People Who Look Like Me - Or Not

After I griped last week about the present state of LGBTQ+ fiction, it occurred to me that I should write about books that I enjoyed.  My point was not that there's nothing good out there.  I was criticizing people who complain that there's nothing out there and we need some books about People Who Look Like Us.  As far as I can tell, there is plenty out there, including books about People Who Look Like You.  But I decided to look through my reading log to remind myself of books that keep me reading gay fiction.

Not too surprisingly, authors I've read before and who are still working turned up.  Alan Hollinghurst has a new novel, Our Evenings, that I bought but haven't read yet, I'm saving it for later.  I don't even know what it's about, but I've been reading his novels since The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and while they don't feature the positive role models that many gay readers want, they are beautifully written and treat something like the real lives of certain, mostly British, gay men.  They're also sexually explicit enough to satisfy those gay men who demand hot man 2 man action.  While some of the characters are conflicted about being gay, they grow out of it, and in general, self-acceptance is not the main issue Hollinghurst writes about.

Another established writer whose new work I watch for is Patrick Gale, whose first novels, Ease and The Aerodynamics of Pork, appeared in 1985.  He's a fine writer, though not the virtuoso Hollinghurst is.  Like Armistead Maupin (whose biography Gale published in 1999), he likes to write about gay characters who interact more or less openly with heterosexuals, another selling point for me.  He also wrote a BBC drama, Man in an Orange Shirt (2017), set at the end of World War II and in the present day.

Speaking of Maupin, I reread his Tales of the City series (1978-2024) every decade. They were a breakthrough in gay fiction, in showing openly queer characters (including a transsexual) who coexist with heterosexuals and happily take swipes at bigots.  That last feature is less common even in more recent gay fiction, for reasons that escape me: it's not like bigots aren't still a worthy and significant target.  I have to confess that the Tales don't stand up as well to intensive rereading as I could wish; I don't know if it's me, or him, or both.  But I still get more pleasure from them than from many other books, gay or straight.  The surprise new installment, Mona of the Manor, published early last year, felt a bit forced to me.  It's a flashback to the early 1990s, which wasn't surprising since by now many of the core original characters would be dead or in nursing homes.

Recently I discovered the novels of Michael Carson, as some of them were reissued as ebooks.  Four of them follow the life of Martin Benson, a conflicted English Catholic, from adolescence in the 1960s to the age of 60 so far.  Benson can be a bit of a drag; even at 60 he's deficient in self-esteem, but he's found a partner who's a good-enough match.  Carson seems to be smarter and more together than his creation, and all his novels reflect his profession in English as a second language.  They're mostly out of print, so I'm tracking them down second-hand on the Internet.  Again, Benson's not a role model, but Carson makes him and his world worth visiting.

Last year I read The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle (2022), by Matt Cain, another Brit (yes, there seems to be a pattern here).  It's about a closeted 65-year-old mail carrier facing retirement, and learning that England has changed since his youth.  He gradually adjusts to new possibilities of openness.  It's not my favorite read of the past few decades, but at least about a gay man who's not an adolescent getting over himself.

Back in the USA, the screenwriter, playwright and novelist Paul Rudnick published a semi-autobiographical novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, in 2023.  Rudnick is a smooth, witty writer, and though I don't find his work entirely satisfying I always watch for what he'll do next.

There's also Christopher Bram, whose work I've read since Surprising Myself was published in 1987.  He's solid and intelligent without being brilliant, but he hasn't published a novel since Exiles in America in 2007.  I like his nonfiction, but wish for another novel.

It feels strange to say this, but I've finally begun reading Jean Genet's novels; these go back to the 1940s.  I've also reread his plays and Edmund White's biography of him.  I probably wouldn't have gotten much from them in my 20s: they are about petty criminals, full of fetishistic details that don't stroke my kinks, and the English translations are hampered by the need to render French jail and street slang into English.  This probably couldn't be fixed by new translations.  But in my old age I found Our Lady of the Flowers and Miracle of the Rose fascinating, as a glimpse of a life and experiences that many gay men fantasize about, including Genet himself.  I learned from White's biography that Genet was an outsider even among jailbirds, wanting to be a tough guy and mostly failing.  I still have three novels and his memoir Prisoner of Love to go.

So much for the old guys, for now anyway.  I recently happened on Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, published in 2017.  It's a sort of mystery/fantasy set mostly in 1950s San Francisco, involving a group of women, mostly lesbian, struggling in a city that's not as free as it's fabled to be.  Nicely done.

Also set in 1950s San Francisco is Frank W. Butterfield's The Unexpected Heiress (2016), the first in a series of murder mysteries featuring a gay private investigator with an independent income so he feels free to slap around (verbally) an antigay bigot who stumbles into his office in this book's first chapter.  That's a good start, but I haven't decided whether to continue the series.  Butterfield is one of a number of gay writers taking advantage of the ease of self-publishing these days, and he's one of the better ones I've sampled.

Then there's Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House (2022), about a secret LGBTQ mutual-support society in early 1950s San Francisco.  I haven't yet read Malinda Lo's Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021), set in San Francisco in 1954, but hope to get to it soon.  Lo has mostly written YA fantasy fiction with lesbian content; I've only read her Ash but I hear great things about this one.

One more area I've found very fruitful to explore is graphic fiction and nonfiction.  The success of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which I loved, opened the door to a lot of more queer content.  The only American example I've read so far is Bloom (2019) by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau.  It's a story of barely post-high school young gay love, nicely done but what has really gotten my attention is Japanese shonen ai manga, a well-established genre with multiple subgenres and a welter of role categories.  Just a few years ago few of these books were available in English, usually on the Internet, but that has changed.

Three that stand out for me include My Brother's Husband by Gengoroh Tagame, an artist mostly known for his, um, erotica.  I was pointed to it by a gay Arab friend I was visiting in San Francisco.  My Brother's Husband is about a single straight Japanese dad who is visited by the widowed Canadian husband of his estranged twin brother.  Lots of tension and stress there, but common humanity mostly wins out even in Japan.  It's very moving and the story is well-developed; I'd seen some of Gengoroh's erotic work, and it did not prepare me for the character development and sensitivity of My Brother's Husband.

My Brother's Husband is intended for a gay male readership, though it's accessible to straights.  Shonen ai manga are mostly for and by heterosexual women, and my next examples come from that genre.  Restart After Coming Back Home by cocomi is about a troubled 25-year-old who reluctantly moves back home to his rural village after losing his latest job in the big city.  He doesn't know what to do next, and his parents don't know either; they have no reason to expect direction or stability from him.  He's taken in hand by another fellow, a boisterously friendly guy who's not fazed by his sulkiness and for some reason remembers him fondly from their younger days.  He's an orphan, living with his adoptive grandfather, and the two gradually get closer until (as the blurbs have it) they Develop Deeper Feelings for each other.  The second book, Restart After Growing Hungry, follows the progress of their couplehood.  The characterization is beautifully done, and I've already read these books twice.

The third interesting example is I'm Kinda Chubby and I'm Your Hero by Nore, in two volumes.  The main character is a big-boned young actor in a small theater company, insecure and unsure of his chances of success.  A young apprentice baker becomes his fan and they work toward a mutually supportive friendship.  Unlike Restart, no erotic / sexual component is declared in their relationship, but it is loving and important to them.  Neither one is shown to have any heterosexual interest.  Are they going to be boyfriends?  You can decide for yourself.  For me it doesn't matter; I've also read this diptych twice.  I'm bemused by people who want cartoon characters to whip out their cartoon genitalia.  For me what fiction and comics can do is show the progress of relationships, and many manga do this very well.  I could mention others I've liked in the genre, ambiguous or overtly erotic,  but I've run on long enough for now.  The notable thing for me about these books is that even when they're working familiar tropes of young men discovering that they love other men, I often find them much more moving than their US counterparts.

Since most Americans don't read much anyway, I don't believe that they've exhausted all the books that exist.  Probably they don't know about them, which raises the question of how people find about books they might like.  Reading reviews has always helped me, and browsing independent bookstores whose proprietors knew me did too.  Nowadays the Amazon algorithms point me to a wide range of books; they're not perfect, of course, but nothing is.  I also find recommendations on social media, by people I either know personally or follow closely enough to take what they mention seriously.  

And if all else fails there are always public libraries.  If you're under eighteen, librarians nowadays might well prefer not to recommend gay books to you lest they be accused of "grooming," but that won't hurt adults, and there's nothing to stop younger patrons from looking at what's on the shelves.  (Yet.  I expect that bigots, emboldened by Trump in the White House, will try harder to purge library collections.  They can be and have been resisted successfully, and had better continue to be.)

What I wanted to show here is that there is a lot of LGBTQ fiction that works for me, whether the characters look like me or not.  I can't take very seriously those people who say there isn't.  What works for me may not work for you, and vice versa.  But there are simply too many books out there to pretend that there aren't.

Scribble Scribble Scribble!

