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Un asunto de vida y sexo
Hugo es un chico tímido de ojos azules y mirada huidiza. Hugo miente; miente a sus padres, a los compañeros de colegio y a sus primeros amantes, que lo adiestran en el placer de un sexo ajeno a la ternura y al sentimentalismo. Hugo sabe; sabe que en la lucha entre su mente, su corazón y sus caderas siempre triunfarán las caderas, y asume esa única verdad como guía para la vida y la muerte. Con esta cruda realidad como telón de fondo y su talento literario como bagaje imprescindible Oscar Moore ha construido una novela insólita y fascinante, casi una parábola de este fin de milenio que nos encuentra lúcidos y rebeldes en nuestra soledad.
UN NOMBRE: Oscar Moore, el joven autor inglés que hace un año escandalizó a la crítica y al público de su país con Un asunto de vida y sexo, una primera novela que algunos tildaron de pornográfica y otros simplemente de realista.
UNA VOZ: La de Hugo, el protagonista de un viaje al dulce infierno del deseo prohibido y al sórdido paraíso del sexo que nace y muere en saunas y urinarios.
UNA HISTORIA: La de un hombre que quiso a otros hombres y guardó para sí mismo sólo una pizca de ironía, la suficiente para morir sin remordimientos.
UN NOMBRE: Oscar Moore, el joven autor inglés que hace un año escandalizó a la crítica y al público de su país con Un asunto de vida y sexo, una primera novela que algunos tildaron de pornográfica y otros simplemente de realista.
UNA VOZ: La de Hugo, el protagonista de un viaje al dulce infierno del deseo prohibido y al sórdido paraíso del sexo que nace y muere en saunas y urinarios.
UNA HISTORIA: La de un hombre que quiso a otros hombres y guardó para sí mismo sólo una pizca de ironía, la suficiente para morir sin remordimientos.
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 11, 2016
"It was the memory of a pause.”
There’s a seedy, twilight world that runs parallel to our cosy, safe terrain. One false move, one wrong turn, and we leave our safe, familiar world behind and enter this dangerous, dark underworld. Once the first step is taken, there is no turning back.
Hugo is 14 years old when he takes that step. He is the only son of a horrifically cold, neurotic and frequently violent woman. His stepfather is a mild man who is content to linger in the background. Hugo is already seriously damaged when he enters his teens. He cannot feel emotion, and has removed himself far from emotional pain. He’s attracted to members of the same sex, and has a definite curiosity, when he accidentally stumbles into the world of “24 hour tango” which takes place at a local public toilet.
From silent, sometimes brutal, encounters with strangers, and seductions that begin with a single, hungry look, Hugo slides into pornography, prostitution and drug abuse. In the beginning, Hugo is able to separate himself from his actions by creating a suave, tougher alter ego, David. It is as though David–not Hugo–experiences the searing often degrading encounters in the public toilets, but as Hugo matures, he drops this persona, and instead, we encounter, Hugo–intelligent, handsome, and yet completely and utterly soulless.
“A Matter of Life and Sex” is one man’s journey to hell. This book is an unrelenting, searing, graphic, brutal read. Many of the details of Hugo’s life will be too much for some readers; however, the details are not salacious. Every word was necessary in this brilliant, stunning novel. The protagonist Hugo doesn’t possess any characteristics that make him particularly likable, but he’s not despicable either. He’s hollow–not shallow–and he feels “no need to develop a conscience” so he never experiences any moral barriers to his behaviour.
Author Oscar Moore creates a character who is basically a living, breathing blank–and in this devastatingly honest novel, there is nowhere for the main character to hide. From Hugo’s days as a confused schoolboy vaguely bothered by his lack of attraction to girls, his college days supporting himself as a male prostitute, to his final catharsis in New York, Hugo lacks the refuge of recriminations, remorse, or even doubt. Hugo dreams of being a street tough and laces his imagination with images of how he’d like to be, but he remains a symptom and a victim of the dark culture he flounders in. Tragically, just as Hugo begins to reclaim his life, the consequences of his past sweep over him. “A Matter of Life and Sex” is a blistering record of the world awakening to the presence of AIDS.
