GLR May-June 2026

Todd then hides Jack’s body in the basement. As the school year begins, he slowly dismembers Jack while remembering aloud their high school years and wondering what could have been. The scenes in which Jack is alive are rendered in the present tense; all other events, even those set in the present, are told in past tense. It’s an elegant structure that makes Todd’s deadened love for Jack palpable. The clarity of its outline further reflects the steady, systematic way Todd (at least on the page) evades capture. Hawk Mountain is a reaction to the horror of being closeted, to rigid gender norms, and to the daily violence of heteronor mativity. These impossible emotions that Jack feels, that many queer people feel, find expression in melodramatic gestures like (fictional) murder. In How to Be Gay , David M. Halperin spells out how gay subjectivity is best outlined through its cultural forms: “[G]ay identity is inadequate to the expression of gay subjectivity. Gay identity does a very bad job of capturing what it feels like to be gay, because it fails to translate into expressive form the full extent and range of gay desire. Even gay sex, or its telltale signs, or the presence of gay men, or their public visi bility and acceptance are insufficient to the tasks of represent ing what it feels like to be gay.” Hawk Mountain and These Violent Delights say something important about gay sensibility: The cost of living in the closet—being unable to speak of one’s love—leads to self-annihilation. It feels like death; it is death. The murderers in these novels escape arrest. But spiritually, who can say if they ever recover, or if they will one day confess? Both books end in tragedy for the protagonists, who certainly do not go riding off into the sunset. As if anticipating these tragic outcomes, Yi ğ it Karaahmet’s Summerhouse insists on a posi tive ending and self-consciously relishes its campy finale. In These Violent Delights , one kills to keep love. In HawkMoun tain , one kills to escape love. In Summerhouse , one kills to pro tect love. Published in Turkish in 2021 and translated into English in 2025, Summerhouse follows Ş ener and Fehmi, two wealthy sixty-something men who live on a chic island near Istanbul and are celebrating their fortieth anniversary. While they appear to most of the island’s inhabitants to be roommates, at the small ceremony several of their friends publicly acknowledge the di mensions of their relationship. Ş ener is a famed pianist who loves arranging flowers and gossiping with neighbors. Fehmi is a solitary architect who’s translating several plays into Eng lish, a language he can read but is too self-conscious to speak. They met at a club where Ş ener performed and have been in

separable ever since. Everything is honey and daffodils until an unspeakably beautiful and arrogant seventeen-year-old, Deniz with “a dia mond-cut chin,” moves in next door. Ş ener, whose study is po sitioned perfectly to watch Deniz masturbate, becomes obsessed. To appear younger, he recalibrates his wardrobe, shaves his mustache, and takes up smoking pot. Fehmi senses that Ş ener’s perception of him has, inexplicably, shifted: “As he ate his food, Fehmi glanced at him for a brief moment and they exchanged a look: brief, indescribable, and impossibly sig nificant. Fehmi looked at the man across from him, eating his dinner in front of a curtain of flowers, with a pity he’d never felt before. An old man, trying with utmost care not to smack his lips, eating stew.” With enough “straight-acting” charm and alcohol, Fehmi eventually finds Deniz in his bed. But once he goes to kiss him, Deniz (whom Karaahmet manages to make shockingly de testable) punches him, screams faggot, and blackmails him. For all his pride in being “one of the guys,” Fehmi cannot defend himself. Just then Ş ener opens the bedroom door and clubs Deniz over the head with a clothing iron. Lightning strikes at that precise moment to show that Ş ener is “The true master of that bedroom.” It’s a deliciously campy moment, and the camp only increases when Ş ener and Fehmi hide the body and join the search-and-rescue team. Ş ener’s effeminate qualities end up saving them: He organizes search campaigns and encourages a rumor that takes the town further from the truth; his cooking and gardening skills become essential to the cover-up. “Every

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May–June 2026

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