‘Packing eight stories into a slim paperback, Jones is a paragon of economy. In the five-page ‘But Names Will Never Hurt Me,’ he gives us everything necessary to understand why the 17-year-old protagonist, who has already made his affectional choices, decides that ‘Rent boy … didn’t sound so bad.’ In nine unhurried pages, ‘The Magenta Silk Thread’ reveals exactly why a 77-year-old war widow is attending her best friend’s son’s wedding and taking the train rather than getting a lift to it. Altogether, these stories present a cross-section of a new embattled minority within an old one–Welsh gay men. Jones’s examples embrace both terms of their identity. Several proudly speak Welsh, and all must come to terms with dour Welsh Calvinism as they do the public dance of appearances that being gay often requires. Jones makes them all vivid and sympathetic, not least by changing narrative perspective from story to story, from first-person subjective to third-person omniscient and even to second-person imperative.’ Ray Olson, Booklist, American Library Association.

For Jupp

Kiss and Tell

John Sam Jones

Tidy: an introduction

David Llewellyn

I first encountered the stories of John Sam Jones in my first few months of living in Cardiff. I’d been out and proud while studying at Dartington College, a leftfield art school in rural Devon, but moving to the city was my first real experience of a ‘gay scene’.

Before then, my interaction with queer culture was limited to films and books. I read William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch as a precocious, wide-eyed 14-year-old, and at sixteen watched Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane in my bedroom on a black and white portable TV. Channel 4’s adaptation of Tales of the City sent me to Armistead Maupin’s charming page turners, while Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet and the documentary based on it changed the way I would watch Ben Hur forever.

Many of the books were by American writers, the novels telling stories set on the other side of the world or in the recent past. What I was missing was a sense of myself on the page. I was a working class kid from the valleys and I fancied boys; there wasn’t anyone like me in anything I read.

Over those first few months in the city I went to bars and clubs and met lots of new friends, some of whom were involved in the arts. While working on a film script that never became a film the producer gave me a copy of the recently published Welsh Boys Too; the cover a sepia image of a man’s bare chest and shoulder in close-up, the tip of a Roman-type sword pressed against his flesh.

Here were stories of the gay boys of Wales, the index of titles accompanied by character names like Dyfan, Rhodri and Gethin. For someone who had gone to art school pronouncing ‘year’, ‘here’, ‘hear’ and ‘ear’ exactly the same, it was refreshing, and though some of those stories were about the difficulties of coming out in the era of AIDS and Section 28 there were also gleeful tales of sex, romance and acceptance.