Quote: Structured as a collection of diary entries, Indecent Assault gives Moody's reflections during the proceedings of a legal case brought against him, which alleged 4 counts of sexual touching (known legally as "indecent/sexual assault") and 1 count of attempted anal sex ("attempted buggery") with a 10-year-old male. Moody was acquitted of these charges in April 1979, and continued to publish on and participate in a wide variety of political movements. The book received positive endorsements from the Body Politic (Canada), Gay News, Chris Stretch (in The Leveller), Jonathan Walters (in Peace News), PAN (the Netherlands), and the Gay's the World Newsletter. Jeffrey Weeks said it "reads very powerfully"...

   

Quote: I am a London boy. Leicester Terrace was where we lived when I was born. It’s near Kensington Gardens. Such a long street it was, so very long. When we walked up towards our house a church spire was always walking in front of us. When we walked down towards the gardens a black church was always standing there watching. I was christened in that church. Oh, I walked and I walked and I walked on that pavement, walked and walked and walked to the gardens. Lampposts all down the street and house after house after house, and they all had numbers. Of course I was in a pram when I was a baby, but I dont remember that. My nurse pushed me. But I walked when I was old enough, she made me. Narrow it was where we used to go in the gardens, bushes on both sides and great trees inside. But first we had to cross the main road, the one that goes all the way to the Marble Arch. But I dont remember crossing that road. I remember the nursery ponds, we used to feed the young ducks there and sparrows that hopped round. I used to wish I could swim about with the ducks in and out of the reeds—they were ducks ! Sometimes I used to go to the end of this pavement place and peep at the Serpentine. Oh how.......

   

Quote: Yeah, I skimmed it. But the fact that he presents it in that manner--as a divorcee looking back on his childhood--that kind of stops it from being YA. It makes me think he hasn't read much, if any, YA. But that didn't bother me nearly so much as the fact that I was rather unable to find a single vivid description of a person or a room. And if he's read much gay coming of age gay fiction at all--the queer, sexually charged incidents of his youth are recounted in a manner that's rather lacking in both *ahem* passion and insight...

There's a bit where our narrator is an adolescent hiding in a closet and witnesses a near-act of homosexual sex by way of complicated bullying. This recalled to me a book I read maybe 20 years ago, Behind the Door, part of the gay, Jewish, Italian writer Giorgio Bassani's five-volume Novel of Ferrara, a modest epic about the quiet horrors of life under fascism. That book's title-giving incident of homophobic bullying also viewed from a closet is maybe a lot more complex than we can ask from a first-time hobbyist novelist, but he could have maybe pulled something profound out of the incident... Regardless, it doesn't feel like honest criticism was ever offered to this writer. It's dissapointing to me how much better it could have been. He's got a first draft. That's the hard part. Somebody at some point needed to tell him, show don't tell. Acolyte Press did better coming of age novels than this.

   

Quote: "It takes a certain level of . . . chutzpah . . . to ignore those gatekeepers"

The law is unjust and inhumane, partly because it doesn't understand nuance. There is all the difference in the world between the case under consideration and violating the copyrights of an author and publisher of a book in print who may be struggling to earn their livings from it and thus to be able to produce more books for the benefit of us all.

Saint Ours died in 1999. Efforts to trace his next-of-kin have failed - if they had been found and given their consent, the translation would have been published as a real book rather than being offered online. Un ange à Sodome has been out of print for even longer, so no one is earning money from it and the publisher is implicitly uninterested in trying to do so. So who is the injured party here? Isn't it a fair guess that if Saint Ours, in whatever paradise I hope he's in, knows what is going on, he's jolly grateful to JM Thian for reviving his book for a new readership?
 
JM Thian is not earning a penny from his "chutzpah". He translated this book purely out of love and respect for it, and a longing to see it widely appreciated. Do you really want to discourage him from giving more of his time for our benefit?