All in all, it was a lively hour of television. One would think that Rose or another talk show host would be eager to repeat it. But nobody ever did, not to my knowledge. It was the exception that proved the rule. Anyone who wanted to hear discussions of gay issues remained dependent on books and magazines.
Minkowitz continued to write smart journalism for the Voice and a new monthly magazine, Out. Bawer left the United States to live in northern Europe, attracted by the culture and finding a whole new career attacking liberal Europeans for being too tolerant of Muslim immigrants. Sullivan left the New Republic after announcing he had AIDS, but he continued to write about politics and gay issues in books and magazines. A ceaseless pump of opinions, he became a pioneer in the new field of blogging. In the months leading up to the broadcast of Angels on HBO, he resumed his war against the play. He blogged about it often, calling it “a pretentious left-wing screed,” gloating over its ratings (“only” 4.2 million viewers), quoting any negative review he could find, yet still never making clear exactly why he hated it so much.
Kushner enjoyed his success even though it made his life more frantic. His father finally came around, admitting he was proud to have Tchaikovsky for a son. He continued to write. Angels was a hard act to follow and Kushner knew it. He did a follow-up in 1994, Slavs, about the collapse of the Soviet Union, using ideas developed for Perestroika. He began another epic drama, Henry Box Brown or The Mirror of Slavery, about an African-American theater troupe touring England during the American Civil War, but he put it aside after a workshop production in London. In 2000 he began work on a semiautobiographical novel of ideas, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures—the title is another riff on Shaw: his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Kushner never finished the novel but ten years later gave the title to a new play about a dysfunctional political family in Brooklyn, a sort of Heartbreak House of the American left. (The play has been produced but is still a work in progress, and it’s too soon to say if it succeeds or not.) He produced nothing gay between Angels and Guide. I may be wrong, but I feel his writing has suffered as a result. His play Homebody/Kabul and his opera Caroline, or Change have their pleasures, but they don’t electrify and illuminate the way that Angels does.
Kushner is a luftmensch, a man of air and ideas, an abstract thinker who does his strongest dramatic work when he uses gay bodies. He writes about all bodies, of course, but gay bodies best enable him to divide his mind into conversing components. They also move him to poetry, feed his sense of humor, and bring out his sensual side. When he taps into his sexuality, he is like Antaeas touching the earth and gaining strength. Without it, he is all mind like a watch, as his hero Herman Melville said of God.
By writing about gay men he ultimately writes about everyone. Sometimes silence is good for a gay artist (Albee, perhaps), but I don’t think it is for Kushner. When he suppresses his gay self, he can’t help but suppress other selves. Releasing it releases the others. A wonderful example of this is the epilogue of Angels.
Prior returns from his dream of heaven ready to die, but then he lives. Four years after his dream, in 1990, he joins his friends at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. (His survival seems more plausible now than it did when the play first opened.) He talks to the audience about his friends and their lives. He closes by addressing the audience first as a gay man:
We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.
Then he addresses them in a more inclusive voice:
Bye now.
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
And I bless you: More Life.
The Great Work Begins.
Releasing the gay self releases other selves, including an all-encompassing, universal self. But as Prior says, there is no final, simple answer. The work can only continue.
20. Rising Tide
In the world of books, gay novels continued to appear in record numbers. They were not always reviewed or recognized by the literary mainstream (Joe Keenan joked that “the mainstream” sounded like “something Republicans pee in”), but queer literature had developed its own support system.
A new magazine, Lambda Rising Book Report, was founded in 1987 by Lambda Rising Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Almost entirely book reviews, it began as a quarterly, became a bimonthly, then a monthly—there were now so many books that editor Jim Marks had no trouble filling its pages. In 1989, the magazine initiated a set of annual literary prizes, the Lambda Book Awards.
