Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  The clinical details of hospital life block out easy Victorian sentimentality. There is no death of Little Nell in this book. These are lean, tough poems, with no emotional fat. There is no straining for meaning either, although larger meanings sometimes come through. In “The Missing,” Gunn uses the loss of friends to talk about his circle and how friendship (and sex) opened into a larger community, “an unlimited embrace.” Walt Whitman’s “city of comrades” is updated to the 1980s and made more real and poignant by the fact that death is chipping away at it.

  Critics who had grown lukewarm about Gunn rediscovered him and admired what he accomplished in The Man with Night Sweats. It really is an amazing book, each poem shining a fresh light on actual experience, the sum larger than the parts. As one straight critic wrote, “Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably.”

  Meanwhile the novelist Andrew Holleran was writing prose poems like little elegies. Dancer from the Dance had been a kind of elegy for impossible love. He feared there was nothing more to say about gay life, which may have been true for him—his second novel, Nights in Aruba, feels like eloquent leftovers from Dancer. Now, however, there was real cause for elegy. Holleran explored loss in a remarkable series of essays written for a monthly column in Christopher Street magazine, “New York Notebook.” He wrote his first column in 1983. A selection, Ground Zero, was published in 1988.

  Each essay is beautifully written, constructed with recurring motifs and metaphors. They are learned and personal, mixing allusions to Proust and Greek mythology with medical facts and sexual grit. Holleran explored a broad range of topics: friendship, bathhouses, celibacy, porn theaters, George Santayana. His dazzling celebration of the comic playwright/actor Charles Ludlam, who died of AIDS in 1987, includes some of the best descriptions of camp drama ever written: “like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet, putting on fake noses, mustaches, pulling out toy airplanes, little plastic gladiators, goldfish bowls, ray-guns, Cleopatra wigs, he always gave the impression of having assembled the particular play from a magic storeroom in which he kept, like some obsessed bag lady, every prop and character that two thousand years of Western history had washed up on the shores of a Long Island childhood.” Then Holleran ends the piece with a blanket declaration: “Not only is Charles Ludlam gone, it seems, so is humor. One can no longer make jokes about death. One can no longer make jokes at all—the curtain is down.”

  AIDS crowded his mind and it brought down the curtain on everything. Even essays that aren’t about AIDS become essays about AIDS. An appreciation of Henry James includes Holleran imagining that the gay men filling the hospitals had all listened to Lambert Strether’s heartfelt speech from The Ambassadors, “Live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to!”—as if James had brought on the disease.

  Holleran moved to Gainesville, Florida, partly to look after his aging parents but also to flee the epidemic. Many people in the 1980s thought AIDS was a New York/San Francisco disease and they could escape it. But once out of New York, Holleran’s fears and accusations grew even darker and heavier:

  AIDS destroys trust…. AIDS is a form of pollution; in this case, polluted blood and semen. We’ve spoiled even that. AIDS is a form of terrorism—sex becomes Paris the summer the bombs went off. Nobody goes. Like Central Park—empty at night because everyone’s afraid of muggers—homosexual life becomes a vast empty space from which everyone has withdrawn.

  Holleran had always been melancholy, yet his chronic depression now served as a magnifying glass for the depression and fear that affected many gay men at this time. He was far from alone in feeling devastated, confused, and more than a little crazy.

  But in addition to the elegies, a kind of counterelegy appeared, an appreciation of love and sex more tender than what had been written before the epidemic. A young poet, Mark Doty, would eventually write elegies, too, but his strongest early poems include warm, witty appreciations of the body written in defiance of the disease. Doty was born in 1953, grew up in Tennessee and Arizona, went to school in Iowa and Vermont, and spent most of his twenties married to a woman. They divorced, and he came out and moved to New York. His second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, includes a gorgeous tribute to a dirty movie house, “The Adonis Theater,” and a sweetly tender poem, “63rd Street Y,” where he compares the view of men from across the street to “a voyeur’s advent calendar”:

  And on the twelfth floor

  just the perfect feet and ankles

  of the boy in the red-flushed room

  are visible. I think he must be disappointed,

  stirring a little, alone, and then

  two other legs enter the rectangle of view,

  moving toward his and twining with them,

  one instep bending to stroke

  the other’s calf. They make me happy,

  these four limbs in effortless conversation…

  AIDS remains offstage for most of his poems, but is acknowledged now and then. In “Tiara” (“Peter died in a paper tiara/cut from a book of princess paper dolls”), Doty answers the mourners who say their promiscuous friend had “asked for it.”

  Asked for it—

  when all he did was go down

  into the salt tide

  of wanting as much as he wanted,

  giving himself over so drunk

  or stoned it didn’t matter who,

  though they were beautiful,

  stampeding him into the simple,

  ravishing music of their hurry.

  I think heaven is perfect stasis

  poised over realms of desire,

  where dreaming and waking men lie

  on the grass while wet horses

  roam among them, huge fragments

  of the music we die into

  in the body’s paradise.

  It’s a highly romantic celebration of sex, something that was badly needed at a time when so many people talked about promiscuity as a selfish, evil activity. Doty was not writing out of ignorance. His own partner, Wally Roberts, had recently tested positive for HIV.

