Between Men Read online

  A moment of infidelity: Alex is a big blond giant with a thick coat of marmalade-colored fuzz on his chest.

  “The Big Fry-Up at the Crazy Horse Café,” like nearly all the stories gathered in Between Men, reminds us how central women are to gay men’s lives. Michael Lowenthal’s “Marge”—narrated by a heterosexual, if confused, teenager—addresses his initiation into what women are, and thus what men are, too, by way of a number of freakish role models. Two are preeminent: his mother, a whore, and their transvestite neighbor, Marge, whom Lowenthal ingeniously places as beyond the “redemption” apparently offered by the growing gay rights movement:In some other neighborhood, or some other city, people like Marge marched and waved flags. They’d have hated him more than they hated the guys who beat him. Every time that Marge smiled at a fist, he set them back. The last thing Marge wanted was toleration.

  Female—or female-identifying—characters are pivotal in most of these tales, but none more so than McConnell’s “Rivals,” which poses fascinating questions about what a “gay story” could be. Its erotic element is largely heterosexual, and the focus of its drama involves teacher Jane, inclusively or exclusively. It’s a fascinating and original study in destabilized narration. When McConnell’s narrator slyly notes that Barry’s “penis was centered now,” we deduce that nothing and no one else is “centered” at all. If the omnipresence of sexual desire to gay male characters in fiction has long been a cause of complaint for some readers, “Rivals” proffers a surprising antidote. It is Jane who struggles to control her longings—“sex was rare between them. Jane made sure”—whereas her chosen Lothario, Barry, not merely “could have lived with sex or without it,” as the narrator understates it; he physically isn’t up to it.

  There are thrilling narrative moves in the stories of several of the less-known contributors to Between Men—Friedman, Jones, Koestenbaum, Lowenthal, McCartney, McIntyre, Ryan. The scene in “Rivals” where Jane discovers Barry’s inadequacy probably trumps them all—for shock value, anyway. McConnell also inverts a staple of gay fiction and gay lives in the past, whereby romantic attachments are glossed as “friendships.” Here, it is Jane who desperately and inadequately resorts to the term; Darius, by contrast (perhaps), offers Barry something more, or better.

  Inversion, mockery, humor, and playfulness are hallmarks throughout Between Men, even if the real story remains serious. Disorientation has a key role in many stories. When Patrick Ryan’s hapless Frankie Kerrigan—familiar to readers of Ryan’s superb debut, Send Me (2006)—finds his astronautic adventure orbiting fast out of control, his sister Karen choruses: “Did this happen on planet Earth?” Alistair McCartney’s “Crayons” is a ridiculous spoof detective story—or is it?—which takes us to a version of Paris during the Occupation. It refuses to adopt any conventions of fictional verisimilitude, however, and threatens to break out into your wider world, reader, as nothing more, or less, than phantasmagoria. McCartney’s “Crayons” draw on himself, and then on you:I can’t register under my own name so I register under the name Alistair McCartney. It’s a preposterous name I know, obviously false, but it’s the first one that enters my head. The proprietor, who has a pencil mustache (Nazi), clearly despises me.

  Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Diary of a Quack” introduces a narrator equally in need of a reader(ship). Nothing could be more disconcerting than this opening:My Name Is Siegfried Kracauer

  Everything I do is legal. My accountability rating is high.

  Anyone familiar with the crystalline beauty of Koestenbaum’s novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and its vertiginous narrator, Theo Mangrove, might initially feel better equipped to assess the quack/nonquack Kracauer. But our pleasure lies in being led deeper into Kracauer’s absurd uncertainties, not out of them. (Aptly, one critic invoked Nabokov’s Pale Fire in respect of Koestenbaum’s novel.) Surrender your preconceptions; accept that your intuition here—as with Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes—is helpfully dry-docked.

