Rating: I really don't know. Five, three, none of them capture the relived reality of the book. Say four.

Okay, so it's like this. I re-read this book because of Kick-Ass Katie's January Reading Through Time thread on The Irish Potato Famine. I was thoroughly delighted by it in 1986. I found it at Liberty Books in Austin, the first exclusively gay/lesbian bookstore we'd ever had. It was a joy to have something every bit as good as A Different Light, the New York store that seemed like Mecca to my book-loving queer self; there wasn't A Section, like there was at the University Co-Op on the Drag, it was the point of the place! BOOKS BY QUEER PEOPLE!! ABOUT US!! All over the place there were covers with *men*touching*men*!! It was heady stuff. I spent $400 (in 1986!) in the first month it existed. This book was one of the first I bought. I'd heard of the Famine, had a vague sense that the English did it on purpose, and that Irish folks in the USA were still pissed about it. That struck me as weird, and it still does to be honest, but it made me think there was some kind of good story here. That, and the cover had a lovely tableau of a dark-haired man tenderly cradling what was clearly his heart's treasure, a blond guy with closed eyes. Sold!

Wealthy Englishman Anthony Altarnun and Irish smith's son Michael Tangney are lovers in pre-Famine Ireland. The neighbours (to misspell it in the manner of the London-published book) are, well, suspicious...the men behave queerly (in the old sense) in their intimacy, as they are pretending to be master and servant. But Altarnun is a fine, upstanding man, honest, forthright, and genuinely good to his tenants.

Then the Famine hits.

Altarnun beggars himself to feed his people. The politics of the Famine means that, because of the duration of the engineered crisis, he ends up destitute and on a Famine Ship to America with Michael. He contracts typhus, is nursed by his not-quite-faithful Michael, and dies before they reach America. And that's where a framing device, the family left behind family members' heirs receiving a mysterious bequest, comes into play. Michael's life in America is apparently successful. Of course his left-behinds wouldn't keep in touch with him, since he was a Sodomite and a catamite and a vile shirt-lifter. So this descendant, unnamed and without any evident personality, has set their eyes on recovering and retelling the story.

It was an astounding blow to my generally poor acceptance of how we were written out of history by our dearly beloathèd families, by the set-up of a society that wouldn't let us form legal families...Michael is telling an Irish fellow emigrant about Anthony:

"My...he...died of typhus. On the ship."
"He?"
"There isn't a name like husband, because the world doesn't admit such things exist. But I was as married to him as any mand and his wife are to each other."

And there it was. That year, 1986, was mid-AIDS crisis. My older boyfriend from my teens, Paul, had died not long before. But there was nothing for me to hang my grief on, "geez what's wrong with you, he was just a friend!", and you know what? That moment on, I was absolutely convinced that marriage equality was not going to make a damn bit of difference because human beings are vile and irredeemable. This idea was borne out once and for all on 9 November 2016 and subsequent events.

The end of the book:

So nothing of Michael Tangney's exists now.
Except for a silver spoon, which {a lawyer} sent to {the writer's great-aunt}; it has engraved on it the initials M.T. and this motto: Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings. It is on my desk in front of me, as I write this.

The blight that is prejudice afflicts populations as well as people. Survivors of one, both, more than enough forms of this uniquely human evil don't have nearly enough of y'all's...our...attention for their stories. As the President of Ireland said to the English government's flunkies on a 1995 visit:

Even now, it is not too late to say sorry. That would mean so much.

Fat goddamned chance. ( )