2 comments/ 8666 views/ 3 favorites Gay Lit. 101 By: endthedream It's a curious thing, gay literature. It has, over the years, been the most difficult of books for me to read. Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, even Gordon Merrick (remember him?) and scores of other gay or bi writers seem defeated before they started. Excellent as Vidal and Williams and John Rechy can be, there is this terrible undercurrent or not so undercurrent in these books, as in James Baldwin's works, that says this is all pretty sad, all pretty violent, all despairing. I guess they fit the tenor of their times and ours still and all, but Lord, they make me want to cut my throat. As a writer of some pretty sad stories myself, this is truly saying something. I don't know where the word "gay" comes from, but if it means happy, then these books make it into a very difficult form to figure out. There are categories. Are there ever categories. One is gay or bi or transgender or transsexual, but one can never quite be one's self, when reading these books, and if "A Sand Fortress" professes something akin to being successful in love and richness of soul, and if a world of reason from Williams takes us into the gay world as it really is, then this is the most unreachable kind of world possible. There seems to be no hope in these novels and the scores of others I've read. Pornography has gotten so horribly degrading and ugly, not a recent occurrence, in the gay world. It is self-abnegating and truly one of the biggest turn-offs in the world. Coming out is coming out in a format, they seem to say, gay porn and gay mainstream, (if there is a gay mainstream) this really is going to be a downcast life full of shadows, and if Larry Kramer's "Faggots" memory still lingers for some, then, though in its black comedy, I think it one of the truest books in the gay lit. If you can make your way through it, for there is still in current novels and gay movies, a terrifying aspect, a justification aspect that calls for the most troubling of human emotions and the most fearful of human betrayals to look forward to, and if I were a young man starting out then, it would scare the life out of me. Magazines like "Blueboy" always were filled with such truly ugly stuff that I had to make my way through it by bent of force. "The Advocate" still sells because of its classifieds, which are horribly depressing things to read. It is the nature of man to want to be with his fellow beings whoever and whatever they are. But if one finds this all a lot more complex, if one is not in the ascending order, then these books and writers give a person the same, basically, iced front that heterosexuals have given out. With my very limited ability to write, I've discovered that it is possible to write sad stories from all different angles. I've even written Lesbian stories. And I've done my best not to categorize. Gay writers have to write for this market or that. And sex is usually, when it comes to gay fiction, so brutal in its words and in its, sex-making, not love making ever it seems, filled with such cruel words—cocksucker, fist fucking (now there's a charming little custom I thought had gone away,) one night stands, and booze and pills and poppers that anyone would wonder why a person would not go screaming, as it were, to the nearest Christer guidance council. The pictures in "Blueboy" and the danger of the stories and the articles, flapping round with all sorts of drunken fear and possible, at the very least, mutilation, and the magazine counterparts of it today, are as filled with horror as was the movie, "Cruising," which the gay community, and rightly so, picketed against. It is filled with as many structures as is much of gay lit. It is a disease, the movie and novel say, don't catch it, or the knife in your back or your front. As Black literature reflects the Black culture of the time, I suppose all literature does as well reflect its own culture, whether it be John Steinbeck, or Philip Roth, or Henry Roth or Jim Thompson. There is a depth of darkness in these writers too, and it would be foolish to say only happy stories and novels need not apply, but that image of Rechy as a male hustler who pisses on people if they pay him, and then heading back to Texas to write another of his excellent novels, still sticks in my head and is so terribly troubling. In movies like "Jeffrey" there is such a sweetness and hopefulness. As in "In and Out" as well. And novels like "A Fairy Tale" are very happy, but they seem forced. They seem as if to say, we have to put on our best clothes and do our damndest not to offend anyone, take one from column A, and one from column B and mix it carefully, and on and on. But gay novels, the ones written by gay men and Lesbians are just as filled with what I have found the gay world to be—and that is it truly is a sad one, it truly is one of breaking alliances and breaking friendships and falling off the edge of the world. I come to writers like D.H. Lawrence, especially his "The Fox," for some kind of comfort, and in its way, it gives it. Gay writers have the ability to tell the times in which we live. But with them, for the most part, the decades never change. The hurts are still there and the stone cold faces and the fear of what happens turning the next page of life or of their work. Because the bigotry against gays will never go away, of course, but it is more than that—it is an exclusive club and you better write what we in effect tell you and think what we tell you to think, and feel the way we say—my way or the highway, which is so ironic and so disturbing. It seems a cop-out really. It