Items

• Burton and Speke
  A historical novel of colonial East Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke drink gin, hunt big game and search for the source of the Nile. Burton is depicted as possibly closeted, Speke as probably gay, but the novel’s racist and imperialist overtones are all too blatant (note the unpleasant reference to “primitive Africa” in the inside book-jacket blurb). There is in addition a deeply misogynistic streak running through the book, including an episode featuring Female Genital Mutilation. The seventh novel from William Harrison (1933-2013), it was received positively by contemporary reviewers, one crediting Harrison with “uncovering a part of lost gay history”. Unusually for the time, ‘Burton and Speke’ was not aimed at a distinctly ‘gay market’. Harrison, who was himself heterosexual, also wrote short stories, nonfiction and screenplays, including for the adaption of this book as ‘Mountains of the Moon’ (1990).