Ralph: Diary of a Gay Teen

A powerful, moving book about Catholic school life on the cusp of the 1970s and of one talented boy’s exploration of his abilities, views emotions and sexuality, Ralph takes the form of a diary and a diary that could only have been written based on actual experience. That is its greatest strength for it is not a retrospective revisiting, and revising, of the past but Ralph’s day by day perception of his life and relationships, with mood swings, exaltationdesperation and ordinary fed-upness, recorded as he experienced them. Ralph is a pupil at a Catholic school run by Benedictine monks, the same Catholic order that ran the different school I was at some five years earlier. Maybe the five-year gap in our respective ages was light years in terms of our different experiences, for Ralph and his friends experience an emotional and social life far removed from the strictness and strictures, ruled by corporal punishment, that I had experienced. What is common ground is the rather hot-house atmosphere, the person you are at school being different from the one you exhibit at home in the holidays, the intensity of feelings.Ralph and his contemporaries manage a form of Catholic atheism which is enviable in its lack of tortured self-doubt and recrimination. They also explore their sexuality in relationships that are both joyous and painful but without the baggage of guilt carried by so many of us who grew up Catholic and gay.Ralph’s diary covers his life from the age of 16 to 19, a time of growth in height, knowledge, intellectual discipline and emotional experience. It is a roller coaster of ups and downs, often funny, quite often sad, but always intriguing. Ralph comes across as someone who aroused feelings of admiration, exasperation and affection among teachers and his fellow students. He engages you irresistibly as he navigates the highs and lows of his life. I defy your anxiety levels not to rise along with Ralph’s as he waits on tenterhooks to know whether he has secured his university place. And, above all, as he looks, as we all do, for happiness and contentment, as well as excitement, in his human relationships.

You're going to need to take your time with this one. Be patient; let it grow on you! If you do, you will be transported on a varied, often bewildering and always entertaining journey in to a young gay lad's mind way back in the 1960's. It's of more than just historical interest too. It's a fascinating read on so many levels and, by the end, you'll know and love Ralph. But ... stick with it and pay attention! This doesn't reveal all it's secrets all at once. Like a patchwork, the further back from it you stand, the more you see.

Yet another much to be recommended moving and percipient study of adolescent self-discovery from Anthony McDonald. As we know from his earlier "Adam" and "Dog in the Chapel", McDonald has an uncanny insight into the working of the adolescent mind Here is a boy searching for his identity, often his sexual identity and usually finding it where he least expected to, as with Adam and Sylvain. The descriptions of life in a late 1960's boarding school were only too real to some one who experienced the same thing in a 1940/50's context, though we would never have been allowed to smoke or visit the local pub! It was an interesting conceit to give us the boy's diary seen from a later perspective, we are not told exactly how much later, together with the inevitable spelling and grammatical howlers, these made it all so much more vivid. You could really see and hear them talking, arguing, experimenting as is boys' wont. I enjoyed too the descriptions of Ralph's daily encounters with his monkish teachers, all so very real. Life in that context has little changed, I suspect. Altogether a very satisfyingly emotional roller-coaster narrative written for once not in McDonald's elegant and lyrical prose, but in the words of a boy hopefully heading for university (yes, he gets there in the end, Durham, where better?), finding himself along the way and finally his sexual fulfilment in the arms of a fellow undergraduate. Much to be recommended.

It took me a while to get into this, so I found it necessary to persevere. It’s probably worth noting that it is, quite literally, a diary, so it doesn’t really read like a conventional book. Important also to perhaps mention that the main character Ralph is providing commentary on his various experiences, issues, and assignations whilst at public school, so state educated people might not be able to fully identify with this kind of schooling, and especially the idea of being away from home and and parents for most of the year. I have read nearly all of the authors many other titles and, almost without exception, I have enjoyed his other works enormously. I’m sorry to say that this book (diary) didn’t really manage to hold my attention for long periods, as I found myself only able to dip into it for short bursts at a time. It therefore took me much longer than normal to get to the end however, get to the end I eventually did.