The Cure for Sodomy by Ken Shakin

[reviews_and_ramblings]

The Cure for Sodomy sucks you into the story from the first chapter and doesn’t let you go until the last word. It’s one of the oldest stories of the world, the story of a life. Actually is the story of two lives, but it’s not like that classical novel where the young learns from the old, since both men are old, only that one is older than the other, and both men are on the descending phase of their life, only that one is ahead of the other. And no, even if I was hoping for an end where there was hope for at least one of the two, no, it’s not like that. And so why people should read this novel? Since it’s your story, our story, the story of the next person you will meet on the street, the neverending story in the eyes of the bum you avoid on the street. What is the moral of this story? That maybe you have to let that bum tells his story, before he dies and no one remember he was. That maybe that man has to allow him to listen, to understand that, even if he doesn’t see it yet, his life is not ended, he has still plenty to live. Maybe he will not be happy, but he will be there to experience the change in the world, and to be able to pass it to another man. He will be a storyteller, and that bum will die in body but not in soul.

This is basically the story of a very handsome man, a stud, who was born when being gay was a crime. Despite everything they did to him, from electric shocks to AIDS, he is still here, and he is still dancing, even if now he is dancing alone. He had the courage to love, two men for real, and a lot of men for fun, and he saw the changing in the world. When he was young being gay was a crime, not that he is old the crime is to be old and poor. Apparently this man was never right in the world, and so why he has not ended his life long ago? Because despite everything it happened to him, the longing to see yet another dawn was always too strong, the hope that the morning after would have been better. Does is matter that perhaps it was not like that? In the end, he lived, and he lived a lot, way more than many other men who denied who they were. And he loved, he loved a lot, and all his men, Jack and Tim, are still alive in his memory, while the narrator, with all his friends and former lover, has no one he wants to remember.

The Cury of Sodomy is history in form of narration, spanning from the pre WWII world, to the McCarthyism, to the ’70, passing not unscathed through the ’80 and the AIDS plague, to today. More than 70 years of being gay with all that it means. It’s not a pretty story, it smells and it’s sad, but in the end I think, that bum has lived for ALL those years, and he has LIVED, not survived.

http://fannypress.com/2010/05/10/the-cure-for-sodomy

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