Women's Lifestyle August 31, 2026 0 Comments

Dive Into Marlon James’s Bold New Novel That Unveils the Raw Truths and Hidden Joys of Queer Community—A Story You Can’t Afford to Miss!

In a dimly lit room in Kingston, Jamaica, 1988, eight men gather, nerves tangled, waiting to breathe life into a play that’s anything but ordinary. It’s John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, but with a twist: “It’s like Lord of the Flies with big people,” the director claims. And, as one actor wittily adds, “But with man-on-man fucking.” That razor-sharp blend of raw truth and unfiltered identity sets the bold, expansive tone for Marlon James’s latest literary journey, The Disappearers. Picture this: a troupe of queer men from varied walks of life, locked in the suffocating grip of ’80s homophobic Jamaica, their fates intertwined by an impending act of violence that shatters their precarious world. This isn’t just a novel; it’s a gritty, at times laugh-out-loud funny exploration of community, longing, and the relentless pursuit of joy against the odds. What does it mean to find your voice amidst chaos? Can shared queerness alone hold a fractured group together? And hey — if life’s a twisted play, who really gets to call the shots on what’s “gay” or not? Buckle up, because Marlon James delivers over 600 pages of unapologetic truth and rich humanity that’ll make you rethink everything you thought you knew about identity and resilience.

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In a room in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988, eight men sit, nervously waiting for play rehearsal to begin. The play in question is an adaptation of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes. The director, Havelock, insists it isn’t a gay play, per se. “It’s like Lord of the Flies with big people,” he says. “But with man-on-man fucking,” one of the actors, Jordan, immediately responds.

This sets the tone for Marlon James’s expansive new novel, The Disappearers. The men acting in the play are all queer. They range in age from just out of high school to middle-aged, and they come from different walks of life, but all live under the intense strain and paranoia of life in homophobic Jamaica of the 1980s. Their production will be met with unspeakable violence, and the novel is an exploration of the men before and after this moment of rupture. It’s also wickedly funny, at times sexy, and full of longing.

It’s a triumph for James, who won the Booker Prize for 2017’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Like that book, The Disappearers is epic in scope—over 600 pages long. And like that book, every single one of those pages is earned. Here, James talks with Harper’s Bazaar about writing the truth about queerness, community, and joy.

How did you find Eddy Porteous’s voice, the voice that opens this novel? What did you read, listen to, or watch to find its rhythm?

Edmond’s voice was both easy and hard. Easy in the sense that he is my age, or at least close to it, and as someone also born smack in the middle of Gen X, I identify with and understand everything he’s experiencing. Eddy’s voice, much like mine, is Jamaican to a point, heavily influenced by American pop culture, especially pop music. There is a generation outside of America that was also raised on The Muppet Show and MTV, and somewhere between those two peaks came a worldview.

But voice is more than just sound. It is point of view and perspective. It’s the product of education, parenting, socialization, and whatever your heroes sound like. Eddy speaks in what Jamaicans would call the Uptown voice, meaning posh, educated, rich, worldly—meaning that you have been to Miami at least twice. It’s also the voice of people who are upper-class-adjacent but not really upper-class, like me. People who sound like we belong even though we look like we don’t.

True Black joy is not a response to anybody’s demand.

On social media, there has been a lot of rhapsodizing about “community,” specifically, odes to queer communities. I was struck by how this book captures community as it exists amongst marginalized people: the desire for connection mixed with shame, antagonism, and self-loathing; the difficulty of making friends with someone who shares your identity when your whole world tells you to hate that identity. First off, what are your thoughts on the romanticization of queer community? Do you find it helpful or useful, or does it open more questions for you? Second off, can you talk about how you approached depicting community, specifically friendships between gay men, in this novel?

I’m not sure that much of that romanticization happens within queer communities. When I lived in Minneapolis, I was far more likely to run into racism in the gay community than homophobia in the Black. So, in many ways, queer community was a myth or a privilege not extended to Black and brown people.

Romanticization is those interracial couples you always see in beer ads. The first person in America to call me n*gg*r was a gay man, as was the second. The main reason I left Minnesota was that the queer community wasn’t much of a community to me. The first time in my life I ever went to a party where absolutely no one would talk to me was a gay party. And yet one of the reasons I wrote this novel was a fear of having missed out on community. A fear that I never had my gay posse. But then what is a gay posse, really?

Had it not been for this play, none of the men in The Disappearers would have even gotten together. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as circumstances and opportunities bring people together all the time. On paper, Eddy and Jordan should have been best friends. They are almost mirror images of each other, but they never become friends. Havelock and Mark are great friends, but at one point Mark was sort of his pimp. Rainford has no friends. They are a lonely bunch, enough to make you wonder if everybody was just being lonely together. Or if shared queerness—or shared persecution—was ever enough.

