The Lost Library
gay fiction rediscovered
Tom Cardamone, editor
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Published by Lethe Press (in cooperation with Haiduk Press) at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 by Tom Cardamone
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All rights reserved.
Paperback ISBN 978-0-9714686-3-4
Cover illustration “First Eyes” © 2009 by Mel Odom
Cover design by Kate Shanley
Text design and composition by Bea Ferrigno
Ebook conversion by Toby Johnson
A version of Aaron Hamburger’s essay on J. S. Marcus’s The Captain’s Fire appeared in Tin House #36.
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About Haiduk Press
The haiduks were quasi-legendary folk heroes who to this day are regarded as romantic, Robin Hood figures; they are an integral part of the folklore of Hungary and Romania. Inspired by their example, Haiduk Press was formed to publish works that gently challenge the cultural status quo and conventional wisdom.
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About Lethe Press
Since 2001, Lethe Press has been giving “voice” to lost and forgotten works of queer and speculative fiction. Our titles have won such awards as the Golden Crown Literary and Lambda Literary Awards.
www.lethepressbooks.com
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I often think of the men who planted the orchard, and I have done so many times in the last week while surveying the damage. They must have known they would never have seen the trees mature themselves, but must have hoped that their children and indeed children’s children might one day pick the fruit on summer evenings, and think of them as they did so.
— Neil Bartlett, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
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Contents
Rabih Alameddine The Perv: Stories Michael Graves
Allen Barnett The Body and Its Dangers Christopher Bram
Neil Bartlett Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall Philip Clark
George Baxt A Queer Kind of Death Larry Duplechan
Bruce Benderson User Rob Stephenson
Christopher Coe Such Times Jameson Currier
Daniel Curzon Something You Do in the Dark Jesse Monteagudo
Melvin Dixon Vanishing Rooms Ian Rafael Titus
John Donovan I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip Martin Wilson
Robert Ferro The Blue Star Stephen Greco
John Gilgun Music I Never Dreamed Of Wayne Courtois
Agustin Gomez-Arcos The Carnivorous Lamb Richard Reitsma
Michael Grumley Life Drawing Samuel J. Miller
Lynn Hall Sticks and Stones Sean Meriwether
Richard Hall Couplings Jonathan Harper
J.S. Marcus The Captain’s Fire Aaron Hamburger
James McCourt Time Remaining Tim Young
Mark Merlis American Studies Rick Whitaker
Charles Nelson The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up Jim Marks
Kyle Onstott & Lance Horner Child of the Sun Michael Bronski
Roger Peyrefitte The Exile of Capri Gregory Woods
Paul Rogers Saul's Book Paul Russell
Patrick Roscoe Birthmarks Andy Quan
Douglas Sadownick Sacred Lips of the Bronx Tom Cardamone
Glenway Wescott The Apple of the Eye Jerry Rosco
George Whitmore Nebraska Victor Bumbalo
Donald Windham Two People Philip Gambone
Come Again: A History of the Reprinting of Gay Novels Philip Clark
Novels and Short Story Collections of Further Interest
Introduction
Tom Cardamone
I took my first steps out of the closet in bookstores and libraries. Tentatively, I touched chipped and creased paperbacks and discovered books that let me know I was not alone. Before I knew who the gay authors were, or at least the usually prescribed volumes, I intuited from coded titles, from the allure of certain book covers, the stories that I soon made mine. These literary wanderings were as splendid as they were haphazard. The more I read the more I craved. And I wanted a conversation, a dialogue, a list of gay books that gay writers adored and championed. Novels and stories and characters that changed readers’ lives, woke them to their rights and futures and destinies and lovers. Books that cried to be passed down from one man to the next, hand to hand, with whispers of sincerity, “you have to read this.” Books that were used, re-read, bookmarked, dog-eared, highlighted, footnoted, forgotten, spines broken, out-of-print, history. Gay literary history. These books whisper back, “Remember what you felt the first time you found me?”
As gay culture is absorbed into the mainstream, our history has been quickly forgotten or simplified -history that always existed in the margins, passed along from one generation to the next in bedrooms and smoky bars. Television, a few films every year, and the Internet have replaced the thrill of visiting a gay bookstore. Now these bookstores are closing. Chain bookstores have ceded us a few rows in the nether regions of their gigantic barns; for every episode of Heroes and rerun of Will & Grace today that speaks directly to a young gay man, there are a multitude of neglected books, consigned to used bookstores and boxed in attics, collecting dust.
After I started sketching out novels and sheepishly submitting short stories and attending book readings I met other gay writers. Inevitably, we would recommend texts to one another. Time and time again, I was struck by how often the novels and short story collections that I was breathlessly urged to read were then just as speedily lamented as out-of-print and hard to find. Worse, I surprised myself when recommending relatively recent titles only to find that the book I deemed so important, so solidly valuable, was already remaindered. Often I ended up buying multiple copies of these favorites whenever I stumbled across them, storing them like talismans to push hopefully on fresh converts. Of course I read some brilliant gay books that continue to stay in print, have won awards, and have been adopted into a gay canon, but I was increasingly curious as to whether they represented the whole of gay literature; were these titles the genuine pinnacle? So many of the books that came up in conversation embodied diversity and history that was either pre-Stonewall or went far beyond the available urban story. The current canon does not make room for campy pulp paperbacks from the fifties and sixties, so unrepresentative of our current lives yet so important as historical documents and, in their day, as proof of our very existence. Serious pioneer texts from these periods and even earlier have been obscured by more forward, modern works. Transformative novels were lost as the dark and dangerous eighties were consumed by the heady nineties. Yet contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting. So I dug deeper. I sifted for more fiction in non-fiction books like Michael Bronski’s Pulp Friction and Gregory Woods’ A History of Gay Literature (both writers accepted invitations to contribute to this collection). I researched small presses come and gone. I made lists of obscure or forgotten titles and rushed to the Strand bookstore to comb the stacks on my lunch break. What I also required, though, was for the conversation to continue. I wanted to hear what books mattered, from writers I liked and knew or wanted to know. I wanted a gay version of Anthony Burgess’ 99 Great Novels but from a multitude of voices, different generations and ethnicities and backgrounds -meaning this wasn’t a book I wanted to write, but one I wanted to read.