In New York, a group of editors and writers started a new organization, the Publishing Triangle, to promote gay and lesbian books. They held their first meetings in a conference room at St. Martin’s Press in the Flatiron Building. The Triangle not only provided publicity and networking, they administered additional awards. The Ferro-Grumley Prize for gay and lesbian fiction was created in the name of Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley with money left in their wills for that purpose. There was the Robert Chesley Award for Playwriting. The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement was established in the name of the editor, who died of AIDS in 1987. The award alternated between men and women: the first was given in 1989 to Edmund White, who had worked with Whitehead; the second, the following year, was given to poet/essayist Audre Lorde.
During its first decade, the Triangle presented its awards at the Lambda Book Award dinners, which were held during the annual American Booksellers Association convention. Whatever city was the site of the ABA each year—Los Angeles, Chicago, even Las Vegas—found itself inundated with openly gay and lesbian authors and editors. Their presence was undeniable.
Another important public event was the annual OutWrite literary conference, begun in 1990 by Out/look magazine. Intended initially as an occasion for writer workshops, these weekend festivals became celebrations of gay and lesbian literature. The first two OutWrites were in San Francisco; the next six were held in Boston. In Boston, young men and women would take over the old Park Plaza Hotel for the weekend, filling the shabby, genteel lobby with Doc Marten boots, ACT UP T-shirts, and Tenaxed hair. Over a thousand participants attended nearly a hundred different panels and readings. There was always a dance on Saturday night.
The chief events at each conference were the opening and closing addresses by literary elders. It was here that Allen Ginsberg admitted he didn’t worry about AIDS, since his sex life was limited to giving blowjobs to straight college boys. The following year Edward Albee told the audience, “I don’t think being gay is a subject any more than being straight is a subject…. With some writers there’s a bit of opportunism involved there. Writing on gay themes has become big business and some of the lesser ones are cashing in.” People began to boo. “Boo away,” he said. “I don’t care.” (Albee had been kicked in the teeth twenty-five years earlier not for writing anything gay but simply for being gay. He and the people at the conference spoke very different languages.)
In the Park Plaza ballroom in 1992, Allan Gurganus, author of the literary best seller Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, stood onstage in a flamboyant white suit worthy of Mark Twain and gave a speech like an evangelical sermon—“Brothers and sisters! And brothers who are sisters and sisters who are brothers!”—celebrating the value of gay experience to literature. The following year, Samuel Delany, the black science-fiction pioneer, author of Dhalgren and The Motion of Light in Water, spoke at length about the amorphousness of sex, using episodes from his own amorphic life—he was once married to lesbian poet Marilyn Hacker—and his visits to the old porn theaters of Forty-second Street. (He later incorporated this material into a fascinating book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.)
And at the 1995 conference, Tony Kushner gave a long, brilliant talk in praise of excess, “On Pretentiousness,” a breathless monologue that tossed together Melville, de Tocqueville, his fears about the new Republican Congress, his response to Leo Be
rsani’s attack on Angels (“I still don’t know if the rectum is a grave, but now I think I have an answer to the question: Is Leo Bersani an asshole?”), a defense of political art, and his recipe for lasagna:
Baking lasagna has long been my own personal paradigm for writing a play…. A good play, like a good lasagna, should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity and an overreach: Its ambitions extend in the direction of not-missing-a-trick, it has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve, or rather, under its noodles: It is pretentious food.
Kushner had won the Pulitzer for theater in 1993, but similar recognition was slow in coming to gay novels. Readers tend to be more conservative than playgoers. As late as 1995, when Edmund White was considered for inclusion in the prestigious if invisible American Academy of Arts, committee member Ned Rorem needed to be cagy in presenting him. He wrote in his diary: “Oral support of Edmund White at the Academy Meeting. It is important to stress the unimportance of homosexuality in his fiction, given that 95 percent of his characters are gay. Their problems are never those of polemical activists, but simply those of more or less intelligent citizens living and loving in the same world we all inhabit.” As if the only good gay people are those who don’t care about politics. Nevertheless, Rorem succeeded in getting White in.