Author Oscar Moore left us just this one novel before his tragic death.
There’s a seedy, twilight world that runs parallel to our cosy, safe terrain. One false move, one wrong turn, and we leave our safe, familiar world behind and enter this dangerous, dark underworld. Once the first step is taken, there is no turning back.
Hugo is 14 years old when he takes that step. He is the only son of a horrifically cold, neurotic and frequently violent woman. His stepfather is a mild man who is content to linger in the background. Hugo is already seriously damaged when he enters his teens. He cannot feel emotion, and has removed himself far from emotional pain. He’s attracted to members of the same sex, and has a definite curiosity, when he accidentally stumbles into the world of “24 hour tango” which takes place at a local public toilet.
From silent, sometimes brutal, encounters with strangers, and seductions that begin with a single, hungry look, Hugo slides into pornography, prostitution and drug abuse. In the beginning, Hugo is able to separate himself from his actions by creating a suave, tougher alter ego, David. It is as though David–not Hugo–experiences the searing often degrading encounters in the public toilets, but as Hugo matures, he drops this persona, and instead, we encounter, Hugo–intelligent, handsome, and yet completely and utterly soulless.
“A Matter of Life and Sex” is one man’s journey to hell. This book is an unrelenting, searing, graphic, brutal read. Many of the details of Hugo’s life will be too much for some readers; however, the details are not salacious. Every word was necessary in this brilliant, stunning novel. The protagonist Hugo doesn’t possess any characteristics that make him particularly likable, but he’s not despicable either. He’s hollow–not shallow–and he feels “no need to develop a conscience” so he never experiences any moral barriers to his behaviour.
Author Oscar Moore creates a character who is basically a living, breathing blank–and in this devastatingly honest novel, there is nowhere for the main character to hide. From Hugo’s days as a confused schoolboy vaguely bothered by his lack of attraction to girls, his college days supporting himself as a male prostitute, to his final catharsis in New York, Hugo lacks the refuge of recriminations, remorse, or even doubt. Hugo dreams of being a street tough and laces his imagination with images of how he’d like to be, but he remains a symptom and a victim of the dark culture he flounders in. Tragically, just as Hugo begins to reclaim his life, the consequences of his past sweep over him. “A Matter of Life and Sex” is a blistering record of the world awakening to the presence of AIDS.
Author Oscar Moore left us just this one novel before his tragic death.
November 9, 2021
Nunca había entendido cómo va eso de la adición al sexo, este libro lo aclara perfectamente.
Le doy cuatro estrellas porque si bien no hay mucha historia me encantó la prosa y la forma de narrar me enganchó desde el primer momento, eso sí, lo leí en castellano, en inglés quizás hubiese sido demasiado para mi nivel
Le doy cuatro estrellas porque si bien no hay mucha historia me encantó la prosa y la forma de narrar me enganchó desde el primer momento, eso sí, lo leí en castellano, en inglés quizás hubiese sido demasiado para mi nivel
January 29, 2023
A hidden queer gem. Seedy, sultry, crushing and emotional. Following the short lived tale of Hugo from a curios boy to his death of AIDS as a young adult. Touching upon many details of the queer community and the curiosity of discovering your sexuality from a young age that still feels relatable and relevant today. This book was incredibly engaging and exciting for some parts, but also v depressing as the narrative lead up to Hugo’s fate.
November 20, 2017
Nice use of details and an interestingly unapologetic voice used to depict Hugo's life from the times he's a child until his death. The content runs the full gamut of his debauched life, and although you can feel how sordid his life becomes, the narrative never asks you to feel sorry for him. Interesting use of letters used to break up the time line.