This project was and is completely organic. When I decided to embark upon this anthology, I simply looked at my bookshelf and e-mailed the authors I had recently read and the writers I knew personally. Of those who were immediately struck by a title and author they wanted to write about (and I do mean immediate; I rarely had to wait more than a day before I received an enthusiastic response) I then asked “Can you think of anyone else who might be interested?” And they did. So straight away I let the contributors drive this project. They even suggested the title.
While waiting to collect their essays, I gathered the books they were writing about and in doing so decided that this anthology should be organized alphabetically by author covered, to best honor and illuminate these writers whose work deserves our attention, reconsideration, and possibly a place, once again, in the realm of the printed and read. I envisioned this collection as more of a round table; writers discussing, defending, remembering and explaining favorite out-of-print gay books or forgotten titles. As I read these books I was constantly surprised. I certainly did not expect to discover a book concerning a gay teen published in 1969, much less a second gay young adult novel from that period. The searing epistolary Vietnam War-era novel that was too hot to read in public; books about a gay black detective and a Roman Emperor’s marriage to his favorite gladiator. These stories spanned centuries and took me from Rome to Boston, Capri to New Orleans, South Africa to Canada, Lebanon to Franco Spain, from the Golden Gate to Times Square. These are the books that challenged young minds, shaped careers, and saved lives.
Certainly there were authors whose work everyone here thought should be covered but regrettably was not (which led to an appendix of memorable books). As contributors were approached and possible publishers contacted, a few of the titles covered actually came back into print, a sure sign that the books we discussed deserve a permanent place on our shelves or at least wider attention. Contributor and gay literary historian Philip Clark wrote the closing essay on significant works returned to print, demonstrating that what is lost is not always unrecoverable.
This collection, meant to entice new readers and encourage pub-lishers to bring back a few forgotten classics, is more the start of a con-versation than the final word. We have to keep sharing our memories and discoveries and in doing so broaden the definition and diversity of the gay text. We must expand our cultural memory so that, in rushing from one century to the next, we carry with us the experience and knowledge that keeps the light burning for all.
Books about books are a rare species, special tomes for writers and book lovers. More than an affirmation of taste, a book about books is often a spirited celebration and sincere investigation. Quickly coveted, it remains on that particular shelf, guarded and revered, and eventually slips out of print. What good company we will keep then, among a library lost, only momentarily invisible, waiting patiently to be found again.
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Rabih Alameddine: The Perv: Stories
Picador, 1999
Michael Graves
One great writer led me to another. My mentor had said something like, “I think you’ll really dig his work. He’s fantastic.” I said something like, “And how do you spell his name again?”
Out of print? Yes. Difficult to find? Certainly. After a great deal of Internet prowling, I finally ordered The Perv: Stories by Rabih Alameddine. Two weeks dragged by (much to my hissy-fitting), and, at last, this collection of short stories was lying on my stoop. The box was beaten, scratched up. It looked as though it had been gang raped by other packages (possibly from Pottery Barn or LL Bean). I promptly ripped it free and delved into Alameddine’s fiction. But there was a problem: my copy was a defect and a screw-up. Many pages were absent from the book. After page 55, I stumbled upon page 70 (enter additional hissy-fits). I was forced to re-order, re-read and start at the start again. All this agitation, though, was well worth it. The Perv has become the trusted comrade I turn to whenever I feel moody. Whenever I feel talentless. Whenever I feel dulled by the writing of others. The Perv waits for me on the shelf, by the bedside, near the toilet.
Rabih Alameddine’s batch of eight stories is a tight, cohesive, well-stitched gathering. Still, he demonstrates diversity. In all areas. Considering both style and content, the author’s pieces are sometimes loud or sometimes quiet. They are post- modernly chic or classically traditional. They are straightforward or even puzzling. Alameddine avoids any sort of limitation.
He is, by no means, a two-trick pooch. He employs countless methods to construct his tales and, craft-wise, the author’s endowments gleam in every sentence.
The Perv reveals a homosexual voice, as well as a unique queer experience. As an artist, Alameddine refuses to be constrained by the trappings of gay literature (sex/shock/sex/shock). He showcases much, much more. The Perv, although somewhat sexualized, remains to be a collection that is propelled by its hefty use of emotion. There is longing, loss, triumph, liberation. Amply described blowjobs and anal scenes may stigmatize gay writers, but Alameddine busts straight through these literary road blocks. The author exhibits multi-colored, multi-dimensional stories that are seasoned with Lebanese culture, political musings and crisis.