One of the things I loved about the British version of Queer as Folk is that they took that idea of community and ripped it apart with a storyline cut from the American version. In one episode, the gay posse arrives at the club together but disperses as soon as they find hookups. One of them overdoses in his bedroom, the hookup flees, and his body sits there rotting for nearly a week. And at his funeral, his mother confronts the friends, admitting that she was not much of a mother or ally, but then she throws out a question that none of them can answer: If you were a bunch of straight male friends, would my son have been dead and rotting in his house for days? Bring that up with many gay men now and silence is still the answer.

Relatedly, what do you think of “Black joy” discourse? The demand to be relentlessly cheerful, upbeat, not too messy?

Thankfully, true Black joy is not a response to anybody’s demand. White people who expect Black joy are really expecting white safety, a sign that they are not under threat. The angry Black man or woman is, more than anything, a disappointment or a reminder that the American dream is a nightmare for some. Black joy doesn’t need a gaze, which is why sometimes when the white person is gazing, they call the cops. As for real Black joy, Black people are blessed to find joy in so many unexpected ways. To watch Black Panther for the first time was to experience Black joy. Girls double-dutching on the avenue is Black joy. Al Green’s “Love and Happiness.” Ackee and Saltfish. Ballroom. Beyoncé’s Renaissance.

What did you think of A Little Life? Or The Great Believers? I know there’s been a lot of discourse around cis (seemingly) straight women writing about young gay men—whether they have the right to do so, whether they can “get it right.” On the flip side, what I loved about this book was the heavy citations of John Rechy and other queer theorists who dwell on gay male identity in ways that feel more expansive—frankly, dirtier and more human. I am curious what you think of that rise in books about gay men and gay men having sex that are written by straight women … and the role of the author in all of this.

The last thing I want to do is come across as a hater, particularly for two writers I very much admire. I wonder if the bigger issue is in commercial fiction, meaning queer literature for straight women. Who’s to say if there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, you get your kicks where you get your kicks, but that type of fiction always de-queers the gayness even when they amp up the sex. Why are none of these boys ever femme? Is this like lesbian pornography for straight men? The dirtiness of gay sex is washed out, nobody needs to reckon with scatological facts, but also the grit, and the realism is washed out as well. What always strikes me as remarkable, not just in the literature but in TV and film, is the miraculously pre-lubed gay ass. These men just jump in bed, ready to get busy. That’s wild, because every gay man I know, including me, has at least six different versions of lube, and five of them are always the wrong one. You get the suspicion that gay sex for straight people still must allow for the fantasy of straight sex. The boys in Heated Rivalry are all gorgeous, but they are all jocks, and two of them have sex with women. The sex is curiously dickless because the sudden presence of genitals takes it out of fantasy and into actual sex, which is not what the straight viewer bargained for.

What is a gay posse, really?

Eddy Porteous is a beautiful depiction of a tragic mulatto—and he would probably delight in using that term. Can you talk about choosing to write from a light-skinned man’s perspective, especially a light-skinned man raised in a majority Black country, with its own very specific understanding of colorism?

I wonder about Eddy. He probably would’ve liked the term tragic mulatto, but more because he was aware of privilege decades before anybody used the term. But he’s also very aware of what privilege does not get him. It doesn’t get him love; it barely gets him companionship. It doesn’t get him a stable family life. It doesn’t even get him family members he likes. And yet he is also aware that white (or white-passing) skin is the ultimate passport. That there are spaces he can enter without being questioned—for example, a nightclub. He’s aware that even when anger is directed at him, it can only go so far, because nobody would dare touch a white man. That said, I don’t think Eddy ever thought that white skin would give him happiness, mostly because he lives in such an unhappy family. At school, light skin only means that punches are verbal, never physical. But Eddy understands the tricky, perverse racial dynamics of a country that thinks it has no racial dynamics.

A beautiful thread throughout the novel is how pop culture, especially music, moves through these characters. But you also depicted something I see very rarely: the pang you can feel when you realize the culture that enacted violence on you has claimed to move on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this emotion so thoroughly depicted in fiction. Can you talk a bit about this phenomenon? And why portray it?

It is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? Here’s a quick one: being gay and loving hip-hop, especially hardcore hip-hop that wasn’t afraid to be publicly homophobic. Hip-hop has long sorta moved on without ever reckoning with itself, while I’m still struggling over Ice Cube saying “true n*gg*z ain’t gay” way back in 1991. But this question makes me think of Kurt Cobain realizing that the jocks who made his life so awful that he fled to music now listened to his records. I do think the queer perspective on this is a little different—although I fully accept Kurt Cobain as queer—in the sense that when harm is done, the person causing the harm moves on, sometimes with shocking ease, while the person harmed remains stuck, trauma now being their permanent present tense.

I remember running into the boys who used to torment me at school and being far more hurt that they had forgotten me. Culture moves on, and it’s amazing when it moves in the direction it used to shun, taking cues from the very people it used to harm. Right now, in Jamaica, I’m seeing gangsters in skintight jeans who only dance with each other, and I’m old enough to remember when wearing that shit could have gotten you beaten to death. But notice that the person carrying the burden of that memory is me.