Tell us about ‘The Pharmacist’.
It’s about a hot young artist called Billy. I think I might have fallen a little bit in love with him. He’s kind of lost his way in life and when he meets Albert, a seventy-year-old veteran of the ‘90s club scene, things start to spiral out of control. It’s very much a London book. Anyone who remembers pre-gentrification Shoreditch will recognize the scruffy gay pubs and the dance scene.
If you were to put it into a genre, how would you ‘define’ it?
I’d love to say, I’m queer and refuse to be defined by genre but that might sound pretentious. Officially, the literary world would call it a bildungsroman – a coming of age story. Very psychological, psychedelic and erotic. But in simple terms, it’s a bittersweet gay love story.
It’s inspired by ‘90s clubland, and those post-Trade encounters and experiences. What are your fondest – and most fearful – memories of that era on the gay scene?
I’m very nostalgic about those times. It’s very much inspired by Trade and the Fridge. There are some very horny darkroom scenes. I remember going to AM at The Viaduct before it became Fire. It was little more than a dirt floor inside a damp railway arch then. It used to be the last place still open, so even though it was a gay venue, everyone used to flock there in the early hours. There would be fashionistas and gangsters mixed with homeless people, raving. It had a very Dickensian charm. That’s what I loved – the glitter and the grime all mixed up. But the club scene also had a very dark side. Some people got lost in that nocturnal world, existing during the daytime, only to escape once more, like vampires.
Are the characters based on real people, fictional or an amalgamation of both?
I saw some people very close to me struggling with addiction and compulsive behavior. Fiction, for me, was a safe way of exploring those experiences without getting burnt. Writers always steal from life.
You published the book online. What are your recommendations to would-be authors looking to publish their first work?
Bookshops now stock prize lists, pulp-fiction and celebrity rubbish. I expect many publishers are governed heavily by profit-margins – how many pages in the book, how many books will fit into a crate, how many crates on a truck… These factors dictate the kind of books being acquired.
I was very excited to become involved with Salt Publishing who are building a fantastic new digital initiative. Okay, so digital books don’t feel and smell like real books – but this does mean that you can publish works of any size without thinking of crates and lorries. It means that old literary forms like novellas, biographical essays and poetry are being given a new life. And it certainly spells hope for marginalized or debut voices.