Queer literature is crying out for exciting, strong and intelligent stories of gay adventure and of travellers navigating the world. So many LGBT books focus on small pockets of the world, especially in the US, and readers like me thirst for accounts of queer life outside the usual stamping grounds; a gay slant with a bigger, more global perspective; the opportunity to remember that there is meaningful life away from the rainbow ghetto. Travel can open up one's experience of life, one's expectations and aspirations, it offers so many possibilities. Unfortunately this is not that kind of book.

In You Can Run Archer and Zane shriek, flounce and exaggerate their way through an entire continent with a breathless and idiotic tone. The insufferable arrogance and self-centredness of the narrator and his friend make this book a real trial to read when one's greatest urge, many times over, is to flush it down the toilet.

With a few exceptions, the inhabitants of South America are generally weird, incomprehensible, possibly hostile, dirty, pathetically poor, have worthless interests, speak mysterious languages, are sexually revolting, and eat disgusting food. They are occasionally romantic, but more often function as comic foils for the narrator, or conform to one stereotype or another. If I didn't know better I'd think that I was reading an account by a colonial explorer on an expedition through "savage lands" from a hundred years ago.

Whilst reading You Can Run I found myself willing local people to rob them and rip them off - and I cheered every time this happened or when Archer's nauseatingly inane disposition took a tumble for the worse and something bad happened to rain on his parade. I was hoping that such mini-disasters would make the travellers sorry that they'd ever left Hipsterville, and make them get on the first flight back home.

Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but this book just goes to show how limited and narrow a mind can be. Why nobody ever told the author to shut up, look around and pay attention is beyond me, I can only conclude that he comes from a culture where this is a perfectly normal way to treat the people in whose country you are a guest.

It's a testament to the people of South America that they managed to put up with this pair of buffoons so graciously, and one hopes that one day they write their own account of what really happened when this silly little man and his friend came to visit.

You Can Run: Gay, Glam, and Gritty Travels in South America, by Jesse Archer
Published by: Harrington Park Press
Released: 1 September 2007
ISBN: 156023654X

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