Blog Tour: Wranglestone by Darren Charlton

Hello!

It’s blog tour day! I’m so excited to be hosting a date on the Wranglestone blog tour, I can’t tell you how much I adored this book. It’s brilliant! I have an awesome guest post written by Darren about Growing up in the 80s, you’re in for a treat! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the tour posts, you can find out who is hosting at the bottom of the page.

Happy reading!

Growing up in the 80s – what are the pop culture references from his youth that inspired Darren to write Wranglestone?

It’s interesting to look back and wonder how much of who I am was informed not only by the books and films that were around in my childhood but by what wasn’t.

Of course, back in the 80’s, Section 28 under a Thatcherite government, prohibited any school or teacher from talking about homosexuality because it regarded (some still do) same-sex attraction as a set of feelings children are conditioned to have by adults. So, even though being an overweight teenager until I was 19 may have always been the barrier to unlocking my sexuality sooner no matter what, I do wonder what might have happened had E.M Forster’s Maurice been on the curriculum rather than A Passage to India.

But one thing is for sure, that the innate gravitational pull towards strong women and camp that gay men often feel, will out. And so, the likes of The Golden Girls, Dynasty and, in the case of the movies, Supergirl, would become strange sanctuaries for a lost gay boy even though I simply didn’t know why. Parallel to all this, I was lucky enough by sheer fortune of birth, to be a Star Wars and Spielberg kid.

I have to confess to not falling in love with reading and literature until I studied it in sixth from and then university, so cinema was the single biggest influence over my childhood. And although there was no LGBTQ representation in the likes of E.T, Goonies, and Neverending Story, they all have something in common useful to any would-be gay boy, the lost and lonely child.

But, of course, the gay community have always had to find themselves buried in code; the spa scene in Ben-Hur; a tuxedo wearing Marlene Dietrich in Morocco. So maybe that’s the biggest single inspiration of Wranglestone, the stuff that wasn’t around in my childhood with a will to take us out of code, and put us up front and centre stage in genre storytelling. If that should reach one young person and mean something to them, then it will have all been worth it.