Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  He continued to write essays, including a book-length set of riffs on his obsession with movies, The Devil Finds Work, that’s also a mess but full of fine things. He published an essay in Playboy in 1985, “Freaks and the Ideal of American Masculinity,” later reprinted as “Here Be Dragons,” that’s his only nonfiction account of his own sexuality. The essay is full of free association about sex and androgyny, American imperialism and the Industrial Revolution, Boy George and Michael Jackson, but it also includes indelible snapshots of Baldwin’s sex life in the 1940s in Times Square (“There were no X-rated movies then, but there were, so to speak, X-rated audiences”) and Greenwich Village (“I quickly learned that my existence was the punchline of a dirty joke”). It’s a painful but powerful piece.

  Baldwin’s health was bad, his body weakened by chain-smoking and drinking. He was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in the spring of 1987. Surgery was performed but the results were not good. He was taken to St. Paul-de-Vence, where he spent his last months surrounded by friends, including his brother David; his biographer, David Leeming; and his loyal ex-lover, Lucien Happersberger, who had finished his third marriage.

  Baldwin died at home. His body was flown to New York and a memorial service was held on December 8 at St. John the Divine, the mammoth unfinished cathedral on the border of Harlem and the Upper West Side. Among the speakers were Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Amiri Baraka. Their eulogies were reprinted in the New York Times Book Review, but they celebrated him solely as a black writer, not a gay one. The Times obituary mentioned homosexuality only as something Baldwin was criticized for discussing too frankly in his fiction. His best novels, Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, were cited only in passing, while he was celebrated primarily as an essayist. The degayification of James Baldwin had begun.

  Robert Ferro wrote a letter to the Times challenging their silence about Baldwin’s sexuality: “[T]oo little has been made of his important contribution in this area. Perhaps this is not surprising; perhaps it is for gay people to claim him as our champion, as blacks have done. For as a man and writer, Baldwin was both black and gay, and in this combination he found his voice, his strength and his crown.”

  Nevertheless, in the years ahead, the literary mainstream continued to downplay or ignore Baldwin’s sexuality. It was too complicated to address both minority sides of him, so they sacrificed the side that made them uncomfortable. But this left Baldwin incomplete, a writer who had promised much but delivered little; he was remembered chiefly as a beautiful talker and another sad American failure—instead of the great novelist he often was.

  Robert Ferro was sick with AIDS when he wrote his letter about Baldwin. He and his partner, Michael Grumley, died that summer—within ten weeks of each other.

  18. Laughter in the Dark

  Laugh and you are free.

  —Charles Ludlam

  Edmund White might call humor bourgeois and Andrew Holleran could claim that AIDS had killed comedy. Nevertheless, humor not only remained a part of gay life, it flourished during the epidemic, sometimes as an escape, but also as a counterattack.

  Charles Ludlam was a comic magician, a short, balding, often ordinary-looking young man from Long Island who used makeup and imagination to transform himself into an astonishing array of stage divas and villains. He studied drama at Hofstra and moved to New York’s Lower East Side in 1965 to work in the downtown theater scene with Ronald Tavel and other avant-garde performers. He then formed his own troupe, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, helped by his best friend from high school, Christopher Scott. (Scott was the lover of the well-connected Henry Geldzahler—they can be seen together in a famous painting by David Hockney—and the couple helped Ludlam financially as well as artistically.) The company, also known as the Theater of the Ridiculous, eventually found a home on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, in a large basement that had been a magic theater called the Shrine of the Orient in the 1920s, and in the 1930s Cafe Society, the integrated nightclub where Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit.” (“It’s got great ghosts,” said Ludlam. “I feel they’re there.”) Here Ludlam staged a startling series of plays, from Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide and Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, his Yiddish-flavored parody of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, to his own versions of Bluebeard and Camille. (“I think that I am the Camille of our era.”)

