GLR May-June 2026

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natural thing was the fact that their blood was divided between two bodies. He could believe that even calling it ‘sex’ was incorrect, because it wasn’t about anything so shallow as physical desire. They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself to gether over a wound.” Deeply insecure, Paul fears that Ju lian will tire of him and find someone better. To keep himself interesting, he invents a game in which he and Julian imagine unique ways to kill people. Eventually the game becomes real, as Paul convinces himself that they must do something irreversible and form a secret that will cement their bond. They settle on a random person they read about in the newspaper, a war apologist who’s distant enough that they will never be linked to the murder (in an au thor’s note, Micah Nemerever dis cusses how he was long fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb case of 1924,

The same predestined outcomes of miserable deaths are affirmed in film. Alfred Hitchcock could pass the het eronormative censors of the 1940s and ’50s only because the gay characters he depicted were psychopathic: Brandon and Phillip in Rope , Bruno Antony in Strangers on a Train , Leonard in North by Northwest . In his pioneering book on LGBT film history, The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo found that between the 1910s and the early 1980s there were 43 gay characters who died. One died of old age, another by castration. Thirteen died by suicide, and more than double that (27) were murdered. Curiously, murder doesn’t surface as frequently in gay literary fiction. Hallmarks of post-Stonewall literature like Dancer from the Dance byAndrew Holleran and Faggots by Larry Kramer don’t depict homicide, despite the gritty underbelly of New York City de

also the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Rope , in which two young Jewish men sought to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by committing the “perfect murder”). Nemerever portrays the boys as doomed because of cul ture, not psychopathy. Told in the third person, the novel’s view over Paul’s shoulder is unreliable. This reflects the con tradictory policies and fragmentary dictates that determine Paul’s world, but it also keeps the reader from clearly know ing why Paul’s father died by suicide or whether Julian’s ten derness and vulnerability are misread by Paul as hatred and manipulation. Eager to assimilate into WASP society, his mother doesn’t bring up Judaism outside the home, and his grandparents don’t speak of the Holocaust. There are zero models of what dating a man in college would look like, and there is certainly zero social or familial support for that prospect. Incapable of dealing with their emotions, the two be come the very force that they had banded together against: the people who commit everyday atrocities. They initially bonded over their mutual protest against society’s quiet violence; by the end, they are swept under and become the vehicles through which that violence perpetuates itself. These Violent Delights shares several themes with Hawk Mountain by Conner Habib, including that when one cannot face the reality of queer love, one may try to murder the love object. Set in 2022, Hawk Mountain opens on Todd Nasca, a newly divorced high school English teacher, and his six-year old son Anthony walking along the beach in a nondescript New England town where they run into Jack Gates, Todd’s old high school bully (with whom he once shared a kiss). Jack is kind and delightful to Anthony, who likes him instantly. Jack, also recently divorced, asks to stay with Todd until his head clears. A few days later, Jack suggests that the two men could start a life together. Upon hearing this, Todd—before he can stop himself—strikes Jack in the head with a statuette of Hercules.

picted in both novels; rather, deaths happen by accident: drug overdoses, housefires, an ambiguous drowning. None of Ed mund White’s books showcases a queer character killing any one, and the murders that do occur—in Caracole (1985) and The Humble Lover (2023)—don’t involve gay characters. The prototype of a murderous gay man may be Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). But despite the au thor’s intent of portraying someone who “happens to murder people,” the figure of Ripley aligns with the pre-Stonewall ide ology conjoining homosexuality to “moral insanity.” Readers of Ripley were enthralled but horrified, and the novel ultimately reaffirmed the ideology that homosexuals were untrustworthy and unstable. Only in the past decade have we seen not only more complex portrayals of queer murderers but also an increase in the public’s willingness to not explain murder through sexu ality. Recently, we’ve seen public lust for queer-ish antiheroes like real-life UnitedHealthCare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione and the fictional social-climbing Oliver Quick in Saltburn . It’s difficult to imagine that a similar degree of public lust could have existed for a figure like Ripley in the 1950s. § M ICAH N EMEREVER ’ S These Violent Delights takes its title from Romeo and Juliet . Set in Pittsburgh in the early 1970s, the novel features an equally doomed relationship between two teenage Jewish college students, Paul (serious-minded, middle-class, artistic) and Julian (charismatic, wealthy, seemingly duplici tous). The two bond in a philosophy class over what they see as moral cowardice from most of the world’s inhabitants: Every day they observe the common cruelties that have enabled such horrors as the Holocaust and the ongoing war in Vietnam. They soon spend as much time together as possible, and their passion becomes as heated as that of Shakespeare’s teenage lovers: “[W]hen they were alone, [Paul] could promise himself that he and Julian were each other’s birthright, and that the only un

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