says you are this and you have these desires and you say it or write it in this way, and if your sexuality is all over the map, then you need not apply. All my life, I've had to re-imagine what I was reading at the time I was reading it. I had to put it in my terms. Well, everybody does that, but I mean I drastically had to do so, far more than other gay readers or viewers, and I thought when gay literature experienced one of its heydays, I would not have to do that anymore, but I still do it and basically I've given up on gay writers and gay filmmakers, though I still read them and still watch the movies, but it's still in an iron corset and if you don't fit, then see a shrink or something. Life to me is a very sad thing. I go along with Kurt Vonnegut's concept of it as being a joke, a very cruel one, though he had a whimsy and a good-natured ness and a comfort to his books that made him a joy to read. I am not saying there should be happy gay fiction, for itself, nor am I saying writers should not write the way it feels, and the way it is. I am against censorship and see the writers and the filmmakers as our bulwark against total chaos and more horror shows running now since ever before in my memory. What I guess I'm saying is this: Let some air in. Stop closeting in the closet in the closet. If one reads Gide or Genet, one comes to a place of such aridness, such desolation, that it seems impossible to read one more word of them. If "Willow Song" is a song of freedom, this sequel to "Song of the Loon," then what freedom are they talking about? Definitely not. But, apparently I still have to keep my mouth shut and still have to fear people around me and know they will hurt me eventually, and the books of gay writers tell me this and horribly so, they are right, but here is the main thing, they are also complicit. If the movie "A Very Natural Thing" was a depiction of gay life decades ago, then it seems things have not changed much, and Larry Kramer was right in "Faggots" and in an interview in "The Advocate"—there is only sexuality and gay people, by and large, care little more than that. Harsh, yes, and far too broad brushed, but definitely a point of view worth considering. Gay literature took a terrible drubbing in the eighties thanks to Anita Bryant and all the Christers who have come since her, and I miss the mainstream paperbacks publishing a slew of gay books, but why none for me? Why none that do not make me still the kid at the window of the book shop on Christmas Eve, hoping this time to find a book that says this is me, this is how it is to be me, and one keeps hoping, and tries to write now and again himself, but hope runs out eventually. One has enough experiences, pretty much all of them bad, and if "Flesh Puppet" is still a concern with fist fucking all over again, then what does a community which I've never found, have for its readers other than, at best and at worst, fictive and not fictive rooms where lonely men hang themselves, or bars where they go off drunkenly with other men of some danger and thus like that danger. It seems all the hetero clichés of gays are incorporated in our own world of gay book writers. It also seems straight writers, like Joyce Carol Oates, are braver and stronger and wiser and see all of this, as well as everything else they write, as so complex, as so difficult to live and to see and to understand and deserving of intense contemplation and reflection. I will take her work that delves into homosexuality now and again over all the "Dream Boys" they can turn out. Gay novels and stories and fantasies seem so angry, not only at people who repress them and hurt them and horrifyingly of all, kill them, and God knows the anger is justified, but angry at themselves, and us if we are like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, us being the Jell-O, that is. If one can get a peter meter rating in Screw, if one can find the dejected hopelessness of sex toys used alone or videos to watch and again to recobble the naked sexing actors as closer to what you would wish and what you remember when, as Ed McBain used to write, "you and I were young, Kathleen," then sexuality, if it doesn't fit, is all the time the loneliest night of the week. McBain was criticized by gay people for his attitude to homosexuals in some of his novels. I never have figured that out. Gay writers excoriate their readers far more so than he ever did. If Quentin Crisp was correct, the reason heterosexuals find homosexuals so off-putting, it is because they, on immediately on hearing the word, think of themselves as homosexuals for a moment, and to straight men, that means, in their frames of reference, being a woman. Far be it from me to disagree with a man who had blue hair and such a lot of it. I think gay writers, though this is a broad brush, and I have most definitely not read all the gay fiction and non-fiction there is, no one could, do this same sort of thing in their own way—they play to the market. All writers do this. One has to. But there is something more when it comes to gay writers. The ones I've read for most of my adult life seem to be all the same really. No matter Gore Vidal, who is brilliant, and I love to hear him interviewed on TV, can change the ending of "City and the Pillar," but it is still a cold hopeless book, though Vidal is a witty and angry and clever and man of passion when speaking. Most of gay novels have a certain pre-formed mix to them. I can tell where they are going by the third chapter or less. It's a mold and that is, though of course not always, the same with most of the ones I've read. They blend. Vidal writes