Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Given the unrelieved horror of the epidemic, it is not surprising that several stories deal with AIDS, and particularly with the intense conflicts the disease has produced between love and fear, compassion and discrimination. These conflicts are familiar ones in gay fiction, and in many respects the stigma of AIDS can be seen as a new homosexuality reviving old fears and the old quest of the individual for a community to end his isolation.

  In his story “The Boys in the Bars,” Christopher Davis captures this situation by describing the disintegration of one community based on pleasure and its replacement by another community born from the revelation of inescapable truths. Davis in effect reinvents the coming-out story by transforming his protagonist’s illness into an occasion for self-discovery and renewed friendship. Drawing on his experience of the theater, Albert Innaurato dramatizes, often with comic insight, the cruel prejudices AIDS has inflamed among straight and gay people. Yet here again the “solidarity” that is almost destroyed by fear is reaffirmed, at least for a few, by compassion in the face of death. Fear and the hunger for friendship are also the subjects of David B. Feinberg’s story, appropriately entitled “The Age of Anxiety.” Feinberg’s special achievement is to combine the anxiety of AIDS with the paranoia of urban living and then to view this confusion from a comically absurdist perspective.

  The specter of AIDS is present in other stories, including Tim Barrus’s “Life Sucks,” which contains a stinging indictment of gay indifference toward some victims of the disease. Although it is never mentioned, AIDS informs the cultural context of Anderson Ferrell’s “Why People Get Cancer,” a story that examines with remarkable precision the potent combination of right-wing religious fervor and anti-gay prejudice that has become so familiar in recent years. Cancer also haunts David Groff’s “Nobody’s Child,” but here it is not the gay man but his straight woman friend who is ill and seeks help. Like Innaurato’s “Solidarity,” Groff’s story eventually offers the possibility of creating a new family out of the devastation of death.

  Gay people have often been keen observers of the family as an institution to which they belong by birth and the bonds of domestic love, but from which they are frequently excluded because of their difference. The family is the scene of the Oedipal drama of identity, the source for models of behavior whose influence can be at once powerful and oppressive, the place where the choices one makes have their most immediate effect. Many works of gay fiction address these issues and describe conflicts between sexual love and familial love, dreams of acceptance and fears of rejection. Sometimes it is the family itself that is rejected, together with its stifling traditions and hierarchical structure dominated by the power of the father. A recurring myth in contemporary gay fiction is the invention of a more democratic family based on a community of friends or “sons.” Writers know, however, that social inventions are never easy and that the essential drama of the family for gay people still turns on difficult choices and painful transitions.

  Richard McCann offers a fascinating version of this drama in “My Mother’s Clothes” by describing a boy’s games with images of the self provided by his father and especially his mother. McCann then shows how the innocence of childhood, and its freedom, are lost when images acquire names, become social categories and divisive identities. Conflicting images of behavior are also central to Christopher Coe’s “Anything You Want,” a story that is itself built on exquisite visual effects. Caught within a disintegrating family where material excess and psychological want exist simultaneously, Coe’s young protagonist moves toward a decision that will affirm his own desires and individuality.

  In Tim Barrus’s “Life Sucks” the destruction of the family and social traditions is seen as part of a more pervasive transformation of our society caused by the upheavals of war, AIDS, and relentless modernization. With this perspective Barrus succeeds in linking the difficulties of gay life to two rich themes in American fiction—the loss of social and moral innocence and the wandering search for a home. The gay man in Lev Raphael’s “Dancing on Tishe B’Av,” on the other hand, is torn between his adherence to a strong religious tradition and a love condemned by that same tradition. His dilemma tests both his faith and the limits of his family’s understanding.

  Two stories explore the ambivalent relations that often exist between gay sons and their fathers. The young man in Allen Barnett’s “Snapshot” searches for a father he never knew in order to comprehend the origins of his solitude and the meaning of his desires. In Gary Glickman’s “Magic,” a son’s memories of his father are so powerful they repeatedly impinge on the present; yet the love he seeks in other men, like the love he sought in his father, remains elusive, appearing then disappearing beyond his grasp. Although their approaches are different, both writers examine the complex relationship between filial and erotic love that is another recurrent motif in gay fiction.

