Who really gives a damn that Tennessee Williams has finally admitted his sexual preferences in print? He has yet to contribute any work of understanding to gay theater, and with his enormous talent one of his works would indeed be worth any amount of personal data. And several others of his generation of writers, as well as some younger ones, all of them gay, have failed to come forth with anything, under any name, that would make a valid case for the homosexual in society.
Williams read the piece (he even saw Nightride) and responded in an interview in the Village Voice with gay journalist Arthur Bell: “I feel sorry for the author. He makes the mistake of thinking I’ve concealed something in my life [but] he writes under a pseudonym. I’ve nothing to conceal. Homosexuality isn’t the theme of my plays. They’re all about human relationships. I’ve never faked it.”
“Lee Barton” wasn’t the only young gay writer attacking the man who was arguably America’s greatest living playwright. Michael Silverstein in “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams” in Gay Sunshine declared, “You helped me free myself but I can see that you are not free.”
Williams’s next work was Small Craft Warnings, a bar play about a crew of wounded souls, one of whom is gay. The straight men and women are just as crippled as the gay man, Quentin, a screenwriter. When the play opened in March 1972, it received better reviews than Williams had gotten in years, but most critics focused on Quentin, treating the work as Williams’s own personal Boys in the Band. His sexuality had upstaged everything else.
Christopher Isherwood remained fully awake and engaged with the world. He was still experiencing the usual ups and downs of life with his boyfriend, Don Bachardy. (Bachardy had a new outside boyfriend while Isherwood didn’t, and Bachardy’s new boyfriend was an old friend of Isherwood’s.) He was still writing, of course. Back in 1967 he had published A Meeting by the River, a very fine, concise little novel about two English brothers who meet in a Hindu monastery outside Calcutta. The younger brother has decided to become a monk. The older, more worldly brother (who has a wife and a boyfriend) hopes to change his younger brother’s mind. The novel is written entirely in letters and journal entries (it might be too concise). Reviewers didn’t know what to make of the book, especially its spirituality. As usual, they wished the author were still writing about Berlin.
Bachardy suggested turning the novel into a play, which the two men did together, the first of many collaborations. The play was produced in both Los Angeles and New York but was not a complete success. Several screenplays followed, however, including a TV movie, Frankenstein: The True Story. The pair enjoyed working together. They would discuss a project at length before putting words on paper, Isherwood dictating and Bachardy typing. They still argued about extracurricular romances, but more quietly now.
On his own, Isherwood read his parents’ diaries, hoping to make peace with his recently deceased mother and to know his father, who had died when Isherwood was still a boy. The results, Kathleen and Frank, appeared in 1971 and it’s an odd book, raw yet dry, personal yet impersonal. This upper-class Englishman and Englishwoman of another era can never be as real to us as they were to their son. But the book gave Isherwood a new device, the double persona of talking about himself in the past as “Christopher” while keeping “I” for his present-day self. He used the device again after he read his own diaries and needed to reconstruct the missing volumes for his first years in California. This diarylike memoir was too rough and libelous for him to publish at the time—it did not appear until after his death as Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951. But he was already thinking about a new project.
Then in 1972 the movie of the musical Cabaret opened. Isherwood’s feelings about the movie were almost as mixed as his feelings about the stage musical, although he was pleased his character was played by Michael York, a handsome actor with a honeyed voice a good octave lower than his own. The character was no longer straight, but Isherwood felt his homosexuality was treated as “a ridiculous weakness… like bedwetting.” For gay men of my generation, however, the movie was a revelation. In our eyes the hero was clearly a gay man who almost makes the terrible mistake of marrying his female best friend. The two friends are both sleeping with the same man, which is revealed in a famous exchange. “Screw Max!” declares York. “I do,” replies Liza Minnelli. York smiles bitterly and says, “So do I.” The sexual triangle was the invention of screenwriter Jay Presson Allen and might be truer to the time the movie was made than to the time of the stories. Nevertheless, the film introduced a whole new audience to Isherwood and sent many of us to his other books. A recently discharged navy officer who had served in Vietnam, Armistead Maupin, was still coming to terms with his sexuality when he first saw the movie. He was so taken by it that he hunted down every book he could find written by Isherwood.