that there is really no such thing as homosexuality—that people are all sorts of sexuality at different times and it is self-defeating to thus limit us this way. Well, that depends on the individual, of course. In other words, one comes home to find after so much prejudice and so much struggle and so much shattering and so much loneliness and finds home does not exist, and perhaps it never has. Home is love. Home is hands reaching out. Pulling to safety. Pulling away from the streets and the bars, and if I have bought into too many old clichés, and of course fiction, whatever it is, has to have conflict, and if basically I am undercutting my essay by saying gay writers seem to feel what I and others have experienced and have somehow lived to tell the tale, then so be it. What I am trying, in closing, to say, is this: they celebrate the wrong things, those things that one does in the dark, one does in the light now, and there seems to be little hope in it, the closing in, the closing out, and then cuts deep into the soul and then they are on their way—gay novels do not, for the most part, squeaky wheel gets the grease, approach this is a terrible thing, which it is, but as the way things have to be, as if all of this is carved in stone. Vidal says we are limiting ourselves, and we are. If one finds a box to live in, then claustrophobia sets in easily and early and one does things to alleviate that feeling as much he can. If one hides in the hiding as gay writers tell us to do, then, plainly speaking, all the freedoms fought and hurt and killed for, all the parades, all the anger at the way things are, all of the fights and the crusades, then if gay people do it too, and gay writers approve of it without the questioning of it, then what the hall has been the point of any of this liberation stuff at all? Gay Lit. 102 There is, it is said, nothing more boring than a lecture on why comedy is either funny or unfunny. So here's my version of that joke. This is my attempt at guessing at my mind's viewpoint of gay fiction and fact in a retrospective. What I thought then. What I think, on re-reading these books and re-watching movies I once took to my heart and said, yes, this is who I am. You should have seen the mental contortions, concerning how to purchase it that I went through when Gordon Merrick's THE LORD WON'T MIND stared me from the paperback rack, in the face and I HAD TO HAVE IT BUT GOD WAS I SCARED. I was working in a large town in Kentucky. I was just on my first job. The bookstore across the street had this very very evil devil inspired book, with an image of a "youngman" (John Rechy word) kneeling, wearing only briefs. Come hither pose. It was difficult as hell to finally work up the courage to buy it. Took about a month. Found the hard cover of it in the library, which gave it, to me, a sort of rightness—if this town's library could have it.... so with something approaching D.T.'s I took the paperback, Avon, to the cash register. Expecting the lightning from the ceiling ball of energy like on an "Outer Limits" episode to come crashing into my head. She rang up the price and put the book in a sack, and I was on my way. It was one huge deal for me. I tried to like the book. I tried to see something to do with me in there. But I couldn't find it. So as with straight novels, I had to do it again with this book—rewrite the characters and story line as I read it, which can make for pretty confusing reading. But I treasured the book. And gradually as other Merrick books were available at that same gateway to hell bookstore, I got more and more courage. Then when they started stocking "After Dark" I became very courageous. And a few more gay novels like "Something You Do in the Dark" and I was just brave as hell in buying them. "Something You Do in the Dark" by Daniel Curzon I loved. It was the first gay novel that I thought spoke to me. It had a one line review on the front cover, by Joyce Carol Oates, whose work I had already fallen in love with, which made the book more important to me. It was a scream of rage. A scream of pain. A scream of the horrors of secrecy and the ultimate result of it. I re-read the book last year. It was just awful. It was over-written, melodramatic, uninteresting and just tired me out. I was like, what the hell has happened? Is this the "Lost in Space' syndrome? As a kid, I thought the first season of "Lost In Space" was terrific. I loved and love lots of TV shows from that time in my life. They stand up and are still excellent. When the summer hiatus came round, I couldn't wait to see the second season of "Lost in Space." So party hats a flutter, the first episode of the new season came on, and it was just horrible. Getting their sea legs. Give them what nobody ever gave me, a chance. Or a fake chance. And the next one and the next one, and the entire season was just awful. I thought well either I matured a lot over the summer or this was just the series now on a downhill slide. When the Science Fiction channel debuted, its first rerun was the first episode of "Lost in Space" and it was awful. And the second and the third..so I decided on that maturing over the summer thing was the actual problem. If you watch the movie "Boys In The Band" now, it will rot your teeth out. I couldn't tell the characters apart in the play, because except for the straight character, they are all the same person. Plays do that to me. But never like this. It was one huge weep party. Mart Crowley has since made apologies for the play, that it was of its time and what he believed then. He should not have apologized. This is how he wrote, this is how felt, and it, true, was