I couldn't catch up with gay male literature even in the 1970s.  This was partly because it was harder to find the older works, which were often out of print, published by small houses, or allowed to slip down the Memory Hole because of their scandalous nature. There were no sections of gay books in bookstores aside from the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City, founded in 1967, which felt too far away to be useful to me.  (Other people my age traveled freely around the country, but I was too unadventurous and frankly unimaginative to do that.)  A few gay writers wrote about the books that they'd read before Stonewall, which they could cover in one chapter; Roger Austen's Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Bobbs-Merrill) didn't appear until 1977, and I didn't read it until years later. But such proliferating resources, including friends in the field, pointed me to more works than I could read.  Much as I was interested, there were other areas I wanted to explore.

By now, LGBTQ+ books are a sizable market niche, and can be found even in small public libraries despite the efforts of bigots to remove them. I've become skeptical of complaints that we aren't represented, though I still see plenty of them. I don't mean to indulge in the old "You kids think you have it bad? Hah! In my day..." line. I'm actually saying the opposite: things are so much better now.  Mainstream publishers are putting out books in every imaginable category, to the point of self-parody: you want stories about disabled transgender Afro-Asian shapeshifters living in small US towns with their gay-sorcerer dads and their telepathic flying cats?  They're out there, and probably in your public library. They can also be found on TV and the Internet.  Sure, some kids are being held prisoner by their knuckle-dragging fundamentalist parents, and that's a real problem, but it's not because there aren't books about People Who Look Like You.  There are even books about People Who Look Like You Being Held Prisoner by Their Knuckle-dragging Fundamentalist Parents.  The problem is about finding ways to get access to them.

But back to me.  I'm a seventy-four-year old white American gay man.  I don't have any difficulty getting access to books or other media about people who look like me.  Nor am I interested in reading only about people who look like me; that hasn't been my goal, at least since I first read lives of George Washington Carver and Clara Barton in fifth grade.  My problem, insofar as it is one, is finding books that I consider worth reading. Self-publishing, including the self-publishing of ebooks, has produced a flood of works of varying quality ranging from the sublime to the dire. The conglomeratization of publishing has produced almost as many books that can't be faulted for bad writing, only for a boring mediocre professionalism and a focus on catering to market niches.  I see this not only in gay writing but in genres such as mysteries and fantasy/sf, which now (happily?) overlap with gay writing.

The strange thing is that this is not really anything new.  There have always been too many damned thick square books.  Sturgeon's Law has always applied.  It's the flip side of the complaint that there aren't enough damned thick square books about people who look like me.  I should make it clear that there are plenty of books that I do enjoy reading, far more than I can ever hope to read.  I'm just musing on the irony that my (and others') wish for more has been granted.  What we hoped for were more good books, and they're out there, lost in the crowd, but it has ever been thus.

What provoked me to write about this is Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by the Polish-German writer Tomasz Jedrowski, published by Morrow in 2020.  (He's reportedly working on another, but it's not done yet.)  It's a love story about two young Poles in 1980, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, and the upheavals by Solidarność were still to come.  The narrator, Ludwik, addresses his lost love Janusz in retrospect from the United States where he now lives.  They came together at a summer work camp after graduating from university, Ludwik unsure what to do next, Janusz ready to work for the government; after an idyllic month camping out in the countryside they must figure out how, if at all, to go on loving each other.  If you've read your share of gay fiction over the past few years, you should be able to predict the obstacles they face.  For me there were no surprises, but it might well be different for a younger, less experienced reader, so I hesitate to criticize too much.

What did surprise me is that Jedrowski, born in Germany to Polish parents, wrote the book in English: it's not a translation.  The reviews quoted on Amazon overpraise his writing, but he still did quite a good job.  As I say, though, I found the story familiar and predictable, except for its setting, which Jedrowski constructed as a historical novel; at most it reflects the world of his parents, not his own experience.  Even there, I had problems.  Jedrowski's characters must contend with life in a repressive two-tiered society suffering from economic austerity -- long lines for food, inadequate medical care, censorship of media both artistic and journalistic, police crackdowns on dissent -- though an elite few enjoyed luxury.  

Ludwik remembers furtively listening to Radio Free Europe as a child with his mother and grandmother, for example.  I immediately thought of something the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson wrote in the 1980s, I think in Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), about his interaction with Soviet dissidents: they were properly scornful and skeptical of official propaganda, but completely credulous of the Western propaganda they heard on Radio Free Europe.*  I felt the same way about Jedrowski's two-tiered society.  Americans have rarely had to wait in lines for groceries except in wartime before the lifetimes of most of us, but poverty and hunger were serious problems here, and exacerbated by the contemporary Reagan and Thatcher regimes, which wanted to eliminate the social safety nets that alleviated them, how ever inadequately. Those programs, come to think of it, also involved waiting for hours in lines or in grim office waiting rooms, trying to appease grim bureaucrats. As for health care in the US, I don't really need to detail that, do I?  Or police crackdowns on dissent in the land of the free?  Young Ludwik couldn't have known about all this in 1980, but older Ludwik doesn't seem aware of it either.

Nor could young Ludwik have known about the long history of antigay repression in the West, though a major prop in Swimming in the Dark is the illicit copy he acquires of James Baldwin's gloom-and-doom gay classic of 1956, Giovanni's Room, over which he and Janusz bond.  He's also aware of US racism; the Soviet bloc made sure its citizens were well-educated about it, much to our government's indignation.  Older Ludwik doesn't seem to have learned much, and I wonder about Jedrowski himself.  Yes, it's difficult to balance all these things in a work of art, and Swimming in the Dark is his first try.  Still, the over-familiar features of its love story left me paying more attention to the background, which I think needed work.

And you know, I feel the same way about books by more experienced gay writers, including some of the most acclaimed.  I haven't been reporting here on my reading as I should, so let me mention quickly a couple.  Andrew Sean Greer's Less (2017) was praised to the skies, but I found it a slog: it relies on a type of protagonist who I believe was introduced by Stephen McCauley but picked up by others, the uncloseted but socially awkward gay nerd, with a close straight woman friend and even some gay male friends. He can't get a date, but he wants a boyfriend, and eventually he stumbles across one -- sometimes literally.  Then there was Andrew Holleran's latest, The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022).  It features another Holleran doppelganger, enduring gay old age and not enduring it very well.  The main thing I got from it was the urgency of finally getting the shingles vaccine, after reading the book's lengthy account of another elderly gay character's suffering from the disease. So that's taken care of. The novel is Holleran's unrelentingly downbeat (but yes, very well-written, as his books always are) take on aging as a single gay man with no evident support network, and he's entitled to it.  

It's worth comparing the prolific Edmund White's experience as he recounts it in his brand-new The Loves of My Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), which I read just last week. White has plenty of health problems, but he doesn't wallow in self-pity, and though as always his curmudgeon routine can be annoying, he's good company on the page.  It's a matter of temperament, I guess: Holleran's temperament is one of what "the Jesuits call 'morose delectation' -- an addiction to melancholy", as he once put it with perverse pride. But we must be tolerant of others' kinks.

I could also mention Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers (Vintage, 2007), a historical novel about the relationship between two gay men in McCarthy-era Washington DC, recently adapted as a Showtime miniseries.  It has some points of comparison with Swimming in the Dark, come to think of it.  It too received higher praise than I would give it, but it was worth reading and I intend to try some of Mallon's other work; again, it's not fair to compare this experienced writer's work to a first-timer's.  It's foully depressing, given the situation, but that's okay - I don't demand happy endings.  Also there's Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician (Scribner, 2021); it's brilliantly done, but I didn't get the point of doing it. (Though it does show that one can write interestingly about homosexual life in the past and in other countries.)  I've liked some of his other writing, including his essays, though, and I mean to read more.

To return to my original point, though, I'm not as impressed as I feel I should be by some of the prestigious gay (or straight) fiction being produced in our supposedly more enlightened times. Maybe it's just me, a consequence of having read too many other books. I'm not sure, in fact, what I'm looking for - but I'll know it if and when I find it.

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* I think this is the passage: "I have spoken in East Europe with courageous men and women, whose persistent integrity in their daily tense confrontation with a brutal security service humbled me; and yet they had constructed in their minds a whole illusory view of 'the other world', made up from 'Radio Free Europe' and a habit (indeed, a dogma) of believing always the opposite of whatever official Communist propaganda stated to be so."  [Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon Books, 1982), 87-8]

Making Honest Men of Us

The Blogger Formerly Known As IOZ linked to a bizarre essay on gay fiction at the Guardian.  Maybe "bizarre" is too strong: the piece exhibits the same highly selective sense of history that so many gay people cling to, but I still cling to the hope that people will learn.  It seems they never do.

The Guardian titled the piece "It's time fiction reflected gay married life," and that's largely what the writer, Matthew Griffin, is calling for.  After reading At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O'Neill's fine novel of teen love during the Irish uprising of a century ago, Griffin says,

... I wanted to know what it was like for one man to love another – beyond initial attraction, beyond the passion of youth. At 18, I probably shouldn’t have been so worried about such things, but I’d read a lot of fantasy novels as a kid which ingrained in me a need for love to endure. I’d seen my parents’ marriage do this, but I needed to know if such a thing was possible for me, even if I’d have to call it by another name. And I needed to know what it would cost.