  The older writers didn’t always understand what was happening. In an interview in Playboy, Gore Vidal said he thought people were overreacting to AIDS. After all, he had grown up with syphilis in the years before penicillin; he was used to sexual diseases. Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

  But Christopher Isherwood understood. More accurately, he understood how little he knew. “I don’t feel I know nearly enough about the AIDS situation,” he told Armistead Maupin in 1985, when Maupin interviewed him and Don Bachardy for the Village Voice. “But these younger men who find they have it—some absolutely awful pressures begin to assert themselves. They’re told by their relatives that it’s a sort of punishment, that it’s dreadful and it’s God’s will and all that sort of thing. And I think they have to be very tough with themselves and decide which side they’re on.” Then he added, “You know, fuck God’s will. God’s will must be circumvented, if that’s what it is.”

  Maupin interviewed Isherwood and Bachardy as a couple and they talked mostly about their life together. They no longer fought about outside boyfriends but fought instead about Bachardy’s driving—he was a terrible driver. They said they still slept tangled together in the same bed.

  This was the last interview Isherwood would give. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he didn’t tell Maupin. Approaching death himself, he firmly rejected the glib judgments that people often make about illness and mortality.

  Bachardy had been drawing pictures of Isherwood ever since he first studied art as a teenager. Beginning in August 1985, as his lover grew more ill, Bachardy drew him more steadily, constantly,
obsessively. The pictures were in black acrylic on paper, the paint diluted to the consistency of ink and applied with different brushes. The images have the stark simplicity of Japanese ideograms fleshed out with washes of gray. The drawing sessions were intense and intimate—Bachardy drew his eighty-one-year-old lover both clothed and nude. Later published in a book with selections from Bachardy’s diary, Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings, the pictures suggest a storyboard of dying, a comic strip of death. Stephen Spender called them “merciless and loving,” and Bachardy agreed. “The thought occurs to me,” Bachardy wrote in his diary, “am I so insistent about these sittings with Chris as a means of extending the time I have left with him…?” Isherwood would sign and date each picture.

  He went into the hospital in October and the pictures stopped for three weeks. When he returned to their house in Santa Monica and the sessions resumed, his face was more gaunt and angular. More disturbing was his indifference to the artwork, he who had always been Bachardy’s biggest enthusiast. “Oh, the pain, the pain,” he grumbled whenever he moved. He stopped signing the pictures.

  That December, Thom Gunn wrote a poem about his friend, “To Isherwood Dying,” where he compared Death to the young men whistling for girls outside Isherwood’s apartment in the opening pages of Goodbye to Berlin.

  Isherwood died at home late in the morning on January 4, 1986. Bachardy had made six drawings of him the night before. After he expired, however, Bachardy continued to draw, unwilling to stop. He drew only the head now, from different angles, the sheet drawn up to his chin, a harrowing abstraction of sharp chin, big nostrils, and open eyes. “I started drawing Chris’s corpse at two o’clock and worked more or less steadily until [the doctor] came around nine…. Chris’s body spooks me because it already has so little to do with him.” The body was taken away to a medical school where it was dissected by students.

  On the last page of A Single Man, Isherwood writes that the body is only trash after individual consciousness floats off to rejoin the ocean of consciousness. Christopher Isherwood was now part of that vast metaphysical ocean—and of a smaller ocean of books and readers.

  17. Tales of Two or Three Cities

  During the first thirteen years after Stonewall, gay life and culture had finally begun to achieve some acceptance. With the coming of AIDS, however, homosexuality was demonized all over again. Antigay politicians now used the disease to resist campaigns for tolerance and equality. Homosexuality was not just a moral hazard, it was a health hazard. Gore Vidal’s old enemy, William F. Buckley, went so far as proposing that people who tested positive for the virus be tattooed—on a private spot, such as the back or buttocks. He insisted he was only being practical even after it was pointed out that the Nazis tattooed people in concentration camps.

  A window had been opened, but it could be closed again. The age of AIDS was also the age of Reagan. Nevertheless, the old silence of the 1950s and 1960s did not return. TV resumed its old timidity about homosexuality now that it was synonymous with illness, but the plays and books continued to appear, actually increasing in number, especially the books.

  After the success of A Boy’s Own Story, Dutton decided to publish more gay fiction. In 1984 the publishing house issued The Family of Max Desir by Robert Ferro, Edmund White’s colleague from the Violet Quill. Max Desir features painful, realistic episodes about an unhappy family with a dying mother juxtaposed with sweet chapters about the son’s gay romance in Italy. Also in 1984, Knopf put out a first book of short stories, Family Dancing, by twenty-three-year-old David Leavitt. Leavitt had made a splash as an undergraduate at Yale when he published a story in the New Yorker about a divorced mother and her gay son. His stories were quiet slices of day-to-day life, the gay characters young and still in college, good sons who are just coming out and not promiscuous or wild. Mainstream readers felt safe with these nice young men in the darkening shadows of AIDS. The book was remarkably successful for a short story collection and was reprinted again and again. Ferro and Leavitt both showed that there was more to gay life than sex, and that families were an important part of that life.