  Ludlam loved theater in all its forms: high, low, grand, trashy, children’s plays, and sex shows. His parody celebrations of theater and movies were grounded in gay sensibility and included gay jokes (when Ludlam as the dying Marguerite in Camille is told there are no faggots of wood for the fire, she turns to the audience and plaintively asks, “No faggots in the house?”) yet his wit and invention could be enjoyed by anyone with a taste for absurdity. When film critic Pauline Kael wanted to describe the joy of movie parody in 1978, “that golden hysteria of taking the situations in old movies to a logical extreme… the true happy dirty madness,” she cited TV comedian Carol Burnett and Charles Ludlam.

  It was an art-for-art’s-sake comedy in a world of its own, yet Ludlam also lived in the larger world. When he created a sword-and-sandal parody, Salammbo, in 1985, he said the show was his response to AIDS. Not only did he consider the cast of half-clad bodybuilders his gift to his gay audience (“We decided we gays have been through enough in the last couple of years. We are going to give them a little something”), but a play about ancient Carthage couldn’t help being about fascism and religion. It began previews midway between the opening nights of As Is and The Normal Heart.

  “Loosely based” on the Gustave Flaubert book that may be the most absurd novel ever written by a major novelist, a weird mix of solemn prose and purple drama, Ludlam’s Salammbo was a mad extravaganza with a huge cast, elaborate decor, live doves, and a gigantic naked fat lady playing a man. The publicity stills feature Ludlam as Salammbo sprawled on a divan like a chubby Elizabeth Taylor surrounded by well-oiled beefcake. Gay audiences loved it, but straight audiences stayed away, fearing it was too gay. An expensive show to produce, Ludlam kept it running by reviving his amazing two-man send-up of Victorian melodrama, The Mystery of Irma Vep, with his lover, Everett Quinton. The two men raced on- and offstage, each playing four different characters, an exhausting workout, but Ludlam continued to perform Salammbo on alternate nights. (Irma Vep contained the funniest piece of comic business I’ve ever seen on stage: On a dark and stormy night, Ludlam in a nightgown and blond sausage curls settles in front of a fireplace with a book. Behind her, a great clawed hand begins to tap on a window. She doesn’t hear it. The claw keeps tapping. The audience laughs. Ludlam remains engrossed in her book. The claw taps louder. Ludlam pauses, takes a deep breath—then licks her finger and turns the page. The audience laughs even harder. Moments pass, an eternity. Just when you think the joke cannot last another second, Ludlam hears the noise and looks up, her eyes wide in horror. The audience goes wild. It’s pure schtick, but schtick of genius.)

  Ludlam and Quinton continued to do Irma Vep after Salammbo closed and Ludlam’s next play, The Artificial Jungle, opened. He was also acting for film and television; he even found time to direct an opera in Santa Fe.

  In the middle of all this, in November 1986, Ludlam was diagnosed with AIDS. He told only Quinton and remained active so nobody would guess he was ill. He began preparations on a summer production of Titus Andronicus for Shakespeare in the Park. He shut himself away with “the flu” for a month in March. Then in April he was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, unable to breathe. He died there on May 28, 1987. His obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times, celebrating his achievements and declaring he had died of AIDS. Such honesty was rare at the time. He was only forty-four.

  When Andrew Holleran claimed in his essay on the death of Ludlam that AIDS marked the end of comic drag and camp, he could not have been more wrongheaded. Other artists followed Ludlam. Actor/actress/playwright Charles Busch had already written and starred in his first hit, Vampire Lesb
ians of Sodom, in 1984. He followed it in 1987 with Psycho Beach Party (he wanted to call it Gidget Goes Psychotic, but the girl’s name was trademarked) and a noir parody, The Lady in Question, in 1989. His work is more pop-driven than Ludlam’s, yet there is the same transformative love of bad theater and bad movies, a keen appreciation for the poetry of camp.

  The same can be said of John Epperson, who created the Kabuki-like drag queen, Lypsinka, a thin, unearthly figure who has no voice of her own but speaks in recorded songs and sound bites from old movies. Epperson was so thin that when he did a striptease in I Could Go on Lypsinking, many in the audience couldn’t help but think of emaciated friends in the hospital, only here the skeletal figure was happily singing against death.

