Ralf Webb for Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America

Ralf Webb is a poet, writer and editor whose debut collection of poems, Rotten Days in Late Summer was published by Penguin in 2021, and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

Webb's poetry and critical writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Fantastic Man, The Poetry Review, and the Guardian. He currently manages a creative writing mentorship programme in collaboration with Folio and First Story, which supports school-age writers from low-income backgrounds.

The event will be chaired by the brilliant author and translator Polly Barton.

In October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel together at San Francisco State College. The troubled state of American society was under discussion, which Baldwin incisively diagnosed as a 'failure of the masculine sensibility'.

Strange Relations explores this crisis in mid-century masculinity and the lives and works of four bisexual writers who fought to express and embody alternate possibilities. Building on Walt Whitman's philosophy of the love between men, Ralf Webb considers the ways in which Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, as well as Cheever and Baldwin, resisted in their art, as well as in their relationships, the damaging expectations of contemporary gender and sexuality.

With a curious, intelligent and sensitive gaze, Ralf sheds new light on each writer. Together, these artists offer a powerful and moving argument for a transformative new masculinity, grounded in fluidity, love and intimacy.

'Textured literary portraits of the masculine mind and body'
Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance

'Webb's writing is of a quality rarely seen, and his book returns you to the world slightly changed, equipped with another angle of vision on the quiddity of man'
Diarmuid Hester, author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears