André Aciman’s 2007 coming-of-age novel Call Me By Your Name is this month’s selection at the Queer Book Club.
The story of a romance between a US teenager spending the summer in Northern Italy with his parents, and his sudden romance with a visiting academic, was turned into an acclaimed movie in 2017.
Set in 1983, the story follows seventeen-year-old Elio who is living with his parents at their villa in Northern Italy. Each year over the summer his father has a doctoral student stay with them for six weeks, this year their guest is Oliver.
The novel won the award for gay fiction at the Lambda Literary Award. In recent years it’s been banned from some US classrooms because of its same-sex content.
Aciman later wrote a sequel to the novel titled Find Me which picked up the lives of the characters a decade later.
Perth’s Queer Book Club is an initiative of GRAI: GLBTI Rights in Ageing, and was established after years of members of Perth’s LGBTIQA+ communities expressing a desire for a book club.
Each month a different selection of people turn up to the discussion, and it’s a welcoming space where people aren’t compelled to speak if they go along.
It starts of with everyone introducing themselves and sharing their pronouns, and everyone is asked to describe the book in just one word. Then a moderator starts the discussion with a few provocations, and you can chime in with your thoughts, or just listen to what everyone else has to say.
At the end of the session everyone rates the book using a unicorn scoring system, one unicorn means you weren’t a fan, while five unicorns shows some serious love.
The group meet up on the last Wednesday of each month to chat about the monthly selection with refreshments provided. Find out more about the group at their Facebook page.