May 30, 2022
HUGO HARVEY’S STORY
Oscar Moore begins A Matter of Life and Sex in a way that immediately engages the reader in Hugo Harvey’s story. Moore starts the novel with a letter dated 23 March, 1991, to Mrs. Harvey, Hugo’s mother, from Oscar Moore. Accompanying this letter is a manuscript of a book that Moore finished before Hugo died: “We both felt you had the right to see it before it was published.” In this letter, Moore describes Hugo Harvey’s character and gives informative background about him: “Hugo was an excellent storyteller.” “For Hugo sex was an addiction and an absurdity.” “He relished his mischievous adventures among the lowlife.” He “never blamed himself for the way his life ended, and he never blamed anyone else either.” “You are his victims only in so far as he made use of your stories to help tell his own.” After “Yours sincerely, Oscar Moore,” the reader turns the page and encounters the first chapter, “Two Wheels to Paradise,” which refers to Hugo’s bicycle, and its first line: “Hugo was a liar.” This is followed by “Of course, he lied to escape punishment and ended up being punished for lying, but he was also a fantasist whose lies invented a world where everything was extraordinary.” Hugo Harvey, the product of a middle-class suburban London upbringing, has a brief but eventful journey through late twentieth-century gay life.
We find out that Hugo Harvey is dead before we read the first sentence of the first chapter. The chapters in the novel go back and forth in time as do the letters to and from various characters that are interspersed between the chapters. This keeps the reader engaged and also makes for a much more suspenseful novel than if it were told in a strictly chronological narrative.
Moore frequently gives provocative first lines to his chapters, and he ends many of his chapters with cliff-hangers. I was reminded of those triple-decker novels by Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers in which the chapter titles give the reader necessary information and the first and last lines of the chapters further the plot of the novel. The first line of chapter seven, “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” is “The first time Hugo asked for money for sex was in a bathroom at the Regent Palace Hotel.” The first line of “Pins and Needles,” the tenth chapter, is “The vein seemed to be breathing gently underneath the skin in the shallow of his elbow.” The last lines of the tenth chapter are “They were both blue when William found them. Hugo with the cold. Larry with the syringe in his arm.” The first line of “Into the Void,” the eleventh and final chapter of Hugo Harvey’s story, is “Death seemed to be in the air.” The last line of this last chapter is “Hugo was scared.”
In the tradition of nineteenth-century novelists, Moore gives us something many modern writers never do: He gives us an epilogue. In this epilogue, Hugo imagines his own funeral. His mother is with him when he dies.
While reading A Matter of Life and Sex, I learned more about “cottaging,” or what Hugo calls the “toilet tango,” than I ever thought I would. Does this “subculture” of homosexual activity in public toilets still exist? The first line of the second chapter, “The Toilet Tango,” tells us that Hugo loses his virginity in a public toilet: “Seduced at the age of fourteen in a littered coppice off the A1, Hugo dropped his shorts and danced to the strains of the toilet tango.” Thus, Hugo begins his journey through life and sex.
In his letter to Rudy dated March 1986, the last letter in the novel, Hugo perceptively compares the approaches to AIDS in New York and in London at that time: “In New York it felt like an epidemic; a wave of death followed by waves of rumour, conjecture, gossip and hysteria . . . Here [in London] the suffering is solitary . . . is privatized.”
I learned a new word from Hugo Harvey: “wittering.” He uses it at least five times throughout the novel, mostly in relation to his mother. The word doesn’t appear in my Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary. A web search turned up this definition: banal chatter. This definition fits the context in which Hugo uses it. Wittering has nothing to do with “wit” or “witty.”
Oscar Moore admits in PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face that A Matter of Life and Sex is “an autobiography thinly disguised as a novel.” If Moore had written the novel in first person instead of in third person, I don’t believe his achievement in telling Hugo Harvey’s story would have been as magnificent as it is. How much of Hugo’s story is Oscar Moore’s story? I bet quite a lot. In PWA, Oscar Moore mentions that he has been writing a second novel. I would love to know what it was about.
