Joy was not just a how-to book, it was also an illustrated work of erotica. It functioned much like a cookbook, pretending to be practical but providing lots of fantasy. The paintings by Michael Leonard and sepia drawings by Julian Graddon are sexy but classy. (The period pastiches by Ian Beck are less successful.) The text, however, includes much valuable information about health, psychology and behavior. There are entries for “Loneliness,” “Guilt,” and “Growing Older,” as well as entries on various sex acts. The book is full of good-humored sanity. The entry on “One-night Stands” advises: “Should one of your friends drop by don’t shoo him out the door or bury your face in your hands and moan. Let them talk together, and if the evening should turn into something social and not sexual, accept it with grace.” Unshockable yet courteous, it sounds a bit like Judith Martin’s Miss Manners, who was also writing at the time. I don’t know who wrote what, but I assume White wrote the detailed how-to descriptions that often become little short stories. The entry on “First Time,” meaning one’s first experience of anal sex, is highly detailed, taking the reader step-by-step to orgasm, then closing with: “At this point neither of you should succumb to sleep or dissolve in idle chatter, but rather he should look you in the eye and tell you how wonderful the experience was for him. You’ll probably find you have all sorts of things you want to tell him.”
It’s a friendly, even sweet picture of gay life, a counterweight to the macho clone culture beginning to be popular. Seventies macho was both a look—mustache, jeans, leather jacket—and an attitude—cool, heartless, virile—that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion. Silverstein and White were not afraid of emotion.
The book still reads as wise and careful. Nowadays a reader will stumble only over the entry on “Promiscuity”:
It is a word that makes little sense in gay life and even straights are tiring of the concept and finding it irrelevant and misleading…. If a gay man is quite unattached, then there’s no harm in his having as much sexual experience as he wants.
Statements like these would be used against the book a few years later. When Joy was published by Crown in 1977, however, White’s only fear was what it would do to his reputation as a serious writer. But he was paid well, and the book sold more copies than anything else he wrote for years to come.
Meanwhile he had begun to write regularly for Christopher Street magazine, introduced to the editor by Patrick Merla. He reviewed art and poetry and brought in a few writers himself, including James Merrill. He was also working on a new novel.
A few years earlier he fell in love with his second actor, Keith McDermott. The boyish McDermott was handsome, smart, funny, self-aware, and serious about his career. He soon appeared on Broadway opposite Richard Burton in Equus. But he wanted White as a friend, not as a lover. White domesticated unrequited love first by sharing an apartment with McDermott, then by bringing his troubled teenage nephew, also named Keith, to New York. Sixteen-year-old Keith Fleming was an unhappy boy with divorced parents. His father sent him to a mental hospital after he ran away from home. His mother, White’s sister, got him released and sent him to New York. Fleming would live with the two gay men for the next nine months until he moved in with a girlfriend.
White further sublimated his love for McDermott by writing a novel about him. His new novel was nothing like his Jim Ruddy book, but wildly experimental and full of hallucinogenic prose. All the metaphors he had repressed for Elena were released in the new work: Nocturnes for the King of Naples.
Nocturnes is a dream novel narrated by a highly fictional version of McDermott speaking to an unidentified “you,” an older man like White, recounting a few gaudy scenes from his life. Some readers love Nocturnes. I don’t. The novel is full of shapely sentences that are pretty enough individually but become absurd when strung together:
No need to tell you that in the midst of my own adventures I would push back the body of the other man until I could see his face; for a moment I’d forgotten who he was. No need to tell you I argued with idiots about Verdi’s place in the history of music. No need to tell you that one day I offered God the same prayer in eight churches.