Gore Vidal was spending less and less time in the United States. He sold Edgewater and bought La Rondinaia (“The Swallow’s Nest”), a cliffside villa in Ravello, Italy, with Howard Austen in 1971. There he began work on a novel about that great sinister figure of American history, Aaron Burr. In the years ahead, he concentrated on historical fiction with almost no mention of homosexuality—it had hurt the sales of his last book, Two Sisters, a metafictional mix of fiction, memoir, and screenplay. Yet he was happy to talk about gay sex in his essays and interviews, including interviews with gay magazines. He spoke at length with John Mitzel and Steve Abbott for the Fag Rag in 1973, but afterward wrote a friend, “I never do see much point in fag-mags—at least for those of us who can write elsewhere and say the same sort of thing. It is the dream of all these papers that the L.A. Chief of Police will become addicted to their style and, finally, like St. P[aul] realize with a sudden blaze that FAGS are not only good but BETTER!”
Vidal published Burr in 1973, and it was a huge success with both critics and readers. I think it’s his best novel. Although there’s nothing gay in it (except for the sodomite based on William F. Buckley), the book plays to all of Vidal’s strengths. Burr is a witty, know-it-all cynic who sees through everyone, a perfect role for Vidal, a fantasy self-portrait. “Fortunately our people have always preferred legend to reality—as I know best of all, having become one of the dark legends of the republic, and hardly real.” Burr tells his life story to the other protagonist, a young journalist, Charlie Schuyler, who is writing the old man’s biography—Charlie suggests a Vidal-in-training. These two first-person narratives extend and complete each other. The “present” of 1833 New York is beautifully drawn, the “past” of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton is lively and prejudiced, and the book has no love stories, always a stumbling block for Vidal. Burr succeeds more as spectacle than as drama, but it is vivid, imaginative, intelligent, and entertaining.
In 1975 Tennessee Williams published his Memoirs and Vidal reviewed it in the New York Review of Books. “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self” is one of his best essays, a rich appreciation of both the man and his work. He genuinely likes Williams, warts and all—“the Glorious Bird” was his private nickname for Williams—and the essay shows a more human side of Vidal. It also includes a wonderfully matter-of-fact portrait of postwar gay life, with glimpses of Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jean Cocteau, and a devastating cameo of Truman Capote as a pest and pathological liar. Williams wrote his sinister soul sister, Maria St. Just, “Gore has written a hilarious review of Memoirs which will sell many copies—it’s been gradually creeping up the bestseller list!!”
Memoirs itself is a loose, genial jumble of unreliable memories and anecdotes. No matter how drunk or trashed Williams had been, he could still type out a lively sentence. The book is entertaining without being especially personal or revealing. Critics were disappointed that there was more about Williams’s sex life than about his plays, but he had never been very articulate about his craft. The feelings of gay readers were more positive: they enjoyed the sexual openness and many wrote fan letters. Some who knew him only as the author of
Streetcar even praised him as a role model.
Nineteen seventy-five was also the year that Truman Capote published in Esquire three chapters of his unfinished novel. He had been talking about Answered Prayers for ten years now; he wanted to prove to the public—and to himself—that it existed. Instead he lost friends and destroyed his literary reputation.