The Perv boasts many standout stories. Choosing a favorite would prove to be a rather laborious task. “Whore” stuns readers. This selection follows Rana, a thirtyish woman who journeys home to attend her father’s funeral. Here, Alameddine deftly pulls readers into his bold setting. He writes, “Beirut spreads behind me. Interminable, a sprawling, disheveled city of mottled, self-conscious buildings … I can see the azure of the Mediterranean, the tides, the flux, the struggle of a town in bloom against its web…The city sheds its shackles only to find that chains held its soul.” Beautiful. His imagery. His hint of politics. But Alameddine juxtaposes the struggle in Beirut with the strife his protagonist carries. Rana is a painter, just as her father once was (Rana, however, is quite a success). Artistically and personally, she is enslaved by the patriarch’s cultural ideals and expectations; therefore, she builds her life around a somewhat hushed rebellion. Rana tells readers, “I was such a disappointment.” She becomes a single spinster who abandons her family (mother and four sisters included). Rumored to be a lesbian, she lives with her cousin Zouzou whom she allegedly sleeps with. The catty, gossiping townsfolk surreptitiously call her a whore. As Alameddine concludes this piece, all questions are answered. Most importantly, with flare, with grace, the writer offers his portrait of a Lebanese woman who battles societal restrictions and forges ahead on her own quest to be free. Empowerment courses through each line in this dazzling story.
With “Remembering Nasser,” a gay protagonist peers back at the loving relationship he once held with his cousin. This scattered, non-linear selection is crammed with tenderness and yearning. They shared a bed and a toilet at age three and stole cars in their teen years. Full-grown, the unnamed narrator and Nasser part ways; the main speaker flees to America and his cousin remains in Beirut. Still, these cousins remain fiercely connected. Alameddine writes, “Fred, my lover, was jealous of him. It completely confused me. Fred used to say my face lit up whenever I spoke of Nasser.” Eventually, the protagonist grapples with the task of revealing his homosexuality to Nasser. Such moments are wonderfully profound. Alameddine writes, “When Nasser had come to the United States for a business meeting, he thought he should come stay with me . . . I tried to clean up, to remove any trace of gayness in the house. Fred was livid. . . . I told Fred there was no way Nasser would accept the situation. Once he knew, all he would be able to see when he looked at me was someone who takes it up the ass.” He finally does expose himself to Nasser. Alameddine simply writes, “the wall went up.” As the narrator and his cousin continue building their own lives (the main speaker ushers Fred through a terrible ordeal with AIDS and Nasser decides that he must marry and leave his bachelorhood behind), they drift further and further apart. But the protagonist still embraces his comforting memories. “Remembering Nasser” rouses readers. While avoiding sentimentality, this story knocks on one’s soul with a full fist.
“A Flight to Paris” expertly utilizes dual points of views: a young gay man and an older Lebanese woman. This is somewhat perplexing, though. Coyly, Alameddine doesn’t unveil his chosen form in an overt, immediate manner. He, instead, requires the audience to read carefully, backtrack a bit and discover this devise. Once in fluid motion, the author’s flight mates kindly clash. They both possess strong initial impressions of one another. The man says, “For whatever reason, I found her somewhat offensive,” and the woman proclaims, “He must be a homosexual. My son must know him.” “A Flight to Paris” affords readers a possible glimpse into Rabih Alameddine’s reality. The older woman discusses her son who has written a novel. She proclaims, “I read it. They tell him its literature. I think its trash.” This may be related to Alameddine’s own life experiences and the publication of his first novel, Koolaids. True or false, this injects a bit of cheekiness into an otherwise heavy piece. The plane soars on and Alameddine amps up the tension. The duo discusses a bevy of topics, including plastic surgery, marriage, commitment and, somewhat uncomfortably, queerness. The man asks her, “Do you think humans can choose who they love?” And the cordial debate meanders forward until the gentleman blurts out, “my lover died of AIDS.” The woman begins to sob, tears streaking down her face and Alameddine’s clever story, like a symphony, captures this storm of sadness. And a spot of hope too.
The title story “The Perv,” is, by far, a very exceptional effort. This piece surprises readers with a brisk bitch slap. It begins, cryptically, with a salacious personal advertisement. The audience is quickly confronted by the abrasive main speaker (who we assume is named Bill). The author writes, “I know you think of me as a pervert. You judge me. By your standards, I am a pervert. But who are you to judge? If I am a pervert, it is God who made this way.” While “The Perv” unfolds, Alameddine constructs his story with chunks of narrative, as well as letters between middle-aged Bill and a 13-year-old boy, Sammy. Bill writes, “My other interests include world travel and languages . . . you said you have a really slim and hairless body; that really turns me on.” Young Sammy tells Bill, “I like soccer . . . I like reading . . .I like computers.” The atmosphere is uncomfortable, unsettling. Readers squirm and shift. But then, Alameddine ignites a nuclear bomb of sorts and this story begins to back flip. The narrator is not the narrator. Bill is not Bill and likewise for Sammy. With his words, Alameddine performs an enchanting, road side magic show and readers are left, awestruck. The author concocts pure brilliance. But the secret to his tricks cannot be revealed for you here. You must discover it for yourself.
In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege. Rabih Alameddine fully acknowledges this, nabbing the opportunity to offer the world a work of importance. The Perv is inimitable. The Perv is distinctive. The Perv is smashing, relevant, weighty. By fiercely creating his own voice and his own vision, Rabih Alameddine astonishes readers with a very special gift: These stories. I ponder Mr. Alameddine and I often remark, “Fuck! I wish I could be this good.”
Always a student of others, I have captured a great deal from Mr. Alameddine’s words. He reinforced what I already believed about fiction and art. Be gallant. Be yourself. Create without a filter. Create without fear.
Sometimes we need fellow radicals to remind us of what we, as writers, have set out to proclaim. He has nudged me and he has almost cradled me. And I am utterly grateful for this book.
