Read The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered Online
Authors: Tom Cardamone,Christopher Bram,Michael Graves,Jameson Currier,Larry Duplechan,Sean Meriwether,Wayne Courtois,Andy Quan,Michael Bronski,Philip Gambone
The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (22 page)
What
Vertical Intercourse
posits as the antidote to the twin toxicities of the ghetto and the epidemic is not to seek it outside oneself, but within: to develop one's psychic muscle.
[Thomas] is one of those “real” men, a solid, masculine pillar of strength. He is certainly the epitome of the strong, silent type. I admire this. But I wonder, does he ever lose it, just go nuts, break down and cry or something? It's hard to imagine Thomas in tears, but it wouldn't be a shock to me. My admiration would undoubtedly grow, to see a man who knew the right time and the right moment to shed his tears of grief, of impending loss.
Thinking about Thomas, in this way, I find him very attractive. For a moment, I think of sex with Thomas, as though I could somehow absorb his masculine strength by taking him into myself. And in the next moment, I think that, when Michael dies, perhaps I can have a fling with Thomas. But I banish the thought at once.
I find it refreshing and even inspiring to hear a gay protagonist sorting out his definitions of manhood in an American novel. Thinking of James Bond, he ventures: “coolheaded, even in a crisis, always strong.” What
Vertical Intercourse
points out is a self-respect that elicits respect from other men, without even trying. We can locate these qualities in many places within the American psyche (the Boy Scout Law
—
"
A
Scout is
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly
,
Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave
, Clean, and Reverent."—
comes to mind), yet how many gay men get to express themselves fully while participating within the institutions that espouse such values, even today?
Paul weaves this contemplation of maturity into the novel at many different levels, both subtle and obvious. Clearly his protagonist is pre-occupied with it; it even creeps into his grumpy observations on pan-handlers, most of whom he would encourage to “grow up:” “He makes me ill. I just want to punch him in his sniveling mouth and tell him to get a job. After all, there's a help wanted sign in the café right where he stands on the corner.” Further along, the situation recurs, this time revealing the narrator's growing compassion, and implying a growing maturity:
One man, a boy really, dressed in retro-punk gear, asks for a dollar. He's so cute that I give him one, and then feel guilty that I have responded to his cuteness, his youthful beauty. Does that make him more worthy than the other beggars? Can I be so superficial as to step over the decrepit hag who slurs the phrase spare change, sir? so that it comes out as spurhansser? Or the obvious tweaker, jittering in front of the bus stop?
Oddly enough, this wisdom on what it takes to be a man is espoused by his female therapist, just as it is often echoed by American society's preeminent women. Thus, when the therapist tells him, “I think you want to be a new, improved version of yourself, and I think that what you want is to be a man,” it may bring to mind Judy Garland's advice to “be a first-rate version of yourself, not a second-rate version of somebody else,” and perhaps even what Maureen Dowd meant when she proposed that “the moment you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.” But of course – who has the perspective to see these men as they are, rather than as they wish to be seen? Their feminine counterpart.
Such strength of character, then, has little to do with physical attributes, which brings us back to
Facing It.
David's transformation occurs when he is forced to acknowledge his past limitations, which shocks him into a new way of seeing his lover Andy's relentless decline:
‘David!’ It was Andy shouting, standing before David and yelling his name. ‘David? Snap out of it! Lord knows I never expected to have to be the strong one at this point …’ He didn't finish the sentence. David looked up at his lover, so pale and thin, so dignified as he faced the severity of his illness. And David realized that he had no right to behave as he was, to draw away into his own world of selfish cares and fears.
That he should be the strong one, David said to himself. That he should be the strong one … David was filled with a sudden strength, a vitality borrowed from Andy's dignity. What had seemed so pathetic only a moment before – Andy's ghastly gray pallor, his thinning hair, the hideous lesions on his skin – what had seemed so pathetic now seemed the inverted symbol of Andy's strength.