The most famous chapter is “La Cote Basque,” a polyphonic portrait of society ladies sharing gossip in an exclusive New York restaurant. It is mean but lively. The other chapters are only mean and tedious. Narrated by P. B. Jones, a Capote-like writer who supports himself as a masseur and call boy, the book is a pornographic fantasy on literary and society life, but written by someone who’s come to hate sex. It’s mean, joyless porn. The longest chapter, “Unspoiled Monster,” contains Capote’s most overtly gay writing, but also his worst. He seems determined to compete with his gay peers, but he does it very badly. The self-mocking literary voice is a tired imitation of Myra Breckinridge. A long episode about Denham Fouts identifies the famous kept boy as a character in Down There on a Visit, as if Capote hoped to steal him from Isherwood—but Capote’s Fouts is just a nasty pricktease, with none of the comedy or mystery of Paul in Down There. (Like Isherwood, Capote shows him dying of his cure for opium addiction, but adds the ugly touch of dying while sitting on a toilet.) The strangest act of one-upmanship comes when Jones goes to the Plaza to service a famous playwright called Mr. Wallace, “a chunky, paunchy, booze-puffed runt with a play mustache glued above laconic lips.” He is Tennessee Williams, of course, right down to the recent bad reviews and the dead boyfriend. His hotel room stinks of dog shit. Jones must take the bulldog out for a walk before he undresses for his client. Mr. Wallace would rather talk than fuck. Capote gives a very broad caricature, but a moment of truth breaks through after a long monologue by the playwright, who says he’s dying. He feels Jones is lying to himself:
No, what I thought was: here’s a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total strangers. Strangers because he has no friends, and he has no friends because the only people he pities are his own characters and himself—everyone else is an audience.
Capote could just as easily have been talking about Capote, except he no longer had pity for his characters.
Answered Prayers is a shocking work, not for the secrets it betrays, but for how coarse and unimaginative it is. (“La Cote Basque” lost Capote the friendship of his society lady “swans,” including Babe Paley, whose husband, William Paley, was rumored to be the hapless adulterer who frantically washes menstrual blood from his sheets before his wife gets home.) Now and then Capote’s old rhythms show in the prose, but the writing offers few pleasures or surprises. It’s hard to believe that the gifted author of Other Voices and In Cold Blood could produce something so mechanical and trashy. It’s even harder to believe he spent ten years working on it, but he probably didn’t. Donald Windham was housesitting in Capote’s UN Plaza apartment in 1970 when he stumbled on the manuscript of “Unspoiled Monsters” in Jack Dunphy’s desk. He read it, of course, and was appalled. He thought it might be a joke, a parody of Jacqueline Susann, until it appeared unaltered in Esquire five years later.
Capote was completely lost in his own dream world now, full of his own “half-believed lies” served to strangers. In an interview in 1975 with Playgirl, Playboy’s poor cousin, he told a false story about Gore Vidal being expelled from the White House by Bobby Kennedy and historian Arthur Schlesinger for insulting Jackie Kennedy’s mother. (He claimed they “just picked Gore up and carried him to the door and threw him out into Pennsylvania Avenue.”) This time Vidal did not retaliate with cutting jokes. This time he sued. He demanded a million dollars, money he knew Capote didn’t have. The case went on for eight long years.
The dinosaurs were taking each other to court. Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits take the place of sex. When Donald Windham published a book of the letters Tennessee Williams had written him in the 1940s and 1950s, a collection that captures Williams at his sanest and most charming, Williams sued Windham, despite a signed agreement.
In 1976, a young gay writer, George Whitmore, interviewed Williams at the Hotel Elysée in New York for the Gay Sunshine Journal. Williams was quite drunk. He clung to the arms of his chair and ranted at length about the Jewish critics who tried to destroy his career. Afterward Whitmore went straight to his friend, playwright Victor Bumbalo, laughing in horror over meeting his hero. Whitmore edited out everything anti-Semitic or insane when he wrote up the interview.
Meanwhile the gay press continued to grow. In 1974 an ambitious gay businessman, David Goodstein, bought the Advocate, moved it from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and changed it from a newspaper to a magazine. More important, he shifted its emphasis from politics to culture, which meant sex and consumerism, but it also meant literature. Gay writers began to appear on the covers—few other public figures were willing to risk the exposure. Within two years, its annual circulation had risen to 60,000 (compared to ONE’s 2,300 ten years earlier). A survey in 1975 estimated that there were approximately 300 different gay publications in the United States, including skin magazines, with a total circulation of 200,000.
