“New York is a hard place to consider home, because it doesn’t care for you as an individual,” he tells me.
They’ve been together for two and a half decades, since Stuart was a textiles student in Scotland, and also have a place in upstate New York. He shares the apartment with his husband, an art curator at the Gagosian contemporary art galleries. A pile of books are neatly stacked on a unit behind him, Young Mungo – the UK edition to be published with its genuinely iconic cover image, Wolfgang Tillmans’ 2002 photograph The Cock (Kiss) – pride of place at the top. Stuart is talking to me from his study at home in the East Village. He’s in the city now, sporting a salt-and-pepper beard and wearing a dark, open-collared shirt. For most of the past 20 years, before he became one of the most successful debut authors of recent years, he worked as a fashion designer in New York, ascending the rungs of responsibility at brands like Calvin Klein and Banana Republic. It is, when he discusses it, still home to him. It’s from that viewpoint that Stuart writes: what he remembers of his hometown most fondly. Scotland has a coldness, but its heart, the banter that binds its people, is strong and unique. Alcoholism, drug abuse and gang violence was rife.Īnd yet, from these dire situations, community often sprung. Prosperity for the working classes was a fantasy. Young people left school, walking into an environment that offered them little to nothing. In the 1980s and ’90s, it was a city shanked by Tory rule, where Thatcherism decimated the steel and shipbuilding industries, forcing a generation of men out of work and, along with their families, into poverty. With his two books – 2020’s Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, out this month – the 45-year-old has rebuilt the Glasgow of his youth, lifted from his “vivid, like technicolour” memory. And then there are the writers and the artists to whom their very work is like therapy, revisiting the places associated with terrible memories in an attempt to make sense of what happened and who they became as a result of going through it. Others process it gradually, learning to cope. Some crumble under the weight of childhood trauma. It’s an intense desire to be closer to the only place that understands him fully, “where I don’t have to explain myself”. “It goes beyond homesickness,” says the author, who left Scotland for New York two decades ago.
The devil reads the words with his eyes because he is mindless and heartless.A great malaise sets over Douglas Stuart when he’s been away from Glasgow for too long. The bible is not for heartless mindless fools. You and your primitive kind need deliverance. I pray that you are able to find the light out of the deep dark tunnel you are in. what is abnormal is your reasoning and your fixation on homosexuality. But i suppose with your reasoning which is fuelled by a huge dose of ignorance a child is better off with heterosexual parents whether they are abused or not. not all children brought up by heterosexual couples have positive experiences. it is that very reasoning that leaves children vulnerable were adults such as yourself should be safeguarding them. it is frightening that people can even entertain the the misconception that homosexuals are paedophiles. do you have the capacity to see that your reasoning is wrong on so many levels. are you saying that all paedophiles are homosexuals or is it that you feel it is better for a child to be sexual molested by a member of the opposite sex because in your mind that child’s future outcome will be better than if the child was molested by a member of the same sex.
I came here to read comments and add mine. You see how cool it is now for people saying there’s no God to insult people who know there’s a God. Think about it., how can a man be married to another man, How? Soon pedophiles will also come out brazenly asking to be accepted after all its a personal sexual choice too. They can sleep with anything from mosquitoes, tables, stones, dogs, brooms,kids to whatever and bcos most media houses are owned by them,we’re being forced to accept this sickness. I read a lady’s comment on facebook recounting how young boys are turning to homosexuality in addition to the usual gang crimes to appear even more cool. And the black Americans are sadly the biggest victims so far.