a massive break through play and film. A movie I loved when it first came out was "A Very Natural Thing" which was just so right and honest and true and uplifting. So I was happy to finally get the film on videocassette. It includes absolutely everything I hate about the so-called gay life style. Numb who cares how this hurts you? Emotions, here have one or two, they are like M&Ms Now we have proven how deep we are; let's get to the sex. Sex partner after sex partner. Fucking in the baths. Men leaving his wife for his true self, which seemed to be constant sex with whomever possible. Two men ran naked on the beach in the film and it is now so funny watching their penises and balls bobbing along. Then, to me, it was erotic as hell, and served for many masturbation fantasies. It was Larry Kramer's seventies novel "Faggot" and Hubert Selby, Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn, and especially John Rechy's "City of Night" and other novels and non-fiction that galvanized me. "Faggots" made me ill, as it was supposed to. Rechy made me realize just how frightening life is, especially the gay life. Which I've never been a part of really and don't want to try it. I've been hurt enough by gay people, thanks anyway. They know where the buttons of pain are and didn't mind pushing them either. And this little love song: In bars, right before closing, the lights out while men desperately grope to find a partner for the night, then the lights back on, and if you were the one alone—well, that's some liberation, isn't it? Patricia Nell Warren's "The Front Runner" and her other gay novels seem to pin it down; for me, gay fiction is just incredibly difficult to write—there are no parameters or too many—it's either heavy handed or underplayed or ridiculous and just falls down onto your lap in shame---I have done every one of these things myself—through my life, it has left me numb to a lot of things, myopic to a lot of things, which is why I write stories, so I can put the ideas down the way I see them, and not have to rewrite what I believe and turn everything around, including writing about situations and characters who have nothing to do with me. Those I work the hardest on. "Blueboy" was the bane of my existence because a local bookstore carried it and I thought I had to read it because it was a gay magazine. I was overjoyed when they stopped carrying it. There is in gay fiction and gay fact more than a little danger. Rechy writes of that quite a lot. He was and is a superb writer. But he was also a hustler. Would do whatever for money. Piss on people. Hurt them. And then go back to Texas and write these truly stunning books, especially "The Fourth Angel" and "This Day's Death." David Elliot's "Listen to the Silence" is an aching, ultimately beautiful novel of intense pain, and Merle Miller's "On Being Different" were novel and article I read over many times. I felt that loneliness, the loss, the being forever considered a freak. BY THOSE WHO KNOW BEST. I knew what that boy was going through and I felt a fresh breeze of cool in a too hot summer when I read "On Being Different." Which quoted from "What I Believe" by E.M. Forster. It was quite a beautiful essay—"if I had to decide between betraying my friend, and betraying my country, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country." I was teaching high school English at the time, found the record of the writer himself reading his essay, played it in class; some students left the room without a word, some returned only after a couple of days. I also played Lenny Bruce records. In that tiny town in the South. I know lots about living dangerously. The violence in "Blueboy" was unconscionable. As was the violence in so many gay novels. I've read some porn and it's always just filled with knifings and humiliation and fist fucking and half killing people and I think well sure "Cruising," novel and movie were abhorrent. I made it through the novel, but not the movie, which was filled with such horrid violence and the stupid theory, it seems, that homosexuality, is catching, like a disease. But gay writers have been, better or worse, writing stuff like this for forever. Their intelligence is greater; for instance, I love Gore Vidal being interviewed, because his wit and vision and fearlessness are need most desperately now—for God' sake, Gore, stay healthy and alive. Please. But man is he one dry as dust writer. "City and the Pillar" he added a "happy ending" to that throws the whole book off. He is a meticulous writer and exceedingly good at his craft, but I don't read him anymore. I don't mean this to be what I am afraid it is, a diatribe, it's just gay writers just never threw the ball in my court too often and I was still adrift. One does not become disillusioned over night. One has to have enough experiences, enough years, and has had to have enough. But: Does this twit like any gay writing? The twit answers in the affirmative. Above all else, I forever love Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" and Visconti's luminous film of it. They are so beautiful in and of themselves and because I had a great one-sided love then and will always connect Joel with them. It so amazed me, a writer that long ago dead, and he tapped me on the shoulder at the paperback rack at a local store when I was in college, as I picked up the Bantam movie tie-in edition, looked at the back cover and begin weeping. Friends, Randy and Jo, were with me. I put the book back immediately. I would have to buy it when I was alone. I remember Jo putting her hand on my shoulder and asking, "Barry, what in the name of God has happened." And I couldn't tell. Mann's writing and Visconti's film are about love, and Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" is also, though it has become some what creepy to read, though valiantly written and limpid and beautiful as are all of Capote's works, but love happens little other wise it seems in gay fiction. Not that there are not beautiful stories such as many here on Literotica or other web sites, and it is a medicine to read them. I try, stumble and fall, but I will try again. And I guess this is the end of this essay. How do you describe comedy without putting everyone to sleep-hey wake up!