Book Review

By Eric Page

Guy UsinU Oil & Fetish (£20).

This fine art book holds a collection of Brighton-based oil painter Guy UsinU’s works – fetish adventures and Brighton folk but not always together. I’d seen some of his work around town so had an idea of the rich, gilded, realist images he paints. UsinU’s gothic indulgences give a Pierre et Gilles feel to the paintings, heavy with metaphor and meaning, but not coy in any way at all. This is blatant, proud, sexual, electric but controlled, guided, a tease of oil on canvas. Suffused with humour, this is self-aware art, toying with irony.

Each page featuring one full-colour image along with a description, sometimes a line or two about the subject matter if a portrait, or something more earthy meant to challenge and elicit more than an initial response. It’s these paintings which are the most fascinating here, providing a fantastically detailed world of kink and fantasy, but explored in a candid, honest way. UsinU’s exploration of kink, using not only the creations on his canvas but our own gaze and viewpoint, issues us with a stark challenge: look away now or look and enjoy and relish the enjoyment of imagination.

The book is an evocative and crepuscular exploration not just of the people and places of Brighton but also the psycho-sexual geography of the artist themselves. Where they lay, pause, linger, what they see, feel and embrace, and what they leave in the echoes of desire, control and abandonment which are captured with such fine detail. A superb gift for anyone interested in sensual or fetish art, the colour and imagery seduce and draw you in, holding the your attention.

His portraits are superb, capturing the dignity and personality of his sitters, exploring their faces with a forensic grace, and allowing their intersectional beauty to shine out, perhaps reflecting his own pedigree, coming from a line of fine oil painters. You can also order prints of the artist’s work from www.guyusinuartist.co.uk.

Miriam Margolyes This Much is True (£20, John Murray).

We all have our favourite Margolyes creation – Blackadder, Call the Midwife, voicing the Cadbury’s Caramel rabbit, Harry Potter’s Professor Sprout. This is the extraordinary life story of the award-winning actor, creator of myriad memorable characters and, now 80, a national treasure.

Conceived in an air-raid, being so mischievous with pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had; how she ended up posing nude for Augustus John aged 17, being ‘sent to Coventry’ by Monty Python and The Goodies and swearing on University Challenge (she was the first woman to say fuck on TV).

This book is packed with unforgettable stories from why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she’s ever had to being told off by HM The Queen. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much is True is as warm and honest, as full of life and surprises, as she is. Margolyes loves to shock or perhaps loves to live uninhibited and free from conventional ties. This rare talent to grasp the variety of live allows her to wallow in glorious spontaneity and the ability to say a loud affirmative ‘YES’ to the opportunities which life presents to her. A natural raconteur, the book is a superb read and may challenge as much as it will certainly delight.

Terry Sanderson The Reluctant Gay Activist (£6.99).

Sanderson, another of our national treasures, has published this revised memoir, in which he looks again at his very long involvement with equality campaigning and particularly the struggle for gay rights, of which he formed a key role and how his life as a leading secularist guided him.

I’ve got a lot of time for Terry – working class, poor, from a Northern mining community, effortlessly kind and deliciously witty, he’s a charming and engaging activist who has never seemed to stop pushing for a better world. This book is a longer version of his previous memoir, The Adventures of a Happy Homosexual, and covers Sanderson’s rather interesting life, from bold radical acts of coming out in a hostile UK society, building communities of queers in Rochdale, working with Claire Rayner as an Agony Aunt in Women’s Own in the ‘80s, being a leading writer for Gay Times and chairing the National Secular Society.

With honest eye-witnessing we can feel some of the pain that LGBTQ+ folks suffered from a brutal Tory government, the horror of the impact of AIDS but also the deep warmth and generosity of queer communities building something new, learning and adapting, building strong alliances and learning to love, fearlessly and without shame, and it’s here that Sanderson excels. This memoir is a shockwave against bigotry, smiting shame wherever he sees it, crushing the bigots under an unrelenting wave of love and holding out his hands to diverse communities, all struggling with oppressions, to create something better: the world we live in today, not perfect, but better.

The new additions bring us up to date with Sanderson’s struggle with cancer and his candid, searing account of facing pain and death are full of tenderness, mixed in with a clarion call to us all about the threats our community faces and how our focused, joint resistance is vital and a duty of us all.