Burston, Paul 1965-

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Burston, Paul 1965-

PERSONAL: Born 1965, in Yorkshire, England. Education: Earned B.A. and M.A. degrees. Hobbies and other interests: Kickboxing, movies, gardening, reading.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Time Out, London, England, editor. Attitude magazine, founding editor.

WRITINGS:

What Are You Looking At?: Queer Sex, Style, and Cinema, Cassell (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor, with Colin Richardson) A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture, Routledge (New York, NY), 1995.

Shameless (novel), Abacus (London, England), 2001, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2004

Time Out Gay and Lesbian London, Time Out (London, England), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Author, editor, and journalist Paul Burston was born in Yorkshire, England, and grew up in South Wales—"not the best place to be gay," as Burston quipped in an autobiography on the Time Warner Bookmark Web site. It was "a very macho place, where playing rugby counts for more than culture." Departing Wales at age nineteen, he studied English literature and drama in London. Burston "fell into journalism by accident," he commented, starting out as media liaison for ACT-UP in London, gradually doing more and more work for the English gay press until he became an editor for Time Out magazine.

Burston's novel Shameless is a "spritely, feisty debut," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Calling the novel "rueful and raunchy," Liesl Schillinger added in the New York Times Book Review that Shameless is "a hootingly funny yet strangely tender first novel about the post-breakup sexcapades of a hapless gay Londoner named Martin and his (usually) luckier friends."

When Martin's boyfriend Christopher, fresh off a physique-building stint at the local gym, leaves him for a male prostitute, Martin throws off his usual calm and reserved lifestyle and plunges headlong into London's gay party scene. While Martin, his friend John, and John's glorious new boyfriend Fernando dance, dope, and dally at all the hottest nightspots, their straight female friend Caroline flirts with a cocaine addiction and ponders whether her gay-seeming boyfriend Graham is indeed gay or merely highly refined sexually. As the novel unfolds, John's relationship with drug-dealing Fernando becomes increasingly difficult; Caroline's habit costs her her job, and her suspicions about Graham drive him away, which drives her deeper into the dubious release of drugs; and Martin's hard partying finally catches up to him. "After months of one-night stands, hard drug use, and forgotten evenings, Martin's newly discovered lifestyle comes to a dramatic end," noted Booklist reviewer Michael Spinella. "Burston shows that when it comes to navigating the choppy seas of modern dating, gay men and straight women are in much the same boat," Schillinger observed.

"It's about time someone translated the sex-and-shopping novel to the gay community," remarked Carrie O'Grady in the Manchester Guardian, emphasizing that Burston's effort has succeeded in doing just that. Although a reviewer for Publishers Weekly found that "the perfect-bodied vanity and dizzyingly juvenile perspective eventually become tiresome," the critic added that Burston's characters and their adventures in clubhopping through deepest London "make for a brisk beach read."