Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published May 1999]
Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner: Queerspotting
Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of
the closet…
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a
family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing
machines, cars, compact disc players and electric
tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck
you are on a Sunday morning. But whatever you do,
don’t choose homosexuality.
Traditionally, this has been the general feeling in
Scottish fiction over the years. More recently, we have
become familiar with the dull, thudding masculinity of
Kelman, Sharp, McIlvanney, Gunn. Even these days,
as Chris Whyte has highlighted, “to be gay and to be
Scottish, it would seem, are still mutually exclusive conditions.”
(Whyte, Gendering The Nation, 1995). Now,
at the end of the millennium, we have hopefully moved
on from our national literary stereotype of the tortured,
lonely (heterosexual, probably homophobic) anti-hero.
(Think Cuffee, Laidlaw, Finn, Doyle and so forth). We
have left behind the good old days when women stayed
in the kitchen, entrapping men then withholding their
love, and potential queers were suitably pathetic, warped
and unhappy. Yet still we cannot readily disagree with
Berthold Schoene that, “Scotland is still waiting for the
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
emergence and subsequent ‘coming out’ of a generation
of angry young men who, unafraid of their own feelings,
would dare contest the misogynous and homophobic
rules of the ‘Emotional Establishment’ inside” (Schoene,
‘Angry Young Masculinity’, in Whyte ed., 1995). Yes,
there are (finally) many female authors at the very forefront
of Scottish literature. Yes, Scottish poetry boasts
some of the best lesbian and gay writers. So how long
must we wait for this heralded new breed of angry young
man? And might there also be an angry young woman?
Perhaps we need not wait that long. Perhaps the picture
is not as bleak as an unreconstructed (or should that
be undeconstructed?) kailyard in winter. At the end of
the 19th century the ‘kailyard’ (literally, cabbage patch)
was all the rage amongst Scottish writers such as J.M.
Barrie, F.R. Crockett and Ian MacLaren. Kailyard literature
painted a sentimental, highly romanticised picture
of rural and small town life in Scotland, full of the local
colour of the Scots tongue. The only problem was, it
bore little resemblance to the often harsh reality of the
time. The realisation that all in the garden wasn’t quite so
lovely didn’t come until 1901, and the publication of The
545
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z