  Humor remained a strong presence in fiction, too. Armistead Maupin had begun with comedy yet successfully incorporated everyday sorrow into his work. David Feinberg began with comic anger in his 1988 first novel, Eighty-Sixed, juxtaposing the life of his smartass narrator, B. J. Rosenthal, in 1980 before AIDS, with his life in 1986 after the epidemic has cut his world wide open.

  Comedy was not sugarcoating but an additional weapon, an extension of vocabulary. Yet there were also talented writers who used comedy to get away from AIDS. They were not mindless escapes but intelligent, clear-minded diversions that acknowledged the fact that gay life went on despite disease. The strongest and most successful was The Object of My Affection by Stephen McCauley.

  McCauley grew up outside Boston, attended the University of Vermont, moved to New York, and worked as a travel agent before he studied writing at Columbia University. There he began work on a novel which he finished after returning to Boston. Published in 1987, The Object of My Affection is the first-person account of a gay man in Brooklyn, George, whose friends include gay men, straight men, women, and one best friend, Nina. Their friendship has an excellent literary pedigree, going back to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but McCauley did not need to be coy or mysterious about George’s life. He avoided the subject of AIDS, yet he did not avoid serious emotion. George and Nina are two equally neurotic, nervous souls who use their friendship as a foxhole to hide from serious romantic involvements. They must learn to let go of each other before they can move on with their lives.

  There are dark sides to McCauley’s artistry (best shown in his startling short memoir about his family, “Let’s Say,” published in Boys Like Us), but the surface is smart, sane, and truly funny. Object of My Affection was one of the few genuine crossover successes in gay fiction. When people talk about gay crossover, it’s often assumed that a book has found straight readers. But many editors and critics suspect that increased sales figures only mean a book is finding a wider gay readership, attracting gay men who don’t want to read anything “too gay.” However, McCauley’s tale of friendship between a gay man and straight woman found a huge audience among straight women: single, young females who longed for a gay best friend, even an imaginary one. Armistead Maupin found a crossover audience, too, although he had to press his publisher to build on it—they were happy with their success in the gay market. A few smart people in movies and television recognized early the story possibilities in both Maupin and McCauley. Tales of the City was optioned for film in 1979 shortly after it was published. Years passed before it was developed as a series for PBS. The series was finally aired in 1993 but, despite its enormous popularity, PBS was afraid to continue for fear they’d lose federal funding. Four more years went by before More Tales of the City was filmed by the cable channel Showtime.

  The Object of My Affection was optioned as soon as it came out, but didn’t reach the screen until 1998. The screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein is very different from the book, telling the story of an unhappy straight woman in love with a perfect gay man—the novel is more complex and balanced. But novel and movie both proved the existence of an audience for the straight woman/gay friend plotline. Max Mutchnick, cocreator of the TV series Will and Grace, has never mentioned Object in any of his interviews, but it’s hard to believe the book or movie were unknown to him and that they weren’t brought up at development meetings with the network. The movie opened in March 1998; Will and Grace premiered six months later. The highly popular situation comedy ran for eight seasons and was seen by far more people than have read any of the books discussed here.

  One gay novelist got out of books and into television as soon as he could. After two ingenious lighter-than-air comic novels, Blue Heaven in 1988 and Putting on the Ritz in 1992, Joe Keenan left New York for Los Angeles to work on the TV series Frasier. He did first-rate work in television, and his jokes about gay life—with special emphasis on the closet and gay/straight differences—were always surprising and slippery.

  Several playwrights addressed the epidemic directly with comedy. Adam and the Experts by Victor Bumbalo used the blackest comedy imaginable to tell the absurdist tale of a gay man and his doctors. Bumbalo used gentler comedy to humanize his very real account of a year in the waiting room of an AIDS clinic, What Are Tuesdays Like? Paul Rudnick boldly incorporated broad, revue-style comedy in Jeffrey to capture a screwy modern world of sex addict support groups and cheerful AIDS fund-raisers. Even Larry Kramer tried his hand at stage comedy. But first he returned to politics.

