Gay sex and the price of Bildung in John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies

This article explores gay sex and sexuality in John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, a novel that has received very limited scholarly attention. The novel explores the life of its protagonist over a period of 70 years and tracks his development from a young boy in conservative Ireland in the 1940s to an older man in the years directly following the Irish marriage-equality referendum in 2015. While this novel is a Bildungsroman in the conventional sense, I am interested in the curious bifurcated structure of the book. While the first half of the novel maps a rich queer sexual culture, the second half of the novel explicitly disavows and pathologises it. The anonymous hookups and cruising that animate the adolescence and young adulthood of the protagonist in Dublin are replaced by a homonormative project of sexual moralism and a politics of ‘respectability’. In this article, I narrowly argue that the character development of Boyne’s protagonist (the Bildung) becomes inextricably tied to the homonormative rejection of gay sexual cultures, making the novel a Bildungsroman in the most conservative sense of the genre. Contribution: This article offers a close reading of a largely neglected novel to problematise the restrictive and homonormative logics that often constrain depictions of sex within the genre of the gay Bildungsroman.