In 1976, a new monthly magazine started up, Christopher Street. Named after the main gay thoroughfare in Greenwich Village, it was based in New York but distributed nationally. It was devoted to culture and politics and hoped to become the gay New Yorker. The publisher and editor, Charles Ortleb, was a young copywriter from New Jersey who had gone to college in Kansas. He was helped by a handful of gay journalists and editors, including Arthur Bell, Michael Denneny, and Patrick Merla. They took over the recently vacated basement offices of the New York Review of Books on West Thirteenth Street and put out their first issue in July 1976—with a picture of an empty closet on the cover. Denneny, who was a book editor at St. Martin’s Press, later said that they assumed gay writers would have drawers full of unpublished work. In fact, it soon became clear that most gay work wasn’t written until there was a place to print it. In early issues writers wrote extra pieces under pseudonyms to suggest a bigger cast of contributors. Ortleb worked with the art director Rick Fiala to create New Yorker–like cartoons, and Fiala too used different pseudonyms, despite his recognizable line and eternally cheerful figures. One early Fiala cartoon showed a gay man happily telling friends, “If you ask me, I think we had more fun when it was unnatural.”
The magazine was originally for both gay men and lesbians. But the women dropped out and Christopher Street became primarily male within two years. Something similar had happened in Boston when Lavender Visions divided in 1971, with the men splitting off to create Fag Rag. The readerships and agendas were different, but in the beginning, at least, men and women tried to work together. (The first gay male best seller of this period was the 1974 novel The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, an editor at Reader’s Digest who had divorced her husband and come out as a lesbian only a year before.)
At the same time the gay bookstore movement begun by Craig Rodwell was taking off. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop moved to Christopher Street in 1970, its new location only a block from the site of the Stonewall Inn. Glad Day opened in Toronto in 1971, named after the William Blake engraving; a second Glad Day came to Boston in 1977. Giovanni’s Room opened in Philadelphia in 1973, named after the Baldwin novel because the owners wanted something to signal the store was gay without being too obvious. (They thought “City of Night” sounded like an adult bookstore and “The Well of Loneliness” too depressing.) These stores were joined by Lambda Rising in 1974 in Washington, D.C., then A Brother’s Touch in Minneapolis, A Different Light in San Francisco, and others.
A mix of market and community was coming together, creating an audience for the books and plays of the next thirty years. This audience was as necessary to the new work as the writers who produced it—maybe even more neces
sary.
The cover of the December 1976 issue of Christopher Street featured a picture of Christopher Isherwood drawn by Don Bachardy. Inside was an excerpt from a new book, Christopher and His Kind.
Reviewers who wished Isherwood were still writing about Berlin finally got their wish, only this wasn’t the Berlin they had wanted. Isherwood announces on the first page that his new book is going to be “as frank and factual as I can make it.” On the second page he famously declares: “For Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.”
Christopher and His Kind is Isherwood’s wonderfully frank, brisk, clear-eyed memoir of his life from his first visit to Berlin in 1929 to 1939, when he came to America. The book is as straightforward about art and politics as it is about sex. It is built out of memories and documents, particularly Isherwood’s fiction, letters, and diaries, but also the letters and diaries of others, including his mother. The double persona of “I” and “Christopher” developed in Kathleen and Frank enables Isherwood to step back and forth nimbly between past and present, as well as acknowledge that a person changes with time: the self that experiences life isn’t always the self that understands it.
The book contains an amazing cast of characters, a vivid collection of people observed by a man who is genuinely curious about others. The portraits include his family, famous friends (W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender), the models for his characters (Jean Ross of “Sally Bowles,” Gerald Hamilton of Mr. Norris, Bertold and Salka Viertel of Prater Violet), and his three German boyfriends (“Bubi,” “Otto,” and most importantly, Heinz Neddermeyer). Isherwood includes himself, too, portrayed more critically than the others yet also with sympathy and humor.
The years are covered in a loose, fast-paced picaresque that builds to a major crisis. After Christopher leaves Germany with Heinz, Hitler comes to power and Heinz becomes a man without a country. Barred from England as an illegal alien, Heinz goes with Christopher first to Greece, then the Canary Islands, Portugal, Denmark, and Holland. Christopher does everything he can to get Heinz a Mexican visa. He is in England when Heinz is expelled from France. They reunite in Luxembourg, but their lawyer cannot get his visa renewed without Heinz returning to Germany. He does so and is promptly arrested for draft evasion. He is tried and sentenced to prison and military service. Christopher does what he can from England, but he is helpless. He feels totally devastated afterward. He quotes from his own diary:
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 19