“a mercurial and strangely moral figure… John Lahr, “Camp Tales,” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1979, 15.
“Here are characters like Randy Dildough… Ibid., 40. (Lahr’s review is not available in the Times online archive. I had to read it on microfilm. I don’t know if the absence is because of a request by Lahr or maybe by Kramer, or if it’s purely accidental?)
The Times wasn’t kind to Nocturnes either. It praised the prose before saying, “But this is narcissistic prose and Nocturnes is a narcissistic novel—which is not to deny the rareness of its beauty, only the breadth of its appeal.” Narcissistic was and still is a code word for “gay.” (John Yohalem, “Apostrophes to a Dead Lover,” New York Times Book Review, December 10, 1978, BR6.)
“Six books by, about, or for homosexuals appear in as many months… Jeffrey Burke, “Of a Certain Persuasion,” Harper’s, March 1979, 122. He also writes: “Both Kramer (intentionally) and Holleran (artlessly) present a gay world worthy of little more than disdain. They do nothing for the cause of literature and less for the cause of gay rights.” Which makes me wonder if Burke were gay. It wouldn’t be the first or last time a gay critic is used by the mainstream to trash gay writers. Several gay men went on to build literary careers out of their willingness to attack their peers. (I won’t name names.)
“John Wayne and Auntie Mame… Patrick Gale, Armistead Maupin (Bath, England: Absolute, 1999), 14.
“suffered a slow process of attrition in a city where no one approved of Nixon… Ibid., 39.
“There were times when he was barely two days ahead… Maupin, Tales of the City (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), P.S. section, “A Pleasing Shock of Recognition,” 5.
“Michael groaned and readjusted his shorts… Ibid., 226.
“We’re gonna be… fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.” Ibid., 311.
“Oh, that marvelous funny thing… Quoted by Maupin in conversation with the author, September 27, 2010.
“As much as I liked Rock… Quoted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 66.
“I wouldn’t have written, I guess,… Armistead Maupin, More Tales of the City, 221–223.
“me too.” Gale, Armistead Maupin, 59.
CHAPTER 14. WHITE NOISE
“Edmund White… is a charming man given to stringent self-analysis… Felice Picano, “Rough Cuts from a Journal,” The Violet Quill Reader, ed. David Bergman, 36–37.
“dessert-and-short-story” Andrew Holleran, “A Place of Their Own,” The Violet Quill Reader, ed. David Bergman, 402.
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America was the brainchild of Charles Ortleb… Patrick Merla, conversation with the author, December 2009. (Merla was editor of Christopher Street at the time.)
“So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated… Edmund White, States of Desire (New York: Dutton, 1980), 1.
“Jeeps—elaborately painted… Ibid., 11.
“When a city slicker has a jerk-off fantasy… Ibid., 132.
“Greenwich Village is the gay ghetto… Ibid., 265.
“gave me a cheek to peck, a purely routine gesture… Edmund White, After Dark; reprinted in The Burning Library: Essays, ed. David Bergman (New York: Knopf, 1994), 105–106.
“a never-ending spectacle… Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1980. (www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-boys-on-the-beach/).
“Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me… Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Second American Revolution, 171.
“a world of perfect illogic… Ibid., 180.
“I was present when Christopher Isherwood… Ibid., 169–170. Readers can’t help but notice that a disproportionate number of antigay critics were Jewish: Stanley Kauffmann, Philip Roth, Joseph Epstein, Midge Decter. One reason for this is that postwar Jewish intellectuals were more fearless and outspoken than the gentiles. Writers with Catholic or Protestant backgrounds were just as intolerant, but did not like talking about sex of any kind. However, I suspect there was also another factor: turf. Jewish writers had broken into American intellectual life after the war. They were not ready to share their importance with the next rising minority group.
“Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” has been regularly quoted ever since… The strain between Vidal and the Podhoretzes continued. Five years later, it erupted into all-out war. In January 1986, Vidal published another essay in the Nation, “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” where he declared that the American empire had died under Reagan, and good riddance. Podhoretz responded in the New York Post that political critics like Vidal and Norman Mailer had never liked America anyway. Decter added her own two cents in Contentions magazine, defending American imperialism. Vidal responded with “The Empire Lovers Strike Back,” later retitled “A Cheerful Response.” He called Podhoretz “a silly billy” and accused the couple of being bad Americans who didn’t know their history and who cared more about Israel. Podhoretz furiously responded with an essay accusing Vidal of anti-Semitism, cleverly titled “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name”—as if anti-Semitism were the moral equivalent of “the love that dare not speak its name.” Before then, however, according to a story heard around town at the time, the indignant couple ran into Victor Navasky on the street. Podhoretz angrily told Navasky, “You are a son of a bitch,” for printing such a piece in the Nation. Navasky only laughed and said, “And you are a silly billy.”
“I am sauntering for the Senate… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 732–733.
“Take time off. Think about things… From Gore Vidal, the Man Who Said No, produced and directed by Gary Conklin (Gary Conklin Films, 1983). Available from Gary Conklin Films.
“old friends…. He’s lived various places, I’ve lived various places… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 735.
“I mention the constant music… Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (New York: Dutton, 1982), 22.
“I didn’t particularly like getting cornholed… Ibid., 19.
“By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men… Ibid., 153.
“Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie… Ibid., 218.
“White has crossed Catcher in the Rye with De Profundis… Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Bodies and Souls of American Men,” New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1982, 15.
“It is any boy’s story… Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Edmund White’s Tale of a Gay Youth,” New York Times, December 17, 1982. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/17/books/books-of-the-times-edmund-white-s-tale-of-a-gay-youth.html?scp=1&sq=christopher%20lehmann-haupt%20on%20edmund%20white&st=cse. In other cases, one sometimes wonders how closely mainstream reviewers read gay books, even when they praise them. John Banville talking about White’s work in the New York Review of Books years later cited “the unrelenting descriptions of gay shenanigans that so startled early readers of A Boy’s Own Story” (“Coupling,” August 10, 2000). But the only sex scenes are at the beginning and the end. Likewise Malcolm Bradbury, in his overview of postwar fiction, The Modern American Novel, described The Beautiful Room Is Empty as a novel about AIDS, assuming that was what the title meant.
CHAPTER 15. ILLNESS AND METAPHOR
“like a bookstore” Andrew Holleran, “Larry Kramer and the Wall of Books,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, ed. Lawrence Mass (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 119.
Someone who had a brief affair with him… Anonymous, conversation with the author, March 10, 2010.
“I think the concealed meaning in Kramer’s emotionalism… Quoted in Larry Kramer, “The First Defense,” New York Native, December 21, 1981–January 3, 1982; reprinted in Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 16. (In later editions, Kramer used a lower-case h for holocaust to differentiate the AIDS epidemic from the Nazi murder of the Jews. But we are referring here to the first edition and have left it as it stood to avoid confusion.)
“the ‘eroticism
’ that has made gay health such a concern… Ibid., 21.
“Gay men certainly have a health crisis… Quoted in Patrick Merla, “A Normal Heart,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, 38.
“I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex… White, City Boy, 288.
“There are drug users and non-drug users… Kramer, “1,112 and Counting,” Reports from the Holocaust, 35.