The gay literature I read in the years after that never quite answered my questions. Much of it is rooted not in the drama of long-term relationships but in the sharp pang of sex, in the search for love in immediate beauty and physical pleasure, often moving from one object of desire to another in quick succession.

As examples Griffin cites Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and (mystifyingly) Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, which was just published this year and could hardly have disappointed the teenaged Griffin.

Apparently determined not to miss a cliche, Griffin continues:

But the tremendous swell that pushed the marriage equality movement forward is evidence that many gay men want more than a life of sexual freedom and excitement – we want love and commitment and stability, even if we may not all want them in the particular forms our heterosexual friends have created.

He sums up:

Long-term commitment is now a real possibility. This changes the experience of desire, shifting our expectations and the meaning we attach to it. Our literature should account for this.

At least Griffin is clear that by "marriage" he's not referring only to state-recognized liaisons, but to all committed, long-term relations.  But how naive must you be to believe that legalizing same-sex marriage suddenly makes "long-term commitment ... a real possibility"?  On one hand, it was always a real possibility, even in the primitive 1980s; on the other, marriage offers no guarantee that the commitment will last.

One commenter on the article remarked, "You want a book to reflect a particular story, you write it."  Though it's mentioned only as the biographical blurb at the end, Griffin seems to have done just that: his first novel, Hide, will be published next week.  From the description, I'm not sure he's complied with his own requirements and strictures.  That same commenter added, "Literature does not have any kind of responsibility to reflect society, either real or ideal."

I agree with that, but my main criticism is that Griffin's complaint is unfounded.  The key word, I suppose, is "much of it."  True, much gay male fiction has been about "the sharp pang of sex, in the search for love in immediate beauty and physical pleasure, often moving from one object of desire to another in quick succession," but much of it has not.  (And it's not as if "much" heterosexual fiction weren't about the single life, or about courtship ending with the wedding, or about marriages cut short by failure -- the novel of adultery is common -- or tragedy.)  Much gay fiction has been about "the drama of long-term relationships," so much that I hardly know where to begin.  Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels, for example.  Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood and A Home at the End of the World.  Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir.  Christopher Bram's debut Surprising Myself is about a male couple, as are several of his later novels.  Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner.  Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap.  Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell, even if it gave John Updike the vapors.  Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man is about widowerhood, so it probably wouldn't satisfy Griffin, but the dead partner is still present in his absence, throughout the story, and that too is a lesson about the drama of long-term relationships.  I recently read Paul Russell's Immaculate Blue, which is about a male couple's wedding, but it addresses the matters Griffin says he wants fiction to cover; besides, the couple in question were Living in Sin for years before they tied the knot, so they've already been living the long-term drama.  Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders follows a male couple over several decades together, and it's a reminder that long-term coupledom doesn't necessarily exclude sexual freedom and excitement at the same time.  Hell, if we don't limit the list to prose fiction, there's James Merrill's epic poem of life, death, afterlife, and Ouija boards, The Changing Light at Sandover.  Those are just off the top of my head, and I didn't even include lesbian fiction.  If I went over my bookshelves I could list quite a few more.  None of them are what you, or at least what I would call obscure.

So, my first and major objection is that Griffin misrepresents the current and past state of gay male fiction.  The kind of story he demands is and has always been told in some gay fiction; he has, of course, no right to demand that all gay fiction do it.  (I admit that he didn't quite demand that, but then it's not clear what he really was demanding, aside from the actual state of contemporary gay fiction.  Some of the commenters saw the piece as a ploy to promote his own novel, but I don't think so, partly because he doesn't mention it and mainly because the misrepresentation he makes is a staple of pop criticism.  Some of the commenters noticed the falsity of his complaint (at least one, perhaps out of a desire to sell his own kind of fiction, confused stories about marriage with boy-meets-boy romance), but most of them swallowed it whole, and I don't think they were selling anything.

My second objection starts from Griffin's desire to know more about the reality of long-term relationships.  I share that desire, but you won't learn what it's "like for one man to love another" from fiction.  Readers who believe that prose fiction or any other medium will give them reliable information about life will soon be disappointed.  Fiction uses real life as one of its raw materials, but writers aren't bound to depict real life accurately, and they don't.  It's at least arguable that depicting reality isn't what art of any kind is for.  (What it is for is another question, which has no single answer.)  Even when a novel describes a marriage, the description is not an end but a means to whatever artistic end the author is trying for.

If someone wants insight into the process of living for a lifetime with another person, nonfiction is probably a better resource, though it has its own limitations.  We have numerous autobiographical accounts of same-sex marriages, from Jesse Green's The Velveteen Father to Paul Monette's Borrowed Time to Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast to Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart.  We have the published diaries of coupled writers -- if Griffin wants an account of the process of two men building a life together, he could read Christopher Isherwood's diaries, which cover most of his thirty-odd years with Don Bachardy.  We have reasonably reliable non-homophobic, un-closeted biographies of gay writers, artists, and other notables who lived in long-term partnerships.  There are also research studies of male couples, starting in the Eighties with Charles Silverstein's Man to Man and David P. McWhirter and Andrew Mattison's The Male Couple, and self-help tomes like Eric Marcus's Male Couple's Guide: Finding a Man, Making a Home, Building a Life.  In sum, fiction and non-fiction already reflect married life, so why is Matthew Griffin unaware of it?

That Is What Fiction Means

I just read a new young-adult gay novel, which I'm not going to name because I don't particularly want to single it out.  It was well-written, and I liked it on the whole, though I admit I'm getting a bit weary of what seem to be not merely conventions but cliches in this genre.  But I guess it's not all that surprising that a 64-year-old might not find coming-of-age stories very relevant to him.

I don't want to deny the enormous value of having lots of affirmative fiction available to kids, gay and straight alike.  But consider the story of the novel I just read: two teenage boys in a suburban school connect online over a Tumblr posting by one of them.  They're both closeted, of course, so they want to meet face to face but are afraid to meet face to face.  In the end, to cut to the chase, they do, and of course they're both totally cute and they fall in love and despite some incidents of antigay bigotry by a few fellow students they come out and everything ends happily.

What bugged me was that they are, of course, both totally cute.  So are all if not most of their friendship circle. It's not fair to expect a story like this to be realistic, but almost anyone who's met other people for romantic or grittier purposes online knows that disappointment is a frequent part of the process.  (Especially when the people don't exchange photographs before meeting, though this can still result in disappointment.)  So, I thought, what would have happened if the narrator had met his correspondent and found him to be not a totes adorable jock but someone pudgy, acned -- or even just not his type?  As often as not the person you meet isn't repulsive, he (or she) just isn't someone you're attracted to, often because you've been constructing a fantasy figure in your mind that no one could live up to.

An old friend of mine, when we were both speaking on a GLB panel to a college psychology class, told of growing up gay in rural southern Indiana.  He's about fifteen years younger than I am, so he grew up in a different queer Weltanschauung than I did.  He met another gay kid his own age while they were both still in high school, and they became friends.  He told the class how they'd also discussed the prospect of becoming boyfriends, but they weren't attracted to each other so they gave up the idea.  This bothered the professor, a middle-aged straight woman; she assured the class that all gay people don't think about sex all the time and that two gay kids who found each other in high school wouldn't usually consider each other as sexual partners.  I can't remember now how we responded to this; I think we just let it go.

In retrospect I'm not sure we should have done that.  There was nothing sinister about these boys considering a sexual relationship.  Neither of them had any prior sexual experience, and most adolescents of any sexual orientation are interested in acquiring some.  Unlike their straight peers, they were in a sort of desert-island situation, without other dating prospects or other erotic options besides the institutions of promiscuity, with all their dangers.  If a heterosexual man and woman were cast away on a desert island, they'd probably have to decide whether to have sex with each other -- there's a long genre of jokes, cartoons, and the like about such a situation.  So why shouldn't two isolated gay boys do the same?

The protagonists of this new novel don't have many other options, even thirty years after my friend's high school days.  So, I couldn't help wondering what would have happened if their great opportunity hadn't panned out?  What if they'd had to cope with rejection from each other when fantasy ran afoul of reality?  Has anyone written a YA novel about finding out that your dream guy, your fantasy prince, turns out to be a frog?

There's drama there.  I wish I could write fiction, because that would be a story I'd like to write.

Perhaps Such Things Pass for Virtue Among the Gods

I just finished reading Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (Ecco / Harper, 2012), which I'd picked up after Band of Thebes mentioned it.  I had second thoughts after BoT followed up by dissing the book severely, but by the time my library hold came through I'd decided to give the book a chance.  It turned out to be worth it -- not a great novel, but a good one.  Unlike BoT I had no complaints about the book's style, and unlike Daniel Mendelsohn I thought its "tone" was fine.

The Song of Achilles is narrated by Patroclus, the beloved friend of the Homeric hero Achilles.  The Iliad is not explicit that the two were boyfriends, but later generations of Greeks assumed they were, though they apparently spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was the top and who was the bottom.  Patroclus was the older of the two, so by later custom he should have been the erastes, but he wasn't a warrior, and "perform[ed] duties such as cooking, feeding and grooming the horses, and nursing."  Miller doesn't take a position on this vital issue, which might be why gay men like BoT and Mendelsohn found her version wanting.