There are no characters, only presences. There is no plot, only a few bits of story: “I” goes to Rome; he has a lover in the theater who shares his life of pure artifice; he remembers his childhood, which ended when his father left his mother and she committed suicide (gassing herself and the family dog in a car in the garage). He later meets up with his father, now a womanizer and heroin addict. In the last chapter, he learns that “you,” who barely appears in the book, has died of pneumonia. He goes out on a foggy beach and shouts:
“But I have no pity to offer, since I, too, am dying, and someone saw fit to play the same prank on me, imprisoning me within an antiquated tot’s body, lacing me into a straitjacket that holds my arms folded in resignation before the maddening vision of a man or god who has died, gone away or never existed save in the tense opaque presences of those things and people who, by virtue of claiming attention but denying the understanding, of demanding love at the cost of rewarding sympathy, must be addressed as ‘You.’ ”
It’s prose on amphetamines, leaping from one pretty phrase to another until it becomes a knotted jumble.
White hid gay experience inside a Trojan horse of high art in order to smuggle it into the city of literature. As I said, it works for many readers, but for me Nocturnes now reads like a closet novel, its druggy, baroque style a gorgeous closed door. But it seems coy chiefly because of what else was published the year that it appeared.
Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s picked up Nocturnes and scheduled it for publication in 1978. After the success of Joy of Gay Sex, it should have made its author king of the gay cats. But it was upstaged not by one novel but by two: Faggots by Larry Kramer and Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran. And there was a fourth novel that year that would later outshine them all: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin.
One hesitates to use the Latin phrase in this context, but 1978 really was the annus mirabilis of gay fiction.
Larry Kramer was forty-three when he published his first book, older than the other writers, but he already had a full career behind him. A native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Yale, he had worked in the film industry, starting in New York and ending at the Columbia offices in London. On his own he wrote and produced a movie of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1970. (It lost to M*A*S*H.) The successful writer/producer was a pugnacious man with a square jaw, heavy brow, and full head of dark hair. He soon began to lose the hair. He moved to New York, discovered the world of bars and clubs, and wrote a play, The Sissies’ Scrapbook, about four friends at Yale, one of whom is gay. It had a brief run off-Broadway. He next wrote a movie about two brothers going to a disco, one of whom is gay. He couldn’t get it produced. He burned to write about the gay new world he was exploring and decided it’d be easier to do in a novel. He began the story of a year in gay New York; he eventually brought it down to a weekend. Faggots went through four drafts, two of them over a thousand pages each. He sold the book to Random House.
One day at the Midtown YMCA, Kramer ran into a younger friend, Eric Garber, a tall, shy thirty-four-year-old with the posture of an awkward adolescent. Garber had gone to Harvard and was drafted into the army afterward, but went to Germany instead of Vietnam. He started law school but dropped out to join the writing program at Iowa. He published a story, “The Holy Family,” in the New Yorker in 1971 under his real name. Everything else he ever wrote would appear under his nom de plume: Andrew Holleran.
The two men were at the Y presumably to exercise and cruise, but they fell into a conversation about writing. Garber told Kramer that he’d just finished a novel about gay life in New York. Kramer confessed that he’d just finished a novel about the same subject. Kramer then generously suggested Garber send his book to his agents,
Ron Bernstein and Pat Loud. (Loud had become famous a few years earlier when she and her family were the subject of the 1973 documentary An American Family. During the filming, she got a divorce and her son, Lance, came out, the first openly gay man on TV. Pat Loud teamed up with Bernstein and, with her reputation as a gay-friendly mother, they attracted several gay writers as clients.)
Bernstein and Loud liked Garber’s novel and were able to place it with another woman named Pat—Pat Golbitz at William Morrow. At the last minute Garber decided to publish under a pseudonym. He was the only son of upper-middle-class parents who had recently retired to a small town in Florida. “I didn’t care who knew I was gay, but I was afraid if certain people in the town my parents lived in found out that they would hold it over them in some way.” He hadn’t told his parents he was homosexual; he never would explicitly. (He didn’t even tell his mother he was publishing a book.)
And so in the summer of 1978 two very different novels about the same world came out within weeks of each other. The authors not only remained friends, they did a book tour together.