But Kramer believed that was the real reason for Koch’s silence: he was a closet case… For the longest time, at least in print, Kramer only implied this or said it indirectly. Then he made the accusation through characters in The Normal Heart and included a Koch-like closeted mayor in Just Say No. Finally he began to say it directly, telling New York magazine, for example, that Koch was “a closeted gay man” (Maer Roshan, “Larry Kramer: Queer Conscience,” New York, April 6, 1998). Kramer and others spoke in more depth about the charge in the 2009 documentary Outrage. Journalist David Rothenberg says on camera that Koch as a congressman had a boyfriend, Richard Nathan. He says Koch insisted Nathan leave New York after he became mayor. Nathan died of AIDS in Los Angeles in 1996. On the other hand, others have said Koch was not just asexual but asocial. His friend Bess Myerson said, “You have to remember something. Ed Koch has never lived with a woman. Ed Koch has never lived with a man. Ed Koch has never lived with a dog. That’s why he’s like that.” (quoted in Michael Goodwin, New York Comes Back, 40). It should also be pointed out that Koch had no difficulty signing New York’s gay rights ordinance in 1986, and he backed his health department’s closing of the baths in 1985, which Kramer campaigned for. Kramer later attacked Koch for not providing money to GMHC in the city budget, but Koch was famously stingy with public funds. He had brought the city back from bankruptcy by cutting back on city services; he continued to cut services even with the epidemic of homelessness during the Reagan years.
“I want to apologize to any of the people dear to me… Kramer, “The Mark of Courage,” Reports from the Holocaust, 64.
“Your own son is gay… Quoted in Gail Merrifield Papp, “Larry Kramer at the Public,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, 257.
“tough sledding… Ibid., 259.
“And you think I’m killing people?” Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 97–98.
“Don’t lose that anger… Ibid., 117.
“The only way we’ll have real pride… Ibid., 110.
making his fictional self more difficult and more interesting when he produced multiple drafts of a screenplay… Author’s reading of a later draft of the screenplay in November 1992.
“The blood that’s coursing through The Normal Heart… is boiling hot… Frank Rich, New York Times, April 22, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/22/theater/theater-the-normal-heart-by-larry-kramer.html?scp=1&sq=frank+rich+%22the+normal+heart%22&st=nyt.
“The aesthetic failings of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart… Michael Feingold, Village Voice, April 19, 1985.
“Don’t you sometimes wish that all the faggots… Quoted in Ned Rorem, “The Real John Simon,” New York Native, 1985; reprinted in Ned Rorem, Other Entertainments (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 136. That was how Simon himself remembered it. Liz Smith quoted a cleaner, more succinct version in her column in the Daily News: “Homosexuals in the theater! My God, I can’t wait until AIDS gets all of them!”
“What could have been a mere staged tract… John Simon, New York, May 6, 1985.
“You and your huge assortment of caretakers… Larry Kramer, “An Open Letter to Richard Dunne,” Reports from the Holocaust, 102.
CHAPTER 16. DEAD POETS SOCIETY
“a good career move.” Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 707. Capote had settled with Vidal a year earlier in Vidal’s million-dollar libel suit. Capote didn’t have a million dollars—he didn’t even have the money to pay Vidal’s legal costs—but he did write a public letter of apology for what he’d said in Playgirl.
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood… Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” from The Poems of Wilfred Owen (New York: Viking, 1931), 66. The poem was written between 1917 and 1918 and first published in 1920.
“It is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms… Randall Jarrell, “A Verse Chronicle,” in Poetry and the Age, 176.
“No air. Breathe in… Melvin Dixon, “Heartbeats,” in Love’s Instruments (New York: Tia Cucha Press, 1995), reprinted in Persistent Voices, ed. Philip Clark and David Groff (New York: Alyson Books, 2009), 87-88.
“Now I understand why [he] had invented his dress-up party… Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (New York: Knopf, 1997), 414.
“In the sunlit current the white gravel of our friend… James Merrill, “Memorial Tribute to David Kalstone,” reprinted in Collected Prose (New York: Knopf, 2004), 365.
“You are gone…. James Merrill, “Farewell Performance,” Selected Poems, 220.
Merrill never indicated that he himself had tested positive for the virus in 1986…. This was first revealed by J. D. McClatchy in his excellent essay, “Two Deaths, Two Lives” published in Edmund White, ed., Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
“Chains of gold tinsel, baubles of green fire… James Merrill, “Vol. XLIV, No. 3,” Selected Poems, 239. The title, which sounds like an issue of a medical journal, has not been identified by J. D. McClatchy, Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser, or Merrill biographer Lanny Hammer. “I’ve always assumed the title was made up…. It would be like JM to concoct a title whose numerals had some hidden meaning.” J. D. McClatchy e-mail message to the author, September 2010.
