In 1982, Vidal decided to run in the Democratic primary in California for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He had kept a home in Los Angeles as a legal residence while he spent most of the year in Italy. Running for public office was a strange decision, and Vidal himself didn’t fully understand why he did it. “I am sauntering for the Senate,” he wrote a friend. “Does one want to win? Ah, that’s a question.”
So why did he do it? He was now a highly successful novelist. Perhaps he was restless and wanted to try something new. Here was an opportunity to speak out against the new conservative movement that had put into power Reagan and other friends of his old enemy, William F. Buckley. But politics is a very expensive medium for speaking out, even at a time when corporate money had not yet bought up the store. Vidal assumed he would spend $30,000 of his own money on the primary. If he won, he expected to spend another million in November running against the Republican nominee. He had always had a political itch, but he hadn’t scratched it since his congressional race in New York in 1960. Maybe he just needed to scratch it one last time.
The primary campaign lasted only ninety days. Vidal gave speeches up and down the state, in colleges and town halls, usually variations on the 1980 “State of the Union Revisited” essay he had written for Esquire. Planks in his platform included the reduction of the military, the legalization of drugs, the decriminalization of sex, the abolishment of the CIA, and the taxing of churches. There’s a very entertaining documentary about the campaign, Gore Vidal, the Man Who Said No, that captures how exciting Vidal was as a speaker, and how drab other politicians were in comparison, especially his opponent, Governor Jerry Brown. Vidal offered to contribute $20,000 to the charity of Brown’s choice if he would debate Vidal; Brown refused to rise to the bait. The only time they shared a stage was at a luncheon for journalists. Vidal warned Brown—in dulcet, pussycat tones—that he was growing stale; he needed a vacation from politics: “Take time off. Think about things. Maybe read a book.”
Homosexuality was more visible and discussable in 1982 than it had been in 1960, yet nobody brought up Vidal’s sex life—except for Armistead Maupin. He interviewed Vidal for California magazine and asked about Howard Austen. Vidal said it was a private matter and that they were simply “old friends…. He’s lived various places, I’ve lived various places. We travel together, we travel separately.”
When the primary was held on June 4, Vidal lost badly, getting only a third as many votes as Brown. But only party loyalists vote in primaries, and they tend to be loyal to conventional politicians. In November, Brown lost to the Republican candidate, Pete Wilson. After all, it was the age of Reagan. But by then Vidal had found another way to express himself politically: he was writing a novel about Abraham Lincoln.
That same year, 1982, Edmund White published his next novel, A Boy’s Own Story. He had been working on it steadily since finishing States of Desire. The opening chapter had run as a cover story, “First Love,” in Christopher Street in 1980. Fresh chapters were read aloud by White to the Violet Quill during the year they met. Gay readers knew the book was coming and eagerly awaited it.
With its ironically old-fashioned title, A Boy’s Own Story is a first-person autobiographical novel that follows a gay boy from childhood into adolescence. It looks at first like a classic coming-of-age/coming-out tale—yet in a perverse, original twist, White’s unnamed narrator doesn’t come out. The novel ends in a dark, unfinished place.
The book isn’t constructed as a continuous narrative, but offers scenes from a life out of chronological order, as if the life were broken. In the famous first chapter, the unnamed narrator is fifteen and meets a tough little twelve-year-old, Kevin, whose family is visiting the narrator’s family. Each night the two boys take turns “cornholing” each other, but during the day they barely speak. The narrator thinks he’s in love.
The second chapter steps back in time: the narrator is fourteen and has a summer job working for his father, which enables him to buy a hustler. The third chapter steps back further and we learn about the boy’s life before and after his parents’ divorce when he was seven.
The novel doesn’t become dramatic until the halfway point, when the narrator starts high school and wins the friendship of the class jock, Tommy, and falls in love with him. The two boys have sleepovers where they sprawl on twin beds in their underpants and talk about Sartre and God and girls. We can’t be sure where we are in time until the narrator reports that the following summer was the summer he hired his hustler, a blond like Tommy. When he returns to school, he and Tommy have a double date and the narrator decides he’s in love with the girl. When she gently rebuffs him, the narrator decides he really is homosexual and must cure himself. He tries Buddhism, but it doesn’t work. He decides he must escape his mother and sister and provide himself with male role models. He asks his parents to send him to an all-male prep school.
The broken chronology adds to the somnambulistic feeling of the book, a tale told by a sleepwalker—which is perfect for the story of any adolescent, gay or straight. The narrator is deliberately vague about time and place. Cities are left unnamed and dates obscure. White is still working with one foot in experimental narrative.
The real star of the book is its prose. States of Desire loosened White’s style and enabled him to be both more direct and leisurely. The dense poetry of Nocturnes is leavened with mundane reality and essaylike observations. Here’s his portrait of his gruff, antisocial, cigar-smoking, Brahms-loving father:
I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me. He never discussed music beyond saying that the German Requiem was “damn nice” or that the violin and cello concerto was “one hell of a piece,” and even these judgments he made with a trace of embarrassment; for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.