  In his introduction to Fresh Men 2 (2005), Andrew Holleran wrote that in several of the stories featured, “being gay seems no longer to be an urgent matter; we now have the freedom to be bored.” Boredom is a legitimate subject for fiction, though boring a reader remains to me taboo—and isn’t what Holleran meant. Though it comes from this publishing house, I must pay tribute to the Fresh Men series. If, as many have noted, gay fiction is in a dire market position, then launching a volume of writings by unknowns takes special courage—or foolhardiness. I first became aware of the work of three contributors to Between Men—McCartney, McIntyre, and Ryan—through the two Fresh Men books, but great fiction has emerged from many more.

  There’s a lot more I could write. Nobody renders location like Benderson or Peck; nobody conveys the insiderness of our nonce gay languages better than McCourt or Mordden; nobody upsets sexual power relations as comprehensively as Glück or Killian. But it’s time to trust you, reader; you know this. Between Men has been my dream job. Editing is work, but thrilling work. It’s not quite like Charlie’s situation in Kevin Killian’s exhilarating feat of narrative control, “Greensleeves”—“‘Continue!’ became his favorite word, as Piers typed out story after story, like Scheherazade”—though that’s undoubtedly a beguiling image. I leave you to savor what I was so lucky to be sent: eighteen outstanding pieces of fiction by the finest gay writers today. My thanks to each for their patient collaboration in the preparation of Between Men.

  I’d like to record a few personal thanks: to those who have put me up—and put up with me—in the States; to Don Weise, a superlative editor; to Patrick Merla, a vital presence in and behind so much gay fiction; and to long-standing and long-suffering friends: Max and Mark; Marc and Richard; Billy, David, and Nigel; and especially to a great writer and outstanding friend, who read Between Men in manuscript and told me—as ever—everything that I actually think, Rob Beeston.

  —Richard Canning, London, December 2006

  Hello, Young Lovers

  Andrew Holleran

  There were several ways, the winter of 1981, to get from New York to the Hotel San Martin. The easiest was to take a night flight to San Juan and wait for a flight the next morning to the other, much smaller, island on which the hotel was located. People who didn’t want to hang around the airport sometimes took a taxi into Old San Juan to wander around the streets looking at courtyards and churches till the sun came up. Others stayed in the airport and tried to sleep in those plastic chairs. Which one they chose often depended on their condition—since many people were sick when they left New York in January. Life in Manhattan seems to climax at New Year’s in a way that leaves you run-down afterward, so that you almost always have the flu, or at least a bad cold. Coughing, sneezing, hacking, wheezing, guests would straggle up the drive to the Hotel San Martin as if they were checking into the hospital. Sometimes the only way you can ditch a cold is to just get out of town.

  The Hotel San Martin was a perfect place to recuperate because there was nothing to do there—no activities, or nightlife. It was best to go with a friend who liked to read, or a couple who wanted to concentrate on each other. Dennis and Kent had been together only a few months the year I went down with them. They had met at a posh party they were both bartending. Dennis was an actor from San Francisco who had just decided to quit the theater, Kent was an Oxford graduate who’d come to New York fifteen years ago to take a year off and never left; and this was their honeymoon. In fact, I was asked along as their photographer. My assignment was very specific. “What I don’t want,” Dennis said, “is an artsy close-up of tiles—you know, the travel magazine thing. No shadows on the louvered doors! Nothing stark! I want a postcard picture, the most obvious, clichéd view you can find—except there has to be someone in it. Me! I want spectacular views with me and my darling in the foreground. No lizards on a balustrade, no tiles! Just the honeymoon couple with a drop-dead view! I like to see where the people are. I have never understood how a picture of a tile shows you what an island looks l
ike. I mean, what on earth is the point of a picture of a tile when you want to see the place?”

  “The point is, my darling,” said Kent, “the tile is a synecdoche.”

  “And what is a synecdoche?”

  “A synecdoche is a part that stands for the whole. The tile stands in for the entire island—it supplies a detail that lets you imagine the rest.”

  “But I don’t want to imagine. I want to just lie in the sun. Oh, darling,” said Dennis, holding his arms out. “You’re not just English. You’re not just Oxford. You’re the Oxford English Dictionary!”