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Allen Barnett: The Body and Its Dangers
St. Martin’s, 1990
Christopher Bram
This book of six short stories created a nice little stir when it first came out in 1990. It not only won both major gay literary prizes, the Lambda Book Award and the Ferro-Grumley, it received a special citation from PEN's Ernest Hemingway Foundation. It was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. One story, “Philostorgy, Now Obscure,” even appeared in the New Yorker.
AIDS was a major reason for the attention. Four of the stories deal directly with the epidemic, which casts its shadow over the other two. The plague was still in its first decade and readers — gay readers especially — were looking for fiction that addressed what was devastating their lives. This book did exactly that, not in raw slices of pain but with quiet craft and perfect prose.
That was the other reason for the attention: it was so beautifully written, the language stylish yet warm, with solid rhythms and well-constructed sentences.
You let go of people, the living and the dead, and return to your self, your own resources, like a widower, a tourist alone in a foreign country. Your own senses become important and other people's sensibilities a kind of Novocaine, blocking out your own perceptions, your ability to discriminate, your taste.
But Barnett was not afraid to be funny or smartass. The AIDS quilt is described as “a foldable, dry-cleanable cemetery.” A lesbian mother tells us about her boy-crazy daughter: “My daughter thinks that lesbianism is next to laziness. She thinks this requires no effort.”
Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels, yet the stories here are rich and full, like concentrated short novels. The digressive episodic construction of each tale recalls Alice Munro at her best. The panels of story don't always come in the pattern we expect, but can suddenly swing left or right, like the movement of a knight on a chessboard. Two stories follow the same set of characters, but the others stand free. Nevertheless, like Munro, the repetitions and variations on certain experiences create the fuzzy outline of an author, like the Invisible Man seen walking in the rain.
No, I’m sorry, I wanted to write pure literary criticism here, but I am leaving out something important: I knew Allen. I thought I could discuss his work in the impersonal language of high literature, but it doesn't feel right. It feels false even to call him “Barnett.” Allen and I were good friends during the last year of his life. We began by talking about books, our own and other peoples’. When he became sick with AIDS, I visited him in the hospital. Later at his apartment I tried to help him figure out the complicated IV drip and bags of saline solution and the syringes needed to clean out the port in his chest. Allen could no longer write once he was ill. All the experience in his book came from his warm imagination and the illness of friends. When he died in 1991, he left me his computer. I wrote my next three novels on it, including Gods and Monsters. My protagonist, movie director James Whale, served in the trenches during the First World War. I gave Allen's last name to one of Whale's dead comrades. It's strange now, and wonderful, too, to hear Ian McKellan in the movie deliver his extraordinary speech about dead friends and speak of “Barnett on the wire.”
I did not reread Allen’s stories for years, perhaps because I feared they might not be as good as I remembered. Yet it's been a joy to go back to his book for this essay and see Allen the author as well as Allen the friend. He was an amazing writer, even better than I thought at the time. I would love these stories even if I had not known him. They deserve to be read and reread, not only because they capture life in the age of AIDS so well, but because they have a moral weight that transcends their moment in time.
I’d like to discuss a few stories at length to suggest their quality and strength. Allen's work wasn't really about plot, but I should warn you in advance that I'm going to give away a lot.
“The Times As It Knows Us” is the best known of Allen's stories, reprinted in anthologies and often cited. It's about a weekend on Fire Island in a house of gay men during the epidemic, an overload of characters we can only slowly distinguish from each other, much as if we were visiting the house ourselves. The story is haunted by the times: both the spirit of the age and the newspaper. The narrator, Clark, keeps a folder of clippings from the New York Times, a public history of the epidemic. Clark wants to dig beneath the shallow, two-dimensional accounts of gay men with AIDS propagated by the media and find a fuller, more human reality. That is exactly what the story does. It's like a Chekhov play where nothing major happens, but everything important is revealed. The men bond and bicker, help and hinder. One comes down with a fever; Clark takes care of him with help from housemates. Some people behave well, others badly, but everyone has his reasons. It's a very rich, densely textured story that captures lived lives without glib judgments or false nobility. Needing to give the feverish man a rubdown with vodka, Clark jokes, “Not the imported, get the domestic we use for guests,” without making the reader doubt his genuine fear for his friend.
“The Body and Its Seasons” and “The Body and Its Dangers” are the two linked stories, following a trio of college friends into adulthood. In the first story, a gay student, Gordon, goes to bed with a female friend, Sara, as an experiment. While they lie in bed, we get pieces of his life, chiefly his Catholic upbringing and sex with two different priests, and sex with Sara's friend Marie followed by ideas about innocence and the Fall as illustrated by a play he just performed in, The Garden. In the second story, Sara narrates. Seventeen years have passed. She lives with her lover Marie and their daughter Rachel, whose father was Gordon. Sara has had a breast removed for cancer yet is still stricken with the disease. All bodies are in danger, not only the bodies of gay men. Sara spends the story musing to herself, gathering together the pieces of her life: her difficult daughter, her more difficult lover, her dead friend Jake, her absent friend Gordon. (We're never actually told that Gordon is dead, but we can't help assuming so.) Her voice is quiet and mature and clear. She imagines Gordon reappearing, talking to her and touching her scar tissue. “What he cannot make whole again, he will convince me doesn't matter.”
This story narrated by a woman is the most overtly sexual in the book. Allen celebrates sex throughout The Body and its Dangers. Where another writer might condemn the desire that kills his characters, Allen treats sex as a valuable intimacy. Yet the act itself is presented more frankly here than elsewhere. From a woman's point of view, penetration becomes wonderfully matter-of-fact in one of my favorite descriptions of a sex act: “He opened himself with his fingers, and straddled Gordon, sitting back and guiding him in at once. He smiled.”