—and how does a person say what he feels about almost all the gay novels and magazine stories he has read over the years? Well, "After Dark" gave way for me to "The Advocate" and I forced myself through the keyhole till I finally admitted how very sad all of this made me. It was like group counseling and telling everybody how god-awful everything is, but by damn we would be happy one day, and soon. But face it, being gay, especially today, is terrifying. Gay people want to live and be happy and find love returned and it's as simple as that. Just like everyone else. But there is sadness in being gay and I forced myself to read "Maurice" and I forced myself to struggle though porn of such sickness to get to maybe one paragraph, or one sentence, that made me feel good or say yes this is how I feel, this is how I would say it—it's like a friend and I have discussed-after writing gay stories or any kind of stories, especially ones that turn on a happy note-though I am not what you would call the most happy go lucky person or writer—there is, as for all writers, this sense of let down, that our story is finished and it's been fiction and fantasy and wish fulfillment or bringing up all the pain in our lives that, in my case, will be likely unread by anyone else. And you just sit there at the computer, feeling like the life has been sucked out of you. It's how, I suppose, I feel about gay fiction in general. If even its comedy or happy in any way, and this is rare, or if it's just a masturbation story, it goes away—it was all an illusion or a facing up to facts and life you'd rather not know about but need to. Like with the great British movie, "Victim," there is always that knife-edge of violence, of mistrust, of blackmail, of betrayal, and to some extent it will always be. I think when a gay person hits the age of thirty, unless he still looks younger, that is downhill for the rest of his life. Larry Kramer wrote an article about that for "The Advocate" some years ago. And of course everything I've written here are broad swipes and artificial categorization, but then so is much of gay writing. I don't think the panic or the one night stands or the cover stories when really it's the guy to the left of you at the bar, and I don't mean politically or at the bar of justice, is really cute and maybe you can attempt to philosophize him up to your bed, I don't think that in essence regardless of setting or plot, can ever be anything else of a Saturday night and a lonely as hell Sunday morning, but the hold bigoted society has on gays: Let's face it, shallowness hits everywhere there are people. It's a defense I guess. Like something the rest of us should feel guilty about not aspiring to. We can't equate sex with love because then we will be hurt. " I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain, its laughter and its loving I disdain.' Simon and Garfunkle. But we need friendship and sex, and maybe gay people can get the sex, but love and friendship are rare commodities for anyone in this world. "Sexual Heretics" was a compilation of gay poetry, stories, and essays from many centuries ago to the present day last century. It is the same compendium of pain and sadness and loneliness. Love hurts. Love means rejection. Love means goodbye. For me. For many people. Regardless of sexuality. I wonder why we even try at all. I mean the odds are astronomical it's going to fuck up, go away, be one sided, tossed away, kindly or unkindly, same thing, it hurts. The silliest gay novel I've ever read with cardboard cut outs, even sillier than "A Fairy Tale" or "Natural Acts" which seemed to have been group written by propagandists George W. Bush should have hired—I've never read anything so disgusting about two paragons of virtue that would make Christ step out of the way and let them take over, was called "Adrenaline" in which two gay men (Chip and Dale were more realistic) in an apartment, have such wild screaming joyous sex that the cops are called and they are running for their lives. I just see these writers and other writers now slaving over their Apple or their Mac and writing their hearts out or writing to make a little money at least, for the market, and though writing is a lonely business, it seems more so for the gay writer though even if he has lots of friends and lovers-when the going gets tough, where are these friends and lovers? Ask Google how it was for Lionel Bart. I remember me on that hot summer day at the book store, I, young, thin, long brown to the shoulder hair, bell bottom jeans, paisley shirt, new and fresh to the adult world, eager to go, trying to work up the courage to buy "The Lord Won't Mind" and finally doing so, taking it to my apartment and reading it so hungrily, I remember thinking I had found home. Man, was I ever stupid. But it was lovely while it lasted. It's Autumn almost, the weather even here is getting cooler, and Autumn is Joel forever and a day. And he is my home. And I really don't give a damn if the Lord does mind. Who asked him anyway?