The epidemic continued to take its toll on literature as well as on the larger world. New writers appeared every year, published one or two books, then became ill and died. Allen Barnett won several prizes for his collection of short stories, The Body and Its Dangers, including a citation from PEN, and died a year later in 1991. David Feinberg died in 1994 after publishing one novel and a book of essays. Poet and essayist Essex Hemphill died in 1995. Many, many more died without the chance to make any kind of mark.
In Tucson, Arizona, on February 6, 1995, James Merrill passed away. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore,” says Prior at the end of Angels. But it was kept a secret that Merrill died of AIDS until 2002, when his literary executor, J. D. McClatchy, wrote about it in a fine essay, “Two Deaths, Two Lives,” comparing his secretive death to the angrily honest death of novelist and memoirist Paul Monette.
A new writer made a big splash in 1990 with his second novel, A Home at the End of the World. Michael Cunningham was a craggily handsome thirty-nine-year-old who grew up in Pasadena, California, studied writing at Stanford and Iowa, then came east and divided his time between Provincetown and New York. He became the boyfriend of psychologist Ken Corbett.
Cunningham had published a first novel back in 1984, Golden States, a coming-of-age story about a twelve-year-old boy in southern California who’s discovering his sexuality. His half sister disappears and he hunts for her, hitchhiking to San Francisco, where he’s befriended by a gay man in his early twenties; things end well. It’s somewhat conventional, but full of good prose and keen observations. Nevertheless, Cunningham later dismissed it as “not good enough” and has refused to let it be reprinted. I suspect he had high hopes for the novel, felt burned when it didn’t get more attention, and then blamed the book. It was six years before he published his next novel. “I had my head in the oven, on and off, during those six years—not literally,” he later said. “You know, it’s hard to do something like write a novel…. I probably have a little less self-confidence than a lot of writers.”
But he eventually began a new novel, which he sold to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. A major chapter, “White Angel,” was published in the New Yorker a year before the book came out. There was much advance buzz, and A Home at the End of the World was a big success. It’s an excellent book but, as with A Boy’s Own Story, one can’t help suspecting it succeeded not only because of its quality but because it was what readers needed at the time: in this case, a serious, accessible novel about gay men in the age of AIDS.
Four first-person narrators tell the story of Bobby, a tramautized straight boy befriended in school in the 1960s by a gay kid, Jonathan. Bobby grows up to be a cook. He moves to New York and rejoins Jonathan, and they set up house with a female friend, Clare, who becomes pregnant with Bobby’s child. (The fourth narrator is Jonathan’s mother.) The shadow of death appears in the form of Jonathan’s friend, Erich, who is sick with AIDS. It’s a gentle story about trying to recover lost paradises of youth and high school, with the Woodstock festival as a symbolic Eden. Bobby, Jonathan, and Clare actually move to Woodstock and open a restaurant. For me, the freshest element is the friendship between a gay man and a straight man, where the sissy helps the wounded hetero pull his life together, instead of the other way around.
People who resist the novel complain that the chapters about adolescence are stronger than the adult chapters, and that the four first-person narrators sound too much alike. I disagree with both charges. The death of Bobby’s brother and loss of his mother are hard acts to follow, but Bobby and Jonathan are more interesting as grown-ups than they are as kids. And the four narrators actually do have their own voices. However, they all have a weakness for pretty-sounding metaphors which pop up now and then like cake frosting roses. (For example, Bobby remembers his mother: “She looked at me as if she were standing on a platform in a flat, dry country and I was pulling away on a train that traveled high into an alpine world.” I have italicized the frosting rose.) They can be mildly distracting, but they don’t hurt the novel.
