Though many of the stories are rooted in north Wales, these are also tales of arrival and departure and the journey in between. For every small town boy there is a proud gay man striding across the world stage, but it’s when describing the Welsh landscape that the writing truly soars. The descriptions of Ynys Enlli and the Llŷn Peninsula in particular make many of these stories a precursor to the more recent phenomenon of queer nature and travel writing, as embodied in books by Mike Parker, Luke Turner and Philip Hoare.

Historically much of gay life happened behind closed doors or in the shadows. It wasn’t until the second half of the last century that queer pubs and clubs became a common enough sight in larger towns and cities, and meetings between gay men were, by necessity, often furtive and illicit. In making their presence felt, the characters you’ll meet here are often outdoors, swimming and hiking and travelling along country lanes, or simply basking and frolicking in the sunshine.

For John Sam Jones, the fictional journeys embarked upon by his characters have often been a reflection of his own peripatetic life. In the 1980s he lived in California, and more recently, in Brexit’s aftermath, he left Wales for Germany with his German husband. It’s therefore appropriate and timely that this collection of his short stories accompanies an autobiography, and that its title is The Journey is Home.

David Llewellyn is a novelist and script writer based in Cardiff. His most recent novel, A Simple Scale (Seren) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize.

Welsh Boys Too

The Birds Don’t Sing…

Vorsicht! The word was written in bold red capitals that drew my eye; in smaller black lettering the warning of extremely dangerous high voltage, Hochspannung… Lebensgefahr!, was almost unreadable after fifty years of weather. The concrete post bearing this token of concern for human life was streaked with rust from the bolts that fastened the sign to it and the barbed wire it supported. I noticed the stains, the colour of iodine and dry blood, reaching down into the bouquet of carnations laid at the post’s base by some earlier tourist to the site and tried to order the chaos of thoughts stumbling into each other. After staring at the intense whiteness of the carnations for a long time I decided that whoever had laid them couldn’t possibly be called a tourist.

The same thought process led me to wonder what label I could give myself; yesterday, wandering through the old market place and nosing around the cathedral with my thrusting zoom lens I’d certainly been one. And a few days before, scrambling along the Orla Perc mountain ridge, the Eagle’s Path, with maps and a compass, the breathtaking snow-capped peaks inviting potentially fatal lapses in concentration, I’d been a hiker or a walker. But here, in this place, without the identity offered by such labels, I didn’t know who I was.

We’d chosen Zakopane for two reasons: no cheap charter flight, and a friend’s recommendation. Some of the boys from the Gay Outdoor Club had been there and spent a ‘…spectacular… wonderful… brill’ week walking in the Tatra Mountains. Gwyn had said that it was like having a Snowdonia the size of Wales to explore, but then, Gwyn was such a size-queen anyway and always professed to things being bigger than they were. And after that last trip to Gran Canaria, when there just hadn’t been enough sick bags to go round all the lager louts on the midnight flight home, I’d vowed never to fly charter again, so a holiday package by coach seemed like a good idea.