  He was; or something close. Kent seemed glad, in fact, when I told him the island we were going to was an extremely quiet place: he said that was just what he wanted. He had packed a long biography of Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy. He liked the fact that Old San Juan was empty when we took a cab there rather around 3:00 A.M. Then, while standing outside a church, we looked up to see four men coming down the cobblestones in white pants, Hawaiian shirts, and gold jewelry, who were obviously barhopping. Dennis stared. “That’s just what we want to avoid,” Dennis said as the quartet walked toward us. The minute they left, for a bar in the Condado, we decided to hail a cab, too, and not wait till morning for the flight. Instead we took a taxi to the publico to Fajardo, a few hours’ drive from San Juan, to get the boat.

  The publico to Fajardo was an old Volkswagen van filled with American sailors who were all drunk, and all talking about the women they’d just had in San Juan, including the one who was still on the fingers the sailor beside Dennis held to his nose the entire journey. “Oh, darling,” Dennis hissed in my ear. “I’ll never have sex again.” The minute we reached the island, however, the sailors disappeared in every available taxi to the American base that still occupied almost half the island in 1981, and we began to walk to the hotel in the brightening dawn. The only creatures up were the roosters: that sound that lets you know immediately you’re in the Caribbean. “Is that a synecdoche?” said Dennis. “Does the rooster stand for the entire island?” “Yes, yes,” said Kent happily. Even for the Caribbean, this island was particularly rural. This island’s claim to fame was a movie that had been made here ten years before about a group of English schoolboys who revert to savages after they are shipwrecked. Walking to the hotel, past jacaranda trees in bloom, and horses grazing and cows with egrets on their backs, we felt ourselves reverting, in the soft tropical air, not to English bullies, but to children who just wanted to be put to bed. In our rooms at the hotel there was only one decision to make—to lie down under the ceiling fans, or on a chaise longue by the pool. But there really was no choice. Lying down under the ceiling fans was the equivalent of anesthesia—you were asleep before you knew it.

  On awakening there was the most wonderful feeling at the Hotel San Martin: the certainty that you’d made the right choice—the journey had been worth it. There are certain places in life whose pleasures are so unadvertised that the mere appearance of another person like yourself creates a bond. That hotel was one. In 1981 no travel writer, with or without a photograph of tiles, or a hibiscus and a toothbrush in a glass of water, had exploited it. It had never been mentioned in the New York Times. It wasn’t even on the list of the people who sniff out the next new thing (gay men preferred San Juan), so one was surprised, in a sense, to see anyone else at the Hotel San Martin.

  Of course, there were Other People at the Hotel San Martin—it was a hotel—but the unspoken feeling of camaraderie at having found the place made you give them the benefit of the doubt. And that was all that was required. In fact, people there hardly spoke to one another. The atmosphere was one of trust. Guests left their doors open to get the breeze, so that, returning to your room, you would often find the very image Dennis had forbidden: a green lizard perched on a suitcase, or a frog in your shoe, or a butterfly looping across the balcony. There was no firm line of demarcation between the interior and exterior; the hotel was built around a courtyard planted with a giant ficus tree. Inside was the slightly rank odor of decaying vegetable matter, luminous shadows, echoing voices, the slap of sandals on the tiled floor, the gleam of dark wood, birdsong, and leaves: the romance of the New World. Outside, beyond the veranda that ran along the rooms, a glimpse of silver sea, tossing palms, and a woman in a blue nightgown, cutting flowers in her backyard across a dried streambed. In the rear of the hotel was a tiled terrace. Beyond it was an ancient swimming pool, its paint peeling off, and, past that, an old white horse, grazing in a field of high grass.