So much has been said about Faggots over the years, especially by its author, that it’s easy to forget what the book is really like. It’s a party novel much as The Boys in the Band is a party play. But the party in Faggots lasts several days, sprawls across Manhattan and Fire Island, and includes hundreds of guests. The gay characters range from a sad schoolteacher to a sadistic movie producer to a manly Winston cigarette model to a giddy sixteen-year-old fresh off the bus from Maryland. At the center is Fred Lemish, a successful screenwriter who wants to make a movie about the wild gay life of the 1970s. He is also pursuing his beloved, Dinky Adams, a characterless beauty who does not believe in monogamy. Kramer weaves this plot and a dozen others into an elaborate Rube Goldberg sex machine. It’s a deliberately cartoony novel that often suggests an animated porn movie full of giant penises and bulbous bottoms. But now and then Fred or another character makes a long speech about how empty and destructive all this sex without love can be.
Faggots is an erotic novel that denounces sex, which is kind of schizophrenic, but sex often turns people nuts. Kramer and his enemies would later claim the book is a uniform denunciation of gay promiscuity, but it actually revels in sexuality. It’s very sexy, which is why gay men continue to read it despite the sermons, repetitions, and frequent bad writing. (Irving Howe once wrote that the cruelest thing one can do to Portnoy’s Complaint is read it twice, a line I often remembered while rereading Faggots.)
But folded inside the clumsy, conflicted novel is a very good novel where the novelist acknowledges that there are no simple choices. Fred famously lectures Dinky on how he must choose love and monogamy, “Before you fuck yourself to death,” a line that was later read as prophetic of AIDS. But Fred gives his speech while Dinky is dressing up in leather for an orgy; Fred is so turned on by the sight that he doubts his own pretty words about marriage. Later, Fred and a hundred other men watch while Dinky is hoisted in a sling and fisted by another resentful lover, Jack Humpstone. Both angry lovers want to see Dinky die. The reader holds his breath, afraid of what might happen. It’s a grotesque but powerful scene, not least because it shows that love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
Dancer from the Dance is much quieter, restrained, and elegiac. It too is a party novel, but one where it’s always after the party. Dancer is an oddly chaste book; there’s constant talk about sex but no actual sex scenes. The title comes from William Butler Yeats, whose work inspired many gay writers. (Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “You were silly like us.”) Dancer is soaked in literary voices: F. Scott Fitzgerald (so strong that readers have referred to it as The Gay Gatsby), Ronald Firbank, Marcel Proust, and a large dollop of Truman Capote. Holleran’s word-painting evokes the New York of the 1970s as strongly as Capote evoked the city of the 1940s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
It got very hot that summer—tremendous heat that made the East Village almost sensual for a spell…. Peaches were ripe in the fruit stall on Second Avenue, the streets south of Astor Place were empty at dusk, and every figure you came upon walking south shimmered for a moment in the distance, then materialized into a group of boys playing ball in a lot littered with broken glass.
But Holleran’s lyricism goes on to add something new:
Even Sutherland, when you ran into him on Fifth Avenue after the office workers had rushed home for a game of tennis before the light had failed, was ecstatic as he stopped to talk after an afternoon in the men’s room at Grand Central, picking the pubic hair from his teeth: “Oh, my dear, there is no other time, no other time at all, but now, when the city is overripe, like a fruit about to drop into your lap, and all the young stockbrokers’ underwear is damp! My dear!”
It’s sensuous, funny, raunchy, sweet, and sad, all at once.
