Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  The friends met four times in the spring of 1980 and twice in July out on Fire Island. There were no meetings that fall or winter, but, in October, Holleran, Picano, White, and Whitmore all appeared in a hardcover anthology of stories from Christopher Street magazine, Aphrodisiac: Fiction from Christopher Street. (The title story, featured only because it made a catchy title, was by a young writer who’d recently moved to New York from Virginia, Christopher Bram.) At the end of the winter, Whitmore irritably quit, angry over criticism from Ferro. There were two more meetings in March 1981, the second attended by film scholar Vito Russo, who read from his work-in-progress, The Celluloid Closet. That was the last meeting of the Violet Quill. Most of the writers remained friends and continued to share help and advice (and review and blurb each other’s books), but they had met officially only eight times over the course of a year.

  Back in November 1980, the SoHo Weekly News published a cover story, “Fag Lit’s New Royalty.” The article inside was titled, “A Movable Brunch—the Fag Lit Mafia” and was written by Australian gay writer Dennis Altman. This bitchery was the first bit of fame for the group. But people didn’t talk about the Violet Quill again until after the AIDS epidemic killed over half its members.

  It is sometimes claimed that the Violet Quill as a group created the new gay literature. I don’t see that. The group was simply a brief bonding of like-minded friends—and they were hardly the only game in gay books at the time. Their most important members, White and Holleran, had voices and careers completely independent of the others. Holleran later wrote a fine essay about Robert Ferro after Ferro’s death, where he downplayed the Violet Quill and called it a “dessert-and-short-story” club. White in his memoirs and autobiographical fiction never mentions the group at all.

  More important, I’m not convinced their work marks a real break with what was written before Stonewall. The old novels offered mostly pictures of unhappy homosexuals: The City and the Pillar, Other Voices, Giovanni’s Room, even A Single Man. And so did the first novels by the Violet Quill writers. And why shouldn’t they? The scars were deep, and liberation could work its benefits only slowly. As was said earlier, Nocturnes and Dancer are as sad in their way as Faggots. It’s not that literature needs to be sunny. How many heterosexual classics end happily? But in the old style—and Holleran would remain locked in the old style—homosexuals are always unhappier than heterosexuals, and they’re unhappier because they’re homosexual. In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

  Shortly before the first meeting of the Violet Quill, Edmund White published a new book that won him the wider audience he had missed with Nocturnes. It was, of all things, a travel book.

  States of Desire: Travels in Gay America was the brainchild of Charles Ortleb at Christopher Street. He thought the time was right for a full-scale portrait of gay life, not just in New York and San Francisco, but the entire country. He felt White was the man to do it. He pitched the idea to the novelist, who pitched it to editor Bill Whitehead at Dutton. Whitehead could pay an advance of only $15,000. White needed another $5,000 to fund his travels. Ortleb paid the difference, in exchange for four chapters to be serialized in the magazine.

  White needed to do the book quickly and cheaply. This meant making short, concentrated visits in different cities, where he saw old friends and made new ones. Many of his contacts were sexual—men met in bars or at the baths. In some ways the book is a continuation of The Joy of Gay Sex, but with White’s mind roaming outside of beds to explore whole communities and cities. He downplays his sexual activities, but they inform his meetings and conversations with a friendly, frisky energy. The book might begin in sex, but it looks out at class, politics, race, and the many different ways that all Americans live their lives.

  States is an exuberant, freewheeling book, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of travel writing freeing the author to change topics frequently, leaping from places to people to ideas. The book is full of miniature essays about hedonism, work, religion, friendship, art, socialism, and happiness. Years of theories and observations squirreled away while White made “art” were put to use. Reality worked wonders for his prose. Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock), he no longer hid in baroque metaphor but returned to the clearer, more direct style of his unpublished fiction. The book is full of wonderful observations expressed in smart sentences:

  So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or automobile windshield) that direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.

  A dazzling two-page account of the semiotics of cars in Los Angeles builds to a damning joke:

  Jeeps—elaborately painted, crested by a golden eagle and lined with coordinated seats and wheel covers—also spell M-A-C-H-O, a condition that only gay men and a few suburban straights in Akron still aspire to.

  The book includes a vast variety of men in different worlds: from publisher David Goodstein lounging naked in his heated swimming pool and holding forth on est; to a tall, shy, handsome businessman who’s succeeded in the lumber industry in Portland, Oregon; to a pack of unhappy young queens trapped in Memphis. White visits the black gay community in Atlanta, the radical political community in Boston, and the many gay communities in Texas, including a bar full of gay cowboys:

  When a city slicker has a jerk-off fantasy about cowboys, he usually forgets their true distinguishing marks—the air of detachment and the polite old-fashioned decorum. He ignores the fact that cowboys are low in perceived status, suspicious of outsiders, grave, insecure, a bit touching—and quite conventional about sex (they would be appalled by rough stuff, for instance).

