‘Nova Scotia House' Reimagines London's Queer Life and History

Yahoo

25-03-2025

LONDON — The British journalist Charlie Porter, who has just released his debut novel 'Nova Scotia House' (Particular Books), owes a lot of what he's learned about writing to fashion criticism.
The former menswear critic of The Financial Times who has also penned two nonfiction books about clothing and style, says writing about fashion shows helped him process information, work out what to put where, and how to keep a reader 'tickled.'
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'Everyone has an idea of what a fashion show is, but the reality of it is so weird. Most people never get to go to a fashion show, so they don't really understand the weirdness of it. It's an education of processing information and just sitting there and listening to stuff and thinking about it,' he says.
His book follows a similar pattern. There are lists and thoughts from the point of view of Johnny, a 45-year-old gay man reflecting on his life in the East End flat that belonged to his deceased lover, Jerry, who died in 1995 from an AIDS-related illness.
The opening paragraph starts with a list of clothes that Johnny is ticking off in his head. 'Two pairs of sneakers, a pair of boots. Two coats — a waterproof and a duffel, back of the door — mine, not his.' Johnny is 19 when he meets Jerry, who is 45 and HIV positive.
Porter says his aim was to document queer lives in the 20th century and to write about sex, love, HIV/AIDS, desire, counterculture, nightlife and community.
'So much goes undocumented because people lived closeted lives and the media was pretty much entirely homophobic. To actually find primary sources where you get an actual sense of being with a [queer] person is really difficult,' he contends.
Porter uses the character of Jerry to pass down knowledge to Johnny of a life before the HIV/AIDS crisis. He touches on the 'philosophies and experiments' of queer men in the '60s and '70s.
'I'm very aware of the lack of passing down of knowledge, because people died. There were few people left to pass this chain of knowledge shared between generations,' he says.
The Johnny character is partly autobiographical.
'He exists today. I wanted to write about someone my age who came to London at the same time I did,' says Porter, who, like his characters, lives in East London. But that's where the similarities stop.
'The house came first because I was thinking about a council block near where I live and I thought about who could be living in those flats,' he adds.
Porter describes the house that Jerry and Johnny live in as if it were a character. He describes it as a sanctuary of love, while the garden acts as the home's beating heart.
'Houses can affect a relationship, and I wanted to think about [the characters] living in a space where their lives flowed with a garden that was westerly facing, so they got sunlight and could grow their own food,' he explains.
The conversations and overthinking that take place in Nova Scotia House four years prior to Jerry's death shape Johnny's character. '[Johnny] is an exploration of who I could've been. He has emotional intelligence,' says Porter.
When Porter arrived in London in the mid-'90s, he was terrified of experimenting with queer life in the city, and instead put all his energy into his journalism career. He was offered a place on the fashion journalism M.A. course at Central Saint Martins by Louise Wilson, the legendary course director for the M.A. fashion program who shaped the careers of designers including Lee Alexander McQueen, Christopher Kane and Simone Rocha.
'I couldn't afford the course, so I had to get a regular job,' he says of securing his first job as a researcher at The Daily Express newspaper before moving on to The Times of London, Esquire U.K., The Guardian, GQ U.K. and Fantastic Man.
After leaving publishing, he began writing books. His first, 'What Artists Wear' (Penguin U.K.), was published in 2021, followed by 'Bring No Clothes' (Penguin U.K.) in 2023. He's been writing fiction since 2008, although 'Nova Scotia House' is his first published work.
'Someone very senior in publishing in 2008 said to me, 'There's no market for gay fiction.' But I just kept writing for myself,' says Porter.
Life has moved on since then, however, and he's already writing his second gay novel.
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