“Philostorgy, Now Obscure” follows Preston, a gay man recently diagnosed with AIDS, when he returns to Chicago to say goodbye to his friends, in particular the two women he used to live with, Roxy and Lorna., who echo the female friends in the “Body” stories. Lorna is married to Sean, their favorite teacher, and pregnant with her second child. Preston goes to the faculty steam room with Sean and they talk about philosophy, in particular St. Augustine. He contacts an old lover, Jim. They meet for lunch and go to bed together. The story ends with Preston and Roxy talking about her own ex-boyfriend while they wait for Lorna to return.
It's a strange, crowded, slightly elusive story yet very beautiful. Allen's death has given it a weight it didn't have when I first read it. This farewell to friends and lovers was never sentimental or melodramatic, but it is now terribly real. Preston thinks about his dead and remembers desire before we're told:
Preston believed that he would survive, not the illness, but death itself. It was one of those things that one believes despite one's self, a tiny bubble of thought that hangs suspended somewhere between the heart and mind, fragile and thin as a Christmas tree ornament yet managing to last decades. He believed in his consciousness, that it would do more than last, but would have impact and consequence, that wherever it went there would be discourse and agitation; decisions would be made and adhered to.
Which Allen managed to achieve in his single, wonderful book. He can still affect how we think about our lives. His bubble of consciousness survives.
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Neil Bartlett : Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
Serpent’s Tail, 1989
Philip Clark
Containing Fragments from and Reworkings of Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990).
[I]ndeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Of course, it was several years before I met my own Boy, my very own Boy, that I read Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. But thank you for that book, Mr. Bartlett. In another of your books, Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, you quote That Man himself:
It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. — Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
And is this quite true? This book you wrote, this Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, this story of Boy and O, the bar where they met, the woman who helped bring them together, the marriage they shared: have I not only read and reread it, given it to others, written about it, quoted from it, but has it also, consciously or not, served as pattern and image for my most important relationship? Has life, as Wilde so famously said, imitated art?
Had I said to my Boy, I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose! — would it have been any less true because I was not the first to say it?
I. In which the Narrator describes Boy for the reader:
“I could tell you that he had white skin, black eyes, and black hair, but you can see that from the photograph. I could tell you that the eyes were so beautiful they could actually make you feel giddy when he suddenly looked up from the floor and straight at you.”
I have described my Boy three times as looking like a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, all black and white: once in a journal, once retelling a story, and now. As Wilde knew, if a line is good enough to use, it is good enough to plagiarize from oneself and use again. Besides, it is appropriate. It is right. My Boy’s eyes were emerald, a cat’s eyes, but in my mind and memory, they are as dark as his bright black hair. They made my stomach tighten with a pleasurable nervousness. I believe I was looking for a Boy whose eyes might make me feel that way.
He was not unlike the 19-year-old Boy who enters The Bar in that book.
II. In which the Narrator explains The Bar’s ritual of naming:
“One thing Boy never said, the line . . . he would never have used, was don’t call me Boy. He loved to be called Boy. He smiled whenever the name was used. He loved it that we had christened him and he knew that he was special to us.”
Long after it had started, we argued playfully about who had first begun our custom. He thought he had, but I knew that couldn’t be true. This ritual was in place well before the day I had him read Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, and I knew I must have initiated it. We never used our Christian names. We each called the other “Boy.”
And if this sounds too precious to you, if it makes you want to stop reading, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you think that this sounds like an affectation, that no two people you would want to spend time with would act this way. Well I have to say that much of the impact of this story depends upon your realizing that this felt entirely natural to us. That “Boy” also meant I love you and I am near and we are safe with each other.
And that when he stopped calling me “Boy,” I knew it was over.
III. In which the Narrator explains a detail of The Bar’s decorations, as designed by Madame, the proprietress:
“And whatever else the décor was . . . the one thing that was always the same and that Madame never got rid of was the ceiling. The design of the ceiling of The Bar was very wonderful. She’d had it inlaid with a hundred, several hundred small white fairy-lights, and it gave the effect of a real fantastic night sky, especially on a good night. I always loved that. The bulbs weren’t just scattered, but were arranged in the correct pattern — so that if you looked up you could see (if you knew which star was which), up there amongst all the dragons, bulls, and poisonous scuttlers of the Heavens, right in the centre you could see the constellation which I always thought of as our special one, a solitary man walking with his faithful dog, the high summer constellation of Orion, the Hunter, stretched and striding above us. But I never knew what all the other stars meant, just that one constellation.”
It is easy to identify The Hunter, spread-eagled on the night’s black bed of sky. He is a man making his own path, always moving toward some unknowable goal. But for a dog, he is alone. This does not stop his progress. I imagine him, the protector, looking down on the heads of The Bar’s patrons.
We had no Bar to turn to. We had no single space in which to be together, and so we turned outdoors, made every place our proving ground. Early on, we saw that nature welcomed us. We could not cross the college campus we first called home without encounters. An evening stroll near fraternity row led to a thick-flanked raccoon waddling across our path, eyeing us with complacent tolerance before drifting into the dusky woods. On the bridge between the cafeteria and the library, we were treated to the spectacle of five deer crashing about the undergrowth. They settled and browsed the leaves while we watched with quiet pleasure. And while neither of us knew the sky’s shining map, every night we found Orion launched above our heads, watching over us, a blessing.
