Though Nova Scotia House is his debut novel, British fashion journalist Charlie Porter has been writing fiction on the downlow since 2008. Porter is already a published author with two thoughtful fashion tomes to his name, 2021’s What Artists Wear and 2023’s Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion; he has also contributed to publications including the Financial Times, the New York Times and Fantastic Man. But his dreams of moving into narrative fiction were dashed shortly after he quit his last desk job, at GQ magazine, nearly 17 years ago. “I showed my work to a senior figure in publishing – who is still a senior figure in publishing – and they said: ’Oh, there’s no market for gay fiction,’” Porter recalls. “Obviously, what they meant was there was no market for what I was trying to do. There was a market then for Alan Hollinghurst and other authors who fit into a kind of Oxbridge thing. But that wasn’t me, so I was put in my place.”
Undeterred, Porter completed the first draft of a novel in 2010 – that one remains unpublished, sadly – and began work on Nova Scotia House in April 2020. Written with tumbling urgency in a near-stream of consciousness style, it centres on Johnny Grant, a queer man who finds himself at a crossroads in his late forties. Johnny has lived in Nova Scotia House, a fictional building in an area readers will recognise as east London, for nearly 30 years. It’s not just his home, but also a daily reminder of his late partner, Jerry Field, who died of an Aids-related illness four years after they met. Because a towering new-build is creeping up next door, the garden that Jerry cultivated to grow food for the couple may no longer be sustainable. And neither, perhaps, is Johnny’s life at the flat. It’s a deeply moving novel, both melancholy and cautiously optimistic, that invites the queer community to reconnect with radical ways of living. By channelling the collective mentality of the warehouses that Jerry called home in his youth, Johnny might yet carve out a fruitful second act for himself.
Unusually, the spark for Porter’s story wasn’t a character or even a loose narrative, but the construction of a new building near his east London home. “As it was being built, I could see that it was probably going to overshadow some flats that were already there, so I started to think about who could live in those existing flats,” Porter recalls. This turned his mind to past conversations with his friend Princess Julia, a DJ and writer who’s been a mainstay of London club culture for more than four decades. “She always talks about the squats she and her friends lived in back in the early 1980s,” Porter recalls. “When they were moved out of those squats, they were offered council flats in what were then undesirable blocks. But now, because of their locations, those blocks are very desirable.” Just not quite as desirable – to some people, anyway – as the swanky new-builds that seem to multiply nearby.
We’re speaking in the bright, incredibly striking living room of Porter’s own east London home, which was turned into a structurally unusual “concrete bunker” – his words – by its previous occupants. Porter’s two-storey space is housed in a 1960s former council block that is definitely desirable and surrounded by signs of gentrification. The LGBTQ+ venues that were once within shuffling distance closed around a decade ago, but one of them, famously chaotic pub-nightclub the Joiners Arms, inspired a fictional drinking den in Porter’s novel. “The book is set in a version of London that is very clearly London, but ’London’ is never said and the bars are invented or have different names,” Porter says. When I mention that a club night Johnny visits reminded me of Vauxhall’s long-running Horsemeat Disco, Porter nods to confirm my hunch, then expands on his point. “I hate nostalgia, so I didn’t want anyone to think, ’Oh, I love Horsemeat Disco’ and bring their own memory of what that is to this story,” he says. “I wanted to describe the party as if you’re experiencing it then and there.”
The age gap between Johnny and Jerry – they met at 19 and 45 respectively – is also rooted in real life, albeit loosely. “The artist Derek Jarman met his partner Keith Collins in 1986, shortly after [Jarman] got his HIV diagnosis, and there was about 25 years between them,” Porter explains. “They were deeply connected and in love until Jarman’s death in 1994, but they never had sex because of the initial uncertainty about how the virus was transmitted.” Porter says this high-profile benchmark gave him “permission” to write Johnny and Jerry’s “very queer relationship of deep love and respect without sex”. He also says that Jerry’s formative years living in commune-like warehouses was inspired by Jarman’s 1970s warehouse period. “But these characters definitely aren’t Jarman and Collins,” he adds. “Jerry and Johnny have very different lives: they’re a community worker and a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery. I had no interest in writing narrative fiction about real people.”
“I wanted to write about those years because I think most HIV/Aids narratives [in fiction] have focused on the early days of the crisis ... I also wanted to look at that period because it’s when exhaustion was setting in alongside despair” – Charlie Porter
In the book, we learn through Johnny’s devastatingly vivid recollections that he and Jerry met in 1991, five years before HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) came in and stopped HIV/Aids from being a near-uniform death sentence. “I wanted to write about those years because I think most HIV/Aids narratives [in fiction] have focused on the early days of the crisis,” Porter says. “I also wanted to look at that period because it’s when exhaustion was setting in alongside despair. Friends who lived through that time have told me what it felt like to go to funeral after funeral, but then be expected by society just to carry on as normal.”
On one level, Nova Scotia House is a poignant love story about a survivor whose life partner was snatched away far too soon. On another, it’s a cathartic tribute to the many others lost to the same disease. “I’d like readers to think about the ongoing impact of the HIV/Aids crisis on their lives: because so many people died, we’re missing their contribution to society now,“ Porter says. But above all, it’s a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community’s potential to form nourishing alternatives to the heteronormative family unit. “When Jerry talks about living communally in warehouses in the 1970s, he’s suggesting that we don’t have to live in this very isolated way in our own individual homes,” Porter says. “The book is written very intentionally to encourage people to think about the way they live today.”
Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter is published by Particular Books, and is out now.
