woke up at 4 am gasping for breath … I feel like I can’t get fully oxygenated. My nose is blocked and I feel dehydrated and gooey in the breathing apparatus, so I’m going upstairs to make myself some tea.
I am seven chapters in to Halliburton’s Royal Road to Romance (1925) and while many queerer books have been written I’m sure this is the gayest one I’ve read yet. His descriptions are so delightfully over the top, florid and memorable, but also one gets the indelible impression that half the shit he’s reporting never happened. Anyway, he ran away from uni in his early 20s, and fetishized his own youth for as long as he could, eventually drowning on a ghastly sea voyage in a thoroughly unseaworthy vessel at some point in his 30s. Content warning, typical American ethnocentric racism.
