Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
It’s significant, and appropriate, that we close with two different novels, The Hours and The Night Listener, about the uses (and dangers) of storytelling. Almost all the works discussed in this history have been stories—I include poems, too, since a poem often suggests a story even when it doesn’t tell one.
Stories are wonderfully slippery things. They are not sermons or editorials that noisily declare yea or nay. They are more silent, almost secretive. They matter-of-factly describe an action or a drama or an individual life in a way that can suggest approval for one reader, disapproval for another, and complete indifference for a third. They can slip past public censors (in some countries, anyway), and our own private censors (guilt and fear and shame). Most important, they can put us into other skins, enabling us to experience things we might not feel otherwise: sorrow, joy, lust, and love; but also how it feels to be oppressed, and even how it feels to be the oppressor. There are good stories and bad stories—true lies and false lies—but the best stories are those that take us someplace new and real; we don’t need to revisit old assumptions and stale prejudices.
This book has offered a history of the different kinds of stories that gay men have told each other and their friends and, ultimately, the world at large. It began with what they were allowed to tell: cautionary tales of doom and destruction, like The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room. But doom is often sexy, and readers frequently found their own hopeful meanings here. Already there was the liberation plot, the explosion of freedom first seen in “Howl” and developed further in the often maligned coming-out story. As said before, it’s surprising how few novels use this powerful plot directly, a narrative as strong as religious conversion. Yet we find it embedded in the denser worlds of Edmund White’s trilogy, Maupin’s chronicle, even Angels in America. There were also stories of romantic friendship, sometimes between gay men and straight women, such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and sometimes between gay men, as in Down There on a Visit. Most important of all were the cooler, unapologetic, here-is-how-we-live stories that strive to escape both judgment and sensationalism. There were early glimmers in the poems of Frank O’Hara, but the new honesty didn’t fully come into its own until A Single Man. Gay writers have been building on it ever since: White, Stephen McCauley, Mark Doty, Paul Russell, myself, and many, many others. AIDS introduced a terrible new set of plots that brought gay literature into the older literary traditions built around death, the elegies and tragedies that confront both fear and grief. The stories in The Hours and The Night Listener show the power of story to deceive, but also its power to contain and even drive out melancholy.
Changing times meant a wider variety of stories could be told, yet the earlier plots remained potent and never went away. All of these stories were part of the change, altering the ways that gay readers thought about themselves and the world.
We should not be surprised that so much of the gay revolution was accomplished through storytelling. It played a larger role for us than it did for the civil rights movement or even the women’s movement. And why not? A disproportionate number of stories are love stories—and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
Epilogue
Rewriting America
Gore Vidal came home to the United States with Howard Austen early in 2003 to live in the Hollywood Hills. Austen was ill and needed better medical care than what they could get in Italy. Also the stairways and paths of La Rondinaia in Ravello were now too steep for the two aging men.
Our narrative began with Gore Vidal and it feels appropriate to end with him. He was the last surviving elder from the years after World War II. Allen Ginsberg had died in 1997, spending his final years as a surprisingly placid, clean-shaven, public man. He continued to write new poems but usually performed only the famous old ones. His readings were enormously popular; he remained a political example and a moral touchstone. His lover, Peter Orlovsky, was in and out of mental hospitals because of his drinking, but Ginsberg stayed serene through it all, concerned yet never overwhelmed. He was seventy-one when he died.
Vidal was anything but serene. He remained fiercely productive, writing new historical novels to fill the gaps for what he called his “Narrative of Empire,” a continuous series from Burr to Washington, D.C., with a postscript, The Golden Age. The new volumes are well-crafted and informative but not as exciting as the first ones. In between he wrote odd experiments like Duluth and a free-associative memoir, Palimpsest, meant as a preemptive strike against biographers. He quarreled with his “official” biographer, Fred Kaplan, when Kaplan refused to show him the manuscript before publication; he later denounced the book while insisting he hadn’t read it. In his own contentious, controlling way, Vidal was preparing for death.
