Abstract
I examine queer grief in personal, cultural, and historical terms. I explore the secrecy, avoidance, and sudden emotional outbursts found in representations of male queer grief both well before and long after the initial outbreak of the AIDS pandemic. I address these themes through an analysis of complex portrayals of gay grief in two Netflix television series -Tore (2023) and Good Grief (2023) -as well as the character of Larry in W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge (1944). What links these three cultural products is the queer (specifically gay male) experience of grappling with the sudden death of a significant person who is somehow deceitful or appears to have secret. The grief does not conform to normative expectations. My analysis suggests that when grief comes suddenly, contains deceit and refuses to follow expectations of normative grief, it could queer our understandings of grieving as non-productive time. The characters of Larry, Tore, and Marc compel the (queer) cultural and political imagination to both pause and move beyond the stagnant present to imagine a brighter grief. Across these three examples, grief is shattered, unmasking the normative theatricality but also the duality of existence: death is ever-present but the expectations surrounding grief are as normative as those of life itself. If grieving is too narrowly defined, it risks bursting out in unanticipated ways, temporarily or permanently severing the mourner from relational connectedness. Solomon cruised the streets at night at the height of the AIDS crisis, hoping for a fatal sexual encounter that could hasten his end, sparing the greater anguish he believed he would cause his family and friends by committing suicide. Imagining his sudden death through illness, he recalls, 'I felt such a sense of release and of gratitude. ' -Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness, 2017, 45 THIS ESSAY EX AMINES queer grief in personal, cultural, and historical terms. It explores the secrecy, avoidance, and sudden emotional outbursts found in representations of male queer grief both well before and long after the initial outbreak of the AIDS pandemic. I address these themes through an analysis of complex portrayals of gay grief in two Netflix television series -Tore (2023) and Good Grief (2023) -as well as the character of Larry in W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor 's Edge (1944) . What links these three cultural products is the queer (specifically gay male) experience of grappling with the sudden death of a significant person who, in two of the three cases (Tore and Good Grief), harbours a secret, i.e., is somehow deceitful. In The Razor's Edge, it is the mourner himself who appears to have secret: his grief does not conform to normative expectations. These three depictions of struggles with queer loss are set in different societies and eras, with varying social and cultural settings, categories and concepts of queer desire and identity, but they all share a connection to the aftermath of war or major crises (such as the AIDS pandemic). There is an important theme -that of deceit -that emerges in intriguing ways, consistently linked to queer grief across all three narratives. Therefore, I will explore the coupling or kinship of deceit and queer grief across these three cases of queering grievance. In this way, the analysis interrogates the subtleties, complexities, and agony of modern gay male grief. The ghosts of the pandemic and of deceit are unavoidable aspects of gay male sexuality, as Lynne Segal notes in her reference to The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (2001) . The same anguish reappears in Tore and Good Grief. HIV and generational trauma were discussed early on by Tim Dean (2009) , who suggested that HIV is inherent in how gay men animate the controversy surrounding barebacking as a form of risky intimacy -one that forces the abandonment of psychological defences and exposes individuals to vulnerability. Segal (2017, 44) , for her part, has advocated a general notion of radical happiness as a means of overcoming and surviving structural depression, psychic sorrows, and the grief endemic to our times. She notes that "the pressure we are under to banish all specters of sadness and failure is one of the reasons many people feel unhappy in the first place [...]". Tore and Good Grief implicate the audience and render it complicit in the act of witnessing queer death and grief. In doing so, they provide evidence of how television series and films can cultivate empathy. They achieve this in part through an age-old literary device: the use of deceit or secrecy surrounding death. I will examine this via the normativespecifically, via the stages of Freytag's (1894) classic dramatic structure. To introduce a new angle, my final case focuses on a literary example of queer male grief: The Razor's Edge. This allows for a study of how a classic novel's character might be linked to recent Netflix series that explore the sudden loss of a loved one amid postwar, post-grief cultural expectations. Both Tore and Good Grief respectively imperfect and overstage stereotypical expectations of grief, thereby queering grief for a potentially normative audience. Where Tore invests in raw emotion and grotesque acts, Good Grief is stylized to the extreme. It is all about soft voices, whispering, designer carpets, private viewings, and mohair scarves softly brushing against the neck -a world of nuance and subtlety. In The Razor's Edge, the main character, young Larry, is a "real man" in that he is a war-decorated pilot, though a "damaged" one on a queer quest. In the novel, Larry is contrasted with an older man, Elliot, an aesthete and socialite who dies bitterly alone. The AIDS pandemic drastically altered perceptions of what constitutes a real man (Silvola 2023, 93-94) . While Larry and Elliot belong to an earlier, postwar generation (the US Civil War and World War I), Tore and Good Grief 's central figure, Marc, represent post-pandemic, post-grief gay identities in the contemporary Western context. Then again, in The Razor's Edge, the queering of Larry's peaceful, albeit restless, grief unfolds in a setting devoid of any liberal discussion on LGBTIQ+ rights or legal recognition of queer lives. It is as if the brute force of grief breaks through Larry -not in the form of pathological melancholy or cathartic tears, but as a kind of mental sobbing. Something is stuck and it cuts Larry off from what is seen as socially normative. At the same time this "something" is also visibly present yet ignored as too disturbing a force. As if to point this out, The Razor's Edge opens with an author's note stating that the story will not end in (Larry's) death or marriage, leaving the reader hanging in thin air. Larry -the one who survives after witnessing his comrade's death -is imprisoned in unending grief among the living, yet there are openings for a better future in this postwar, pre-pandemic setting, as Larry's search for meaning reaches beyond Western rationality. For this reason, I will first discuss the recent Netflix series Tore and Good Grief, and only then return to the earlier novel, The Razor's Edge.
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