Style, especially for dialogue, in historical fiction is always a difficulty.  Miller goes with the rather stilted and formal diction common to the genre, but she seems comfortable with it and makes it work.  I liked her characterization of the two boys.  Patroclus is not macho, not a warrior, which is apparently not at odds with his depiction in the Iliad.  (I've read the Odyssey, but not the Iliad.  Gotta fix that soon.)  We see Achilles entirely through Patroclus' eyes, which are loving but not uncritical.  The Song of Achilles isn't a naturalistic story: the gods, particularly Achilles' mother Thetis, are real and present, so Achilles is more than a man: the best of the Greeks, charismatic, a natural warrior.  But he's also proud and ruthless.

Numerous male readers have complained that Miller, being a girl, doesn't and maybe can't understand the warrior mind, and they claim that she has written a dopey romance.  I'd put this down to mere homophobia, and in many cases it surely is, but Band of Thebes and Daniel Mendelsohn are gay men, so there must be a different explanation in their case.  I think a certain misogyny is at work here; I also suspect that the book's jaundiced view of war may be a factor.  I didn't think Miller overdid the emotion (the boys' relationship "begins with an embarrassing breathlessness and climaxes — sorry! — in the long-awaited and, it must be said, cringe-inducing consummation," says Mendelsohn), nor do I agree with him that she writes "swoony soft-porn prose."  But this is a matter of taste, I guess.  I liked Miller's writing, I found the book an engrossing read.  The Song of Achilles isn't a great book, but it's a good one.

Too Gay, Not Gay Enough, and Just Right

I'm probably guilty of this myself, but it still bothers me when other people do it. (I like to think that if I caught myself doing it, I'd correct it. But I'd probably argue about it instead.)

Band of Thebes linked to an online conversation between Carol Anshaw and Stephen McCauley, nearly all of whose novels I've read. That's easy to do, since neither of them publishes much: Anshaw's fourth novel in about twenty years, Carry the One, will be published in March; McCauley has published six in about the same period, and his first, The Object of My Affection, is still my favorite. I like them both, but they say some things that throw me a bit. For example:

Steve: ... It's always jarring (and boring, no?) to have gay characters presented as the perfect neighbor and friend whose main function is to fix someone's hair or make a fabulous outfit for them. It seems to me that really expresses a great deal of discomfort around the subject. You have to justify their presence in a work of fiction by having them be supernatural in their goodness. You still see that in the way African-American characters are presented as the all-good supporting cast who help the white folks get in touch with their feelings and solve racism.

Carol: I think of those as "gay" characters. They give absolutely no manifestation of sexuality; they are composed only of their affect. Gayer than springtime hairdressers. Women with tool belts [although, to be honest, I kind of don't mind those]. Probably African-Americans feel the same way about "black" characters.

I think if you're going to attempt to write narratives with gay characters, you have to let go of worrying about homophobic responses. Queer is the place you start from, not a condition you are going to argue on behalf of.

I don't want to harp too much on terminology, but I think what bothers me here is not the "gay" vs. "queer" distinction (empty though it is), but that McCauley and Anshaw are talking about two different kinds of work, not two kinds of characters. The gay characters who "give absolutely no manifestation of sexuality" turn up in work by and, more importantly, for heterosexuals. (Just as the "magic Negro" characters appear in works by and for whites.) As McCauley put it, they're the "supporting cast."

You can call the characters whatever you want -- when I was young, we might have distinguished the two classes as "homosexual" and "gay", with the gay ones being central -- but what counts is their place in the narrative. (Band of Thebes sniped the other day at Mike Mills's film Beginners because the main character's gay father comes out [at 75!], and dies a few years later, the only "two gay storylines" allowed by "mainstream entertainment gatekeepers"; while that's true, strictly speaking, the film 1] was not mainstream 2] and was an autobiographical work by and from the viewpoint of the straight son. Despite this, he gave his father a richer, more honorable treatment than we usually get from heterosexual artists, and much better than the mainstream.) And I can think of a number of novels written by heterosexual or unspecified authors that dealt with the love and sex lives of their gay characters. As long as there are novels and films in which "Queer is the place you start from, not a condition you are going to argue on behalf of", I don't object to those in which we're supporting characters -- though I won't give them many points for inclusiveness either.

McCauley, I think, is too optimistic when he says,

I'm sure you had the experience, as I did, of being in a movie theater and hearing an entire audience freak out when two men kissed on screen or even touched each other in an intimate way. As a young person, it was a pretty jarring, upsetting experience. It made me feel I was in hostile territory. It's hard to imagine that happening now, probably because people have become so desensitized from watching totally mainstream entertainment like "Glee," "Will and Grace," and "Modern Family."

I've had that feeling of being in hostile territory, and I agree that progress has been made, but "desensitized"? Let's see: "Glee" didn't get any male-to-male kissing until the second season, and "Will and Grace" took longer than that. And there was still hostility. For that matter, straight boys are freaking out over frontal male nudity in movies, without any homoerotic stuff on the screen. McCauley himself notes recalls "one reader comment about Alternatives to Sex in which a reader complained that there wasn't enough warning on the cover that it was about a gay man. Like maybe one of those warnings labels on a cigarette pack?" No, we still have a long way to go, and maybe we'll never get there.

Even odder to me is when McCauley says,

As much as I love Paul Rudnick's hilarious pieces in the New Yorker, they sometimes seem to come from a collective "gay attitude" rather than an individual point of view. Although come to think of it, I suppose he's toying with that notion. Some of the humor comes from the way he winks at that. "We know we all think this way, right?"

All I've read of Rudnick's essays are the ones in I Shudder, and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey (HarperCollins, 2009), and I don't see a "collective 'gay attitude' in them. For example, from page 239, speaking of the 1993 March on Washington:

There was true, infinite gay diversity, which meant that there were many people to admire, a more select group to ogle, and a copious supply of marchers dressed or undressed in ways that would embarrass the conservative gay politicos who yearned for timid respectability.

I'd bet that what McCauley says about Rudnick is what Rudnick would say about other gay writers.

Both Anshaw and McCauley talk about the mixture of sexual orientations in their characters -- all of them aren't gay, that is. I'm all in favor of that, though I'm also quite comfortable with fiction that keeps straight characters on the periphery, just because I don't think you can claim that gay people and relationships are fully equal if you need to throw in some straight ones for balance or (gag me) universality. McCauley (hm, he does seem to be the main problem here, doesn't he?) also says,

It's interesting that just as openly gay actors are more accepted playing straight roles, openly gay writers such as Emma Donahue and Colm Toibin are accepted writing books like "Room" and "Brooklyn," neither of which has any gay content. The books are taken on their own merits, even after they've written gay novels. It points toward writers getting less stuck in a particular mold or being limited by a label.

I'm all in favor of writers not being limited, but what McCauley is talking about here is nothing all that new. (Of course it's true that the category of "openly gay writer" is a relatively new one.) Women writers have written about male characters, and there used to be (maybe still) almost a subgenre where a Jewish writer wrote a novel only about gentiles. Black writers, too: Chester Himes's prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry, whose protagonist and most other characters are white, or James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. But think too of Armistead Maupin, whose novels have always had a mix of gay and straight characters, or the protean Gore Vidal. But it cuts both ways: for writers like Alma Routsong (better known as Isabel Miller, the author of the lesbian classic Patience and Sarah) it was liberating to be freed from the necessity of writing about heterosexual characters. As Carol Anshaw says,

Like, I know there are gay people for whom being queer is still troublesome, or for whom being out feels exposed. I'm way on the other side of the spectrum. I feel so lucky to be queer. When I was straight, I hated the strictures of marriage, of polite society in general. I hated plugging into the program (which was much more of a program back then, credit in your husband's name, taking his name as yours, etc.). Everything got better when I came out. I'm a natural renegade, and so jumping the fence landed me in an unequivocally better place.

Amen to that. One of the reasons I'm annoyed by the "I was born this way, I can't help myself!" line is that coming out landed me in an unequivocally better place. Coming out freed me to be the person I wanted to be, and while many born-gay people would say the same thing, it's hard to believe them when they talk about their lives as something they would never have chosen if their genes hadn't made them do it. But then, I'm a natural renegade too.

And oops! Anshaw referred to herself as having been straight, in the past tense. I've been meaning to write about the fuss that started when Cynthia Nixon said the same thing -- not only GLBTQ people but "supportive" straights were all over her case. More to come on that.

Nebraska

Another book review for Gay Community News, published in the April 30-May 6, 1989 issue. As I feared, Whitmore died between the time I wrote the review and the time it appeared in print. Rereading the review now, I wonder if I should reread Nebraska, but I really have little interest in stories which pile on the misery for no evident reason except, I suppose, to show the author's High Artistic Seriousness. Happy endings and happy people are like, so gay, y' know? For this reason I've never gotten very far with Dennis Cooper, Scott Heim, and other gay writers like that. It's not that I object to unhappiness, even misery, per se, nor to characters devoid of affect; but I don't get what these boys are driving at. I guess it's just a blind spot of mine, and again, I have no idea why my editor sent me the Whitmore books. Hell, I couldn't even come up with a flip header for the review.