But Howard Austen died first, in November 2003. Vidal had spent the past fifty-three years insisting Austen was only a friend, not a lover. Yet he was devastated. He wrote about it in his next memoir. Point to Point Navigation is occupied chiefly with settling scores, but in the middle of the grumbling is a surprisingly intimate chapter about Austen’s final illnesses: peritonitis, lung cancer, a brain tumor, and pneumonia. As Austen was being wheeled one more time into an operating room, he told Vidal, “Kiss me,” and Vidal did. “On the lips, something we’d not done for fifty years.” After he died, Vidal went to look at the naked body on the gurney and regretted that he couldn’t cry. The two men were deeply, inextricably knitted together. There are intimacies that have nothing to do with sex.
Vidal sold La Rondinaia and moved to California for good. At the beginning of Point to Point, he declares, “As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit…” But he wasn’t gracious. He grew more truculent and short-tempered. He had always been critical: it powered his intelligence and fed his wit. As he grew older, however, he suffered a hardening of intellectual arteries. He repeated fewer ideas over and over; his wit seemed to disappear. When he joined a BBC panel via satellite on election night 2008, reprising his time at the 1968 Democratic convention, he was only testy and snappish when asked about Barack Obama, treating his colleagues as idiots.
He cannot have been happy with the posthumous revival of Truman Capote. He had been more right than he knew when he called Capote’s death “a good career move.” Now that Capote’s later, disastrous public self was out of sight, critics and readers could rediscover his best work and see he was often a great writer.
Vidal was loudly unhappy when Edmund White produced a play, Terre Haute, about Vidal’s pen-pal friendship with Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. White, too, had moved back to the United States (to teach at Princeton) and he had a new boyfriend, a young American writer, Michael Carroll. When White took up playwriting again, for the first time in thirty years, Vidal gave him his permission to write about himself and McVeigh. The simple, two-character piece doesn’t really work (it would take Dostoyevsky to understand either McVeigh or Vidal’s angry fascination with the mass murderer), but Vidal hated it for other reasons. “That play implies that I am madly in love with McVeigh,” he declared, then denounced White for everything he’d ever done. “I look at his writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not.” It’s like a blast of gay invective from the 1950s, a startling throwback to another era. But Vidal was in a wheelchair now and often in pain. The arthritis that first afflicted his legs in the Aleutians during the war had returned. And Howard Austen was no longer in his life to provide an anchor and an ear and remind him of his wiser, more rational angels.
Vidal was a godfather of gay literature, in spite of himself—a fairy godfather. He would cringe at this description. He continued to insist there is no such thing as a homosexual person, only homosexual acts. Yet generations of younger gay-identified men read and admired him: for The City and the Pillar, for Myra Breckinridge, and especially for his eloquent essays
. He had spoken out about sexuality when few writers were able or willing to speak out. He had praised Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood at a time when the literary world was finished with the first and not yet ready for the second. He was smooth, articulate, witty, and necessary. He pointed us in a new direction, but he could not go there himself. The arguments and defenses he once needed for protection had rusted around him like an old suit of armor. The world had changed more than he could have anticipated, and in ways he couldn’t appreciate.
When you stop to think about it, the transformation is nothing short of amazing. And the process was reflected in the written word.
In just over fifty years, between 1948 and 2000, a tiny literary species, a handful of books and plays that appeared only now and then to abuse or silence, grew into a lively ecology of many animals, hundreds of titles that came out every year and sometimes won national praise and prizes. The world changed, too, but the literature itself was an agent of that change, feeding it and reporting it, serving as both cause and effect. During a half century when books and plays lost much of their importance in American culture at large, they played a major role in the growth of gay life.