White celebrates sex with Kevin in this memorable passage:
I didn’t particularly like getting cornholed, but I was peaceful and happy because we loved each other. People say young love or love of the moment isn’t real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.
Many will ask if a few nights of sex between two boys who rarely talk during the day can really be called love. But for many gay men the first experience of good sex is so electric that it magnetizes the body and soul forever. When we catch up to the spot in the narrative, however, where this prelude of love takes place, the summer after the narrator’s first semester at prep school, it’s only mentioned briefly and then passed over, as if sealed in a separate dream.
The sixth and last chapter is the strongest in the novel. The narrator attends prep school, sees a psychiatrist (the vividly awful Dr. O’Reilly) and goes with friends to a brothel. Nothing helps him overcome his homosexuality.
By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men. I’d linger in the locker room and study the brawny back of a senior, a body builder, a German with blond hair greased into symmetrical waves, with a faint dusting of brown hair on his shoulders and (he’s turning around, he drops his towel) with an almost pinkish red puff of seemingly rootless pubic hair somehow floating in a cloud around his penis, as though the big gun had just been fired.
He evokes a whole catalog of naked schoolmates, a sensuous portrait of the world seen from the closet:
Just as each shell held to the ear roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, although all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex.
The boy obsesses over a French gym teacher. He babysits for a Latin teacher and his wife and becomes intimate with their unhappy marriage. They take him to bed, but only to watch
while they make love. Then a jazz musician comes to the school to teach part-time, Mr. Beattie, a hipster out of Baldwin’s Another Country. The fifteen-year-old narrator recognizes a man who enjoys sex with men. He sets up an assignation with Beattie, then goes to the headmaster to report that Beattie distributes marijuana to students. He meets with Beattie and goes down on him, happily knowing he will soon be fired.
Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie because neither one action nor the other alone but the complete cycle allowed me to have sex with a man and then to disown him and it; this sequence was my ideal formulation to love a man and not be a homosexual. Sometimes I think I liked bringing pleasure to a heterosexual man (for after all I’d dreamed of being my father’s lover) at the same time I was able to punish him for not loving me…. Tommy had not loved me. My dad had not loved me.
A Boy’s Own Story is a disturbing, tricky novel. In contrast to the sunny, more open world of States of Desire, the world of Boy’s Own Story is dark and claustrophobic. Shut off from his real feelings by his fear, the young protagonist is forever trying out different emotions, unsure what’s appropriate. The novelist does something similar years later, trying out different explanations. In the name of realism, White often leaves matters unfinished or uncertain. He has since made clear how autobiographical the book really is. The novelist is trying to make sense of episodes from his own life.
White presents his young self as a monster child who thought that love is power and the ultimate power is betrayal. It’s a strong, brutal idea. It makes a powerful condemnation of closet life. And yet I find myself resisting the idea, in part because the story is told in chilly, essaylike fragments rather than as a fully involving drama. And also because the idea feels too strong, too brutal, too neat. I wonder if White isn’t being too harsh on his younger self and something else was happening there. He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last gay writer who needs to think of himself as a villain.
The book received rave reviews from the gay and straight press alike when it appeared in September 1980. The feminist scholar Catharine R. Stimpson praised it in the New York Times Book Review, saying “White has crossed Catcher in the Rye with De Profundis, J. D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel. It is a clear and sinister pool in which goldfish and piranhas both swim…. The subject of A Boy’s Own Story is less a particular boy than the bodies and souls of American men: the teachers and masters; the lovers, brothers, hustlers and friends; the flawed fathers who would be kings to the sons who should be princes.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed the book in the daily Times three months after it was published, but made up for tardiness by calling it “superior fiction…. It is any boy’s story, to the degree that it evokes the inchoate longing of childhood and late adolescence…. For all I know it may be any girl’s story as well.” The Washington Post said American literature “is larger by one classic novel.”
The mainstream had finally accepted a gay novel as a real work of literature. The high quality of White’s prose certainly helped. And the sorrow of the story didn’t hurt. But I also believe that culture had changed and critics were finally ready to treat gay fiction as the equal of straight fiction. This difficult yet beautiful book happened to come along at the right time.
A Boy’s Own Story sold well, not only because of the reviews but because of its classy cover with a hand-tinted photo of a handsome boy on a beach. (Later there were complications: the boy was underage and the family had not given the photographer permission; there was talk of a lawsuit. The publisher put the photo of a professional model on future editions.)
Boy’s sold a healthy 30,000 in cloth but sold even better in trade paperback. Trade paper opened up a whole new world for gay fiction. Avon Books had had some success with gay titles in mass market paperback, beginning with sexy potboilers like The Lord Won’t Mind and One for the Gods by Gordon Merrick. They tried other gay books, ranging from murder mysteries to reissues of Christopher Isherwood, but the profit margin on mass market was so slim that they could make money only with big sellers. Dutton, on the other hand, found that trade paperbacks with their higher list price could turn a profit with lower sales figures. Boy’s Own Story was so successful in trade paper that Dutton decided to do more gay books—all in trade in their Plume line, all with hand-tinted photos on the covers. Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
A Rick Fiala cartoon in Christopher Street at this time showed a gay bar with three or four men sitting at the counter, all busily writing or typing. Another man complains, “This used to be a fun place before everyone started writing a gay novel.”
