Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  One can speculate that Kramer was angry because White had finished a novel while he still struggled with his own. Or that he was afraid White’s look at the 1970s would displace Faggots, which really is about nothing but sex. A generous reader might even argue that Kramer was sincerely worried White’s novel would reignite the old sexual frenzy. In fact, this article was the first shot in Kramer’s strange new war against gay promiscuity, one he would wage over the following year in a number of places, including the op-ed page of the New York Times. The sixty-two-year-old author was suddenly obsessed with the idea that gay men in their twenties were once again having too much sex now that AIDS appeared to be less dangerous.

  Because, in a surprising development, the epidemic seemed to be subsiding.

  21. High Tide

  The change had begun a few years earlier when the safe-sex campaigns began to show results: the infection rates for HIV were dropping. Annual deaths from AIDS peaked in the United States in 1995 at 50,000. Then in 1996 protease inhibitors were introduced. Andrew Sullivan wrote a cover story on the new treatments in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, declaring that the epidemic was over. Well, it was over for him, but it took time for the expensive drugs to help people without money or access to better care. Even so, AIDS deaths dropped to 37,000 in 1996, 21,000 in 1997, and 18,000 in 1998. The rate of new infections decreased, too, although not as rapidly.

  This was good news, but it was not the dramatic conclusion that people had hoped for, the discovery or cure that would change everything overnight. Instead there was only a slow shift, like the return of daylight on the morning of a cold rainy day. AIDS became a manageable, chronic condition, but there was still no cure. It didn’t feel real, but what would feel real after so much death? By 2000, over half a million Americans had died in the epidemic. It’s estimated that anywhere between three-quarters to three-fifths of those deaths were gay or bisexual men. Homosexuality was still such a shameful secret that there is no clear statistical record.

  In a curious bit of timing, soon after protease inhibitors were introduced, the movie of Object of My Affection finally got made and the sitcom Will and Grace premiered on network television. Maybe it’s only coincidental, but it was as if the zeitgeist decided that being gay was no longer synonymous with death and our stories were safe for popular entertainment.

  There were soon more gay movies, almost all of which were independently produced—the rise of low-budget independent filmmaking energized American cinema for everyone, gay and straight, white and black, male and female. Some of these films were quite good: Longtime Companion, with a script by playwright Craig Lucas; Gods and Monsters, from my own novel Father of Frankenstein; and Mysterious Skin, from the novel by Scott Heim. On the other hand, any partnership between big-money studios and gay lit remained difficult. Lucas and another gay playwright, Douglas Carter Beane, were brought out to Los Angeles after their successes on the New York stage. Both men apparently had bad experiences there, at least based on the plays each wrote afterward about gay artists in Hollywood. The Dying Gaul by Lucas is a bitter, angry piece about a gay writer who is tricked into betraying his principles and becomes so furious that he inadvertently causes the death of a woman and two children. The accident doesn’t entirely make sense (it involves a killer salad), but the anger is utterly plausible. Beane was angry, too, but he expressed it in a joyfully nihilistic, excoriating comedy, The Little Dog Laughed, where everyone sells out: an actor, his agent, even a hustler who falls in love with him—all of them preferring conventional success to real happiness.

  But books and plays were not the only game in town anymore. There were now movies and even TV shows to compete against. A few years later, in 2002, when Edmund White wrote an introduction for a reissue of A Boy’s Own Story, he wrote it as an elegy for gay fiction, which he claimed had been killed off by Will and Grace.

  Michael Cunningham kept his distance from the literary battles of White, Kramer, and others. He was involved with AIDS groups, especially ACT UP, but he stayed out of gay literary politics. He did not like public speaking, anyway. He spent a lot of time at the gym, maintaining a muscular build well into his fifties. Success was good for him. He was frequently seen strolling on the streets in New York or Provincetown, a model-handsome man with the blissful serenity of a satisfied lion.