The increased numbers of gay books was enough by itself to improve the chances of good work getting published. Many so-so books appeared, but the amount of first-rate work remains impressive. It didn’t always get the attention it deserved. I’m thinking in particular of the novels of Paul Russell. His third book, Sea of Tranquillity (1995), juxtaposes the lives of an astronaut and his wife trapped in a bad marriage with the wild life of their gay son, who strives to experience everything physical and spiritual. AIDS lifts him and the book into a higher sphere. Russell’s other novels are equally ambitious and startling; he has a devoted readership, but his books never got many reviews in the general press.
He was not alone in this. Mark Merlis followed an impressive first novel about academic life in the 1940s, American Studies (1994), with an even finer second novel, An Arrow’s Flight (1998), where the Philoctetes story is transposed from ancient Greece to the gay urban scene of the 1990s. It sounds pretentious or silly, but it’s genuinely witty and ultimately wise. Michael Nava, a lawyer in Los Angeles, wrote a remarkable series of mysteries about a gay defense attorney, Henry Rios: The Little Death (1986), Goldenboy (1988), How Town (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996), The Burning Plain (1997), and Rag and Bone (2001). Each book functions as an individual murder mystery, but the series forms the sustained fictional biography of a gay Hispanic American dealing with issues of career, family, and love over a span of twenty years. Nava had a huge following among gay readers and won the Lambda Book Award for Mystery six times. However, caught in the double bind of being both a gay writer and a mystery writer, Nava did not get his full due from mainstream critics.
AIDS played an important role in this literary ferment, yet one that’s hard to define. It’s not irrelevant that two of the literary prizes—the Ferro-Grumley and the Whitehead—were named after men who died of AIDS. Death can feed creativity. Times of trouble often coexist with intense artistic productivity, so long as the trouble leaves one room to breathe. The AIDS epidemic was not a sudden cataclysm but a slow-motion disaster, a creeping fire that left people with time to brood and worry. Writers used this time to write, fighting off their fears with prose and poetry. AIDS gave a new urgency to the work, and it gave gay writing a new importance in the culture at large. For many straight people, the epidemic provided gay men with a respectability they didn’t have before: they were tragic heroes now. A few lesbian journalists even complained that the plague gave men an unfair advantage over the women in the cultural marketplace.
During these years, Edmund White remained in Paris and continued with the series of autobiographical novels he had begun with A Boy’s Own Story. They were his most popu
lar books and they promised to be his masterwork, his own In Search of Lost Time. Yet he kept being distracted.
After Caracole, his straight novel, he returned to the project with a new book bearing an old title, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. It comes from a gnomic passage in a letter from Franz Kafka to his neglected fiancée, Milena Jesenska, comparing them to two people at opposite ends of a room with facing doors: sometimes both are in the room, sometimes only one, and sometimes “the beautiful room is empty.”
The novel picks up where A Boy’s Own Story left off, with the unnamed narrator still a teenager at prep school. But the world now has names (Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati) and the narrator gets a real friend, someone who can tell him the truth about himself. It’s a woman, not a man, a painting student named Maria who’s seven years older than the hero and attends the art school across the street. Based on White’s friend Marilyn Schaeffer, she is one of his best characters, a sometime Stalinist and sometime lesbian who loves abstract expressionism, grand opera, and the Everly Brothers.
She is the first of several characters in a book built not so much out of narrative as out of character sketches. White is a gifted portrait painter, able to conjure a man or woman in a handful of words. Other vivid figures include Annie, an unhappy anorexic; Tex, an old-style queen who runs a bookstore; and Lou, a lean, handsomely ugly, self-educated advertising executive who is also a heroin addict. This portrait gallery takes the narrator first to college, then to New York. He is still the anxious courtier trying to understand each royal court he stumbles into, the amnesiac from Forgetting Elena faking it until he learns the rules. Although he describes himself as an amoral monster out of Gide or Genet (“My own immorality didn’t trouble me”), he’s basically a nice middle-class boy from the Midwest. He’s no longer the chronic betrayer of A Boy’s Own Story. The worst thing we see him do in this volume is make himself miserable.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 33