People worried that there were only so many gay plotlines, and authors would soon run out of stories. But then a virus appeared that gave both writers and readers a terrible new subject.
IV
The Eighties
15. Illness and Metaphor
The virus had been present for several years before it began to sicken and kill. Even then it only slowly came into focus. It was some time before it had a name. And in a cruel moral twist, it was spread sexually, which meant it could be interpreted as punishment for sex.
Sex was the most visible and exciting thing about gay life in the 1970s. Homosexuality was no longer about lies and guilt, secrets and suicide, but about fun and games, freedom and joy. Gay men had been having sex with strangers—many strangers—long before Stonewall. As the lives of these writers should make clear, gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books—it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love. After the Sixties, however, the numbers of participants increased wildly. Bars, baths, and clubs opened in every major city. Anyone could be sexually active. You didn’t need to be brave or beautiful or bohemian. You didn’t need to be political or even to come out. The sexual liberation of everybody at the end of the 1960s set the scene for the gay sexual freedom of the 1970s.
Any sexually communicable disease introduced into this highly conductive circuit board was going to spread rapidly. It was analogous to the spread of bubonic plague by overland trade at the end of the Middle Ages or the spread of cholera by steamships in the nineteenth century: new avenues of communication opened new doors of infection. The old sexual diseases—gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, and hepatitis—exploded in frequency, but it was believed they could be contained. Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex—every city had a free clinic. But nobody had ever seen anything like this new disease.
The bad news first appeared as rumors among New York gay men in 1981 about a virulent strain of pneumonia. Lawrence Mass, a doctor and writer, investigated the story for the New York Native, a new gay newspaper that was a spin-off of Christopher Street. Chuck Ortleb had created the newspaper chiefly to generate revenue to support his magazine. Mass spoke to one doctor and several public health officials and cautiously reported in the Native in May 1981, “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded.”
Two months later, however, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control published startling figures on a different disease: Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer that afflicted only the elderly and was rarely fatal, had been found in otherwise healthy gay men. The New York Times ran a brief piece in its inside pages on July 3, 1981: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexual Men.” Mass went back to the doctors and investigated further and wrote a more troubling article that appeared on the front page of the Native at the end of July: “Cancer in the Gay Community.” A few days later he received an urgent phone call from novelist Larry Kramer. Kramer wanted to hear more about this “cancer.”
The author of Faggots had been relatively silent since 1978. Kramer lived in Manhattan, in a large third-floor apartment in a high-rise building at the foot of Fifth Avenue; his balcony faced the Washington Square Arch. Money earned in movie work had been smartly invested by his brother, Arthur, and he was
financially comfortable. Andrew Holleran remembers his apartment being full of books, “like a bookstore”; Kramer couldn’t go for a walk without buying more. He seems to have been too restless to read carefully or deeply, however, judging by his later comments on other people’s work. He was writing a new novel himself—about a Jewish widow in Palm Beach—but it wasn’t going well. He was seeing his eleventh psychiatrist. (He was as familiar with shrinks as Edmund White.) And he continued to go to the baths regularly, despite his criticism of that life. He initiated a few romances, but they didn’t take. Someone who had a brief affair with him at this time told acquaintances that the sex was great but they couldn’t talk afterward without getting into an argument.
Kramer was disturbed when a couple of friends were struck by a mysterious illness. That was why the articles in the Times and Native got his attention and why he called Mass. Mass put him in touch with Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, who was working with the gay cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Kramer invited Friedman-Kien to speak at his apartment on August 11, 1981, to a gathering of eighty men. Friedman-Kien told the crowded room what the doctors knew and what they feared. A few weeks later, on Labor Day weekend, Kramer and friends went out to Fire Island to distribute copies of Mass’s Native article and to raise money.
Right from the start, it was feared that the new disease was connected to sex. The first diagnosed cases were all gay men with histories of high sexual activity. Nobody was sure how a cancer could be spread sexually—early hypotheses included poppers and fisting. Fears of illness were naturally tangled with guilt about sex. “After sex, all animals are sad,” said the ancients, and sadness often leads to guilt, even in a sexual revolution.
Kramer’s first piece in the New York Native, “A Personal Appeal,” appeared in September 1981. It was short and carefully worded, unlike what he wrote later. The closest he came to blaming the disease on sex were two sentences: “The men who have been stricken don’t appear to have done anything that many New York gay men haven’t done at one time or another…. It’s easy to become frightened that one of the many things we’ve done or taken over the past years may be all it takes for a cancer to grow from a tiny something-or-other that got in there who knows when from doing who knows what.”
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 25