And then it occurred to me that Nebraska would make a great Coen Brothers movie, or a movie by any filmmaker who shows his or her High Artistic Seriousness by tormenting the characters mercilessly. "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport," King Lear lamented. No, dear, that's playwrights and moviemakers and edgy gay novelists.

Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic
by George Whitmore
New York: NAL Books, 1988
224 pages
$17.95 hardcover

Nebraska
by George Whitmore
New York: Grove Press, 1987
154 pages
$15.95 hardcover

I've been reading George Whitmore's articles in the gay press for years and always found them intelligent, interesting, and well-written. (Also sometimes wrongheaded and infuriating, but that's gay journalism.) So I wasn't too surprised when I found a book by him displayed in the window of my usual local bookstore. Nor was I too surprised that Someone Was Here had originated as an article in the New York Times Magazine; whatever my differences with the Times, it represents a level of professionalism that Whitmore has certainly achieved. On the other hand, the Times also represents a self-consciously haut-journalese style that absorbs the prose style of any writer in its path, and Whitmore is no exception. Most of Someone Was Here could have been written by almost any competent journalist, and that's a shame, as proven by the book's epilogue, where the tone abruptly shifts: Whitmore acknowledges that not only is he gay, he has been diagnosed with AIDS himself. Up to this point the book has consisted of omniscient-narrator third-person accounts of people with AIDS and their families and helpers; now Whitmore suddenly appears in the midst of these people, shipping parcels to Houston for one of his subjects, visiting and holding a small HIV-infected child named Frederico whose parents both died of AIDS. Perhaps the rush of involvement the reader suddenly feels compensates for the detachment of the previous two-hundred-odd pages, but it also throws that impersonality into uncomfortably sharp relief. Thanks to writers like Whitmore as well as to the Names Quilt and other projects, AIDS is becoming a plague with a human face; we are -- to a perhaps unprecedented degree -- enabled to know its victims not just as statistics but as people. Someone Was Here is interesting, intelligent, and worth reading as an object lesson in the difficulty of playing chicken with an epidemic: we can't get too close, but we have to get as close as possible, for all our sakes.

Nebraska, Whitmore's second novel, was published a few months before Someone Was Here. It's a strange little book. This time we have a first-person narrator, but his voice is not the author's: a twelve-year-old Nebraskan named Craig McMullen, who has been run over by a truck and lost a leg. It would be going too far to say that his family is in trouble; rather, they are classically 1950s' lumpen-Midwestern. Dad is a handsome drunken Irish redhead, violent when present, but mostly absent. Mama works at "Monkey Wards", her body swelling from the ankles up. Grandpa, an old railroad man, lives with Grandma in a ramshackle house he built himself, one room at a time. Sister Betty becomes a cheerleader, sister Dolores grows up too fast. Uncle Wayne, Mama's baby brother, comes home after his discharge from the Navy, waiting for a call from his friend the Chief; the two of them plan to open a garage in California as soon as they can get the money together.

But there are delays, punctuated by mysterious long-distance phone calls from the Chief, and Wayne stays on. Coming home one night after a drinking bout, he helps the convalescent Craig change his sweat-soaked pajamas, and briefly touches the boy's scrotum. A few weeks later the highway patrol brings Wayne home, though without arresting him. Not surprisingly to a gay reader with any knowledge of the period, it turns out that Wayne was discharged dishonorably from the Navy for homosexuality; that the Chief, his lover, has rejected him out of guilt; and that Wayne has been cruising the rest stops. After Craig has been manipulated into claiming that Wayne "interfered with" him, Wayne is committed to a mental hospital for electroshock. Craig is sent to live with his grandparents. His father, who has been living in Denver and has given up booze for Jesus, suddenly appears and kidnaps him, but Craig escapes. His father then returns to Denver and blows out his own brains with a shotgun.

Twelve years pass. After Grandma's funeral, Craig goes to California to pick up Uncle Wayne's trail, hoping to understand what happened to him. He finds him living with the Chief, handsome and well-preserved, but regressed emotionally to pubescence -- to Craig's pubescence, in fact.

Nebraska reminded me somewhat of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, with its attempt to make a kind of poetry out of demotic speech, its merciless depiction of bigotry, cruelty, and madness. But Whitmore isn't interested in the kind of lyricism Walker achieved, nor does he offer more than a hint of her hopeful vision of redeeming love; in this he more resembles Raymond Carver, the poet and short-story writer who wrote stark, painful tales of human isolation. Imagine a cross between the two, then: more vivid than Carver's bleached-out, gray-scale snapshots, less optimistic than Walker's tormented but loving epic, but with all their power and then some. I hope Whitmore is as much a survivor as Craig, because I think he has important books in him, and these two are just a taste of what he could give.

This Ain't Rock'n'Roll, This Is ...

This review appeared in the April 30-May 6, 1989 issue of Gay Community News. It garnered an angry letter from Barrus, published an issue or so later; I don't blame him, but I still stand by the review. Why did GCN send me the book? I have no idea -- one of the disadvantages of living a thousand miles away from the paper, in the days before e-mail was ubiquitous. The editor at the time, if I recall correctly, was a leather bear, but he printed the review.

More recently, in the wake of the James Frey debacle, it was revealed that Barrus had published three volumes purporting to be the memoirs of a troubled half-Navajo named Nasdiij. The books won raves for their intense prose; I'm almost tempted to take a look at one of them and see if I recognize the author's voice.

INTENSE RECTAL PAIN; or,
THIS AIN'T ROCK'N'ROLL, THIS IS...

Genocide: The Anthology
by Tim Barrus
"A LeatherLit Book."
Pound Ridge NY: Knights Press, 1988
224 pp.
$8.50 paperbound

Genocide: The Anthology is a collection of allegories or parables for the Age of AIDS. Some are set in the indefinitely distant future; the first, for instance, "The Dependency of Variables", has two young men traveling in a faster-than-light spacecraft piloted by a sentient computer named Tsan. Others are set in a time which seems to differ from the present only in that PWAs are hunted down and quarantined. Each section is followed by a poem. Some of the poems seem to me not bad, but perhaps this is only by contrast with the prose, which is unspeakable. But that's just one queen's opinion. Try a sample.

Reaching for the realm Tsan discovered surrender. It was a definition more powerful to his sensors than information from the genocide stars. Lao plunged into Jia violently. There was a sensual, anguished glint of madness to the sex that could only be matched by the penetrating, pulsing madness, the blackness, the sweet swallowing blackness which surrounded them. Madness and need. It was the definition of an endless spasmed dream. It was glorious fuck and Jia shook from it. Screamed with it. Begged and pleaded for it.

Redefine who and what I am. Pour your semen into my bloody guts and split me into a hundred thousand unerring pieces. It was religion.

It was ecstacy.

It was the now of now. . . .

“Fuck him,” Tsan said. It was almost a whisper. “Fuck his ass.”

Tsan scanned blood pressure. Heartbeat. Increased adrenalin levels.

Intense rectal pain.

Whew; that was a moment. If the preceding looked good to you, go for it: Genocide: The Anthology, $8.50 plus tax at your nearest gay bookstore. Personally, I never thought I'd find a writer who'd make William S. Burroughs look good to me. Barrus has a certain raw energy that might have carried me along if I hadn't kept tripping over sentences like “Kandyapple applekandy”, “Chinatown Chinatown”, or the climactic “Heroin razzle heroin dazzle.” On the back cover, he writes: “My concept is one of irreversible annihilation. If you see hope in this work, that's your stuff, not mine.” Don't worry, Tim. You'll be pleased to know that I see no hope in this work at all.

The Sissy's Progress

Another book review for Gay Community News, published sometime in 1985.

The Journals of Denton Welch
edited by Michael De-la-Noy
Dutton,New York
380 pp., $22.50 hardcover

Maiden Voyage
by Denton Welch
(first published in 1943)
Dutton, New York
284 pp., $8.95 paper

In Youth Is Pleasure
by Denton Welch
(first published in 1945)
Dutton/Obelisk, 1985
154 pp., $7.95 paper

A Voice Through a Cloud
by Denton Welch
(first published in 1950)
Dutton, New York
256 pp, $7.95 paper

Browsing in a bookstore, I find, is a lot like cruising. One is looking, if not for excitement, at least for stimulation, an interesting new face, someone who might be worth getting to know better. And how does one decide? As often as not, by the cover -- how else? But that's only the beginning: next one reads the dust-jacket blurb, leafs through the pages to see if the first superficial impression is confirmed by indications of intelligence or character. Is this the kind of author I want to take home with me? Will I feel like kicking him out after reading him once? Or is there a basis for a long-term -- not monogamous of course, this is the twentieth century -- relationship?

While checking out the New Arrivals shelves in the bookstore under his apartment, the Promiscuous reader noticed The Journals of Denton Welch. Do wha? he wondered, and pulled the volume out for a closer look. He noticed the self-portrait on the dust-jacket (a classic wimp, just his type), read the blurb: hot young 1940s British writer, hit by car in 1935 (fractured back, kidney problems, TB of the spine, catheter, partial impotence), died in 1948 at 33. Well, the chronically ill were not ordinarily his idea of a good time, but then the word "his loving relationship with a young man named Eric Oliver" caught his eye. Another contact (in a lifetime tally of thousands, Dr Kinsey) had been made.