  An intriguing variation on this theme is present in James Purdy’s “In This Corner . . . ,” which relates an encounter between an older man and a young “son.” Purdy’s inimitable blend of realism and myth creates a haunting tale in which the ache of longing and the despair of solitude finally lead to an affirmation of love. The search for love returns in David Leavitt’s psychologically uncompromising portrait of uneasy friendship and sexual dependency, “AYOR,” which explores the wavering boundaries of gay life, their temptations, dangers, and sudden reversals. Initiation into gay life is also the central theme of David Brendan Hopes’s lushly romantic “Once in Syracuse,” but here one man’s love for another is both aroused and threatened by differing visions of beauty and masculinity.

  Joseph Pintauro’s provocative story of prison life, “Jungle Dove,” dramatizes a more disturbing form of initiation. Instead of the violence of passion described by Purdy and Hopes, Pintauro examines the violence of sexual power and fear that engulfs two men divided by racial tensions yet drawn together by their loss of freedom. Fear and intolerance also produce extremes of violence in “Red Leaves,” Melvin Dixon’s penetrating and strangely poetic account of a gang of youths whose need to prove their manhood drives them to murder a gay man. Allan Gurganus’s beautifully detailed story, “Adult Art,” on the other hand, is a celebration of desire that recognizes yet transcends sexual categories and reaffirms the value of tenderness. Gurganus describes the joys and mysteries of sex, the tactics of pleasure, and the strategies of the heart in ways that are delightfully fresh.

  The pleasures of a very different sensibility can be found in James McCourt’s recreation of life in the 1950s and 1960s, “I Go Back to the Mais Oui.” McCourt takes us on a voyage through the past, including a visit to the Stonewall Inn on the night of the famous rebellion, and offers a dazzling collage of characters and events, art and opera. At once autobiography and history, his story’s ultimate subject is its style—one that is certainly his own, but also unmistakably gay.

  Many writers in this collection, like McCourt, capture the diverse settings of an evolving gay world from the dusky parks of Paris to a Gay Pride parade in New York City; but there are several stories in which a recognizable gay community is absent, or in which various manifestations of gay life are viewed from an unusual psychological distance. The narrator of Hopes’s story, for example, is a formerly straight hustler who is both fascinated and repelled by the gay world he enters. Barrus’s story is told by a divorced Vietnam veteran with children who progressively becomes an outsider to the life of Key West; and Innaurato’s narrator describes himself as a fat, unattractive man—characteristics that enable him to criticize the often excessive premium the gay world places on physical beauty.

  Still other stories turn around characters who are either sexually ambiguous or straight. Gurganus’s protagonist is a married bisexual; Purdy’s is a widower without a conscious sexual identity. Pintauro follows the thoughts of a straight man who fears rape and longs for his wife; and the central character of Raphael’s story is a sister who never quite accepts her brother’s gayness. Dixon
and Ferrell use more radical points of view by telling their stories, respectively, through a gay basher and a religious fanatic—characters who, instead of appearing as nameless monsters, reveal a more complex, and perhaps more frightening humanity.

  In my introduction to the first volume of Men on Men I noted that gay fiction is an opportunity for gay people to see and judge themselves rather than being merely observed and judged by others. This is still true except that now a number of writers are using a gay perspective to examine the way others see us, thereby encouraging those others to do the same—to look at us and themselves in a new light. The territory of gay fiction is expanding, even to the point of examining straight sexual behavior as in the stories by Pintauro, Dixon, and Gurganus. This expansion with its shifts in focus does not represent an effort to return gay life to the margins of existence it occupied for so long, but the determination to explore the neglected margins of gay life itself, which often overlap equally neglected aspects of the straight world. Gay fiction is proving that it is capable of renewing itself. It is also demonstrating its ability to renew American literature.