But where else could gay people tell their stories? They couldn’t tell them in movies or on television in the 1950s and 1960s. For the longest time, it was hard enough to tell them in print or onstage. We can only guess at the numbers of gay men and women who read or saw this work. The sales figures tell one story: The City and the Pillar was a best seller with 30,000 copies in 1948; The Night Listener was not quite a best seller in 2000 when it sold 100,000 copies (with dozens of other gay titles, old and new, to compete against). But the social impact of the literature goes beyond the size of its immediate audience, especially in the beginning. Books and plays gave journalists an opportunity to discuss a forbidden topic with a wide readership. Initially they could discuss homosexuals only negatively, yet any kind of talk was preferable to silence for people who needed simply to be told, “You are not alone.” The attacks were often as valuable as the defenses—in the long run.
The personal cost to the writers, however, was high, and remained high for decades. We’ve seen how Gore Vidal and Truman Capote were brutally slammed at the start of their careers; how James Baldwin was attacked for writing about his sexuality instead of his race, first by white liberals, then by black activists; how Christopher Isherwood was dismissed when he started filling in the blanks about his life in Berlin. Abuse made these men unhappy, difficult, and sometimes crazy. It’s a wonder they functioned as well as they did. Their careers would’ve been so much easier, and more profitable, if they’d written about things outside their experience—which they all tried at one time or another with varying degrees of success. (And it didn’t protect Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee from insult and critical dismissal.) But making art is difficult enough without needing to pretend to be someone else. A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés. Writers as talented as Vidal, Isherwood, and Edmund White floundered when they tried to tell more conventional love stories. A gay man who writes nothing but straight stories works with his heart only half connected. The gap can sometimes produce interesting sparks, but it’s not good for the work or the writer in the long run. More important, literature can grow and change only when new experience is introduced—not just new techniques, but unexamined emotions and fresh identities.
These novels, plays, and poems spoke first to gay readers, giving them a place to explore and understand their own feelings. They enabled isolated individuals to imagine themselves in couples and even communities. The stories changed over five decades, becoming less coded and more frank, even graphic. Yet their role remained much the same as when they spoke in whispers. They have always said in effect: “You are different, but you are not alone.” There were sometimes additional twists and variations: “You are not normal, but nobody is. There is no such thing as normal.”
Later this work spoke to the culture at large, the so-called mainstream, but that’s harder to describe. In the world of novels, we can only guess at how many, or how few, straight readers visited this country. Straight novelists, however, soon recognized that there were great stories here and began to include gay characters in their work: Charles Baxter in Feast of Love, Bharati Mukherjee in Desirable Daughters, and, most famously, Annie Proulx in “Brokeback Mountain.” These writers saw homosexuality as just one more culture in a lively, multicultural America. In the world of poetry, gay work was less of a problem, chiefly because poets and poetry readers are happy to find each other no matter who they are. But in the world of theater, the change was clear and visible. Gay story lines became an accepted mainstay on and off Broadway. Richard Greenberg won the Tony in 2003 for Take Me Out, his play about baseball and homosexuality. In 2004 I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, a dazzling monologue by an East German transvestite who survives both Hitler and Communism, won the Tony and the Pulitzer. Theater has always been more progressive than books, but the gay presence in American theater offers a promising model of equality.
And then, a few years into the new millennium, the book business began to change. Around the time that Hollywood decided to concentrate on blockbusters and lost interest in independent movies, publishing lost interest in midlist novels—and gay fiction is nothing if not midlist. The number of new gay books declined. The recession of 2008 then took a heavy toll on the entire industry, hurting publishers and killing bookstores. Chain and independent stores began to close, including many gay bookstores. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop shut its doors in 2009. The coming of the e-book added to the confusion: nobody knew what would sell or how to sell it anymore.
First-rate work by established gay writers continued to be printed by mainstream houses. Armistead Maupin returned to Barbary Lane with Michael Tolliver Lives and Mary Ann in Autumn. Peter Cameron put out his best novel yet, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, a worldly meditation disguised as a young adult novel. Mark Doty issued Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award. But life became very difficult for other gay writers. New voices continued to be heard, but they now depended on small presses and blogs, in the same way that gay writers in the Fifties had depended on pulp houses and little magazines. Blair Mastbaum published a wonderful first novel about a gay skateboarder, Clay’s Way, with Alyson. Vestal McIntyre did his first book of short stories, You Are Not the One, with Carroll and Graf. James Hannaham put out a surprising first novel about a closeted African-American born-again Christian, God Says No, with McSweeney’s. And Rakesh Satyal did a remarkable first novel, Blue Boy, with Kensington, about a precocious gay Hindu boy in Cincinnati who believes he’s Krishna.