  The book returns to New York, where White analyzes ideas about gay sensibility, art, and media. He includes an extended, brilliant riff on the varieties of New York gay men as defined by the neighborhoods where they live:

  Greenwich Village is the gay ghetto, though in a city where one out of every four men is homosexual the term doesn’t mean much. The gay Villager can be a well-heeled executive who works midtown…. Or he can be an actor-waiter-singer-dancer-pusher-hustler in a dismal room in a tenement filled with Italian families; he was originally attracted to the Village when he arrived in New York ten years ago by its artistic associations; he stayed for the sex. This is the world of freelancers, those gay men who can arrange their hours to suit themselves, who piece together a day out of two hours of clerking at a boutique, three hours researching a history of magic and eleven hours of loafing.

  It’s very tongue-in-cheek and nobody should take it literally. Yet it’s impressive how much truth White captures with his jokes. A playful satire, States makes fun of both straight and gay life. Like most satire, it exaggerates for effect. Yet a basic decency and sanity always shines through.

  A travel book can be all voice and no story, a grab bag of data strung upon an itinerary. States belongs to a literary tradition that extends from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. It remains for many people their favorite book by White. It still gives pleasure, and not simply as history. (Yet it’s fascinating to see how much has changed in thirty years. Casual sex was more casual then, but over two-thirds of the men White meets require pseudonyms: “let’s call him Bill.” Even the appliances are different. White excitedly reports that wealthy David Goodstein owns a refrigerator with an ice cube dispenser in the door!)

  States of Desire was published in January 1980 and dedicated to Patrick Merla. It received much attention from the mainstream, for good and ill. Two reviews, one by Paul Cowan in the New York Times Book Review, one by John Leonard in the daily Times, make an interesting study in contrasts. Leonard felt he was visiting a strange new world and he wasn’t comfortable, but he was fascinated. He loved the prose. Cowan, on the other hand, despised everything about the book, including the writing. He called it dishonest and misleading because it wasn’t a complete picture of gay America:
it didn’t include any nice homosexuals, only rich ones who wanted to have sex with each other. (He must have skipped the pages about community service in Los Angeles, prison work in Utah, and political activism in D.C. and Boston.) He and Leonard were both startled by the phrase “filthy breeders,” said not by White but by an unhappy man stranded in the boondocks. Cowan and Leonard were two straight white guys who had never been treated as Other. But Leonard accepted the phrase as a bitter joke and enjoyed it, even played with it. Cowan was outraged that White could even quote it. Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?

  States established White as the voice of the new gay generation. He was regularly invited to write articles on gay life for various publications—he did a fine essay on gay words for an anthology, The State of the Language—and to review and interview the older generation. He wrote about Christopher Isherwood and William Burroughs for the Times. He met and interviewed Truman Capote for After Dark.

  It was a promising encounter, like the passing of a baton in a relay race, even if Capote and White ran in slightly different races. Capote had finally overcome the disaster of Answered Prayers and finished a new book in 1980, a collection of short pieces, Music for Chameleons. White visited him in his U.N. Plaza apartment, bringing photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to take pictures. White was surprised Capote showed no interest in the sexy Mapplethorpe or his sexy assistant. Capote was distracted and depressed throughout the interview, making repeated trips to the next room for sips or hits of something. He came to life only when White mentioned his nasty portrait of Tennessee Williams in “Unspoiled Monsters.” Capote laughed loudly and said he and Williams had known each other a thousand years and were friends again. Mapplethorpe took a photo of the two writers together, White looking happy and confident, Capote barefoot and weary. The picture represents a changing of the guard, the old giving way to the young, and it’s not a pretty image. White reports that when he left, Capote “gave me a cheek to peck, a purely routine gesture, as though we were Gabor sisters air-kissing each other for the benefit of the camera. ‘Well,’ he told me, ‘you’ll write some wonderful books, I’m sure, but believe me…’ He took off his glasses and stared at me. ‘It’s a horrible life.’ ”

  Each time gay people made themselves more visible in print or public life, a social critic felt obligated to respond. In September 1980 the response came in an essay by Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach.” It had been ten years since the GAA liberated her offices at Harper’s. She was not happy with the new age and had already written extended criticisms of other groups: feminists, liberal parents, the radical young. She now took aim at a new target.

  She opens by expressing surprise that homosexuals could claim they were discriminated against. After all, she knew homosexuals intimately from years ago when she and her husband, Norman Podhoretz, spent summers in the Pines on Fire Island. Homosexuals there weren’t oppressed. In fact, they were the oppressors, making straight people feel bad with their well-kept bodies: “a never-ending spectacle, zealously and ruthlessly monitored, of tender adolescence… an insistent reminder of the ravages to [our] own persons wrought by an ordinary heterosexual existence.” (This was before gym culture caught on for straight people, too, and they could blame fat on being moral and married.) Even worse than the bodies were the jokes: “I am referring here to the manner of speech, gesture, and home decoration known as ‘camp’… entirely a homosexual creation, a brilliant expression of homosexual aggression against the heterosexual world.”