Once again, more slowly: the youngest of four sons, Maurice Denton Welch was born in 1915 in Shanghai to a well-to-do British father and American mother. His early childhood was largely spent traveling with his mother, whom he adored, until her death when he was eleven. After two years at a public school in England, which he hated, he ran away: no sooner had his relatives persuaded him to return to school for one more term than his father, still in China, proposed an extended visit to Shanghai. At seventeen he entered art school in England.

The next few years were extremely important for Welch. Unlike his father and older brothers, who were apparently quintessential English public school jocks, Denton was a quintessential English sissy: a willowy, prissy, high-strung artistic mama's boy, fascinated by antiques, old churches, dollhouses, and strapping young men. His first two novels, written out of his understandably painful and confused early adolescence, have established a picture of his weakness of which his later disability seems to most commentators merely the logical continuation. Yet it is clear that once he escaped from his father's and brothers' shadows and from the ambivalent schoolboy machismo of public school, Welch began (while remaining no less a sissy) to discover his strengths. It wasn't just that he did well in art school, for despite his recognized talent he wasn't sure he had found what he really wanted to do. Rather he began to strengthen his body with walking tours, and although living more or less on his own, he began to acquire the courage to be himself, even to realize that other people might be interested in him just as he was. 

These beginnings were shattered when, at twenty, he was knocked from his bicycle by a careless motorist. He never fully recovered. For the remaining thirteen years of his life he was often bedridden, frequently in great pain. The accident and his ensuing hospitalization are the subject of his last novel, A Voice Through a Cloud, which is as painful to read as it must have been to write:

I must have screamed again, for all I can remember is a shriek of pain invading my whole body. The shriek seemed to be following the pain into every limb. I was nothing but a shriek and a pain. I was sweating. Everything was wet. I was crying. Saliva dribbled out of my mouth.

In the middle of the furnace inside me there was a clear thought like a text in cross-stitch. I wanted to warn the nurses, to tell them that nothing was real but torture. Nobody seemed to realize that this was the only thing on earth. People didn't know that it was waiting for them quietly, patiently.

I felt that if I bore the agony a moment longer it would split my skin. It was such a growing and powerful thing; it would burst out of the tightness of my body....

But the moment [the nurse] pricked me so heartlessly, pushing the needle right in with vicious pleasure, I had faith; I knew that it was magic. It was like the Sleeping Beauty magic.... The pain did not abate at all. It was still there, eating me up; but in the hundred years' sleep it would die. It couldn't live for a hundred years. And brambles would grow and everything turn marble-grey. The dust would be as thick and as exquisite to the touch as moleskin; and there would be moonlight always {Chapter I, end}.

Once again Welch was in the power of others, helpless and dependent. His body, which he had begun to enjoy and trust, had failed him, even if not by its own fault. For the rest of his life he would mourn the strength and freedom he had found briefly, then lost. Even so, he made the most of his times of near-health: he resumed artistic work, walked and cycled when he could, and in 1940 began to write.

In 1942 he sold a story, "Sickert at St. Peter's", to Horizon. His first novel, Maiden Voyage, was published in 1943 with a laudatory foreword by Dame Edith Sitwell, who hailed Welch as "not only a born writer, but a very considerable one." Maiden Voyage was a sort of novel/memoir based on the teenaged Welch's flight from school and his holiday with his father in China. Welch's precise and vivid prose won praise not only from Dame Edith but from Elizabeth Bowen and E. M. Forster, among others, and the book sold well.Surprisingly, this account of a teenaged sissy who, between antique-shopping jaunts and satirical encounters with other Westerners in China, wanders about striking up conversations with and buying drinks for rough-hewn soldiers and sailors who attract him, seems to have drawn little homophobic hostility:

...As I walked between the bamboo groves, I stopped to watch a soldier who was carrying a bright red blanket. First, he shook it, then he threw it over a clothesline and began to beat it with a stick. He must have seen me through the fence, for, dropping the stick and lighting the cigarette, he ambled over to me and said, "Hullo, mate."

"Hullo!" I gulped, rather taken aback....

I thought for a moment; then I found myself saying rather primly, "Would you like to come to tea this afternoon? If you're at a loose end. I live quite near."

He looked at me soberly, through the separating fence. "What would your Mum and Dad say to a stranger?" he asked.

"I've only got a father and he won't be there," I answered {pp. 188f}.

Welch's second novel, In Youth Is Pleasure, drew more fire. Pervaded by an astonishing Gothic masturbatory teenage homoeroticism, the novel was almost too much for Welch's publisher. Indeed, considering such scenes as the following, in which the young hero, on holiday at a hotel on the Thames, meets a rather eccentric schoolmaster-missionary during a rainstorm, it is amazing that the book found a publisher in those days at all.

"Hold out your hands," the man said suddenly.

Orvil did so, and in a moment the man had tied them tightly together.

He threw the other end of the long cord over a metal strut in the roof and then began to pull.

In this way he hoisted Orvil to his feet and soon had him standing on tiptoe, his arms stretched to their utmost, his body, as it lost balance, eddying and turning slightly, like a corpse on a gibbet....

With the same surprise tactics, the man suddenly let go of the cord, so that Orvil crumpled into a heap on the floor. The man went up to him, quietly undid his wrists and offered his own. "Now it's your turn," he said; "you can tie me up exactly as you like." He seemed to be contrite after so much teasing {pp. 78f.}.

While working on In Youth Is Pleasure and the stories which were to be collected in Brave and Cruel (1949) and A Last Sheaf (1951), Welch had met Eric Oliver, the young man who was to remain with him until his death. He had also begun to keep journals. (When one considers that he was also writing and publishing poetry, painting, and doing illustrations for magazines, his productivity despite his illness becomes quite impressive.) An edited and expurgated edition of his journals was published in 1952; now an essentially complete version, edited by Michael De-la-Noy, has been issued in this country by Dutton, along with paperback reissues of Maiden Voyage and A Voice Through a Cloud. The journals are almost as well-written as his fiction, and reflect much the same interests, with a slight edge in frankness about Welch's sexuality. (Unfortunately, they are badly printed, with many typos, paragraphs skewed on the page, and at the top of one page--368--a line or more of missing text.)

It is not clear from his writings whether Denton Welch ever had sex with anyone, even before his accident, but lest any enterprising champion of cold showers try to claim (as Justin Kaplan did for Walt Whitman) that Welch only looked, never touched, I cherish the following remark from his journals (page 167): a correspondent complained that

Professorial people are cold. 'They talk about classical philosophy and then want to whip you into bed.' (This doesn't sound cold to me at all.)

Comments such as this suggest to me that Freudian readings of Welch's work, like those in Robert Phillip's homophobic Twayne English Authors Series study of Welch (1974), which understand his homoeroticism to symbolize decadence, corruption, castration, and the like, misrepresent Welch's intent. Despite his uncertainties about his personal lovability, he never expresses any doubts whatever about the rightness of his queerness; the question simply never comes up in his writings. Because of this his writings have hardly dated at all, indeed they still seem pretty daring. Maiden Voyage and In Youth Is Pleasure are not about a neurotic youth who fails to achieve heterosexuality; they make much more sense as portraits of a boy who has not yet achieved -- though he will achieve, and on his own terms! -- homosexuality.

Their imagery of the frustration and weakness of a sissy in a jock's world does not illustrate the failure of the sissy to measure up, but his quite reasonable alienation from a world hostile to him. (Like any member of a minority, he's not always sure whether he wants to belong or not.) In the stories about his art-school years these motifs are diminished or missing altogether, but the protagonist is still alone, a detached observer of the quirks of others. Not until A Voice Through a Cloud does Welch's artistic world admit other people as full participants, and even that novel never finds a satisfactory end -- partly because of the narrator's declining health, but mostly (I believe) because one character was still missing. A Voice Through a Cloud ends with the convalescent Welch and his housekeeper/companion Miss Hellier looking for a house to live in. But the right house had to have Eric Oliver -- the Friend -- living in it; and that would have been another novel, which Denton Welch didn't live to write.

All this, of course (reflected the Promiscuous Reader) had little to do with why Denton Welch's work was worth reading. Though it didn't hurt to find 1940s gay fiction in which fulfilment consists of finding Mr. Right rather than embracing the Masculine Role and heterosexual marriage, the fact that fulfilment must occur off-scene kept the books from being fully satisfying. While the Promiscuous Reader found Welch's eroticism excitingly diffuse and suggestive, he recognized that readers for whom eroticism means explicit descriptions of organs and acts would find Welch's work steamy but frustrating. Finally it was the combination of these factors with Welch's carefully crafted style -- eruptions of almost magical imagery into sharply observed descriptions of English middle-class life -- that made his fiction and his journals rewarding and worth returning to, and made their republication now something of an event in gay literature.

Odi Et Amo

Another of my book reviews for Gay Community News, published in 1984 or so.