I’ll always remember the climactic scene that occurs in the last chapter, “into the Void”: “They had dropped the acid in the back of the car before arriving at The Saint . . . By the time they were inside, Hugo had lost track of time and place. Everything was aglow.” Hugo goes up a “black spiral staircase . . . to another kingdom . . . The world went black. The Saint was an old theatre. The Fillmore East in another life. And the circle had been left intact, with its passages and seats and booths. But the lights were left off . . . You could look down, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to wait for the action to start.” Then Moore gives us an intense three-page paragraph that begins: “Hugo leant against the back wall waiting until he could see again . . . He had to find the active core where hands came out of nowhere and wordlessly undressed you.” What ensues is a scene from a lower circle in Dante’s hell. This paragraph concludes: “he slumped forward onto a carpet sticky with cum and effluent. And passed out.” What for Hugo at first seems like just a matter of life and sex becomes a matter of life and death.
I’m going to say this and leave it at that: Hugo Harvey is an iconic character in AIDS fiction. Also, I’ll ask this question: Why isn’t Oscar Moore’s only published novel better known in the U.S.? Someone should reissue A Matter of Life and Sex and PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face, Moore’s beautiful collection of Guardian columns that was never published in the U.S.
Oscar Moore was lost to AIDS in September, 1996 at the age of thirty-sex. Rest in peace, Mr. Moore. Thank you for writing Hugo Harvey’s story.
Oscar Moore begins A Matter of Life and Sex in a way that immediately engages the reader in Hugo Harvey’s story. Moore starts the novel with a letter dated 23 March, 1991, to Mrs. Harvey, Hugo’s mother, from Oscar Moore. Accompanying this letter is a manuscript of a book that Moore finished before Hugo died: “We both felt you had the right to see it before it was published.” In this letter, Moore describes Hugo Harvey’s character and gives informative background about him: “Hugo was an excellent storyteller.” “For Hugo sex was an addiction and an absurdity.” “He relished his mischievous adventures among the lowlife.” He “never blamed himself for the way his life ended, and he never blamed anyone else either.” “You are his victims only in so far as he made use of your stories to help tell his own.” After “Yours sincerely, Oscar Moore,” the reader turns the page and encounters the first chapter, “Two Wheels to Paradise,” which refers to Hugo’s bicycle, and its first line: “Hugo was a liar.” This is followed by “Of course, he lied to escape punishment and ended up being punished for lying, but he was also a fantasist whose lies invented a world where everything was extraordinary.” Hugo Harvey, the product of a middle-class suburban London upbringing, has a brief but eventful journey through late twentieth-century gay life.
We find out that Hugo Harvey is dead before we read the first sentence of the first chapter. The chapters in the novel go back and forth in time as do the letters to and from various characters that are interspersed between the chapters. This keeps the reader engaged and also makes for a much more suspenseful novel than if it were told in a strictly chronological narrative.
Moore frequently gives provocative first lines to his chapters, and he ends many of his chapters with cliff-hangers. I was reminded of those triple-decker novels by Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers in which the chapter titles give the reader necessary information and the first and last lines of the chapters further the plot of the novel. The first line of chapter seven, “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” is “The first time Hugo asked for money for sex was in a bathroom at the Regent Palace Hotel.” The first line of “Pins and Needles,” the tenth chapter, is “The vein seemed to be breathing gently underneath the skin in the shallow of his elbow.” The last lines of the tenth chapter are “They were both blue when William found them. Hugo with the cold. Larry with the syringe in his arm.” The first line of “Into the Void,” the eleventh and final chapter of Hugo Harvey’s story, is “Death seemed to be in the air.” The last line of this last chapter is “Hugo was scared.”