  Leavitt followed two years later with his first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes, which took these themes into more dangerous territory: a young man comes out to his family and forces his father to acknowledge his own homosexuality. It’s a double coming-out story, but the mother/wife is the real protagonist. Her situation is the most interesting since she is both victim and willfully blind enabler. Reviews in the mainstream press were more mixed—Leavitt was hitting straight readers closer to home—but Lost Language sold even better than his stories.

  Dutton put out an anthology of gay short stories in 1986, Men on Men, edited by George Stambolian, showcasing a wide variety of writers. Additional Men on Men collections followed, a total of eight volumes over the next fifteen years with 152 stories by 139 different writers. Meanwhile Dutton published more gay novels and a few lesbian novels, too. The titles were reprinted in their trade paperback line, Plume. Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s Press continued to publish gay novels in hardcover, although his biggest success was the 1987 history of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts. St. Martin’s initiated its own gay paperback imprint, Stonewall Inn Editions, in 1988.

  The publishing industry had discovered niche marketing, taking a concept from ecology (each species finds a niche in an ecosystem) and applying it to a species of reader. Thanks to the existence of the gay press and gay bookstores, gay-themed titles virtually sold themselves—with an approximate 7,500 copy ceiling in hardcover. They didn’t need to be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review to find a readership—and they rarely were. It was the age of the gay midlist novel. Publishers could count on a small but solid profit while hoping an occasional novel would cross over into bigger sales. By 1992, 10 percent of Plume’s titles would be gay. The new literary presence was so strong that Esquire made a joke about it in their August 1987 overview, “Who’s Who in the Literary Power Game.” A list of absences (“Lost in Space”) included “Young heterosexual male authors.”

  But Esquire was ahead of other publications in their awareness that the culture was changing. In November 1987 they ran a long article by Frank Rich, chief drama critic of the New York Times, “The Gay Decades,” a smart, friendly, openly curious exploration by a straight man of how gay life had changed since 1960 and how it affected the world at large. Rich’s point of view was different from a gay man’s, which made the piece even more interesting. For example, he admitted he found the giant Calvin Klein underwear ad towering over Times Square intimidating: “I couldn’t decide whether the image was more threatening as a homoerotic come-on or as an unrealizable heterosexual physical ideal that women would now expect me and all men to match. But the billboard quickly became part of the landscape.” His honesty was a breath of fresh air.

  Out in San Francisco, Armistead Maupin continued to follow the tangled lives of the circle of friends at 28 Barbary Lane. Harper and Row continued to issue the books as paperback originals and the audience continued to grow. The San Francisco Chronicle serial was so popular that other newspapers and magazines tried their own serialized novels, the most memorable being Leap Year by the gifted short story writer Peter Cameron, published in the New York weekly, Seven Days, in 1988. Cameron, too, mixed straight and gay characters, but this time in Manhattan.

  The Barbary Lane novels were comedies, but Maupin was not afraid to include harsh realities. He brought a lesbian couple back from Guyana in time to miss the Jonestown massacre. When AIDS hit, he was the first established novelist to write directly about the epidemic. He had an advantage over other writers in that his fictional world was already up and running, with characters who were in harm’s way. But how does one introduce a murderous plague into a comic pastorale without destroying its mood or scaring off readers?

  Maupin did it deftly in his fourth novel, Babycakes, which came out as a book in 1984. People go on with their lives, especially
straight people. Mary Ann Singleton, the ingenue from the Midwest, is now a TV journalist married to Brian Hawkins, the former libertine. They are struggling to have a baby. Mrs. Madrigal continues to dispense wisdom and joints. And Michael Tolliver now works for an AIDS hotline. He is quieter and sadder, but still himself. He can make jokes about the disease, then drop the comic mask and acknowledge how much it hurts. As the novel progresses, however, we realize a major character is missing: Jon Fielding, the immensely likable doctor who was involved off and on with Michael during the first three novels. Michael has a dream about him early on, but we’re not told he died of AIDS until a third of the way in, when Michael discusses his death with Mrs. Madrigal. Then Michael visits his friend Mona in England and tells her the full, excrutiating story. It’s an ingenious storytelling device, subtle and true to life, but quietly devastating.

  And life still went on. The next novel, Significant Others, appeared three years later in 1987. Mary Ann is a highly successful TV personality and she and Brian have adopted a daughter and moved into a high-rise overlooking 28 Barbary Lane, where Michael still lives. Michael is now HIV positive; he carefully monitors his health as he goes on with his life.

  When Brian learns that an old girlfriend is sick, he panics that he too has AIDS. The novel takes place during the ten days he waits for the results of his HIV test. He doesn’t dare tell his wife. He and Michael and many other characters leave town for the Russian River, where the wealthy “boys only” Bohemian Grove is meeting just down the road from the lesbian “girls only” Wimminwood music festival. More tightly constructed than its predecessors, the book is like a bedroom farce set in the forest, Maupin’s own As You Like It. Much of it is pure slapstick, but the last twenty pages, as everyone comes to terms with his or her demons, are full of complex emotions. Among those demons is the fact that Michael has fallen in love.