The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (27 page)

George wrote thoughtfully about men, both gay and straight.
Nebraska
is aggressive, masculine and muscular. This novel will not age. It stirs the senses in many ways. One can smell the summer nights as well as Craig’s youth. The dankness of the motel room where Craig’s father abuses him creeps into your bones.

George wrote
Nebraska
first as a play, but the play didn’t work — too much of the major action took place off stage. George tried to solve the problem, but after many drafts, he still was not happy with the play. George and I would share our work with each other. In a discussion we had about the play, we came to the conclusion that it might be a novel. George applied and was accepted at the MacDowell Colony. Off he went to that wonderful artists’ haven in New Hampshire. Five and a half weeks later he handed me a copy of
Nebraska
, the novel. George wrote quickly and was astonishingly precise. This can be attributed to his experience as a journalist and the poet that was an integral part of his being.

The novel was published by Grove Press and garnered many well-deserved excellent reviews.
Vogue
called it “lean, uncompromising.”
Kirkus Reviews
said, “Alyrical, evocative novel . . . A tough, economical, and finally haunting book.”
Village Voice
: “
Nebraska
is
Huckleberry Finn
gone awry. . . . Wonderful.”

George was living with AIDS. It should be remembered that he sued the Northern Dispensary, a Greenwich Village clinic, after it refused to treat him because he had AIDS. The clinic was fined $47,000 by the City’s Human Rights Commission. It closed.

After the book party for
Nebraska
, a group of us went to a restaurant. George, always a great looker, was in a wonderful mood and looking quite handsome. He was surrounded by his friends and his dear lover, Michael Canter. I was unusually quiet. At one point George turned to me and asked, “What’s wrong with you?” I lied and told him that I was fine. George could read me, and I could tell if I continued to sit there withdrawn, he would get really pissed. So I started to yak it up, but didn’t do a very good job of acting. I couldn’t stop myself from foreseeing what was going to happen to my friend. We’d seen too many friends in hospitals and sat together at too many of their funerals. That night I was down that road, somewhere in the future. And in doing so, I was ruining that most special moment — mainly for myself. I was missing the opportunity to bathe in the love and success of a close friend who was such a part of me. George, wiser than I was, did not ruin that night for himself.

Nebraska
was George’s second book. His first was
The Confessions of Danny Slocum
. This book is part novel, part autobiography and a totally hilarious and penetrating look at gay life in the late 1970s. After
Nebraska
George went on to write
Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic
, a compassionate, harrowing and beautiful book. Later he would write about his own experience as an AIDS patient. That article became a cover story for
The New York Times Magazine
.

In his life, he loved order, quiet, loyalty and the company of his friends. In his work he was a true daredevil.

I miss the brave books I’m sure he would have written. But I miss his humor and his penetrating smile more. I miss his phone calls. The missing never stops. George died in 1989, two years after
Nebraska
was published and a year after
Someone Was Here.
He was 43 years old.

Coward-McCann, 1965

Philip Gambone

I first came to know of Donald Windham through his association with the great gay American playwright Tennessee Williams, who was Windham’s friend and literary mentor for 25 years. In 1977, Windham published the correspondence he had received from “10,” as Williams often signed his letters, under the title
Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965
, a book I devoured. I had come to love Williams’ plays and to admire his courageous portrayal of shocking, taboo subject matter, especially homosexuality. As an aspiring writer still in his 20s, I combed those letters (Windham’s replies were not included) looking for the courage to write my own stories, looking for tips on how to be half as fabulous a gay man as Williams was, looking for clues as to how to cultivate a literary friendship such as the one he and Windham had.