  The history of any culture is a history of change, and of struggle. Throughout its own history, American culture has been repeatedly enriched by artists from different regions of the country and from different minorities—Jews after World War II, then blacks and women. In an essay published in the November 1987 issue of Esquire, Frank Rich discusses the great influence gay people have had on American popular culture over the past two decades, but then concludes that the advent of AIDS has now put a stop to this process of “homosexualization.” It is clear, however, that a new period of gay influence has already begun despite AIDS, and in some cases because of it. Gay fiction is providing access to language for an ever more diverse community and producing writers whose superb command of language can no longer be ignored. Above all, it is revitalizing American literature by contesting its social and literary assumptions. At this time in the history of our culture, and for all who read it, gay fiction means life.

  —George Stambolian

  December 1987

  MY MOTHER’S CLOTHES:

  THE SCHOOL OF BEAUTY AND SHAME

  Richard McCann

  He is troubled by any image of himself suffers when he is named. He finds the perfection of a human relationship in this vacancy of the image: to abolish—in oneself between oneself and others—adjectives; a relationship which adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

  —Roland Barthes

  LIKE EVERY CORNER HOUSE IN CARROLL KNOLLS, the comer house on our block was turned backward on its lot, a quirk introduced by the developer of the subdivision, who, having run short of money, sought variety without additional expense. The turned-around houses, as we kids called them, were not popular, perhaps because they seemed too public, their casement bedroom windows cranking open onto sunstruck asphalt streets. In actuality, however, it was the rest of the houses that were public, their picture windows offering dioramic glimpses of early-American sofas and Mediterranean-style pole lamps whose mottled globes hung like iridescent melons from wrought-iron chains. In order not to be seen walking across the living room to the kitchen in our pajamas, we had to close the Venetian blinds. The comer house on our block was secretive, as though it had turned its back on all of us, whether in superiority or in shame, refusing to acknowledge even its own unkempt yard of yellowing zoysia grass. After its initial occupants moved away, the comer house remained vacant for months.

  The spring I was in sixth grade, it was sold. When I came down the block from school, I saw a moving van parked at its curb. “Careful with that!” a woman was shouting at a mover as he unloaded a tiered end table from the truck. He stared at her in silence. The veneer had already been splintered from the table’s edge, as though someone had nervously picked at it while watching TV. Then another mover walked from the truck carrying a child’s bicycle, a wire basket bolted over its thick rear tire, brightly colored plastic streamers dangling from its handlebars.

  The woman looked at me. “What have you got there? In your hand.”

  I was holding a scallop shell spray-painted gold, with imitation pearls glued along its edges. Mrs. Eidus, the art teacher who visited our class each Friday, had showed me how to make it.

  “A hatpin tray,” I said. “It’s for my mother.”

  “It’s real pretty.” She glanced up the street as though trying to guess which house I belonged to. “I’m Mrs. Tyree,” she said, “and I’ve got a boy about your age. His daddy’s bringing him tonight in the new Plymouth. I bet you haven’t sat in a new Plymouth.”

  “We have a Ford.” I studied her housedress, tiny blue and purple flowers imprinted on thin cotton, a line of white buttons as large as Necco Wafers marching toward its basted hemline. She was the kind of mother my mother laughed at for cutting recipes out of Woman’s Day. Staring from our picture window, my mother would sometimes watch the neighborhood mothers drag their folding chairs into a circle on someone’s lawn. “There they go,” she’d say, “a regular meeting of the Daughters of the Eastern Star!” “They’re hardly even women” she’d whisper to my father, “and their clothes. ” She’d criticize their appearance— their loud nylon scarves tied beneath their chins, their disintegrating figures stuffed into pedal pushers—until my father, worried that my brother, Davis, and I could hear, although laughing himself, would beg her, “Stop it, Maria, please stop; it isn’t funny.” But she wouldn’t stop, not ever. “Not even thirty and they look like they belong to the DAR! They wear their pearls inside their bosoms in case the rope should break!” She was the oldest mother on the block but she was the most glamorous, sitting alone on the front lawn in her sleek kick-pleated skirts and cashmere sweaters, reading her thick paperback novels, whose bindings had split. Her hair was lightly hennaed, so that when I saw her pillowcases piled atop the washer, they seemed dusted with powdery rouge. She had once lived in New York City.