IV. In which a patron of The Bar has been attacked:
“This time there was no knife, they just got him on the floor and it was just a fist which had come down on the man’s face again and again. And it happened just two streets away from The Bar. He came into the bar with blood everywhere . . . He wasn’t as badly hurt as he looked, actually, but it was enough to make us all think at least twice.
People say to me that I must be keeping a list of all the attacks I hear about. They say it’s morbid, they say what are you trying to prove anyway. They say why do you have to talk about that just now. They say to me, how many of them do there have to be before you think you’ve got enough on your list. They say when are you going to stop it, and I say, when am I going to stop it, when am I —
Not long after we began dating, one of our favorite professors screened the movie version of Bent, Martin Sherman’s play about the claiming of gay identity, set amid the brutality of the Holocaust. Having read and been stunned at the play’s power in high school, I knew what to expect of the movie. But when I walked into the darkened classroom, I was too distracted to think much about the film. I knew we would be together that evening, and in the sweet daze of one newly in love, my thoughts were always at least half with him.
But after the opening cycle of scenes, the tightening net, the knowledge that there will be no hiding, no passport, no border, no cloak of night, and after the inevitable arrests, the main character, Max, finds himself in the cattle car with his friend. When the Nazis choose his friend to mock, to abuse, when they bash their clubs against this man’s ribs with the sickening thud of metal to flesh, Max stands still, knowing that to react will only invite his own destruction, paralyzed by self-protection. And I — I who do not cry at movies, who know the line between what is real and what is on the screen, who affects, like any proper boy, not to feel — I am thinking of him, thinking of his being touched for so slight a reason as petty hatred, and I cannot stop the tears no matter how I try to hold them in.
Together, we had yet to hear more than a few words tossed from cars as we made our way through the town’s grid of gently curving streets. But did he notice that I held him extra-long in our welcoming embrace that night? That stepping back I examined his face, half-expecting swollen lips, a cut or bruise below those emerald eyes?
V. When Boy reappears in The Bar with O, with whom he has spent six days:
“In the week of their absence, we had decided that their lovemaking would be extraordinary, legendary. Since so many of us had made love to either O or to Boy, we felt that by comparing notes, we knew a great deal about how they behaved when making love, and so when we saw them reappear so obviously as lovers we were pleased to see that our predictions had been correct. We had assumed that their affair would in some way be a violent one, because O was known to be violent, and because Boy made you feel strange when he gave himself away to you, a strangeness, and a feeling that you always wanted more, that often came out as violence. And now here to prove our thesis was Boy, silent, stunned, extraordinarily tired, ravaged by intimacy, shattered by sex, dazed with sex.”
Beginning that first time, shivering in my arms from nerves and the February cold, he gave himself away. Some nights he would lie on his belly, legs slightly spread, and turn his face toward me, expectant. I could lower myself on top of him, chest to back, could whisper to him any words I wanted. But even buried inside him, my teeth on the back of his neck, I still wanted more, to thrust deeper, for his flesh and my flesh to meld. This did not even have to be during sex, a touch of the hand, an embrace would find me desperate to take his body with me right down into the deep, under the earth, to drag his body beneath the sea, the heavy waves. Of course none of this made sense, I could not tell him how I felt, this desire for union, this desire to be inside his bones.
He didn’t even have to say those words “Do anything. Do anything you want to me, you can do anything you want, I give you entire permission over me” for I knew I could take him, I could fuck him any way I could imagine, I could take all of him. But no, I never lost that feeling of strangeness, of wanting more, and no, of course, I never could get far enough inside.
VI. From the early days of the courtship of Boy and O
“Their daily, repeated intimacy at this time was astonishing for Boy because it had never happened to him before. And it was astonishing for O, because he did not really think that this was ever going to happen to him again. When O was in the bath, he would call out to Boy, put that record on again will you? or Put some music on, whatever you like, and then he’d leave the bathroom door open while he toweled himself dry. This was so that he could hear the music, but also so that Boy could see him naked if he wanted to, just as he was, just naturally naked from the bath, not for some pornographic scenario this time. In fact both of them found that sort of scene extraordinary, though in a way of course these were the most ordinary moments of their intimacy.”
Within six months, we were living together, our own apartment, a ten-minute walk from campus along the tree-lined road. Just to be able to sit at my desk, writing, to be able to then look over and see him reading on the couch, his legs curled beneath him, to be able to pick up a book of my own and, running a hand through his spiky black hair, kiss him and sit down beside him to read, this was wonderful. It is a true wonder at any age, but particularly as young as we both were. To be able to hold his hand as we sat before the television in the evenings, to be able to buy food at the market and, shoulder to shoulder, cook our dinner together, to wake beside him in the morning and, rolling over, to stretch an arm along his stomach, my hand resting at his heart, if you cannot imagine how this would feel, if you do not understand how extraordinary these things are, then you know nothing, nothing, nothing.
VII. In which the Narrator describes the marriage of Boy and O, their ceremony having been arranged by Madame — I’m sorry, arranged by Mother
“It was complicated enough. Some people were not comfortable with the ceremony and half left, ending up in the kitchen while they exchanged the rings and made the actual vows, which was all done in the living room.
The vows were read very slowly, as if there could be time enough in these pauses for us all to think about what those famous and infamous words might actually mean on this particular occasion, and how you could make them mean what you wanted them to mean with regard to this person who you wished to spend time with and honour in some way, to cherish, to care for in some real way for whatever time. I do understand why they said all that out loud.”
He was formally dressed in the black suit I loved to see him wear, and he stood quietly near his sister as she prepared to say the vows. Were it not for him, I would not have been there— not at his sister's wedding, of course, not in this far corner of Virginia, but also not at any wedding. Too awkward, too religious. Too painful, perhaps, to know I could not speak those vows to him.
