Between Men Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Hello, Young Lovers

  Greensleeves

  Pretend I’m Here

  A Joint and a Nice Piece of Ass

  The Ballad of Jimmy Pie

  The Big Fry-Up at the Crazy Horse Café

  Bacon

  Eggs

  Beans

  Toast

  Black Pudding

  Marmite

  Tea

  Sausages

  Jam

  Mushrooms and Tomatoes

  Bubble and Squeak

  Spotted Dick

  A Serviette

  Thermopylae

  Bisexual Pussy Boy

  The Piers

  Neorealism at the Infiniplex

  Rivals

  Crayons

  Mouth of the River

  Pennsylvania Story

  Marge

  A Good Squeeze

  Diary of a Quack

  My Name Is Siegfried Kracauer

  I’m a Marxist, Sexually Speaking

  Don’t Jab My Balls with Your Umbrella

  Smack Smack

  Here’s My All-Purpose Eulogy

  For Dinner: Chicken Legs

  Future Topics

  I Jumble Chakras

  I Am Pink

  A Characteristic of Stavros’s Speech Is Over-elaborateness

  A Heavy Concentration of Healers

  Family History

  At Least I’m Not a Victim (Today) of Hypomanic Flight of Ideas

  Killer 69 Is Making Progress

  Sheet, Draped over Killer 69’s Buttocks

  Our Town Bears an Indeterminate, Pregnant Relation to Vaudevillian Pleasures

  DJ’s Ass

  Killer 69’s Ball-Sac

  How Did Siegfried Kracauer Die?

  Sophie Tucker Played Valhalla Palace

  Happy Twentieth Anniversary of First Coitus

  The Suicide of Isaac Gold

  Marlon and Liz

  Vaudeville Is Not Dead

  The Ego in Bits

  The “Tommy” Patch

  More on the “Tommy” Patch

  The Professor’s Spanking Act

  My Slowness Stems from Sadism

  Bettina Kracauer’s Andalusian Nouba

  Jacob Kracauer’s Upper Lip Has an Opinion about the Creation Myth

  The Painted Boy

  About the Contributors

  About the Editor

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  First, a recap. I was nine, and not beginning to figure out my sexuality —I didn’t have one—when, in 1977, Seymour Kleinberg’s The Other Persuasion was published. The demographic was emerging; the literature was there: ergo—or now it seems—an anthology of gay fiction. Unlike most subsequent collections, The Other Persuasion mixed male and female contributors. Marcel Proust and Jane Rule improbably rubbed shoulders. In another corner, D. H. Lawrence was buttonholing Forster, who was avoiding Radclyffe Hall, who was being ridiculed by Gore Vidal. Gertrude Stein was explaining something about a rose to Christopher Isherwood, who keened away, looking over his shoulder—longingly?—at a disengaged Paul Bowles. Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene surveyed the rest, fixed observers, adding occasional wisecracks. They overlooked a Young Turk inspecting his fingernails, Edmund White (the sole link between Kleinberg’s volume and this book).

  I didn’t see The Other Persuasion for almost a decade, but even then, it was very confusing. Thankfully I didn’t come across Jeffrey Meyers’s wretchedly unsympathetic Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930 (1977), just about all that passed for literary criticism on the topic then. By the time I went to college in 1986, Kleinberg’s groundbreaking gay collection had been joined by a number of others—all American in origin, even if they came out in England. Most worthwhile were two books sourced from the magazine Christopher Street. The first was Aphrodisiac (1984), improbably edited by nobody. It featured a number of fine writers still prolific today, including two contributors to Between Men, White and Andrew Holleran. Christopher Bram made his debut, too, providing the title story. The second, First Love/Last Love (1985), edited by Michael Denneny, Charles Ortleb, and Tom Steele (three editors from none?), introduced more excellent writing from stalwarts like Holleran and Felice Picano, alongside other important new voices like David Leavitt and Ethan Mordden and—poignantly—someone who had swum so far beyond the tide of literary fashion in the thirty years he’d already notched up in print, James Purdy. (Fifteen years on, I would be especially fortunate in having all three agree to an in-depth literary conversation for my first book, Gay Fiction Speaks [2000], with Holleran, Picano, White, and six more.)

