Call Me

When Liam decides to begin answering the personal ads of London's gay papers, he is at first bemused and fascinated. After all, it is simply a way to entertain himself and pass the time. What Liam doesn't bargain for, however, is his growing reliance on the ads and the men who answer them. What at first was a form of distraction is quickly becoming an obsession, and Liam is discovering just who finds him so alluring.

Gay male fiction has long had the reputation of being simply about sex, a charge that is untrue, even when sex is the main topic of the story. P-P Harnett's Call Me, which was released in England in 1996 to critical acclaim and a hailstorm of outrage, is certainly riddled with sex. Liam begins to answer personal ads to find out (or so he tells himself) about the type of person who places them. He quickly becomes obsessed with the ads, his respondents, and new sexual experiences. But while Call Me is graphically sexual, it also addresses what it means to be a gay man looking for human contact in the maelstrom of the AIDS epidemic. Harnett has a winning, breezy style and a perverse sense of humor, but the power of the book resides in his ability to convey the sheer desperation that people feel--not about sex, but about the desire to make sense out of their lives, their feelings, and their desires.