The letters were such fun to read. I loved Williams’ campy patois, the coded language, the gossipy news: “The ‘crowd’ here [Provincetown, 1940] is dominated by a platinum blond Hollywood belle named Doug and a bull-dyke named Wanda who is a well-known writer under a male pen-name.” I loved the outrageous honesty: “There are only two times in this world when I am happy and selfless and pure. One is when I jack off on paper and the other when I empty all the fretfulness of desire on a young male body.” Loved, loved, loved Williams’ descriptions of writing
The Glass Menagerie
, the rehearsals, the subsequent triumphs, and the later flops. The letters were peppered with famous names, witty aperçus, and candid confessions of sexual shenanigans.

Windham and Williams had met in New York in January, 1940. Windham, then 19 and “practically penniless,” had recently fled Atlanta with his 21-year-old boyfriend. They were living in a single furnished room. The romance of all that delighted me. As I read the letters, Windham seemed like the writer-in-training and literary acolyte I longed to be. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel any strong desire to delve into his novels. Perhaps that’s because Windham’s books were hard to find, mostly out of print; or perhaps because, in the last years of the 70s, newer gay voices — Andrew Holleran, Ed White, Joseph Hansen, Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin — had begun to appear. Whatever the reason, it was 30 years later that I finally got around to reading one of Donald Windham’s novels. It happened, really, quite by chance.

One day, browsing in one of my favorite used bookstores in downtown Boston, I came across a copy of Windham’s novel (his third, it turns out),
Two People
. I might have easily passed it by but for the author’s name, which triggered happy memories of reading the Williams-Windham correspondence so many years before. I pulled it off the shelf. The dust jacket — a sketch of the Spanish Steps in Rome, a few people lolling about — seemed innocuous, even old fashioned. And the title, such a generic one, seemed innocuous as well, promising little more than a safe plot, a pleasant read. But the book — its heft, its sheer physicality —piqued my curiosity. It was an immaculate copy, not a mark or tear, and the pages, creamy white, had the soft, thick, luxurious texture that hardback paper used to have. I checked the publication date: 1965. A quick glance at the dust jacket blurb — “The story of an American man and an Italian boy in Rome . . . a situation that another author might have made melodramatic or sensational” — clinched it. Code for a gay story! That night, curled up in bed, I began to read.

In the opening sentences, Forrest, the American, who is hanging on in Rome after his wife has left him, picks up a stray newspaper and reads that several people have jumped from bridges into the Tiber. Their intention, he soon realizes, was “diversion, not suicide,” just the Roman way of celebrating the New Year. This moment, which might pass as nothing more than a bit of scene setting, is, in fact, Windham’s deft way of announcing one of the novel’s main themes: that a diversion, even one that is “unique and unfathomable,” is preferable to emotional suicide.

A shy, amiable New York broker, Forrest is conventional in every way. He’s from the Middle West; he has two children. Twice a week he plays handball after work. His days in Manhattan have been “as much alike as the business suits” he wears to work. We soon learn that an aimless year in Greenwich Village and “some early promiscuous encounters” are long behind him. At 33, he counts on his life being settled. But then, on the Spanish Steps, he meets Marcello, a 17-year-old, whose attitude toward the American is “carefully balanced between the indifference of a departure and the deliberateness of an approach.” A casual
buon giorno
on Forrest’s part leads to a conversation, tentative at first, and then, when Marcello turns to him with a smile that’s “a part of the sunshine,” to an invitation back to the American’s apartment, where they make love.

At first, Forrest feels that he has made a mistake, that he has “started something that he would regret or that would end without anything having come of it.” A jaded gay acquaintance warns him that he’ll be robbed or blackmailed. When Forrest tells Marcello, “My friend says that boys in Rome began doing this after the war,” Marcello answers, “Your friend is wrong. Roman boys have been doing the same thing since ancient times.” It’s the matter-of-factness with which Forrest (and Windham) treat homosexuality that makes
Two People
so interesting, both from an historical and fictional perspective. Forrest becomes neither a possessive lover nor the boy’s surrogate parent. As a result of a much earlier homosexual experience, the American has learned that “categories do not account for everything,” and he seems content to let this affair play itself out in the “innocent male conviviality” that is Rome.

