The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Sunday’s Child (Geoffrey Chadwick Book 1)
By Edward O. Phillips
First published 1981
ReQueered Tales edition, 2019
Four stars

“When one is trying to be haughty one ought not to guffaw.”

This book’s beautifully crafted plot, together with its elegant, literate prose, make a dark comedy that is a work of art in the way too few books are today. It takes us through a tumultuous week in the life of a fifty-year-old upper-middle-class WASP corporate lawyer in Montreal. Still reeling from a recent break-up with his lover of three years, Geoffrey Chadwick almost inadvertently picks up a hustler and takes him home – only to accidentally cause his death during an attempted robbery. Everything else in the book spins off this cataclysm and the choices Geoffrey makes as the enormity of what has happened washes over him.

That said, this was a very difficult book for me to review. By the fifty percent mark on my e-reader, I was sure I couldn’t give it more than three out of five stars. At the end, however, with Edward O. Phillips’s beautifully calculated final line, the rating had risen to four stars—a reluctant four stars, but four nonetheless. In short, this is a very good book that I disliked rather a lot.

Part of my complicated reaction to Sunday’s Child relates to my age—both when the book was first published in 1981 (when I was twenty-five) and now at its reissue (sixty-four). A closely related aspect of my reaction to Sunday’s Child is neatly encapsulated in a line from a 1981 review of the book in the Toronto Sun, as cited by Alexander Inglis in his excellent 2019 introduction, describing the book as “…a wise novel about homosexuals.”

First, it is not a book about homosexuals. It is a book about a bisexual man old enough (as is the author) to be my father. It is a book that straight readers could have taken comfort in because it reaffirmed their prejudices and left them feeling smugly liberal in their sympathy. There are three gay men in the book, but they are all secondary characters. The main characters are not gay, but bisexual. Radical and modern at the time it was published, Geoffrey Chadwick’s character seems sadly dated now, a relic of a time when internalized homophobia was so commonplace as to be unrecognized for what it was (even by twinks like me). The fact that neither Geoffrey nor his lover Chris identify as bisexual (even though Chris is cheating on his unsuspecting wife with Geoffrey, who himself was married and had a child) is a detail that contrasts strongly with today’s focus on the much vaunted spectrum of sexuality that has pushed the Kinsey 6 to the margins of identity politics. I suspect that at twenty-five I wouldn’t have even noticed.

The hardest aspect of this book for me lies in the fact that Geoffrey, his lover Chris, and his old friend Larry, all represent the kind of “gay” men who, in 1981, I had learned to avoid like the plague. I was a child of Stonewall, and I had no patience for the archetypes of the past. Larry, a grossly alcoholic queen of the most stereotypical (but not inaccurate) sort, is embarrassing, and surely was meant to be seen in contrast with the steadfast, polished, and discreet (i.e. closeted) Geoffrey. There is only one gay man in the book for whom I felt real sympathy—Geoffrey’s humorless but beautiful and intelligent nephew Richard. Then there’s Walter, septuagenarian friend of Geoffrey’s alcoholic dowager of a mother. His is a marvelous character, of the sort of sly elderly gay man I knew from among my parents’ friends as a child. Yet he is sexually neutral, a veritable eunuch, and is an object of pity in Geoffrey’s eyes, a failed man. “Maybe one of the reasons I resent Walter—maybe resent is too strong a word. Regret? —is that in him I see traces of myself…”

And there you are. The older man I am now sees parts of himself in Geoffrey Chadwick—and not the best parts. Geoffrey is not just old enough to be my father, he rather reminds me of my father, and that puts a whole Freudian spin on my reaction to Sunday’s Child. Geoffrey represents a part of gay heritage that I really don’t want to claim; that in fact I would like to forget. Ironically, that’s what makes the reissue of this book important: forgetting your own people’s history, however unattractive, is never a good thing.

And yet, it is Geoffrey Chadwick who rescues a stray cat and her kittens from certain death and offers help and reassurance to his gay nephew. Even though he represents so many things that, in my lifetime, have become intolerable to me, he also represents things I was taught to value as I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. Those moments of generosity of spirit and actual heroism in the book remind me of how incredibly fortunate my own life has been. How can I not honor that?