  In 1986, an awkward, jejune eighteen-year-old, I’d been “persuaded” by these “others,” sexually speaking—though only, thus far, in theory. I was stunningly ignorant in . . . well, everything. My future tutors sent a reading list the summer before I “went up,” which I presented to staff at the main library in my hometown, Birmingham, then a postindustrial mess tottering on governmental economic life support. Did the library staff know of a poet called Arnold? Was it something Arnold, or Arnold something? I didn’t know. I remember looking up Tennyson in a set of stained index cards under L for Lord. Nothing. The staff traced a few Brownings, but didn’t have copies. I avoided asking about Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, fearing it was in Latin.

  I traipsed despairingly to the city bookshop, where a big, bright window display confronted me: two dozen copies of a single paperback. A cocky, lustrous teenager in a blue singlet gazed out leftward. The way it was arranged, he was staring at himself, mostly. And himself. And himself. Who wouldn’t? Only the left-hand column of “hims” gazed through the pane and over my shoulder—at a mass of cheap concrete, discount stores, and rain.

  He couldn’t have looked less like I felt. I can’t remember if I got hold of any prescribed reading that afternoon. But I definitely bought the boy—oh, and the novel that came with him, in what the jacket trumpeted was its “First British Publication.” (This was innovative, since “paperback originals”—novels first appearing in softcover—did not then exist.) It was Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story.

  The real-life tale of boy-and-jacket is worth reading in itself. (White recounts it in Gay Fiction Speaks. ) But what it did to my own story, needless to say, is what has stuck, and it’s largely why I am writing this. I would later learn that gay fiction—especially in America, seemingly light-years ahead of Britain at that time—had had numerous “birth years” already. For example, I’d entirely missed—like most ten-year-olds, it’s true—the so-called Stonewall literature of liberation; in particular, its annus mirabilis, 1978, which saw key novels by White, Holleran, Picano, Larry Kramer, and Armistead Maupin.

  The narration of A Boy’s Own Story marked a semantic shift in gay characterization. It wasn’t, however, because White avoided making him a freak. He was a freak—in spades! But he was his own freak somehow: unadjustably, irreconcilably, often winningly freakish—and, for the record, aware of how freakishness worked; of the uses you might one day put freakishness to, if it didn’t crush you. Unlike too many of his fictional forebears, White’s “boy” wasn’t endlessly denying his sexuality or explaining it away. He worried at it, yet practiced it, too. He consulted family members, shrinks, and the like—but their inadequate responses to his importunateness led the boy to a decisive break with their example and instruction; catalyst for the journey undertaken in the book’s sequel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). I was so desperate to read that novel immediately, as a cash-strapped undergraduate, that it remained, for many years, the only hardback on my shelf.

  Gay fiction today, naturally enough, aspires to do more than offer still mo
re variations on the theme of “coming out.” White’s later foreword to his Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1991), however, succinctly described how coming to terms with one’s homosexuality will always inform how the gay individual—in fiction and life—reacts to everything else:Since no one is brought up to be gay, the moment he recognizes the difference, he must account for it. Such accounts are a kind of primitive gay fiction, the oral narrations told and retold as pillow talk or in pubs or on the psychoanalytic couch. Every gay man has polished his story through repetition, and much gay fiction is a version of this first tale. . . . Acknowledging homosexual desires and integrating them into a larger notion of the self is the first bold action of gay fiction, whether written or whispered.

  However much society has changed—particularly in the arena of sexual ethics—this cogent summary strikes me as enduringly true.

  White’s name led me to The Other Persuasion and the Christopher Street books; these to Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), another obvious staging post; the defining gay novel of its decade, and the finest. I won’t adumbrate its many virtues here; you’ll probably know them. Still, as I’m reviewing here the trajectory of gay fiction anthologies, I should point out that Holleran’s novel gave rise, inadvertently, to a sort of “watershed moment” in their history, some sixteen years after its publication.

