Sucking Sherbet Lemons
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
What do you do when you're fat, 14, obsessed with the Catholic Church, with Doing the Right Thing, with scones and sweets, with other boys and their private parts? Well, if you're Benson, you panic and flee, hiding from the flesh as a novice in a monastery. Alas, St Finbar's monastery is as full of temptation as the grammar school he'd left behind. The devils of desire find Benson once again and throw him back into the world from which he'd tried to escape. Returned to school, Benson is still trying to square the circle of his conflicting enthusiasms and desires. Can he be both gay and Catholic? Gay and Happy? Sucking Sherbet Lemons recounts the coming out experience of a gay man at a time when homosexual acts were illegal. Written in the late Eighties, in response to those who condemned gay men in the light of the AIDS epidemic – and instated Clause 28 to end discussion of the subject – this is a powerful and hilarious broadside aimed at the forces of intolerance, ignorance and fear. The times have changed, with legalization, and now even Civil Partnerships in Britain – but the difficulties, silence, bewilderment and embarrassment of ‘coming out' have not. Sucking Sherbet Lemons is a coming out novel for the ages. We are proud to re-release this gay classic to help, entertain – and console – a new generation, gay, straight, and all points in-between.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Demonstrating how Catholicism can be lethal for gay teens, this wonderful and maddening coming-of-age novel follows Martin "Wobbles" Benson's attempted flight from his "deviant" sexuality into the arms of a lusty and hypocritical Catholic brotherhood. Set in the '60s and published originally in 1988, Carson's first novel in his Benson Series is amusing and confident, not unlike a male counterpart to Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Once Martin realizes that he's not simply going through a phase, he's overcome with fear, grief, and shame. He enters a monastery to purge the sexual darkness from his soul, but soon discovers that the brothers haven't suppressed their own desires even after a lifetime of prayer. He returns to the abuses of his former Catholic school, but in time finds some like-minded friends, allowing him to explore his sexuality and accept himself. While the closed-mindedness and subsequent pain is hard to bear, there's comic relief in Benson's imagined journey through heaven and hell, which is often laugh-out-loud funny. The author turns what could be a depressing tale into a story that makes you want to cheer for the hero and pray that he emerges into adulthood unscathed.