  Gay people couldn’t possibly suffer from discrimination, she insists, since they went into fields dominated by other homosexuals, such as interior decorating and theater. She claims they rarely become lawyers or doctors. She admits that many school teachers are homosexual, but thinks their only restriction is that they must be discreet. She apparently didn’t know that teachers were still regularly fired when arrested on gay misdemeanor charges well into the next decade. She apparently didn’t ask or look around enough to see that there were millions of homosexuals outside the “soft professions.” She never mentions that gay people existed outside New York and San Francisco.

  Halfway through the essay (and it’s a very long essay), Decter abruptly announces that she’s been talking about the good old days and that these were the homosexuals she liked. Now she’s going to talk about the new activist homosexuals, whom she can’t stand. She unhappily recalls the zap at Harper’s: “They arrived with the inevitable platoon of TV cameras and reporters and, having had their moment in the sun of media, settled down for a rather rude daylong visit.” She complains about their clothes, “the drab and unprepossessing appearance of the demonstrators; no gathering of homosexuals I had ever seen had been so without dash or high taste.” She doesn’t like their politics, either, and she despises their new literature “devoted to photographic genuflection before the altar of Phallus… Homosexuality, like negritude and womanhood, had become a small ‘market.’ ” (Negritude? It’s the name of a literary movement of French African writers in the 1930s, but I don’t think it’s what Decter had in mind.) She finds one exception, however, in States of Desire, which she likes. She calls White “a gifted and cultivated writer, far more suitably and recognizably a representative of the kind of homosexuals who were my neighbors in the Pines.”

  I suspect States inspired her to write her own essay on gay culture, but it’s hard to believe she read the book carefully: so much of it contradicts her arguments. However, she did notice White’s mention of frequent sex, and she was appalled. She goes on at length about S&M, fisting, leather, the new movie Cruising, and transsexual surgery—all of which she believes are an expression of a homosexual death wish. She even argues that the high rate of gay suicide, which the GAA first told her about, is caused not by oppression but by this death wish. She goes on to blame everything—death wish, promiscuity, bad haircuts—on the gay rights movement. Before gay rights, homosexuals not only dressed better, they didn’t think they were oppressed. According to Decter, they didn’t even know homosexuality was an option.

  This long, wild piece appeared in Commentary, which was edited by her husband. I discuss it at length only because it shows what some members of the so-called thinking class could still think about gay people in 1980—and because it irritated Gore Vidal into writing one of his most powerful essays, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star.”

  Vidal had found a new career as a historical novelist. He followed Burr with another novel in 1976, 1876, a counter-Bicentennial novel about the corruption and racism of a hundred years earlier and, by implication, the present. The book put him on the cover of Time. He next wrote a novel about religion, Creation, set in Persia in the fifth century B.C. He didn’t write gay novels anymore, but he still had his principles and his temper. Ronald Reagan soundly defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980 and the Reagan Revolution began. The Christian conservatives were on the rise, supported by Jewish neoconservatives like the Podhoretzes. An editor at the New York Review of Books showed Vidal the Decter essay, thinking it would interest him. It moved him to scorn and fury.

  “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” displays Vidal at his most brutally comic. He has much fun at the expense of Decter’s pseudosociological observations. After quoting her puzzlement over why Fire Island lesbians are always accompanied by “large and ferocious dogs,” Vidal comments, “Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto.” Vidal actually succeeds in making sense out of her cockamamie death wish theory: homosexuality is so “hateful”—her word—that homosexuals want to obliterate themselves, either literally or figuratively. But as Vidal points out, she also believes this is a life they’ve idly chosen. He describes her view as “a world of perfect illogic.”

  He counters Decter’s catalog of types and stereotypes with a recent French memoir, Tricks by Renaud Camus, a matter-of-fact diary
of one-night stands that dissolves all generalizations about the kinds of men who enjoy sex with other men. Vidal avoids identity names like “gay” and “homosexual” and uses his own: “homosexualists” and “same-sexers.” But the boldest device in the essay, and what got Vidal into trouble with some readers, was his comparison of same-sexers with Jews. It’s a running theme throughout the piece and he announces it early in a powerful paragraph. He believes they have much in common and should band together. After all, the Nazis sent both to concentration camps, where the Jews wore yellow stars and the “homosexualists” wore pink triangles.

  I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. “After all,” said Isherwood. “Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.” The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. “What are you?” asked Isherwood. “In real estate?”

  The New York Review of Books insisted he cut this paragraph. Vidal refused. He gave the essay instead to the Nation, whose Jewish editor Victor Navasky was happy to run it as is. It appeared in November 1981 under the confrontational title “Some Jews and the Gays.” The title was changed when the essay was reprinted in a book, the new title emphasizing the shared oppression of the two minorities. “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” has been regularly quoted ever since it appeared, mostly its jokes but also its ideas.