  David Leavitt’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (1994; the volume was coedited by Mark Mitchell) took Dancer from the Dance to task for a number of things, among them a perceived “voyeuristic fixation with beauty that powers the novel.” Leavitt felt this fixation “compels younger gay men who don’t know better to wonder if that’s all there is to the business of being gay.” In consequence, “Dancer from the Dance romanticized—even exalted—what is to many of us the dreariest aspect of gay experience.”

  I’ve never found beauty—or the search for it—dreary; but so much comes down to taste. Yet Leavitt’s argument is more complex than this quotation suggests. (He returns to it in the interview in Gay Fiction Speaks.) In any case—and not since I’m on decent terms with both authors—there’s a more interesting way of responding to this claim than simple opposition. What struck me as odd was Leavitt appearing to criticize Holleran for failing to take account of Dancer’s effect on an ignorant reader. This might not necessarily be the young Leavitt himself, though he does discuss it at length precisely because it was the second gay novel he discovered. (A footnote added to a second edition of Leavitt/Mitchell’s book in 2003 notes that “[t]oday, Dancer from the Dance is no longer the first gay book most young American gay men read; nor can any one book be said to play that role.”)

  Yet the very profileration of gay novels around and after Dancer, which Leavitt generally applauds—including a contrasting account of the sexual subculture, Kramer’s Faggots—surely answers the complaint. The breadth and diversity of the lives being written up in gay fiction—and all gay literature—lessened the power any single rendering of gay life might acquire. For countless years, gay male readers had twisted their sense of sexual selfhood by way of the distorting prisms of Baron de Charlus, Querelle, or—much later!—Maurice. White gives a neat variation on this dark notion in the Faber foreword, describing his oscillations as a teenage reader “between grim psychiatric case studies and the outrageous Anthony Blanche scenes in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” From 1978 on, the number of characterizations exploded ad infinitum—if not always for the better, then always toward diversity.

  Leavitt may have regretted the “damage” done by Dancer. But he accidentally caught one of its key innovations, the reason why it remains so much more pertinent than most seventies gay fiction today. As he concedes, Dancer introduced characters no longer bound by the crippling “double life” of the closet. Yet the consequent temptation to advertise a gay, urban Shangri-la—certainly indulged in by some—is entirely resisted. Dancer is a nuanced, ambivalent study of its zeitgeist, with a near-exhausted “wait-and-see” quality attending the letters that frame the novel’s exhaustive inventory of the subculture. Its pendant—to borrow a term from art—is thus Edmund White’s nonfictional States of Desire, from a year before. Leavitt pinpoints the fact that Holleran fights shy of conveying any sense of liberation, since the very people who had left the closet “were made to suffer much more by each other than by heterosexual agents of oppression.” Awkward and unpalatable as that fictional verdict may feel, it had—and has—the ring of truth. The new freedoms may have seemed ideal, but Holleran did not confuse this with idealizing the protagonists who were experiencing them.

  The other “watershed moment” here is my sense that Leavitt’s own work also answered the very objections he raises. His early fiction especially—Family Dancing (1984) and The Lost Language of Cranes (1986)—contributed strongly to the reimagining of what gay fiction could be about. Harold Bloom and George Steiner have both long promoted the idea that literature “answers” literature; that creative writers do, and should, react to their forebears. There may be—to adopt Bloom’s term—anxiety in this influence, but it is a creative and vital anxiety. Still, in then arguing that “contrary to gay opinion, most gay men do want more from their lives than a few decades spent panting after unattainable perfection; indeed most want relationships based on spiritual as well as physical attraction, which grow more solid as the years go on,” Leavitt’s introduction risked providing yet another prescription for gay fiction. Auden memorably wrote in his poem on Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I find myself longing for someone to make the same high claim for fiction.