“Later I realized what I was doing… James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: BTL, 2000), 40.
“hippy silliness and self-regarding camp.” John Mole, “Two-Gun Gunn,” review of Selected Poems in Poetry Review, September 1980; quoted in Thom Gunn in Conversation, 108.
“A gust of morphine… Thom Gunn, “Lament,” in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 466.
“an unlimited embrace… Thom Gunn, “The Missing,” in Collected Poems, 483.
“Gunn restores poetry to a centrality… Neil Powell, “The Dangerous Edge of Things,” PN Review, May–June 1992; quoted in Thom Gunn in Conversation, 111.
“like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet… Andrew Holleran, Ground Zero (New York: Morrow, 1988), 94.
“Not only is Charles Ludlam gone… Ibid., 99.
“AIDS destroys trust…. Ibid., 189.
“And on the twelfth floor… Mark Doty, “63rd Street Y,” in Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 90.
“Peter died in a paper tiara… Mark Doty, “Tiara,” ibid, 96.
“I don’t feel I know nearly enough about the AIDS situation… from Armistead Maupin, “The First Couple: Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood,” Village Voice, July 2, 1985; reprinted in Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, 191.
“merciless and loving… Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings (London; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990), x.
“The thought occurs to me… Ibid., xiii.
“Oh, the pain, the pain… Ibid.
“I started drawing Chris’s corpse at two o’clock… Ibid., xvii.
CHAPTER 17. TALES OF TWO OR THREE CITIES
By 1992, 10 percent of Plume’s titles would be gay. Esther B. Fein, “The Media Business: Big Publishers Profit as Gay Literature Thrives,” New York Times, July 6, 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/06/business/the-media-business-big-publishers-profit-as-gay-literature-thrives.html?scp=1&sq=gay%20publishing%201992&st=cse.
“Young heterosexual male authors… “Who’s Who in the Literary Power Game,” Esquire, August 1987, 56.
“I couldn’t decide whether the image was more threatening as a homoerotic come-on… Frank Rich, “The Gay Decades,” Esquire, November 1987, 97.
> “1. Stop begging for acceptance…. Armistead Maupin, “Design for Living” Advocate, 1985; reprinted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 149–151.
“We were finding instant points of agreement… Quoted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 71.
“increases the intimacy and it increases the dangers of fights… Ibid., 75–76.
“Do you think I should come out?” Ibid., 131.
“Three years of daily fretting… Armistead Maupin, Sure of You, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 225–226.
“He tilted his head and let the sun dry his tears… Ibid., 226.
“Mr. Maupin writes for everyone: gay, straight, single, married,… David Feinberg, “Goodnight, Mrs. Madrigal,” New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/22/books/goodnight-mrs-madrigal.html?scp=1&sq=david%20feinberg%20on%20armistead%20maupin&st=cse.
“Well, at least you got to stay your own gender.” Quoted in Melanie Rehnak, “The Way We Live Now: ShopTalk; Family Affair, New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 30, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/30/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-4-30-00-shoptalk-family-affair.html?scp=2&sq=keith%20fleming/edmund%20white&st=cse.
none other than Susan Sontag… Mathilda argues like Sontag; she has the same strange relationship with a grown son that Sontag had with hers; she even irritably picks at her teeth at parties like Sontag (as White reports in his memoir, City Boy).
“You’ve given me the gift of your completely innocent trust… White, Caracole (New York: Dutton, 1985), 138.
“In Paris people cultivate social life as an art form… Edmund White, “The Paris Review Interview,” Paris Review, Fall 1988; reprinted in Bergman, ed., The Burning Library, 264.
“Even though George had been a baby… Edmund White, “An Oracle,” in The Darker Proof (New York: New American Library, 1988), 180.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 40