Burning Reckless: Queer Fire in ‘The Lord Won’t Mind’
Quiet fires shape the architecture of lives in shadow
In Gordon Merrick’s sprawling, provocative, and emotionally charged trilogy, we find a vision of queer intimacy shaped by necessity rather than aspiration or visibility.
When The Lord Won’t Mind was published in 1970, it was promoted—most notably in The New York Times—as “the first homosexual novel with a happy ending.”
While that claim overlooks the hopeful and affirming notes of earlier, lesser-known works like Better Angel (1933) or Imre: A Memorandum (1906), Merrick’s novel stood apart for its mainstream reach, commercial success, and unapologetic portrayal of erotic and emotional queer life. It became an immediate bestseller.
Once dismissed as pulp for its virile beauty and explicit sensuality, Merrick’s work has been reappraised—especially after Joseph Ortiz’s 2022 biography—as structurally ambitious, emotionally rich queer storytelling.
Nowhere is that clearer than in his trilogy, originally published in a decade when gay relationships were still widely delegitimised. The novels explore the mechanics of long-term queer devotion and reveal how, in the absence of social models or legal recognition, queer men constructed their own architectures of love in invisible worlds.
Obsessive Beginnings: Desire as Violence
Charlie and Peter, the trilogy’s central couple, are introduced in a near-explosive haze of desire. Charlie, raised in a wealthy, image-obsessed family, is beautiful, repressed, and volatile in his longings.
Peter, gentler and more at ease with his desires, brings that hunger into focus. Their first encounters are erotic and destabilising—tangled in shame, worship, and rage—and culminate in a bond that would seem all-consuming, even unhealthy, by contemporary standards.
And though they’re both conventionally beautiful, it’s their emotional contrast that truly shapes their dynamic. Charlie performs masculinity with a desperate rigidity, trying to be the kind of man his family—and, in turn, society—would accept.
Peter, by contrast, moves through the world with a softness that feels almost transgressive: emotionally available, gently assertive, and sexually assured.
That softness destabilises Charlie since Peter seems to embody a masculinity that doesn’t require performance.
Desire, then, becomes entangled with envy. Charlie both yearns for Peter and wants to be him. This shifts their intimacy beyond erotic fixation—it’s a collision of internalised ideals.
Down on my knees again. Worship isn’t enough.
Unlike today’s more sanitised representations, where queer desire is often domesticated for mainstream consumption, Merrick presents it as unruly, overpowering, and sometimes grotesque.
The emotional violence of early queer literature, vivid and unsettling to modern eyes, isn’t a byproduct of repression but a response to it. When bodies are denied expression, they erupt.
As a result, Charlie and Peter’s early intensity speaks to a generation of queer men who were denied public models of love. They had to invent their own, often through pain, possession, and contradiction. Merrick lets us sit in that discomfort.
Pragmatic Love: Open Relationships as Survival Structures
The author's world is neither utopian nor nihilistic. His characters are lovers pained by the friction between their devotion and the constraints of social erasure.
But they’re also co-architects of lives designed to endure that erasure. Open relationships, for example, aren’t framed as transgressive or utopian. They’re simply pragmatic.
In One for the Gods (1971) and Forth into Light (1974), Charlie and Peter grow beyond their obsessive beginnings into something more lived-in and less exclusive.
Sex outside the relationship becomes part of its ecology. It's not without friction or heartbreak, but Merrick doesn’t moralise, treating these moments as part of the queer domestic experiment.
These aren’t narratives about betrayal but about capacity. Merrick’s men are allowed to want, fail, and adapt. In a cultural moment when gay relationships were already coded as unstable, he made instability part of the structure.
Queer Masculinity and Emotional Dependency
Another radical element in Merrick’s work is the depiction of emotional dependency between men. In a society where masculinity was synonymous with self-sufficient stoicism, and emotional labour was outsourced to wives, two men leaning on each other—both emotionally and domestically—disrupted the heteronormative order.
I pronounce us man and something-or-other. We’re married, big boy.
This idea resurfaces decades later in William di Canzio’s Alec (2021), a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913–14 but published posthumously in 1971), where queer men attempt to forge private legitimacy in a hostile public sphere.
In Merrick’s trilogy, Charlie and Peter navigate these dynamics with difficulty. Power shifts constantly between them, often tied to beauty, money, or perceived maturity.
The novels dissect how masculine pride and vulnerability can coexist uneasily in queer relationships, especially when those bonds are the only anchor in a conservative world.
Again, this emotional interdependence is framed as adaptation, not weakness. Without access to institutional support or legal protection, the only safety net available was one another.
Family-Making and the Presence of Women
Perhaps the most unexpected development in the trilogy is the inclusion of a woman in Charlie and Peter’s relationship. Martha is far from a peripheral figure.
In fact, she’s essential. Her role as a mother to their children transforms their bond from a dyad into a triangulated family structure.
It’s important to note here that this isn’t a conventional love triangle but a negotiation of legacy. In an era without surrogacy or adoption rights, queer family-making required intimate alliances.
Martha isn’t a mask for heteronormativity, nor does she threaten their love; she expands its possibilities, albeit at her own emotional cost.
That's because, shaped by the same social scripts as the men, Martha struggles with her own expectations around love and fulfilment. Her heart is set on Charlie, but she senses her only entry to his emotional world is through Peter—by being useful, available, and accepting.
Even allowing Charlie’s lover to explore his sexuality through her body is less about desire than proximity. It’s an attempt to breach a structure she knows she can never fully enter.
Martha’s views on masculinity and sexual dynamics reveal just how deeply the roots of gendered homophobia run. But messy dispositions and fraught dynamics are Merrick’s strength. His characters are made of flesh and contradiction, not ideals.
And where contemporary queer literature often idealises chosen family—friend-based and emotionally intimate—Merrick’s vision is more precarious, biologically entangled, and daring in its vulnerability.
From Immaturity to Endurance
Across the trilogy, Charlie and Peter’s relationship matures. What begins as a volatile obsession gradually settles into something durable, though never entirely stable.
I’ve known a boy. I’ve measured beauty. What more do I want?
Ageing, distance, shifting desires, and societal change ripple through their bond. And if Merrick’s work has a throughline, it’s his honesty about the toll of time on love.
The novels closely mirror the lives of queer people who had to build partnerships without ceremonies, laws, or guidebooks.
As a result, stability isn’t assumed; it’s constructed and reconstructed, again and again. Merrick never romanticises queer endurance, insisting on its labour.
Legacy and Contrast: Then vs. Now
I say, if it’s love, the Lord won’t mind. There’s enough hate in the world.
Today’s queer literature often focuses on identity politics, systemic trauma, and visibility. These narratives are vital. But in gaining social legitimacy, many contemporary stories sidestep the earlier, messier questions:
How do we live together when no one wants us to? How do we structure desire, finances, and futures without recognition or legal protection?
Merrick’s trilogy offers blueprints, not answers. They’re imperfect, unpolished, and deeply lived-in, but this is what makes the trilogy so unforgettable. His characters aren’t always admirable, but they’re always trying.
Conclusion: The Quiet Radicalism of Structure
The real radicalism in Merrick’s work isn’t in the explicit sex scenes or dramatic conflicts, though there’s no shortage of either.
Instead, it lies in his insistence that queer men could, and did, build lasting lives. Not performatively or hypothetically, but truly—in flesh, failure, and persistence.
When society refused to see them, they became undeniable to one another. That visibility was often harsh, unflattering, and real. For Charlie and Peter, that was enough to keep going.