But when I gazed at him, when I saw him look at her with such pride, bursting with pride, that’s the phrase they use, when I heard his sister and her new husband recite these words, I began to understand. Not only to know these things to be true, this have and this hold, this care for and this honor, but to speak these things aloud, to declare them in front of the world, yes, I understand.
These words were still hard to hear, they were still complicated, but they were, for once, also mine. I gazed at him, and my lips moved with the cadence of the vows, saying them aloud and meaning every one.
VIII. After letters Boy receives from ‘Father’
“This letter made Boy so angry that he stayed silent all day after reading it. Since Boy never replied to these letters, he had no real reason to expect that they would ever refer to O or congratulate him on his new life with O, or even mention it, how could they; the man who wrote them knew nothing of all that, nothing. But still Boy was angry, white with anger.”
And after Boy and O have taken 'Father,' now ill and infirm, into their flat:
“Why he had to prove himself like this wasn’t entirely clear. Sometimes his eagerness to do everything properly, to get it right, was so constant that it seemed fierce; his way of caring for the old man seemed as close to anger as it was to care somehow, and the silences in the flat seemed almost like the intervals in a long and violent argument. . . . All O could think of doing was to support Boy in this task or effort. . . . But he was determined never to be defeated by this man, O could see that.”
Dear Boy,
I am at the window on the second floor, the top floor, and you stand in the wet grass at the very edge of the street, head down. Mostly you listen to the man who stands at his car door, the door open, the door in hand, leaving. If there is conversation, there is little of it, or maybe you respond with your head still down, barely ever meeting this man’s eyes. Maybe you are, after all, still a boy sometimes.
I have met this man. When it became clear what I am, who I am to you, that was all. He would not look me in the eye again, he would not ask you about me. After each phone call, you are tense with the energy required to speak without saying.
I want to ask, “What did he do to you?” What did he do to turn you, so alive, into this shell I see standing in the grass?
You have not lived in this man’s house for years. I do not understand why you continue to see him. He is everything you do not want to be: rough, brutal, silent. He works the farm you will never return to, that you will remember so strongly, that you may visit, but that you will never return to. You owe him nothing.
But I also know you cannot choose whether you owe him anything. You cannot put 19 years of knowing him away, as though they never were.
When he slams the car’s door and drives away, you turn toward our building. I meet you on the stairs, halfway up and halfway down, and follow you into our apartment. There is silence that I cannot interpret: sadness? anger? Or are you simply, profoundly tired? I turn you toward me, place my arms around you. I will stay near, near for as long as you need me, ready to catch you should you fall.
IX. From the aria O sings for Boy
“I can’t see you weep except through tears of my own,
And when I can’t see you, I worry about you; take good care of yourself.”
Boy, I am lonely without you.
I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose!
~ ~ ~
George Baxt: A Queer Kind of Death
Simon & Schuster, 1966
Larry Duplechan
When I began writing my first novel back in 1984, it was largely in reaction to the near absence of black characters to be found in gay-themed fiction up to that time. Harvey Fierstein has said, “There are lots of needs for art. The greatest one is the mirror of our own lives and our own existence.” (The Celluloid Closet (film), 1995) And as a young black gay man in the 1970s and 80s, I was painfully aware of a lack of fictional characters that reflected me. Weary of waiting to read a story about a man like me, I wrote Eight Days A Week, a story about a man almost exactly like me. It was, after all, my mirror.
In 1972, during my Sophomore year in high school (Westchester High in Los Angeles), I happened upon a public library copy of Mort Crowley's Broadway play, The Boys in the Band (which I had heard of but not yet read or seen). I checked the book out, read it, renewed it several times, committed much of it to memory, and quoted from it extensively in schoolyard conversation (imagine if you will a small 15-year-old black boy referring to a classmate as a “sunt – that's French, with a cedilla”). In retrospect, it seems the virulent self-hatred of Crowley's group of gay friends circa 1968 escaped me all but completely. What struck me most about this, the very first piece of gay popular art ever to make its way into my young hands, was that I now had written evidence that there were other gay people (to my knowledge, I had yet to meet one in the flesh), and that they had friends, lovers, birthday parties, and lightning wit. Not only did other gay men actually exist (in New York City, anyway), but there were other black gay men. I wasn't the only one.
True, Crowley's one black character, Bernard, was a pathetic mess (I could see that, even at 15). But as Harvey Fierstein has said regarding the portrayal of gays in Hollywood movies, “visibility at any cost. I'd rather have negative than nothing.” (The Celluloid Closet (film), 1995) (Last Harvey Fierstein quote, I promise!)
Around 1975, a college friend lent me his copy of Gordon Merrick's 1970 man-on-man bodice-ripper, The Lord Won't Mind. Aside from our shared appreciation for man-meat, I could not have had less in common with Merrick's protagonists, Peter and Charlie, a pair of tall, handsome, hyper-masculine donkey-dicked Aryan über-menchen who not only fucked one another, but women, as well, the obvious message being that Peter and Charlie were in love with one another, but they were no girly-men. The only black character in The Lord Won't Mind was the maid, an old-Hollywood mammy stereotype who overcomes her religious convictions enough to allow that if Peter and Charlie truly loved one another, then “the Lord won't mind.”
