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There’s a moment in Charlie Porter’s debut novel, Nova Scotia House, when a character relates that she has attended 14 funerals that year. It’s the mid-’90s in London, and the AIDS crisis is pulsating, but in 1996, anti-retroviral medications would be made available that meant it was possible to live a full life with an HIV diagnosis.
Until then, the lives of queer people—their emotional arcs, relationship dynamics, imaginations—were tempered by the looming death sentence of AIDS. When Porter first came to London in 1992, that spectre felt close.
Nova Scotia House finds its rhythm in an era of the AIDS crisis that has been less focused upon, delicately weaving together queer lives lived before, during, and long after it. Nineteen-year-old Johnny lands in London and falls for 45-year-old Jerry, who is HIV-positive. Their love story is traced with a golden thread of queer magic, from the ’70s gay activist movements that Jerry found his voice in to the fire of their love and Jerry’s courage through his illness. “What am I to do with this anger?” Jerry asks, before dying in 1995. Then, we meet Johnny again, now 45 and grappling both with his pain and the challenge of trying to carve out a more hopeful future.
As a fashion writer, Porter has often thought about the generation of creative minds lost to the crisis—the art, fashion, culture never realized. As the author of the nonfiction books What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes, he’s also in tune with the importance of primary sources, something the AIDS crisis largely lacks. When Porter and I meet in an east London cafe, I share that my own uncle died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993, while his partner lived to be an old man. I often imagine the possibilities of their lives if only granted those three extra years, with just some old photos, letters, and his theater playbills to remember my uncle by. The fiction of Nova Scotia House asks both its reader and its author: How can we connect again with radical queerness and countercultural ideas of living? How can we live life as fully, optimistically, and queerly as possible?
Vogue: Bring No Clothes and What Artists Wear are both so thoroughly researched and emotionally astute. They feel like historical documents, but also radical emotive arcs. How does your nonfiction practice differ from your fiction?
Charlie Porter: This book predates Bring No Clothes. I started it in the spring 2020, during the editing process of What Artists Wear. I was writing this in a very different way, though. My nonfiction books are very research-based. They happen during a day’s work in the British Library. Fiction is very much when I say, I’m going to do some fiction, or I need a pause or to do something different. One helps the other. It’s symbiotic.
They’re physically different as well. Bring No Clothes was laptop-based. I did all the image research, and that happens as I’m writing. My fiction is all handwritten in capital letters—that was just because my handwriting is terrible. But then the pace is so steady and clear: It allows me to breathe in the sentence, rather than [he motions as if tapping on a keyboard] breathing at the end of the sentence. We talk and think in ways that can be unclear—writing in capitals helps me to steer through that.
You’ve said that you approached Bring No Clothes like a lab technician, and the characters were in a petri dish—I wondered how you developed Nova Scotia House’s characters?
What interested me most about doing a project on the Bloomsbury group was that they weren’t an obsession of mine. It was a thrill to have the opportunity to explore and really interrogate them without any sense of fandom. Fiction writing, for me, is instead about letting people live. It’s like The Sims: I build the house, put people in them, and see what they do there. I know to some extent what’s going to happen, but how they spend their time with each other, how they are, happens during the writing. My hope is that the reader can feel that—what’s happening on the page is just happening. A lot of writers work with storyboards but, to me, that could become very stilted. They’re not alive. I let them walk around, I let them go to a party, see what happens. It’s an attempt to mimic an experience of living which doesn’t believe in predestination.
Did you look to other AIDS crisis-related art or media?
I very much didn’t seek it out during the writing process. I saw an extraordinary production of Angels in America at the National Theatre in 2017, and a production of The Normal Heart. When It’s a Sin broadcast in 2021, I actively didn’t watch it. I knew that it was a different story to mine, different intention and era. I just watched it for the first time last weekend, and I was completely broken by it. Before that, it was important to keep the world I was making watertight.
I think what Bring No Clothes and What Artists Wear do so well is show how we synthesize the most inarticulable parts of ourselves—through clothes, style, taste, our community. But there’s a generation lost to the AIDS crisis whose inner worlds we can no longer access. How did you go about envisioning them?
The reason I wrote the book was because I wanted to tell the stories of queer, countercultural lives that aren’t otherwise documented. My nonfiction relies on letters, diaries, archives. Queer lives have so few primary sources, particularly in the 20th century, before and during the AIDS crisis. If I wrote this as nonfiction, there would be gap after gap, or there would be a homophobic New York Times report to point to. In the ’80s, the media would describe the partners of people who had died of AIDS-related causes as “longtime companions.” It’s also often the case that narratives around AIDS become very elegiacal. But fiction was the only way for me to get close to what I wanted to say about these people and their experience of living countercultural lives. The purpose is to reconnect with experimental living from before the AIDS crisis. I could do that through language, making it as intimate as possible. I guess what I’m doing is inventing primary sources in the text.
The book features pages of art from Johnny’s visit to an AIDS memorial exhibition, which is a crucial point of the story. They open up new ideas for life. How did you come to this powerful visual epiphany?
That’s one real moment in the book. It’s a retelling of myself going to that exhibition in 2021, when it was on display for a weekend in London. I was deep into the book, but I didn’t know this would be a part of it. In the States, they have the NAMES Project Aids Memorial Quilt. It’s a well-established charity organization. The quilt is preserved and it can go out for loan.