Marcello is “serenely beautiful.” At one point, he is described as “a youth on a Greek vase,” but in general Windham does not indulge in the kind of prurient encomiums to comely ephebedom that characterize, say, Mann’s descriptions of Tadzio in
Death in Venice
. This restraint is one of the novel’s many appealing qualities. And unlike Tadzio, Marcello is old enough — and Italian enough? — to have learned how to pick up guys in cinemas. (Windham notes that “promiscuous encounters are to Italian boys what ice cream sodas at the corner drugstore are to their American counterparts.”) There’s a dual practicality to these hook ups: “Instead of having pleasure alone, he had it with someone and was given money.”

A second encounter, a week later, leaves Forrest bewildered, unable to explain his new desire. “The boy’s figure, lean and rounded, evoked neither masculinity nor femininity, rather the undivided country of adolescence; and his silent receptivity, open equally to tenderness and passion, spoke of no special desires, but of a need for love so great that it prevented him from asking for it.” Those looking for hot scenes of passionate man-boy sex will not find them here. If you read the novel too quickly, you could almost miss the references to the times Marcello and Forrest go to bed. Still, there are beautiful passages that nicely capture the limpid dynamics of their lovemaking:

Although Forrest gives Marcello money and gifts, it’s clear that the relationship is about something more than prostitution. With Forrest, Marcello is alternately friendly and shy. In one particularly telling passage, Forrest offers to buy a present, and after some coaxing, Marcello hesitantly tells him he’d like a new shirt. With that, the boy opens an Italian grammar book he has brought along and inscribes it “
A Forrest con simpatia
.” Later, Forrest consults a waiter, asking him about the exact meaning of
simpatia
. Closer to love than friendship, the waiter tells him.

The chapters alternate between Forrest’s point of view and Marcello’s. Windham, who was 45 when
Two People
was published, does an extraordinary job of getting into the head of a teenager, and a non-American one at that. The intense and confused needs, the egocentrism alternating with shyness, the self-consciousness, the moments of brutal honesty, the feelings of loneliness and loss and confusion. Marcello’s father, a Sicilian tile contractor, treats his son “as though he were an employee that he wanted to make a profit on.” He expects the boy to follow in his footsteps. He treats Marcello’s interests in other careers with grudging tolerance. Sundays are the worst, for then the whole family spends the day together — church, visits to relatives, dinner — where the two usually end up fighting.

Rome, too, is a character in this novel, a place of romance, beauty, eroticism, chaos, squalor, mystery. A city “charged with an elixir,” Henry James once said. All over Rome, Forrest encounters “sights that drew him out of himself, not through an attraction that he recognized in them, but through an obscure affinity that returned and persisted beyond under-standing.” It’s the seductive elusiveness of Rome — the impossibility of pinning it down — that Windham offers up as the city’s most appealing quality. Like Marcello (or Forrest, for that matter), the city resists easy pigeonholing.

A further complication is that Marcello also has a girlfriend, Ninì, a girl with full breasts and skin whose “plumpness and whiteness . . . was more suggestive of a woman than of a girl.” In the context of his playful, but chaste, times with Ninì, Marcello thinks of his continuing relationship with Forrest as a “friendship.” The sex he and Forrest have, Marcello tells himself, is a stopgap measure before he can “properly make love” to Ninì. Forrest is, Marcello assures himself, “no competition to his feelings for Ninì, anyway.”

Windham doesn’t treat this arrangement ironically. His intention is not to write a novel about a “bi-curious” kid who is deluding himself. It’s about two people — note that the age discrepancy is absent in the title — each in search of something. For Marcello it’s autonomy, identity, maturity, experience. And indeed, through his relationship with both the girl and the American, he gradually enters into an understanding of “the process by which love, when the world expands, limits responses and makes intensity possible.” It’s the intensity of the adult, not the child.