The story could not be simpler. A beautiful young man, Malone, comes to New York, comes out, leaves corporate life, lives with a lover, then leaves him to meet a hundred other men, often as a hustler, attending endless dances and parties before he disappears. Along the way he is advised by a witty older man, Sutherland, who has the best lines in the book. When Malone decides he’s wasting his life and wants to go back to work, Sutherland asks what he will put on his résumé for the past ten years. Malone hesitates. “Looking for love,” he finally says. Sutherland replies:
“Looking for love… No, I don’t think that would get very far with Union Carbide. Or Ogilvy and Mather. Or the Ford Motor people. Looking for love is not one of the standard entries on the resume. You see, you have been writing a journal for the past ten years, and everyone else has been composing a resume. Don’t think you will be forgiven that… After all, the Empire State Building is nothing but a mass of sublimated love.”
Dancer is about looking for love, living for love, but it’s a love story with no love object, no beloved. It’s all longing, all dreams and melancholy. Dancer is a scrapbook of mood pieces that shouldn’t work as a novel, but it does: the moods are so perfectly rendered that they are enough.
Malone’s story is told by a narrator whose exchange of letters with a friend opens and closes the book. They use a variety of camp pseudonyms ranging from the Duc de Saint Simon to Rima the Bird Girl. The framing device was inspired by the playful letters Holleran and another writer, Robert Ferro, wrote to each other after they met at Iowa University. Only at the end does the fictional author use his real name: Paul. With Andrew Holleran we find pseudonyms behind pseudonyms, masks behind masks. It gave him the anonymity he needed to protect a very delicate, finely tuned sensibility.
Christopher Street featured Dancer on its July 1978 cover and called it “the gay novel of the year.” It began to sell immediately. Soon it was being cited in the gay press as the “good gay novel” against the “bad gay novel,” Faggots by Larry Kramer. There were reviews of both books in the Advocate, Fag Rag, the Body Politic (by George Whitmore, who said Faggots should be burned), and Gay Community News.
Despite the attacks, Faggots sold very well: 40,000 in hardcover and 300,000 in paper. And why shouldn’t it be successful? It gave gay readers the opportunity to feel morally superior to men who got laid more often than they did and to jerk off. But Dancer sold equally well. More interesting, both books succeeded with almost no help from the mainstream. It took several months for general reviewers to catch up. John Lahr reviewed the two books together in the New York Times Book Review in January 1979 under the title “Camp Tales.” He loved Dancer, praising the language and calling Malone “a mercurial and strangely moral figure.” He hated Faggots. “Here are characters like Randy Dildough, Blaze Sorority, Boo Boo Bronstein, Jack Humpstone, Nicolo Loosh presented in a jocular, baroque style which is, sentence by sentence, some of the worst writing I’ve encountered in a published manuscript…. Mr. Kramer wants the book to be a rambunctious farce, but his frivolity isn’t earned and so it beco
mes an embarrassing fiasco.”
Yet literary quality was only part of the problem for gay readers. It was Kramer’s picture of liberated life that they rejected. But as Holleran himself later pointed out, his own picture in Dancer is as dark in its way as Kramer’s: love between two men is beautiful but impossible. White’s vision in Nocturnes is sad as well. If Faggots hadn’t existed to serve as a lightning rod, Holleran and White might also have been attacked for being grim and negative.
The reviewer at Harper’s hated all three books. It had been nine years since the GAA zap and Midge Decter was gone—she felt the magazine had become too liberal—but the publication remained unfriendly. Somebody named Jeffrey Burke tore apart a half dozen gay titles in a single sneering review: Faggots, Dancer, and Nocturnes were beaten up along with Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach, Wild Man by Tobias Schneebaum, and Dress Grey, a West Point murder mystery written by a straight man, Lucian Truscott (who had covered the Stonewall riots for the Village Voice). These are very different titles with only one thing in common: “Six books by, about, or for homosexuals appear in as many months. To the rattling sound of typewriters racing and presses rolling is added the ringing of the register. And more often than not, art is shortchanged.” It was ten years after Stonewall, but in the eyes of Harper’s, the new books were being written much too quickly. At least the magazine was paying enough attention, however, to notice a new development in contemporary literature.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 22