In 1976 – America's Bicentennial year, my sophomore year in college, and 10 years after the publication of A Queer Kind of Death – Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner was published. Like so many of my friends from UCLA's recently-founded Gay Students Union, I read, re-read and re-re-read Ms. Warren's debut novel, discussed it ad nauseum, carried it and quoted from it like the kids in Jews for Jesus did the New Testament. In its own way, The Front Runner (the story of a young gay track star and his somewhat older track coach lover) was as much a romance novel as The Lord Won't Mind, and as old-school as The City and the Pillar or Giovanni's Room – its beautiful gay male protagonist is killed at the end. But for me and my colleagues, Ms. Warren's portrayal of gay male life and lovemaking seemed so true to life (she seemed to know so much about how we mid-70s gay men dressed, how we cruised one another, even how we dirty-danced) that it was rumored that Patricia Nell Warren was really a gay man writing under a nom de plume.
Still, the only black character in The Front Runner’s world of muscular, masculine “macho gays”“ (a term I'm pretty sure was a Warren original – certainly, my friends and I never used it) was Delphine de Sevigny, a middle-aged femme queen who wore diaphanous caftans and called everyone “chérie” in a voice borrowed from Marilyn Monroe. Now, I wasn't the world's most masculine man, but I was no Delphine, and I recall being a tiny bit miffed that Patricia Nell (as my friends and I called her, as if she were an old pal) had not seen fit to write a black “macho gay.”
It may well have been in the midst of one of my diatribes about the dearth of black gay characters in gay fiction when someone (I don't remember who, but God bless whoever it was) handed me a copy of A Queer Kind of Death, very possibly with the announcement that the protagonist of the book was a black gay man, a police officer, didn't die at the end, and wasn't a drag queen. While I don't recall the cover art (and a bit more about cover art later), it was very likely the initial trade paperback edition. I do recall being pleasantly surprised that someone had finally written a black gay character with which I might be able to identify (that is, not crazy, not wearing a frock, and not dead), and just plain surprised at the publication date of the book: 1966.
When A Queer Kind of Death was first published, Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States. The Beatles released the Revolver album, then retreated into the studio to record Sgt. Pepper. Nancy Sinatra's knee-high white vinyl go-go boots were made for walking. The Sound of Music, released in 1965, was still the box office champ and won an armload of Oscars. Peyton Place and The Dick Van Dyke Show were among the most popular television shows, with Emmy awards to prove it; and Star Trek made its debut (I missed it and cared not – I was a Patty Duke Show fan, and Star Trek was on at the same time).
Notwithstanding the much-touted “sexual revolution” of the time (by 1965, an estimated 6.5 million women were on The Pill), the mid-1960s was a difficult and dangerous time for gay people, even in New York City, where A Queer Kind of Death is set. The Stonewall riots were still three years in the future, and the notion of homosexuals as a downtrodden minority and/or a political force was all but unknown in America. Early homosexual apologetics groups The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis existed, but were small, underground, and little known outside their own memberships. New York's sodomy laws were very much in force (and ultimately would not be repealed until the year 2000). New York City gay bars were Mob-owned, and often run without benefit of a liquor license, as the State Liquor Authority had free reign to refuse them; and despite the bribes to local police necessary to keep them open, they were routinely raided, and their clientele jailed (and their names and home addresses listed in the newspapers, often resulting in loss of jobs, family shame, and sometimes suicide).
All things considered, I find it no less than amazing that journeyman screen- and television writer George Baxt should have begun writing a murder mystery novel starring a black gay detective in 1965. No less a publishing giant than Simon and Schuster published the first edition in 1966. There quickly followed a trade paperback edition (1966), the one I most likely read a decade later. As I remember, I read the book ravenously, despite being no big fan of the mystery genre (A Queer Kind of Death may well have been the first murder mystery I'd ever read), so great was my joy at finding a novel with a black gay protagonist. Over thirty years and many black gay novels (several of them my own) later, I found my recent re-read of A Queer Kind of Death a good deal less joyful.
In brief, A Queer Kind of Death concerns the death (apparently by foul play) of Ben Bentley (née Benjamin Bernheim), a handsome twenty-something actor/model/hustler. In the ages-old tradition of the genre, nearly everyone in the immediate orbit of the deceased had some reason to want him dead, among them Seth Piro, failed writer and Ben's ex-roommate (and ex-lover); Seth's estranged wife, Veronica; the wealthy but elderly Jameson Hurst, with whom Ben had also previously shared digs (and presumably a bed); Adam, Hurst's current caretaker/kept boy; a Native American (called Indians in 1966), ex-masseur/call boy; and Hurst's mysterious, reclusive, and oddly powerful sister, Ella. It falls to Detective Pharoah Love (“Negro and homosexual,” to quote New York Times reviewer Anthony Boucher —The New York Times, June 12, 1966, as quoted on the back cover of the 20th Anniversary Edition of A Queer Kind of Death—) to ferret out Ben Bentley's killer.
The 1986 “20th Anniversary Edition” of A Queer Kind of Death, a copy of which I recently bought on the cheap from Amazon, sports one of the most egregiously designed covers ever executed (and I freely admit that a couple of my own book covers qualify as eyesores): a pale purple background from which emerges a drawing of an African-American man's mouth – wide, full lips open to reveal somewhat overlarge upper teeth; in the foreground, a human skeleton wearing a black jacket, pink open-collar shirt, a blue-and-gold-striped neck scarf, and a curly black wig, a long-stemmed red rose between the skull's teeth. Granted, the cover art has nothing really to do with the quality of a book itself, but still – not pretty. The original 1966 paperback and 1969 British paperback versions of A Queer Kind of Death are considerably more attractive: the former featuring a close-up of the face of a good-looking, bespectacled black man in the background, with an abstract design of a sprawled male body superimposed. The latter, a skeleton of a hand with a pink carnation between the finger bones.