In the tradition of nineteenth-century novelists, Moore gives us something many modern writers never do: He gives us an epilogue. In this epilogue, Hugo imagines his own funeral. His mother is with him when he dies.
While reading A Matter of Life and Sex, I learned more about “cottaging,” or what Hugo calls the “toilet tango,” than I ever thought I would. Does this “subculture” of homosexual activity in public toilets still exist? The first line of the second chapter, “The Toilet Tango,” tells us that Hugo loses his virginity in a public toilet: “Seduced at the age of fourteen in a littered coppice off the A1, Hugo dropped his shorts and danced to the strains of the toilet tango.” Thus, Hugo begins his journey through life and sex.
In his letter to Rudy dated March 1986, the last letter in the novel, Hugo perceptively compares the approaches to AIDS in New York and in London at that time: “In New York it felt like an epidemic; a wave of death followed by waves of rumour, conjecture, gossip and hysteria . . . Here [in London] the suffering is solitary . . . is privatized.”
I learned a new word from Hugo Harvey: “wittering.” He uses it at least five times throughout the novel, mostly in relation to his mother. The word doesn’t appear in my Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary. A web search turned up this definition: banal chatter. This definition fits the context in which Hugo uses it. Wittering has nothing to do with “wit” or “witty.”
Oscar Moore admits in PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face that A Matter of Life and Sex is “an autobiography thinly disguised as a novel.” If Moore had written the novel in first person instead of in third person, I don’t believe his achievement in telling Hugo Harvey’s story would have been as magnificent as it is. How much of Hugo’s story is Oscar Moore’s story? I bet quite a lot. In PWA, Oscar Moore mentions that he has been writing a second novel. I would love to know what it was about.
I’ll always remember the climactic scene that occurs in the last chapter, “into the Void”: “They had dropped the acid in the back of the car before arriving at The Saint . . . By the time they were inside, Hugo had lost track of time and place. Everything was aglow.” Hugo goes up a “black spiral staircase . . . to another kingdom . . . The world went black. The Saint was an old theatre. The Fillmore East in another life. And the circle had been left intact, with its passages and seats and booths. But the lights were left off . . . You could look down, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to wait for the action to start.” Then Moore gives us an intense three-page paragraph that begins: “Hugo leant against the back wall waiting until he could see again . . . He had to find the active core where hands came out of nowhere and wordlessly undressed you.” What ensues is a scene from a lower circle in Dante’s hell. This paragraph concludes: “he slumped forward onto a carpet sticky with cum and effluent. And passed out.” What for Hugo at first seems like just a matter of life and sex becomes a matter of life and death.
I’m going to say this and leave it at that: Hugo Harvey is an iconic character in AIDS fiction. Also, I’ll ask this question: Why isn’t Oscar Moore’s only published novel better known in the U.S.? Someone should reissue A Matter of Life and Sex and PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face, Moore’s beautiful collection of Guardian columns that was never published in the U.S.
Oscar Moore was lost to AIDS in September, 1996 at the age of thirty-sex. Rest in peace, Mr. Moore. Thank you for writing Hugo Harvey’s story.
January 22, 2019
An uncompromising and at times difficult to read story about a man's sexual awakening in a society where it is repressed. Told at some points from the narrator's deathbed as he dies from AIDS related illnesses the story at times makes you dislike the narrator but ultimately makes you feel his pain in coming to terms with being gay in a society where it is difficult to be so openly. The hedonistic and sometimes self destructive path he takes is told in vivid terms and comes across as very true to life.
June 19, 2010
This book was bleakly depressing.
October 4, 2013
The chapter "Pins and Needles" may be the best thing I've ever read about gay men and heroin.
December 9, 2021
A bleak and uncompromising book of it's from adolescence to death by AIDS it is an unflinching and gut wrenching read.