  Nevertheless it’s correct that, as White put it in the Faber volume, “If gays tell each other—or the hostile world around them—the stories of their lives, they’re not just reporting the past but also shaping the future, forging an identity as much as revealing it.” That’s never to suggest that gay fiction could provide readers with an imprimatur, a code of conduct. Most of the protagonists in Between Men, I’m thrilled to say, behave badly, argue unconvincingly, backtrack constantly, misdescribe, misappropriate, and misbehave. They have little enough in common even in their own stories, and could not fall out of one author’s vision into that of another. As Diana puts it in Patrick Ryan’s “Pretend I’m Here”: “There’s no end to the sickness and depravity of the human spirit. . . . Maybe that’s the good news.” Or, to quote Daddy in Ethan Mordden’s “The Ballad of Jimmy Pie:” “Tempt me, Satan, you win again!” (Bloom fans will appreciate the Miltonic reference.)

  Leavitt and Mitchell’s Penguin anthology—strongly and scrupulously edited—arrived at, or just after, the moment when the idea of one “gay fiction” became insupportable. It was either shattering or containing multitudes or both, depending on one’s view. The book entered a much more crowded marketplace, vying for your attention alongside the Men on Men series (of which, more soon), Ethan Mordden’s excellent gay anthology Waves (Vintage, 1994), and White’s Faber collection of 1991, in which both Holleran and Leavitt rightly found a place.

  The rest is history, usefully defined by one of Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” as “one fucking thing after another.” The 1980s and early ’90s saw a number of extraordinary bifurcations in gay culture. On one hand, as the History Boy announced, the consolidation of gay lifestyle/spending power propelled more and more of . . . everything, if increasingly in niche markets; women and men would rarely share a stage. For a while, there was “one fucking [book] after another.” At the same time, “crossover” works on gay themes—novels, plays, films with broad appeal—were notably rare. Often, whatever their virtues, such stories self-consciously acted as primers to gay lives and thoughts, turning us back into homogeneity just as most of our literature was freeing us from the same. Reader, beware the “universal”; it’s very particular.

  For a moment (almost), any gay man could publish a novel. It’s bad form to loiter on the talentless, so I’ll not name books that meant nothing to me, didn’t convince, or clunked along without t
he benefit of drama, character, purpose—or proofreading. There were many—perhaps for you, too? A legacy of this tranche, and the admittedly ongoing trickle of inferior work, is that anyone researching gay fiction will be asked weekly: “But there aren’t really any good books, are there?”

  My “coming out” year, 1986, saw the launch of George Stambolian’s essential gay fiction series, Men on Men, from Plume (later so ably stewarded by David Bergman). Stambolian steered a bright course, paying due attention to the established voices, which largely stemmed from the East Coast. (Maupin’s Tales of the City was, naturally, far from the only gay fiction emerging from the West, but it was, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, just about the only material penetrating nationally.) In the first Men on Men volume, however, Stambolian broadened our understanding of American gay fiction decisively. Almost half the contributors hailed from the West Coast. Of these, three—Dennis Cooper, Robert Glück, and Kevin Killian—remain among the most innovative and imaginative gay authors two decades on.

  Something still more decisive was happening of its own accord. If the spread of the gay literary diaspora in Men on Men was conspicuous, the number of contributors dead by the time it went to press was remarkable: Sam D’Allesandro, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Richard Umans. Bruce Boone, John Fox, Richard Hall, and Stambolian himself followed. AIDS claimed the lives of eight of the nineteen contributors to the first Men on Men.

  After the “rare cancer’s” first appearance in the summer of 1981, gay writers were somewhat slow in tracking it in creative work. By 1986, the number of novels, films, and plays concerned with AIDS was still only a handful. The deluge would come. In 1991, Edmund White—in the Faber foreword—could write that “[t]he enormous body of fiction that has sprung up . . . about AIDS in the last few years reveals that literature is still the gay community’s strongest response to crisis.” In the early to mid-’80s, however, most people had other things to do. There was your own health, certainly—but also your lover’s, friends’, peer group’s. There was worry, prejudice to counter, care to fight for: new circumstances to adjust to. The earth gave way. Holleran’s collected AIDS journalism was called Ground Zero.