There’s an offshoot quilt in the UK—it’s a smaller operation that has never been formalized. When antiretrovirals were introduced in 1996 and it became possible to live a full life with HIV, the UK’s quilt project basically collapsed. It’s in storage—as in, a lock-up. Forgotten for decades. In the mid-2010s, a collective of workers from HIV charities formed a partnership to save it. They’re incredible people working to get this hugely important social document in the public eye.
It’s been the biggest honor to get to know the people involved, and they graciously allowed me to use eight images of the quilt panels in the book. I like disappearing in books. I disappear twice in What Artists Wear, like when artist Lee Mary Manning does a photo essay about Nicole Eisenman. I like allowing the book itself to pivot the narrative.
My uncle died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1993. My nonna—his mother—would hold onto letters she wrote to his friends who, over the years, would stop writing back one by one as they too passed away. That ephemera was very important to her to hold onto. I’m lucky to have even such small touch points with him.
It’s incredible your family was able to hold onto his memory and share that when a lot of people wouldn’t. I’m good friends with people who are a few generations above me and they were just expected to carry on. There was no compassion or sense of magnitude for what people were living through, so a huge part of the book is also attempting to now offer them space to grieve. I hope it’s cathartic for some.
I often think about Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, which starkly lays out how many thinkers and countercultural creative movements we lost to AIDS.
There is an entire ecosystem lost that we can’t begin to fathom, so what we can do now is imagine a parallel universe where it all would have happened. We can consider how we can encourage alternative ways of living, thinking, and making, rather than acquiescing to what’s become the norm when the norm has happened against us, and the norm is not good enough.
You first came to London around the time of the book’s arc. Did your experience inflect the book?
I came to London in ’92. With the book, I was interested in who I wasn’t. No one in the book is me—obviously, there’s things about me that informs them, but to me, they still live when I read the book, they’re alone, and they could have done something since. I knew I wanted to write a book about someone of a similar age, who came to London, but who had another kind of emotional intelligence. See, I couldn’t even approach a guy. Here’s Johnny, someone who can speak up for what they want. When I did start sleeping with men, there were times I wasn’t able to voice my own feelings. I channeled all my energy into writing, doing student papers, and shutting down libido or a sense of who I was as a fully flesh, human being. In Bring No Clothes, I wrote about the fact I didn’t sleep with anyone until I was 27. It was important to do so to express how that reflected in the life of E.M. Forster. It was liberating for me to write that. With this book, I can really understand my desire to form this character.
How did you navigate writing sex scenes that are real and raw, steamy, and sometimes dark and chaotic? They very naturally augment the narrative without feeling forced.
I wanted the book to be super hot. When I saw HIV and AIDS finally talked about on TV, it was a shocking late-night TV clip, or someone putting a condom on a banana—totally removed from desire or humanity. I’d never written like this before, even though I’ve been writing fiction since about 2008. [Sex is] an interaction between humans; as much as it is pleasure, it is also connection, camaraderie. I find that more hot than some euphemism-heavy description of sex that’s supposed to change everyone’s lives. I wanted sex to be a physical activity like all others we engage in—like walking or cooking. It’s just the hot one! I didn’t want queer sex to be treated as this secret world.
The flat’s small garden also feels like a motif for an alternative, queer form of living—a way of life in a little patch of land that resists.
Jerry and Johnny meet by volunteering at a local park. I wanted that energy of volunteering in a community. Growing to eat and growing to live is super important. It’s what they have to do in this small council-flat garden—those roots grow through the book. Gardening is both so outside of time and within time. It’s within time because things grow in certain seasons—you must water and tend to them at certain times for plants to flower. But it’s also outside of time because, well, plants don’t know that it’s the ’90s! They’re outside of our need to define by time. That’s what I wanted to do in the book as well—move away from the obsession with time definition. The ’70s are never described in the usual way the ’70s are described. It’s described in terms of a philosophy of living, rather than basic cliché and imagery. Same with the ’90s and the present day. Their gardening is the same through each era.
I started gardening in 2005 when I was writing about menswear, so I’d be away for the month of June. That’s the worst month to be away from your garden. My gardening is still focused on plants that can survive my fashion week absences, even though I quit menswear in 2018. I have volunteered in a public garden every Friday since 2019. It’s been so informative to my writing, thinking processes, and the rhythms of living. Often writing happens while I garden.
The book ends on an optimistic note. How important was it to articulate both people’s pain and resistance, as well as queer joy?
I want my book to be an invitation to readers to think differently and to look at their own lives. To reconnect with these losses and threatened ways of thinking and philosophies. To feel it is possible to regrow—but it’s important that it’s not about recreating what once was. I mean, you can’t go live in a warehouse for free like they used to. They’ve all been destroyed or converted into luxury flats. The book is anti-nostalgia. There’s so many future elders that were lost who can’t pass on their knowledge. I’m really trying to bring those voices and ways of thinking to life.
I want the book to be encouraging, enabling, activating. We think of history in terms of legislation, rights, and freedoms: freedoms won and freedoms now in jeopardy. We must never forget what happened. It’s necessary that queer joy continues to exist outside of time, and this book is an attempt to readdress that.