October 18, 2025
I couldn't finish it. At first it was very interesting, very interesting. But I had the wrong idea about the book. It's not erotic or pornographic, it's autobiographical. Of course, this isn't a problem, at least not for me, but it's something that needs to be clarified. At the beginning, when he tells his story, you get a sense of humor, good writing, well thought out. Everything is clear, precise, concise, and in fact it never stops being so... It's just that it becomes repetitive because it gives you the same feeling. Suddenly you've been reading about his mother for almost an hour and you don't even know why you're still reading, at least I didn't. I skipped pages when I couldn't take it anymore and felt the same way. I was caught up in the tension at the beginning, but the author became more mundane, expressionless, and went on too long... And it's not that I mind the mundane or the psychological, but this was boring, with a pace as slow and ordinary as everyday life, as repetitive as this review.
March 2, 2017
I found this one difficult to rate. To be honest, I didn't like the writing style. I think it would have benefited from a lot of editing. However, I found the content of the book extremely moving and thought provoking. It is bleak and unforgiving, but well worth a read.
May 15, 2025
Horrifyingly kinky. Made me rethink sexually deplorable acts. I fully Hugo’s narrative was completely unguided, a path of destruction from the very beginning. Hugo knew himself better than anyone else. I feel as if he accepted his unwillingness to leave the allure of his dangerous lifestyle behind. I wish I could have more background on Hugo and Chas’s relationship and its blossoming. The author was only interested in focusing on Hugo’s mother, which is fine, i just hate mommy issues in a gay boy like him.
June 2, 2025
What a masterpiece! I'm surprised this book doesn't have a cult following or something of that kind, since it is such a unique book. The language is slow, dark, honest, vivid and emphatic (from a distance). Only wish Oscar Moore could have wrote more before his passing.
September 24, 2017
Deprimente, deprimente. No lo pude terminar...
(Rememoró un establecimiento de
baños en la rue St. Anne de París.)
(Rememoró un establecimiento de
baños en la rue St. Anne de París.)
September 27, 2018
Despiadada la incomprensión de un adolescente hacia su sed de deseo y su interacción con el mundo adulto.
January 12, 2022
Inexplicable el vacío que me deja este libro.
September 11, 2024
Fearlessly brazen, often hilarious, and unexpectedly moving.
August 4, 2023
There's something especially tragic about dying young and leaving one well-nigh perfect work behind. For better or worse, it doesn't seem to happen all that often, if the AIDS epidemic is any indication. Sure, there's Bill Sherwood's *Parting Glances*, but most of the fiction is eminently forgettable. Oscar Moore's only novel is a notable exception.
Sure, it's probably mostly autobiographical, but even having a plot already at hand in the form of one's own past isn't enough to make for a worthwhile read. Moore's style is a delight from beginning to end, and the ruptures in chronological order are oddly effective, first exposing the pain and then excavating down to its cause, and leading inevitably, mercilessly to the hospital bed. The "Pins and Needles" chapter impressed me as a bit long, but it builds to a horrifying crescendo. Which isn't to deny that the novel is witty throughout and often laugh-out-loud funny, even while handling matters such as hopeless schoolboy crushes with admirable sensitivity.
A keeper, along with the novels of Christopher Coe and Janes Robert Baker’s *Tim and Pete*.
4 1/2 stars.
Sure, it's probably mostly autobiographical, but even having a plot already at hand in the form of one's own past isn't enough to make for a worthwhile read. Moore's style is a delight from beginning to end, and the ruptures in chronological order are oddly effective, first exposing the pain and then excavating down to its cause, and leading inevitably, mercilessly to the hospital bed. The "Pins and Needles" chapter impressed me as a bit long, but it builds to a horrifying crescendo. Which isn't to deny that the novel is witty throughout and often laugh-out-loud funny, even while handling matters such as hopeless schoolboy crushes with admirable sensitivity.
A keeper, along with the novels of Christopher Coe and Janes Robert Baker’s *Tim and Pete*.
4 1/2 stars.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews