Kiss and Tell

Contents

1. About John Sam Jones
2. Praise for John Sam Jones’s fiction
3. Dedication
4. Title Page
5. Tidy: an introduction by David Llewellyn
6. Welsh Boys Too
7. The Birds Don’t Sing…
8. Sharks on the Bedroom Floor
9. The Wonder at Seal Cave
10. But Names will Never Hurt Me
11. My Velvet Eyes
12. The Magenta Silk Thread
13. Etienne’s Vineyard
14. Pocket Sprung and Nested
15. Fishboys of Vernazza
16. The Fishboys of Vernazza
17. Just Beyond the Buddleia Bush
18. A Particular Passion
19. The Wedding Invitation
20. Eucharist
21. Food For Thoughts
22. Between the Devil and the Virgin
23. Mischief and Deep Secrets
24. Gifts
25. The View from Sasso Fermo
26. Fridolin’s Dance
27. Kiss and Tell
28. Medi’s Wedding Dress
29. Copyright

John Sam Jones was born in Barmouth on the north-west coast of Wales in 1956. After secondary school at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech he went on to study biology at Aberystwyth University, and then theology as a World Council of Churches Scholar in Berkeley, California. He realised he was gay as a teenager at the beginning of the 1970s and began his life-long coming out at the age of eighteen.

His collection of short stories – Welsh Boys Too – was an Honor Book winner in the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards. His second collection was the acclaimed Fishboys of Vernazza, which was short-listed for the Wales Book of the Year. He has also published two novels With Angels and Furies and Crawling Through Thorns. He published a memoir The Journey is Home, Notes from a Life on the Edge in 2021 which also appeared in Welsh, translated by Sian Northey, as Y Daith Ydi Adra, Stori Gŵr ar y Ffin.

After working in ministry, education and public health for more than thirty years, John lives with his husband in a small German village a stone’s throw from the Dutch border.

Praise for John Sam Jones’s fiction

‘This hugely enjoyable collection of short stories by John Sam Jones provides an insight into everything from the desire to be a parent to being coshed with a stubby fencing picket following a disappointing woodland liaison… poignant, often touching stories lead one to conclude that we are what we are but considering the deep-seated prejudice which unbelievably still exists in the 21st century, some of us are more comfortable facing the truth than others.’ The Big Issue

‘Welsh Boys Too, addressing the lives of gay men in contemporary Wales, was immediately recognised as a ground-breaking moment in Welsh writing in English… in this new collection of ten well-crafted stories, Jones writes as a returned native confronting the entrenched prejudice that has too often driven Welsh gay men into permanent exile… it reminds us that gay Wales is not just a minority concern.’ Planet

‘Jones writes sensitive, skillful and fat-free stories. This book is a must… and would make an excellent starting-point for anyone wishing to dip into queer fiction for the first time.’ gwales.com

‘John Sam Jones created a storm with his first collection of stories, Welsh Boys Too, about homosexuality in Wales. Now he has followed up his award-winning book with another sensual collection of stories… A former chair of the advisory body on gay and lesbian issues to the Assembly, Jones is not one to shy away from the questions faced by his characters… clever, poignant and perceptive.’ The Daily Post

‘Offers an alternative definition of what it means to be a man in Wales… breaks free of old clichés of masculine identity.’ New Welsh Review

‘An interracial gay couple baby-sits the two young children of a friend for a weekend; a high school boy grapples with his emergent sexuality while looking for support from the conservative adults in his life; and a mentally disturbed woman seeks vengeance against the brother who slept with her husband, in John Sam Jones’s Welsh Boys Too. These intriguing short stories look at homosexuality through the lens of Welsh culture, subtly linking homophobia to other kinds of discrimination – racism, religious intolerance – with objectivity and sensitivity.’ Publisher’s Weekly

‘Welsh Rarebit – John Sam Jones’s charming, thoughtful collection of Welsh stories, Welsh Boys Too, is a joy to read. Contemporary, yet timeless, these tales of young men living in rural Wales have a pathos and dignity to them that sustains this slim, but vibrant collection. Rustic homophobia tends to be insidious rather than blatant, and Jones’s subtlety of language and style highlight this, as does the wild, unsophisticated backdrop of the slopes of Cader Idris, or the seagulls circling the cliffs of the barely inhabited island of Enlli. Unsophisticated these men may be, unscathed they are not – but they are survivors, and their stories are as uplifting as they are sad. Treat yourselves.’ Sebastian Beaumont in Gay Times

‘Welsh Boys Too is a bold and adventurous collection of stories inspired by the lives of gay men in Wales. Funny, poignant and ultimately revealing, it introduces John Sam Jones as a new voice in the world of Welsh fiction. After spending years away from home, studying in California and as a chaplain in Liverpool, Jones returned to North Wales to be saddened by the prevailing homophobia within society and began, through writing, to explore the lives of the gay men who lived there. In a sequence of short, pointed stories, seen through the eyes of eight men, he discloses, in an often humorous manner, how they try to live their lives in a society where rejection is second nature.’ The Western Mail

‘…John Sam Jones has balanced this short anthology well; each story earns its space and does not take away from any of the other works presented. An example of this balance is the collection’s ability not to shy away from sex whilst not sensationalising it either.’ Adam Lewis in Gair Rhydd

‘Cymreictod ynddo’i hun yw un o’r pethau sy’n ein gwneud ni’n fwy cul… ac mae’r iaith Gymraeg yn arf yn erbyn pobl hoyw. Dyna un rheswm pam fod Cymro Cymraeg wedi penderfynu cyhoeddi ei straeon byrion Cymreig eu naws yn uniaith Saesneg… Mae Welsh Boys Too gan John Sam Jones yn gasgliad o wyth stori fer sy’n trafod gwahanol agweddau o fywydau dynion hoyw yng Nghymru.’ Cerys Bowen, Golwg

‘The eight quite short stories in this thin yet evocative first-ever collection of queer fiction from Wales open the door, with fluid charm, on yet another culture’s take on coming out, AIDS, homophobia and domestic togetherness. Though undeniably contemporary there is at the same time an other-worldliness to the author’s world; the familiar is filtered through the gaze of a culture which is as distinct from that of America, or even England, as, for example, Italy’s might be, or that of Greece. Makes for fiction that’s both absorbing and entertainingly anthropological.’ Richard Labonte

‘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.

Re-reading them after twenty years I felt an almost Proustian rush seeing a mention of the gay travel guide Spartacus, which once graced the coffee tables of more affluent friends and the shelves of Waterstones’ ‘Lesbian & Gay’ section, becoming a digital-only publication in 2017. Other stories are a reminder of how far we’ve come. If we were to set them in the present day, some of the characters living with their ‘special friends’ might now be living with husbands or long-term partners or boyfriends, without the need for euphemisms.

I first read them around the time I came out to my immediate family, which I can only describe as a beautiful anti-climax. I’d been prepared for them to cut me off, to banish me from ever darkening their doorstep again. To my pleasant surprise my parents said they already knew, and my then-teenage brother said, ‘Tidy.’

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I grew up in a place where gay men were ridiculed and despised in everyday speech, even by the occasional school teacher. When I was outed in my last year it began months of insults, culminating in one changing room fight and a later punch in the face from a complete stranger. In reading these stories from our recent past we can only hope things in Wales have changed – and continue to change – for the better.

In that sense, these stories are unavoidably of their time, but read with all this hindsight what struck me is how fresh they feel. In Sharks on the Bedroom Floor we’re reminded of the slate industry’s historic ties to slave plantations in the Caribbean, a point that resonates in the age of Black Lives Matter and the downing of statues. The theme of family recurs throughout, and the domestic scenes are beautifully observed, even when things are almost unbearable, as in The Wedding Invitation, its protagonist Seth experiencing the opposite of Hiraeth. I am fairly confident that whatever your age, you will recognise relatives, friends and maybe even lovers in these pages.

In many stories Welsh identity is as important a theme as sexuality. Characters to-and-fro between north Wales and the cities of northwest England, each hinting at something more than simply ‘home’, ‘freedom’ or ‘escape’. Others return from further afield, like California’s Bodega Bay, or are bound for the continent, to Etienne and the Ligurian coast.

Another motif I noticed while rereading these stories was that of myths, legends and storytelling. A gay uncle’s reading of Prince Caspian turns a bedroom carpet into shark infested waters. Elsewhere there are references to the Mabinogion, while Fishboys of Vernazza adds a strange and sexy slice of magic realism to the mix.

Language and landscape run through this collection like an interwoven thread. Language – English, Cymraeg, and even Castellano – can be a means to keep secrets, or the way in which a secret is discovered, and Jones has fun throwing mono- and bilingual characters into a room, with all the tender intimacies and interpersonal conflicts that ensue.

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.