He has stuck it out! David told himself. He's been strong and faced it at every turn, while I ran and hid in my fucking press coverage of the damned crisis. It was nothing new, really, but it was, for David, one of those rare moments of crystal clarity, when the tragedies, as well as the victories, of the world somehow fit, a moment when David saw that what had already been accomplished had been good, had been real.
He stood and held Andy close, saying nothing. It was a moment when the whole of Andy's illness became a true reality, when both of them saw together that they had weathered a storm, and moreover, that there was more to come: they accepted Andy's illness. And they gathered their strength for what was left.
Paul's writing is consistently convincing and emotionally powerful, despite occasional lapses into cliché (e.g., “weathered a storm,” above), flowery language (in
Longing,
“the relationship blossomed, like a traveler's vacation planned over weary winter months, finally coming to fruition”), and stilted dialog (from
Vertical Intercourse:
“You know that from time to time I indulge a dusky taste,” meaning a predilection for sex with black males!).
In general, however, the personality at work behind the fiction does not call undue attention to itself. Only the resolution to
Longing
rings rather hollow, with its love story, which arrives late in the novel and feels rushed to an obvious conclusion. Paul's truth here was bleak – not uncommon in the twentieth-century Bildungsroman,
(
German, meaning "novel of formation": that is, a novel of someone's growth from childhood to maturity. In their grappling with the
Puer Aeternis
("eternal youth") dilemma of many gay men, all of Paul Reed's novels involve elements of the Bildungsroman.)
even within the gay canon (witness
Massage,
by Henry Flesh) – but it lacked resonance, at least for me. I didn't hear the side of the bleak truth that leads to triumph. Learning hard lessons is more than harsh; it's useful. What is useful is what we take from that experience into the next phase of our lives. It's not all bitter fruit.
At its best, Paul's literary work soars. While rich in descriptive detail, Paul's novelistic style is concise; observe in
Longing
how seamlessly he connects two pivotal and contrasting years at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic:
How many hours did we eventually spend on those steps? How many months did we sit, as languid as lovers after orgasm, doing nothing but staring out into Castro Street, accepting everything that crossed our vision as utterly believable, including the decrepit old man who scooped up his poodle's poop with his bare hands and deposited it in the garbage bin? We saw everything from those steps, from which we declined every suggestion and every invitation with a haughtiness deserving of Cleopatra on her barge. We saw the world of the Castro change before our eyes: One season we reclined and observed tap-dancing blonds, leathermen, and drag queens, hundreds, even thousands of bare chests sporting hair, tattoos, pierced nipples (left and right), handkerchiefs and bandanas the colors of the rainbow and then some. By the next season we saw fear and caution, green and orange hair, too many police, young men shuffling with canes, an unusual outside-world mix of women and children, and men not clad in tight jeans, and a group of nervous, confused Filipino women wearing masks of white hankies over their noses and mouths as they stood awaiting the 24 Divisadero.
Such vignettes also reveal Paul's skill as a chronicler – specifically, of urban America's rising gay middle class during the latter decades of the twentieth century. The most truthful tellers of tales make the best historians. No less a literary light than Richard Labonté has asserted that Paul's importance in the gay-lit pantheon rests in large part upon this knack for cultural reportage
. (
Via email with Bill Brent, 24 January 2009.)
Certain elements are universal to any social crisis. Once the sudden shock of the new subsides, the deeper toll lies in the details. In
Vertical Intercourse,
a decade and a half after the ordeal depicted in
Facing It,
the protagonist expresses deep grief over having no mentors or trusted support left to grow old with. He has seen the epidemic take several waves of friends to early demise, and now watches in resignation as his friend Michael declines in health. This trajectory seems to mirror the decline of San Francisco's streets, once pleasurable to stroll, and now a repository for society's dismissed.
Thus, the slow, grinding collapse of one man's social edifice is quite akin to what has happened on a grand scale in America during the early years of the new century: malaise, a dearth of spirit that can lead to a death of spirit. Death is the ultimate dismissal, as it is no respecter of person, position, or time. The protagonist's observation that “I've lost most of the witnesses to my life” is plaintive, and speaks to a larger longing for trusted support within community.