Joseph Torchia had written one earlier novel, The Kryptonite Kid, about a possibly gay boy, Jerry Chariot, obsessed and fascinated with Superman. It was much more fun than As If After Sex, and its ambiguity about the protagonist's sexual orientation (reasonable enough, considering that he was just a kid) , made it possible for the book to draw a juvenile and young-adult audience. In 1982 Torchia published a short story in Gay Sunshine, a "postscript" in which the protagonist, now grown up, meets Superman in a gay bar. As If After Sex was Torchia's last novel as far as I can tell. A Google search turns up several Joseph Torchias; my bet is on the Dominican theologian / philosopher who writes on Augustine and Plotinus.

I'm still a resolute anti-Platonist, and what I say in this review about gay men's attitudes toward manhood still seems relevant to me. Gay male fiction, though I still encounter some death-obsessed stuff (which includes Brokeback Mountain, as both story and film), nowadays includes enough life-affirming work, complete with gratuitous happy endings, to keep me going.

Happy New Year!

MORTIFYING THE FLESH

As If After Sex
by Joseph Torchia
Holt, Rinehart & Winston
190 pp.
$13.95 hardcover

I once found myself listening to a gay man who was saying wistfully, “I wish there was someplace you could go, maybe a club, where only masculine men would be allowed in.” Like so many gay men, he harbored the fantasy of rubbing elbows with a room packed full of manly men in flannel shirts and mustaches, six ax handles across the shoulders, and nary a sissy in sight.

Ever tactful, I did not point out to him that if such a place existed, he probably would not have been allowed into it, for while he wasn’t a campy sort he was too much of a nerd to meet his own specifications; I did not point out that his lover, who was butch enough to achieve entry, made his life hell by his readiness to share his manliness with all comers; I did not point out that a roomful of such men would be excruciatingly boring – but then I have never shared his fantasy. The standard male images exalted by both gays and straights I find anti-erotic. Which isn’t to say I’m never attracted by muscular men, only that I am by temperament a resolute anti-Platonist; I am not at all interested in ideal types, but rather in individuals. This makes me feel at odds with other gay men most of the time, for I suspect that many of my brothers are more attracted to Manhood than to men. Or, worse, they think they ought to be.

For this reason I may be the wrong person to review As If After Sex, Joseph Torchia’s ambivalent novel about the Male Principle made flesh to come and dwell among us. When Seymour Kleinberg dared to question the new gay machismo in Christopher Street a few years back, some readers fumed that he wanted to turn us all into screaming queens, that he was a man-hater (!), and that they might be gay but they could still be Real Men. Dear Reader, spare me. I don’t hate men, I love ‘em; I eat ‘em for breakfast. But it seems to me that fussing about masculinity is intimately related to homophobia, misogyny – is, in short, if not the root of our difficulties as queers in this society, then at least one of them. It also seems to me that loving men doesn’t mean I have to be uncritical of them.

But each to his own. If you’re into Real Men, you will probably love As If After Sex, so just skip the rest of this review and go on to the next one (I think it’s either Nancy Walker’s Love Signs or The ADVOCATE Companion to the Works of Ayn Rand.)

For those who are still with me so far: Robert, the novel’s narrator, is a young writer who moves from Florida to San Francisco. After a brief tormented affair with a husband and wife, he proceeds to a longer tormented affair with a Divine Stud named Julian, whom he has seen regularly at the gym where they both work out. Julian attracts not only Robert but all the men at the gym because of his anchorite zeal for perfecting his maleness:

One look at his body heaving and sweating, crying and hurting, and there was no turning back to the mirrors. Those powerful men were powerless against his hard skin, his dark sounds, his flushed face, his fierce determination – and their own desire to have what they could not be. His pain seemed to speak to them. … He was building from within. He was making himself complete, almost Godlike in the way he could create himself, and yet he was so perfectly and utterly man. [3]

One night Julian leads Robert through the teeming streets to a dirty bookstore, where in a labyrinth of movie booths they tumble rapturously into each other’s mouths. “You’re not like the others,” Julian tells Robert. What others? There’s the rub: Julian, being the Divine Stud, feels (in Angelo D’Arcangelo’s words, which could stand as a review of this book) “that it was his duty as the incarnation of all that was beautiful in men, to put his cock like a sacred wafer or holy suppository into whomever desired or needed it.” This isn’t easy for Robert to adjust to, naturally, but then gods aren’t always kind – indeed they are prone to s/m relationships with their devotees – and anyhow, as Julian points out, Julian has to share Robert with his typewriter.

The two men go to Mexico together, where Robert grapples further with the mysteries of his deity. But back in San Francisco, after a sinister encounter with a symbolic figure named Phaedrus, they begin to drift apart. Julian ruins his perfect body with drugs, and ultimately dies. But though his dying god doesn’t rise again, Robert the faithful acolyte tends the Eternal Flame: “I am heartily sorry, Julian … For having offended …”.

“You’re not like the others,” Julian tells Robert. Oh, yes he is. But so is Julian. Good looks and muscular bodies count for nothing in a novel, but they may be taken on faith if the author supplies appropriate characterization. But Julian and Robert are ciphers, mere mouthpieces for Torchia’s meditations on the male sex. This might be forgivable if Torchia had anything of interest to say about men or being a man, but he doesn’t; he isn’t interested in men anyway, but in abstract manhood, so he ends up saying nothing about either men or manhood.

It might be possible to overlook even this if As If After Sex weren’t written in such an unbearably leaden, pretentious, and humorless style; if Catholic allusions and imagery didn’t abound; if Torchia didn’t use the word “sex” as leitmotif, playing on its various meaning – sexual activity, sexuality, gender, and above all genitalia: “a tug on my consciousness as well as my sex” (32), “my sex in his hand” (39), “wounded in more than my sex” (170), “some creature battered and wounded in its sex” (177). This last device might work if it were limited to Robert, but all the characters, including a street hustler and an elderly customer of Julian’s talk the same way. And then there’s this other thing.

The little piles of short sentences.

Piled on top of each other like this.

He does it a lot, every few pages sometimes.

I guess he think it’s poetic, or at any rate artistic.

But it gets old, really old, very soon.

That it’s so easy to parody helps matters not at all.

The cumulative effect is redolent of that other tedious and pompous book about a false god, the Gospel according to Saint John, which like the present volume only seems profound if one is a fellow-believer. Of course it may be that Torchia wrote As If After Sex to criticize the cult of gay machismo. But if so I feel certain that the men at whom it was aimed will not perceive the criticism; the blade of Torchia’s irony is just too dull. More likely the book will be read as what it probably really is anyhow: a lament of shattered faith, a cry from the depths against men who turn out to be not gods but only boys in carapaces of muscle and denim and leather. The hope will remain that somewhere the true incarnation of the god exists. But he doesn’t exist. This is not to say that we shouldn’t admire or lust after muscular bodies, only that muscular bodies have no meaning beyond themselves. They are not manifestations of some Platonic Idea of Maleness.

A word about the novel’s unhappy ending is also in order. Aside from its comparative sexual explicitness, As If After Sex could have been written and published in the 1950s: one sick pervert dies from too many drugs, the other is plunged into grief. It isn’t just this book I’m complaining about. The same is true of far too much recent gay fiction, whose authors seem to think that ending with misery and/or death proves they’re Serious. This is not a call for “gratuitous” happy endings – but on second thought, why not? The wretched endings we’re now getting in gay male fiction are also gratuitous, and what’s worse, they fit (consciously or not) into the homophobic tradition of pre-Stonewall gay fiction. Writers and readers may think that times have changed because the love scenes are steamier, but don’t you believe it.

I trust no one will say that unhappy endings are more “realistic.” When did gay men become so interested in realism? Anyhow, Armistead Maupin’s novels reflect more awareness of, and affection for, the texture of real life than As If After Sex. Maupin’s characters may get into cartoonlike adventures, but they are real people. Torchia’s characters do drearily familiar things, but they are ghosts. I suspect Torchia was trying to give cosmic overtones to hustling, jealousy, and machismo. If so, he failed. If you want art about hustling, etc., try reading the late Paul T. Rogers’s Saul’s Book, just out in paperback. Me, I’m gonna reread Babycakes.

P.S. May 2008: Nudged by an e-mail message, I did another Google search for Torchia and found his obituary: he died of liver cancer in 1996. Regardless of how I feel about As If After Sex, I felt sorry. It seemed so much more fitting that the author of this book should have become a Dominican theologian, still alive and flourishing in his field.

His Horrible Old Condition

My second (and final) review of Burroughs for GCN, after Port of Saints. Published in 1981.

After I'd mailed off the review, I found a book on Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (Seaver Books, 1981), by a British celebrity journalist named Victor Bockris. Printed on page 32 was a photo of Burroughs with his companion/amanuensis James Grauerholz, looking at a mockup for the dust jacket of Cities of the Red Night. It was identical to the published version, except for the subtitle, A Boy's Book, which, according to the caption, "was later removed from the jacket and title page." It stunned me; irrationally, I felt directly addressed by that picture. Of course the subtitle was probably removed for marketing purposes, lest some clueless bookseller stock it in the children's section. But still, it felt eerie.

