By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
This review is also on Reedsy Discovery
Spoilers: When writing a Historical Fiction novel featuring a member of the LGBT+ community, it is important to write them accurately with how the time period affects their lives, relationships, and their feelings about the world and themselves.
Yes there are some that minimize those struggles and are just as effective, The Shabti by Megeara C. Lopez for example. It is a Supernatural Horror novel set in the 1930’s which treats the romance between the two lead male characters as a nonevent as compared to the supernatural entity that is haunting them. That is a rarity.
To realistically portray a character, particularly an LGBT+ in a historical time period, it is important to accurately capture that time period, homophobic and transphobic warts and all and how the lead character challenges those standards. Otherwise, there's no point in writing about that time period at all. Ary Chest’s novel, Priceless Passion excels in giving us a gay man's struggles with class division, poverty, homophobia, and romance on his journey towards self-reflection and discovery of his own identity.
In 1927, Baltimore, Eustice Mercidale is a son of external wealth and privilege but internal misery and despair. His father, Burton is a coal industrialist who rules his family and business with an iron fist, emphasis on fist. His mother, Jessica, is a non-entity who goes along with whatever her husband wants to maintain social standing. His sister, Ophelia, is a wild flapper who challenges her father's authority. Eustice himself is torn between behaving like the good obedient son and his own desires for rebellion and finding his own path.
The first few chapters give us the opulence, extravagance, and corruption during the Roaring Twenties, the flaws that would later lead to the Great Depression. The Mercidales live a seemingly enviable life of immense wealth. They have a large network of business partners, society matrons, and affluent young people. They go to parties to see and be seen. Eustice and Ophelia went to the best schools and traveled. They seem like the family everyone would want to be like. But it is all a front.
Eustice feels the intense pressure to excel and be the #1 son who will take over the family business. He can't rebel but Ophelia does. She wears short dresses, goes out all night, and has many affairs. She openly flaunts her flamboyant behavior defying a staid cold environment that is all surface but no substance. That wants but doesn't need. That has but doesn't deserve. That owns but doesn't love. That controls but doesn't understand. Eustice understands these feelings but can't yet find it in his heart to openly challenge his father like his sister does.
There are some hints that Burton’s staid, religious, overly moral personality is a front for corrupt and criminal activity. The employees who mine and separate the coal to support the Mercidale’s lifestyle work under horrible conditions which are augmented by Burton’s decisions to cut corners on safety and worker benefits. He encourages Eustice to become more involved with the business so he is able to see this darker, more hypocritical side of his father.
Eustice’s standing within the family requires him to defend his father's actions, because they will soon be his, while inwardly hating what Burton has done and the abusive hold that he has on his family. Burton’s hold on Eustice at first works all too well. Outwardly, he is the rigid businessman to be but inwardly has longings and desires towards men which he is forced to suppress. However, it is this inward private life which allows Eustice to take some action and find a path separate from his family.
This call to action takes human form into that of Cyrus, a server that catches Eustice's eye at a masquerade party. Eustice has had previous affairs with men, but they were always clandestine, secret, a way of finding personal pleasure while denying his own emotional longings.
Eustice's flirtation with Cyrus builds into something larger as they encounter each other at various social gatherings and exchange some witty saucy by play. Eustice fantasizes about this new presence in his life until those fantasies become reality and they engage in a physical ongoing relationship.
What makes his relationship with Cyrus different from previous ones, is the emotional connection that grows through their encounters that reaches beyond sex and sees something more substantial. Cyrus becomes someone that challenges Eustice’s worldview and whom he can visualize spending a life with.
Those secret fantasies end up becoming reality when Eustice discovers that his new boyfriend is a Communist. Instead of being appalled, Eustice finds a way out of the ornate but oppressive half life in which he is living. He understands Cyrus’s motives in an abstract sense, and has no personal love or loyalty towards his father. However, he is still caught between his old safe rich world and a new life that consists of unpredictability, potential poverty, and outright rebellion and activism. The answer is made for him in a heart stopping chapter in which Eustice says goodbye to his life as a Mercidale in the most definite, unpredictable, and violent way possible.
It is the second half of the book that takes Eustice away from his creature comforts where he really comes to his own as a character. He and Cyrus move to another part of the country away from his wealth, connection, and resources and he discovers an inner strength that he didn't know that he had.
He works in domestic and secretarial positions and for the first time really understands what it means to work hard and earn very little, how oppressive or simply thoughtless those in charge can be towards those that work for them, and what it means to go to bed hungry or to panic when he or Cyrus are sick or injured and can't afford a good doctor or medicine. He understands why people like Cyrus fight against their oppressors. Eustice now knows the reasons behind them, though he doesn't condone their more violent actions which ultimately becomes a deal breaker between him and Cyrus.
Unlike his previous life in which he and his family had material possessions but barely disguised revulsion for each other, Eustice and Cyrus have very few things but a stronger love. The hard times make them closer and smooth out their rough edges and previously conflicted views. They cling to, uphold, and support each other to keep the proverbial wolf at bay outside the door.
During his time with Cyrus, Eustice also openly embraces life as a gay man, as openly as he can in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. He and Cyrus live together but to most people, they are simply roommates or co-workers (because they are different races, they are unable to pass as brothers without creating an elaborate story). They meet other LGBT+ people in secret windowless clubs and arrange to exit them in small groups or with lesbian women so spectators don't get nosy.
Many of the sexual encounters are hidden by people who have to otherwise pretend to be happily engaged or married as Eustice reveals to another man in an earlier chapter. They can live together in secret but can't openly talk about their lovers without using coded phrases such as nicknames, or gender neutral names.
They never know if they will face arrest or murder, or the possibility that someone who might have been a supportive ally before would either turn against them voluntarily or reveal too much accidentally. It is a suffocating existence for people to identify a certain way or loving someone when straight cis gender people do without a second thought or concern whether they will face arrest, public scrutiny, ostracism, bullying, unemployment, or death.
Eustice and Cyrus do their part in helping their fellow LGBT+ community members. They take part in a series of elaborate vigilante actions that protect and defend others from potential arrest or ramification. Because society will not protect them, they have to protect themselves. That is the kind of life when one lives on the outer fringes of what is seen as acceptable society and is one which Eustice is willing to pay if it means being with the man that he loves.
Priceless Passion is very realistic in how it portrays the hateful atmosphere that surrounds Eustice and Cyrus and the courage that they have by not only living within it but defying it in their own way.
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