  After the success of The Normal Heart, he worked on a few plays and even went back to his novel. But art is long and life is short. The AIDS crisis continued to eat at him. He was not alone in his frustration over how little was being done. There were now 37,000 cases of AIDS in the United States and over 16,000 deaths. The FDA was slow in approving new drugs; the one drug available, AZT, was considered both overpriced and toxic. A new activist group, the Lavender Hill Mob, held 1960s-style zaps in New York and Atlanta to call attention to these problems.

  When a speaker canceled at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in New York on March 10, 1987, Kramer was invited to talk instead. He eagerly accepted.

  The Center was housed in an old high school on West Thirteenth Street (opposite the building where Anaïs Nin introduced Gore Vidal to Truman Capote). The ground-floor meeting room was big and shabby. Kramer stood in front of a crowd of three hundred sitting in folding chairs. He began by asking the people on the lefthand side of the room to stand. “At the rate we are going, you could be dead in less than five years. Two-thirds of this room could be dead in less than five years. Sit down now.” He spoke quickly and to the point. Time was running out, he said, and GMHC and other AIDS organizations were not political enough. Gay people needed to get more political. He praised the Lavender Hill Mob for what they had done in Atlanta.

  Michael Petrelis of Lavender Hill was in the audience that night. At the end of the speech he jumped up and proposed they do a public action in New York. Kramer agreed. “We have to go after the FDA—fast. That means coordinated protests, pickets, arrests. Are you ashamed of being arrested? Well, until we do, I don’t have to tell you what’s going to happen.”

  Two nights later another meeting was held at the Center. More people attended and they formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP. Their immediate goal was to press the government to release new drugs more quickly. It was a highly ad hoc, totally democratic group, avoiding the bureaucracy that many felt had hobbled GMHC. Their first action was a demonstration on Wall Street, a few blocks from the stock exchange. The Public Theater provided a dummy of the FDA director to hang in effigy. Traffic was blocked and seventeen people were arrested, including Kramer, Petrelis, and a few GMHC board members.

  ACT UP grew quickly. It energized the AIDS wars, attracting thousands of young men and women, including people with media savvy and a gift for graphic design. Their posters and slogan, “Silence = Death,” became ubiquitous. They organized major protests against federal health agencies and the major drug companies, including Bristol-Myers and Burroughs Wellcome. Their weekly Monday night meetings became so large that they needed to move across town to the Great Hall of Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln once spoke.
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br />   However, a year after the Wall Street action, Kramer left ACT UP, just as he had left GMHC. He decided ACT UP was too ad hoc, too democratic. He wanted more structure. Later, when Kramer said the organization was his child, his creation, several members argued that his speech had been a catalyst but other people were more important as founders. The details remain confusing. David Feinberg joked about Kramer’s tendency to turn against his offspring in a satirical fantasy where he imagined news items in a time after AIDS: “Larry Kramer forms an organization dealing with our most pressing health concern since the AIDS epidemic: DSBU (Deadly Sperm Build-Up). Three months later he will be forcibly removed from the board of directors, at his own request.”

  Whatever the reason for his departure, Kramer returned to playwriting, going back to an unfinished script, an out-and-out comedy, Just Say No: A Play about a Farce, set in Washington, D.C. A gay protagonist, Foppy Schwartz, a Capote-like confidant of famous women, serves as ringmaster for a parade of thinly disguised public figures, including a Koch-like closeted mayor, a Nancy Reagan–like First Lady, and her Ron Reagan Jr.–like dancer son. The story has something to do with the stolen videotape of a White House orgy; a call girl is murdered; the First Son falls in love with a man. A black maid regularly addresses the audience with asides like “White Jew Georgetown Faggot Strangles Loyal Schvartzah for Talking Cheap.” On the page it reads as energetic, noisy, obvious, and not very funny. Friends who saw the 1988 production, however, report that it was highly entertaining.