  After dinner, when it was dark, I joined the other children congregated beneath the streetlamp across from the turned-around house. Bucky Trueblood, an eighth-grader who had once twisted the stems off my brother’s eyeglasses, was crouched in the center, describing his mother’s naked body to us elementary school children gathered around him, our faces slightly upturned, as though searching for a distant constellation, or for the bats that Bucky said would fly into our hair. I sat at the edge, one half of my body within the circle of light, the other half lost to darkness. When Bucky described his mother’s nipples, which he’d glimpsed when she bent to kiss him goodnight, everyone giggled; but when he described her genitals, which he’d seen by dropping his pencil on the floor and looking up her nightie while her feet were propped on a hassock as she watched TV, everyone huddled nervously together, as though listening to a ghost story that made them fear something dangerous in the nearby dark. “I don’t believe you,” someone said; “I’m telling you,” Bucky said, “that’s what it looks like.”

  I slowly moved outside the circle. Across the street a cream colored Plymouth was parked at the curb. In a lighted bedroom window Mrs. Tyree was hanging cafe curtains. Behind the chain-link fence, within the low branches of a willow tree, the new child was standing in his yard. I could see his white T-shirt and the pale oval of his face, a face deprived of detail by darkness and distance. Behind him, at the open bedroom window, his mother slowly fiddled with a valance. Behind me the children sat spellbound beneath the light. Then Bucky jumped up and pointed in the new child’s direction—“Hey, you, you want to hear something really good?”—and even before the others had a chance to spot him, he vanished as suddenly and completely as an imaginary playmate.

  The next morning, as we waited at our bus stop, he loitered by the mailbox on the opposite comer, not crossing the street until the yellow school bus pulled up and flung open its door. Then he dashed aboard and sat down beside me. “I’m Denny,” he said. Denny: a heavy, unbeautiful child, who, had his parents s
tayed in their native Kentucky, would have been a farm boy, but who in Carroll Knolls seemed to belong to no particular world at all, walking past the identical ranch houses in his overalls and Keds, his whitish-blond hair close-cropped all around except for the distinguishing, stigmatizing feature of a wave that crested perfectly just above his forehead, a wave that neither rose nor fell, a wave he trained with Hopalong Cassidy hair tonic, a wave he tended fussily, as though it were the only loveliness he allowed himself.

  WHAT IN CARROLL KNOLLS MIGHT have been described by someone not native to those parts—a visiting expert, say—as beautiful, capable of arousing terror and joy? The brick ramblers strung with multicolored Christmas lights? The occasional front-yard plaster Virgin entrapped within a chicken-wire grotto entwined with plastic roses? The spring Denny moved to Carroll Knolls, I begged my parents to take me to a nightclub, had begged so hard for months, in fact, that by summer they finally agreed to a Sunday matinee. Waiting in the back seat of our Country Squire, a red bow tie clipped to my collar, I watched our house float like a mirage behind the sprinkler’s web of water. The front door opened, and a white dress fluttered within the mirage’s ascending waves: slipping on her sunglasses, my mother emerged onto the concrete stoop, adjusted her shoulder strap, and teetered across the wet grass in new spectator shoes. Then my father stepped out and cut the sprinkler off. We drove—the warm breeze inside the car sweetened by my mother’s Shalimar— past ranch houses tethered to yards by chain-link fences; past the Silver Spring Volunteer Fire Department and Carroll Knolls Elementary School; past the Polar Bear Soft-Serv stand, its white stucco siding shimmery with mirror shards; past a bulldozed red-clay field where a weathered billboard advertised IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW, until we arrived at the border—a line of cinder-block discount liquor stores, a traffic light—of Washington, D.C. The light turned red. We stopped. The breeze died and the Shalimar fell from the air. Exhaust fumes mixed with the smell of hot tar. A drunk man stumbled into the crosswalk, followed by an old woman shielding herself from the sun with an orange umbrella, and two teen-aged boys dribbling a basketball back and forth between them. My mother put down her sun visor. “Lock your door,” she said.