came to teach English and suck cocks, and boy is he sure out of teaching English.
Cleanness by Garth Greenwell is a masterpiece of gay fiction. Let’s start and end with that. He writes so beautifully it hurts my head. It’s stunning, quiet and loud at the same time. Harsh and tender, rushed and also slow. Possibly much like the maestro himself
I will automatically love and defend any and every gay author. There's that many of us that we'd all comfortably fit inside one darkroom in Sofia. But that’s not why I loved Cleanness. What Garth Greenwell does to sex is an art form. Throughout the scenes in the book we’re with him in the chilly nights and weird hook ups and we feel the pain, literally, in some cases, of what it's like to feel alone and horny and free in a city where no one knows your name.
But, much like the Bulgarian twink whom I shoehorned out of my corporate-paid hotel room instead of stealing away from the city he longed to escape from and marrying, Cleanness doesn’t quite reach the heights that at least I so eagerly wished it could have, purely because Garth Greenwell is so riddled with talent it’s a crying shame he didn’t.
There are pieces of politics, like him stumbling through a protest and getting a very brief slice of the struggles of the LGBT community in Bulgaria in the 90s. Or early 2000’s? We’re never quite sure. At least not in that scene. But despite that there's not much of a sense of the wider political context Garth finds himself in.
We hear from the taxi driver that all politicians are corrupt, but Bulgaria joined the EU and that didn't happen overnight. So at some point they stopped beating the protesters and shutting down the queer film festivals. Garth is slap bang in this transition, or at the end of start of it, he never says, of a country transforming from communist dictatorship to western democracy, but you wouldn't know if from reading the book. Save from a few moments of wondering about how to transport the ideals protesters are fighting for into the vox populi. Maybe go out and ask a few? If you’re not too busy with, you know, teaching English.
Also there's a tension between public acceptance and political repression Garth doesn't seem to pick up on, at least not very explicitly. Perhaps it comes from the unknown time gap the book spans, but how can he and boyfriend R gallivant so freely around the country, publicly eat together and be together without any cloud of suspicion? Not to mention the variety of hook ups arranged through an internet free of secret police. Anyone who's tried to love a person they shouldn't under a truly totalitarian regime carries a constant fear with them that this American tourist doesn't have.
When it comes to R., for like in a little black book or hookup-riddled phone book, no one is actually named, Garth doesn't like that R sent him explicit pictures via a site for sex which he, too, must have either somehow sent or offered as well. Why all the protestations, Garth? Prude much?
But as I read I had one overwhelming thought, like when a friend starts a story with, ‘my friend did this…’ Cut the crap, Garth, this is you, isn't it? The nameless narrator, the characters identified only by their initials, even the pointless lack of quotation marks all scream verbatim. If it was going to be fiction then fictionalise it. Change the city, add a love interest or even a joke or two. Because I can't believe someone would make up a story about hooking up in Sofia and knowingly not add any element of spice like some kind of goat stew free of taste. But of course we know Garth lived in Sofia, taught English, and so forth. It's in his damn bio.
The best parts of the book is where he's being human. Being with R and going to the first Lidl in Sofia, for example. Of course his American sheen doesn’t enable him to appreciate the quintessential Europeanness of Lidl. Britain doesn’t get it either. But these parts of the book might as well have been called ‘Being a Stranger in a Strange Land,’ because the culture clash between the highly European R and highly American Garth is even more pronounced in these parts of the book. Especially when Garth has to fly Ryanair to Bologna with his Erasmus student boyfriend. Sorry Will Ferrel, Garth already did the pastiche of European culture. Yet we can all see he and R are doomed from the start. R likes frozen lasagnas from Lidl and Garth likes Bulgarian opera. It's going to end in tears.
Despite so much charm and Besson-esque slivers of hot-white beauty, it’s in the meta narrative the book fails for me. If this is really you, Garth, if these things happened as they did, as they very much seem to, then why not just come out and say so? Hi I'm Garth and here's a story about my sexscapades in Sofia. I’d read that. Others might not, though.
Is that what stopped you? The publisher? The market impossibility of getting a gay European sexscapade adventure onto mainstream bookshelves? Because if so, tell me now and I'll delete every word of this. Because getting more gay work into the mainstream is worth all manner of sins, and I wholeheartedly support what ever he had to do to do it.
Still, that's the ultimate issue for me with this book, it’s a gay story forced through a straight lens. Like Bohemian Rhapsody before it, Rami Malek’s Freddie is the queer icon seen through a straight eye. Straight eye for the queer guy. Sorry breeders, (winking eye with a tongue sticking out emoji), we’re allowed to have our own lives that don’t have to revolve around satisfying you.
Cleanness has been cleansed of the sparkling rainbow where sit the words not written. Maybe even in the messages not sent, the friendships not made or the hook ups not had. It's middle aged, middle class, middle earth man’s rather dull life abroad interrupted by some rather good sex. And I think Garth is a far more fascinating, well-rounded, full-on gay literary icon up there with the likes of CC Bloom herself than the book makes him out to be.
Like a jockstrap faded by too many much-needed bleachings, Cleanness is a dull snap of a story made palatable for the straights to fawn over. While this book is without a doubt an incredible, hands down five star mainstream read, it’s also what stops it from being the gorgeous, multicoloured, multi-dimensional masterpiece of queer literature I desperately wanted It to be.