In an ironic twist, this time of reduction in the book trade was a time of enormous gains in the real world. Gay people were being treated less like outlaws and more like fellow citizens. In April 2003, the New York Times ran their first wedding announcement for a same-sex couple: playwright Tony Kushner married magazine editor Mark Harris. It was a symbolic marriage, not a legal one, but more announcements followed, including those for legal marriages—first in Massachusetts, then in Vermont, Connecticut, and most recently New York. Even more amazing, at the end of 2010, Congress overturned the law known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prevented openly gay people from serving in the military. Nobody could have imagined such a thing in the years after World War II.
One might claim that gay people have won their rights but lost their literature. It has a nice dramatic sound, but I don’t see things so harshly. As I said, good work continues to be produced. However, we are going through a transitional period, in both the medium for storytelling and the kinds of stories people want. We don’t know yet what the next phase will be.
Gay life today is highly visible in music, television, stand-up comedy, the Internet and YouTube. But it got its first foothold in the public consciousness in novels, plays, and poems
. The influence of that work is now everywhere, ranging from the trivial to the profound. The kinky sex acts featured in Sex and the City or a Margaret Cho monologue were first described in books by Gore Vidal, Edmund White, and Larry Kramer. The gender-role clowning of Sacha Baron Cohen, Glee, and Lady Gaga was pioneered by Vidal and Charles Ludlam. And the inclusive mixing of gay and straight characters in TV shows like Six Feet Under and Ugly Betty was first seen in the novels of James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, and Armistead Maupin—our initial glimpse of a plausible Eden.
Before gay experience crossed over into other media, it energized American literature—in much the same way Jewish experience energized it in the 1950s and 1960s, and feminism energized it in the 1970s, introducing new subjects and fresh points of view. The best work discussed in this history remains alive and relevant. It was most valuable when it first appeared, but good art has a way of staying fresh, of living in the past, present, and future. During the two years I wrote this book, a movie was adapted from A Single Man, another movie was made about the writing of “Howl,” and a musical based on Tales of the City opened in San Francisco; there were New York revivals of Boys in the Band, The Normal Heart, and Angels in America, as well as new editions of essays by James Baldwin and letters by Allen Ginsberg.
These men continue to speak to us through their poems, plays, novels, and lives. Directly and indirectly, this loose conspiracy of writers opened doors in the imaginations of both gay people and straight people. These eminent outlaws succeeded in rewriting America.
Acknowledgments
Without being aware of it, I spent much of my life preparing to write this book. I came of age during a remarkable period of American history—the Sixties and Seventies—reading many of the novels, poems, and plays discussed here when they first came out. And I spoke steadily over the years with a circle of friends about literature and politics, developing the ideas that inform this narrative. I continued to talk with these friends while I wrote this book, bouncing ideas off them and picking their brains. My extended literary family includes: Schuyler Bishop, playwright and editor; Kim Brinster, bookstore manager; Michael Bronski, critic and teacher; Victor Bumbalo, playwright; Philip Clark, critic and librarian; David Fratkin, painter; Mary Gentile, consultant and writer; Michael Goodwin, painter; Damien Jack, writer and reader; Mary Jacobsen, novelist and therapist; Richard Kassner, psychiatrist and writer; Michael Matarese, family physician and history reader; Patrick Merla, editor and writer; Mark Murtagh, investor, reader, and education expert; Mark Owen, chef and writer; Richard Reitsma, teacher and writer; Paul Russell, novelist and teacher; Ed Sikov, biographer; Neil Theise, liver pathologist and reader; Sarah Van Arsdale, novelist and teacher; Brenda Wineapple, biographer; and Draper Shreeve, filmmaker, reader, and partner.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 36