Within the crucible of grief, however, forms a promise of increased wisdom and maturity, and with it a perspective that, in its highest form, brings what Paul refers to as “the renewal, the hope.”
Such longing is universal to the human condition, and Paul accurately captures the sense of it. As an incisive chronicler of social upheaval, and an author skilled at depicting internal states with ringing honesty, his humanism transcends the spirit of his times. Thus, many may yet find his tone enjoyable, his vision acute, and his wisdom instructive.
Pushcart Press, 1983
Paul Russell
Even now, 25 years after I first read it,
Saul’s Book
retains a certain terrible majesty. I remember buying a copy at a bookstore in Provincetown sometime in the early '80s — though whether on my first rapturous visit to that Sirens’ Cove or my second (and last) disastrous one the following summer I can’t properly recall. So much of the past is a painful blur. But I still have that original copy — a foxed and dog-eared Penguin paperback (the hardcover original had been published in 1982 by Pushcart Press) on whose lurid cover a young man, cigarette dangling from his mouth, looks wistfully toward a marquee advertising LIVE GAY BURLESK BOLD RASCALS XX MALE MOVIES XX. “A Times Square Hustler’s Passionate Love Story” proclaims the book’s own tawdry marquee. I think I bought
Saul’s Book
because the cover also claimed, in what seemed a forlorn stab at legitimacy, that the novel had won the first annual Editors’ Book Award (whatever happened to
that
award, I wonder?). The brief biographical note described the first-time author as “a schoolteacher and a social worker,” and assured (reassured?) the curious (skeptical?) reader that “he knows firsthand the people and places found in his book.”
What I found within the book’s covers was exhilarating. I was in my 20s, a newly minted Ph.D. trying to make my way as a writer and college teacher and out gay man. The world of the novel bore no resemblance at all to my own, and yet I found myself avidly dreaming its prurient dreams, escaping gratefully into its ghastly fantasies with all the swooning surrender of a Victorian virgin allowing herself the excitations of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
. Like all sweet escapes it beckoned me to dangerous places I had always secretly wanted to visit, places where my own carefully managed self might, under controlled circumstances, be allowed to come apart, lose itself completely, be utterly annihilated — if only momentarily and in perfect safety. For the space of its pages, in other words, I could become that doomed young hustler I had always, ridiculously and at the same time profoundly, thought was somehow my most authentic self. For the exemplary citizen, after all, the idea of throwing himself away can be very tempting, as if in revenge for all those years of good behavior, all those suppressed impulses that are the casualties of his outward success (I had my Ph.D. from Cornell, I was teaching at Vassar College).
The 12- and 16- and 20-year-old narrator of
Saul’s Book
is a Puerto Rican street hustler and drug addict nicknamed Sinbad the Semen. The setting is ostensibly Times Square and its immediate environs but is really the whole world. Hustling is thus the subject immediately at hand and a metaphor for human relationships generally (“Everybody’s running some kind of game”). The same goes with addiction, in tropes that will be immediately familiar to readers of William Burroughs. As Sinbad says,
Everything around the Square is burnt out, beat up, shit. Nowhere. The Square is the pits, the asshole end of the world where everything is garbage and nobody gives a fuck about anything anymore except themselves and just making it through the day, burnt out like the buildings, or as Saul says, “It’s the isle of the dogs.”
Saul is the middle-aged john, seducer, tormentor, alcoholic, teacher and trickster to whom Sinbad is bound by mutual dependence, exploitation, betrayal and perhaps love:
From the time I was twelve I existed only in relation to Saul, so I have nothing that is my own. I lived my life through him — in him and in spite of him. I found no pleasure in living for myself. I despaired, I loved, and I survived. But who is to say whether survival is a virtue or a vice? Who is to say that he did not force me to survive merely because it amused him to do so?