The subtitle has been restored in some later editions, though not to the covers of the books as far as I can tell. I still wonder if it meant that Burroughs had more self-consciousness, and even humor, about what he was doing than I realized when I wrote these reviews. Later I saw footage of Burroughs reading his work aloud in Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary Burroughs, and realized for the first time how very funny Burroughs's writing could be. But still later, I learned from Dennis Cooper's obituary of Burroughs in All Ears (Soft Skull, 1999), that some of Burroughs's later works, possibly including Cities, were partially ghostwritten. That would fit -- parts of Cities of the Red Night felt slightly off, more like an imitation of Burroughs than the real deal.

Burroughs's influence continues to be felt, down to the hoaxer J. T. Leroy who wrote of junky street hustlers, and the extravagant violence of "extreme" cinema. I am still not innarested.

HIS HORRIBLE OLD CONDITION; or, COME BACK TO THE RAFT, BILL HONEY!

Cities of the Red Night
by William S. Burroughs
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981
332 pp.
$14.95 clothbound

The jacket blurb touts Cities of the Red Night as Burroughs’s “magnum opus, perhaps even more important than Naked Lunch. … equally shocking and provocative.” I don’t think so. The capacity of art to shock is like a narcotic: the user develops a tolerance and requires progressively larger doses as time passes to get the same, or any, effect. Since Life has outdistanced Art by several lengths since Naked Lunch appeared in 1959, it is probably to Burroughs’s credit that Cities of the Red Night, his latest novel, is not more shocking than his earlier work. It’s less so, I’d say, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m jaded. Naked Lunch was obsessive, dreamlike, surreal, and as casually cruel as a cat mutilating a mouse. The horrors Burroughs depicted so lovingly seemed only the superficial symptoms of a deeper, cosmic malignance probably too overwhelming to be faced. Cities of the Red Night is petit Guignol, done with wires and plaster casts and green pea soup. A sense of menace builds for awhile, but collapses well before the end to reveal that it’s just a fake, and a cheap one at that. Perhaps Burroughs wants to reassure us, though I doubt it. More likely he is a minor writer who has already said his say. For a writer who believes that words are a malignant virus, he surely is reluctant to take the cure.

I said in a review of Port of Saints, his most recent prior fiction, that Burroughs writes boys’ books: adventure sagas of idyllic masturbatory sex and extravagant but phony violence in a universe where there are no mothers. Cities of the Red Night is more of the same. This time we get a pirate subplot, and high time too, set in the early 1700s: a little group of teenaged boys run away to sea from Boston with an opium trader who turns out to work for a Captain Strobe. Strobe, who is based on a real 18^th-century pirate called Captain Mission, is a sort of nautical Robin Hood dedicated to establishing a new society based on religious and sexual freedom, the abolition of slavery and the death penalty (except for bad guys), liberal opium rations and lots of cock. Instead of Madagascar, where the real Captain Mission’s colony was wiped out by the natives, Strobe encamps in Panama, where he easily overpowers the Spanish opposition and begins spreading like a radioactive virus over the isthmus.

There is also a subplot involving Clem Snide, Private Asshole (that’s what it says here, dear reader, no shit). Snide is sent on the trail of a boy named Jerry who has disappeared in Greece under suspicious circumstances. It turns out that he – Jerry, I mean, though it hardly matters – was decapitated in a bizarre sex-magic ritual and his head shipped in a crate labeled MACHINE PARTS to Lima Peru. Snide begins to prepare magical comic books about the Cities of the Red Night, where all manner of noxious debauchery is practiced. (It is never clear to me whether Burroughs actually considers this debauchery noxious or not. Sometimes he seems to disapprove, even while he is cataloguing the practices in enthusiastic detail.) There is some kind of power struggle between the minions of two powerful and evil women, queen bees as it were, which erupts into incredible violence without victory for either side.

There is still another subplot involving B-23, a mysterious disease caused by a radioactive virus, causing sexual delirium, spontaneous ejaculation of infectious radioactive semen, and death. Addiction to opiates provides some resistance to it. Burroughs aficionados will be interested to know that radioactive viruses, erogenous sores and rectal mucus are more prominent in this than in previous volumes, to the point of becoming leitmotifs if not actual characters. I believe that Burroughs considers erogenous sores cute: “It is a gang of naked boys covered with erogenous sores. As they walk the giggle and stroke and scratch each other. From time to time they fuck each other in Hula-Hoops to idiot mambo” (p. 222). Isnt’t that sweet? The Hanged Man, one of Burroughs’s fave sexual talismans from Naked Lunch, is also back.

It is beyond me how anyone could take this book seriously. In Naked Angels (a 1976 study of Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac), John Tytell quoted Marshall McLuhan’s comparison of Burroughs to “a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our house,” and said that Burroughs’s method “is cleansing and purgative, however terrifying the implication” (p. 139). But it is hardly news that our society is in trouble. While Burroughs deserves some credit for having said so in the way he did during the 1950s, many other writers since then have colonized the territory he pioneered, and Burroughs now comes on more like a septuagenarian doing Trick or Treat at our door while flames are leaping from the roof of our house.

Nor is shocking the average American much of an accomplishment. I think it is more significant that Burroughs became widely read by the slightly more adventurous, and among the straight college boys with hip leanings I’ve known, Burroughs is (with Genet and Ginsberg) the queer writer most likely to be known to them. This is, I’m convinced, at least partly because he makes homosexuality sound like a boarding school in which there are no vacations Burroughs was in the days of Naked Lunch as guilt-ridden about fucking boys as he was about shooting junk, and his ambivalence was expressed full-blown in his writing. Sex, smack, and mayhem were fused into a “cry from hell,” as Newsweek called Naked Lunch. Homosexuality could be lumped together with addiction as part of Burroughs’s degradation, and there was little in his texts to argue otherwise.

Burroughs became quite influential, but how well he was understood is another matter At least two important rock bands, Steely Dan and Soft Machine, took their names from his writings, but not because they were prepared to deal with gay themes; and Hunter S. Thompson, who in his obsession with random violence and drug-crazed excess is a parody of Burroughs, substitutes football for sex of any kind in his writing. Homosocial, sí; homosexual, no – at least in print. What straight males like Thompson, or Fagen and Becker of Steely Dan, or Norman Mailer (who said that Burroughs “may conceivably be possessed by genius”) could relate to, and borrow for their own use, was Burroughs’s virulent misogyny. Thus he became the Godfather of Gonzo.

Cities of the Red Night supposedly goes beyond warnings of apocalypse to offer a vision of an alternative: Captain Mission/Strobe’s Utopian communes. “I cite this example of retroactive Utopia,” Burroughs says in a foreword, “since it actually could have happened. Had Captain Mission lived long enough to set an example for others to follow, mankind might have stepped free from the deadly impasse of insoluble problems in which we now find ourselves. ... Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it” (pp. xiv-xv) But Burroughs offers only a sketchy and unconvincing picture of his utopia. For example, the death penalty is to be abolished under his Articles, “except for violation of the Articles,” which takes back with one hand what the other just gave. Since in Burroughs’s fiction the bad guys always wear black hats, it may not seem like a contradiction to him, but in practice it would work out to no change at all. Even in fiction Burroughs is too fond of blowing away the cops of his dreams ever to give it up.

There is also his treatment of women. On pages 111-112 Burroughs gives voice briefly (and for the first time in his fiction to my knowledge) to a woman character who does not “relish being treated as a breeding animal” without implying that she is a lesbian (an insult, from him) or a prude. Having paid lip service to this issue, he drops it. Women through most of the book, as in his writing in general, are either villains or breeding animals. Captain Strobe’s bold buggering buccaneers are almost exclusively male. As a fantasy, this might be considered (though not by me) cute or sexy; as a serious account of Utopia it is, to use the original meaning of the word “utopia,” nowhere.

Burroughs considers himself tough-minded and unsentimental (See, for example, the interviews in The Job [Grove Press].) But he really seems to think that a free human society can be established simply by declaring principles and killing of a few villains. If this were true, humanity would not be in the trouble we are now. It is very convenient, I know, to locate the source of unfreedom in evil controlling intelligences outside oneself, but it is a lie. I think Burroughs himself knows better, but if so he hasn’t put that knowledge into this book.

There is more: the racist description of Arab and Latin-American youths as quasi-human sex objects (or E. M. Forster Syndrome); the pseudo-scientific jargon Burroughs uses as pretentiously as do the scientists he often ridicules; the borrowings from such pop-hip frauds as Aleister Crowley, Carlos Castaneda, and Wilhelm Reich; the invocation at the book’s beginning of deities of death, decay, and rotting genitals, which to my mind shows where this book is really at; and the maddening sense I keep having that Burroughs thinks he has written a book of major importance. Burroughs is not a liberated or liberating soul, but the artistic heir of writers like Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Wilde, whose celebration of the bizarre and scandalous was inseparable from their guilt over it. He is – I hope – the end of a tradition, not the founder of one. As the former, I can respect him somewhat, for he helped to kill off that tradition. As the latter, I can only quote his words from Naked Lunch: “You think I am innarested to contact your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.”