But I think there is European distribution, so you should be able to get it wherever you can listen to us.

And you should ask your local bookshop to stock it for you if they don't have it because it's really good.

And the themes of that are sort of him coming, you know, he's sort of becoming aware of his sexuality and is conservative society.

Yeah, it's a story of a boy, it's a very, no, it's a, it's a story of like a, a week or so

in the life of an 18-year-old gay kid at a gymnasium in this provincial town who falls in

love with another boy and they have a kind of affair. The boy's name, by the way, because it was

1979, is Laif Garrett. Leif Garrett? Leif Garrett, the singer. Oh my God,

Leif Garrett was like a pillow-y-lipped twink sort of singer, rock singer. And so he

names the boy Leif Garrett, obviously, some kid who just looks like Lef Garrett,

whatever. And then the school authorities find out about this, and there's a kind of, like, disciplinary,

and the parents of the other boy find out about this, and the other boy's parents are very

sort of well-placed bourgeois, and there's this kind of disciplinary process, and at the end,

the narrator moves to West Berlin, but kind of learns about how all of this works.

And it's full of extremely trenchant observations about masculinity and Germany and being a gay

guy and what that means. And I think the politics of the book are really smart. It's also just

a really great read. So if the West Germans and size were so conservative time, how come he became so successful?

Because the book was published exactly at the right time.

Like the book came out in 1979, which was seven years after the Rosa Frum Prowdenheim film,

it's not the homosexual who's perverse but the society in which he lives.

That's now a few

years into the existence of gay liberation groupings in cities like West Berlin and Cologne.

And so there was kind of a little bit of a market for it. Like everything was, and it was also,

...