  The horse was in not much better shape than the hotel. The swimming pool hiccuped—at least that was what the noise it emitted sounded like; unless it was the noise the diver in an iron helmet makes in an old movie where you see his breath rising to the surface in big bubbles. Glug, glug, glug, went the swimming pool—decomposing, like everything at the hotel. There was no concierge. No chambermaid kept your room in order. The swimming pool needed a coat of white paint. The wicker chairs on the veranda were so frayed they were coming apart. The big broad beds in the rooms you passed were made level only with magazines placed under their uneven legs. Their tangled sheets, strewn with the detritus of bathing suits, tank tops, tubes of suntan lotion, and bottles of moisturizer, spoke of one fact: this was a place people came to collapse. The retired manufacturer from Boston who had just bought the place sat at a small desk in the hallway going over accounts with a pen and pencil. No one made the beds. Even the flowers people picked—star of Venezuela, gardenia, and hibiscus—they forgot to put in water, because in the tropics, after one day, you cease to understand with the clarity one has up north why anything has to be done immediately.

  Indeed, the prevailing mood at the Hotel San Martin was a vast lethargy. Few guests at the hotel exhibited the energy necessary to do much of anything. Sometimes somebody walked into town, or hired a taxi to the remote beaches one could not get to on foot. It was too much trouble to go to the best beaches on the navy base, because that required passing through a checkpoint, which required removing pieces of identification from a wallet. Most people just decomposed. Guests spoke to one another only at breakfast—and that consisted primarily of trading travel tips. Come dinnertime, they were so exhausted by the sun and sea, they sat like zombies, staring into the flames of the candles that floated in oil in seashells on each table. The terrace at that hour had an almost religious atmosphere, as if we were all waiting for a service to begin. In fact, we were starving. There was a little bar beneath the owner’s desk, but nothing like a cocktail hour. Dinner was at seven—and that was that. While waiting for our food the guests watched Dulcinea flick her tail in the gloom beyond the pool. After dinner everyone went to bed, for there was nothing else to do.

  The second night we did summon up the energy to take a walk after dinner to the village at the bottom of the hill, but no one was doing anything there, either. The people in the village were all in their houses watching television underneath a naked lightbulb suspended from the ceiling. The only exception was a slender young man in a phone booth at the edge of a cracked cement basketball court, talking to someone, I imagined, on the mainland, oblivious to the vast, magnificent, darkening clouds above the ocean at his back. Here we are, I thought, come all this way to see something he saw every day of his life and could not be bothered to look at. “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” said Dennis after we fled a barking dog and went back up the hill. “Thank God there’s nothing to do at night.” And with that we parted in the corridor. The ceiling fans that kept mosquitoes away created a white noise so soporific their hum was the last thing you heard until the sound of a rooster the next day.

  The first item of business after waking was to step onto the veranda, rub the sleep from your eyes, and stare at the hibiscus flowers beaded with drops of dew along the balustrade, and beyond them the housewife in a blue nightgown cutting flowers in her backyard, and beyond her the sea. Then one heard, with perfect clarity, the voices of the couple in the room next door. She: “You’re such a
lecher!” He: “I can’t help it!” Then, like the cries of the roosters and goats, the dogs in the village below, came the familiar urgency of breath, the gasps and groans, as two larger mammals copulated before going to the beach, their only witnesses myself and the lizard perched on the balcony. Even sex seemed incongruous on those fresh tropical mornings. Even desire required too much effort. On a short walk before breakfast the second morning there was a crew digging a ditch for a water main along the road, and as I walked past, a young man with a smooth brown chest and large green eyes stood up from his shovel and smiled at me—but there was nothing to do but murmur “Buenos” and keep walking. One was in love with the island. When I passed the couple from Michigan on my return, emerging from their room with rosy faces and large designer eyeglasses, on their way to toast and scrambled eggs, I felt no more envious than I did when I knocked on the door of my two friends.

  “Come in!” they cried, still tangled up in sheets when I entered, their torsos covered with strips of sunlight let in by the louvered door, exactly like the photograph Dennis forbade me to take. “How long have you been up? What’s happened?” said Kent in his plummy British accent. “Any scandals? Gossip? New arrivals?”

  “No,” I replied. “Nothing’s happened—though there’s a gorgeous guy digging a ditch outside the hotel—if we hurry, we’ll pass him on our way to the beach.”