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House With The Green Shutters by G. Douglas.
This time round however, the fin de siècle has seen
the emergence of another new genre, one that seems
set to catapult us into the next millennium with rather
more truth, not to mention style – the ‘satanic kailyard’
(the name comes from a forthcoming essay by Christopher
Harvie entitled ‘Kelman, the Canon, and the
Satanic Kailyard’). This wonderfully appropriate term
describes contemporary texts by Scottish authors such
as Welsh, Warner, Hird, Legge and so on; that is to say
the new generation of Scottish authors writing about
Scottish urban working class youth in all its dubious,
depraved, or just plain deranged, glory. The old cabbage
patch has become the new housing scheme. The
characters are more likely to work the benefit system
than the land, and would generally rather settle down to
heroin and Temazepam than neeps and tatties. However,
has there been an equivalent revolution in sexuality?
The satanic kailyard texts that will be considered here
are Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House and Alan Warner’s
The Sopranos, although reference will also be made to
their debut novels, Trainspotting and Morvern Callar
respectively. In the light of these texts then, the question
which springs to mind is: in contemporary Scottish
literature, why is it suddenly cool to be queer?
One of the primary aspects of satanic kailyard in general
which is important in this context is its relation to
popular culture, something which hasn’t always been de
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
rigeur in Scottish fiction to date. It is perhaps due to the
relative youth of the authors themselves that the details of
their characters tend to be just right – they wear the right
clothes, listen to the right music, go to the right clubs,
take the right drugs, and so on – for people in their situations.
Therefore it is reasonable to extrapolate that they
will also have the right attitudes, and, “homosexuality
has become acceptably familiar, if not yet unremarkable,
for a growing generation.” (Andy Medhurst, ‘Wish You
Were Queer?’, The Face, Jan 1999). With this in mind,
let us proceed to examine the texts in question, and their
portrayal of homosexuality, in depth.
Out of the collection of stories which make up The
Acid House it is undoubtedly the novella, ‘A Smart
Cunt’ which is the most interesting as regards homosexuality.
Brian, the central character, is straight in the
sense of being heterosexual. However, there is another,
far more important sense of the word in which he tends
to be far from ‘straight’ – that pertaining to drug use. In
any narrative by Welsh, this is how we must understand
the term. Brian’s friend Denise, on the other hand, is
gay, as it seems is Penman. In many respects Denise
is stereotypically camp; he “pouts with a saucy wink,”
‘squeals excitedly” and “minces smartly.” Needless to
say, these activities are never performed by a heterosexual
male character. Despite his apparent effeminacy
though, Denise is easily capable of the aggression typical
of most other characters in Welsh. When one of his
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