  He published a third novel in 1995, Flesh and Blood, a family saga that includes a mother who becomes friends with a drag queen. The book received good reviews, but also critical ones in the Washington Post and New York Times from reviewers who were indignant that a gay novelist thought he had the right to make moral judgments about straight people. Cunningham kept his old readers but did not gain any new ones. Then in 1998, a year after The Farewell Symphony, he published the novel that made him famous: The Hours, his homage to Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

  Mrs. Dalloway is a difficult book, a headlong prose poem that darts in and out of the minds of a dozen different characters during a single day in London after the First World War. The prose is dense, the psychology complicated, the range of characters—from the fragile title character to her society friends to a veteran of the trenches who goes insane—daunting. I have always admired the novel but confess that it wasn’t until my third reading that it finally unlocked and fully came to life for me. The Hours, however, is instantly accessible, like a guidebook to Woolf with a plot—or rather, three plots. Cunningham tells three different stories about Mrs. Dalloway: one about Woolf writing it (“The Hours” was her working title) and two about American women who read it in different decades and use it to give shape to their own lives. All three stories are haunted by madness and suicide. The American stories connect together in a surprising, satisfying way.

  The Hours is smart and well-written with serious literary credentials. It succeeded with both critics and readers, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Ferro-Grumley, and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award. (The Lambda Book Award, however, went that year to An Arrow’s Flight.) It was briefly a best seller in hardcover and became a perennial seller in trade paper. But I have to say that I prefer A Home at the End of the World, which told a brand-new story. Bear in mind that I had unlocked Mrs. Dalloway for myself and did not need a substitute. People who love Mrs. Dalloway often think less highly of The Hours.

  The book’s huge success was also helped by the fact that the three protagonists were all female, and because Cunningham had learned to downplay gay sex. Unlike Edmund White, he left his private life out of his fiction. Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn’t help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize. Yet we cannot ignore the significance of a book by an openly gay writer with major gay characters winning a bundle of mainstream awards. It would’ve been unthinkable ten years earlier.

  A more direct, less overtly literary yet equally important novel appeared two years later in 2000, another story about the value of storytelling: The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin.

  After leaving Barbary Lane, Maupin, like other writers here, tried his hand at more mainstream material. Maybe the Moon (1992) is about a woman, an actress, Cadence Roth, who is also a dwarf and bisexual. Okay, the subject is not really mainstream, but this is not quite a gay novel, either. Cadence was based on Maupin’s friend, Tammy De Treux, whose acting career included working inside the costume of the title character in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Cadence narrates her own story, Maupin writing for the first time in first person, but as a woman. One can’t help thinking of an earlier act of transvestite ventriloquism, Myra Breckinridge, although Maupin brings us so close to Cadence that there’s nothing freakish about her. As always, he humanizes everyone he touches.

  Maybe the Moon is good, but his next novel is amazing. The Night Listener is Maupin’s best single book; it’s also his most autobiographical.

  It, too, is written in first person; here Maupin turns himself into a late-night radio stor
yteller, Gabriel Noone. Like Maupin, Noone is a San Francisco–based local and national celebrity from the South. And he is breaking up with his partner, Jess, much as Maupin had recently broken with Terry Anderson.

  After years of living with AIDS, Anderson started the new cocktail of protease inhibitors and antivirals and regained much of his health. The two men had been able to overlook difficulties in their life together when they thought time was limited. When time opened up again, Anderson wanted to be on his own. “Learning you’re going to live can cause as many upheavals as learning you’re going to die,” Maupin has said. Such separations were so common among gay couples that they had a name: cocktail divorces. Maupin and Anderson remained friends, like Noone and his ex.

  The new novel includes other pieces of autobiography: Maupin’s relationship with his father, his memories of his late mother, his private thoughts about writing, sex, politics, marijuana, and getting old. But the most important piece of autobiography is at the center of the book, a stranger-than-fiction, true-life story that was already public.

  Back in 1991, a teenager wrote a fan letter to novelist Paul Monette, author of a highly successful memoir about living with AIDS, Borrowed Time. Tony Johnson was thirteen and he, too, was living with AIDS—contracted when he was sexually abused by a pedophile ring led by his mother and father. He had escaped his parents and now lived with his adopted mother, a social worker named Vicki Johnson, in Union City, New Jersey. Monette lived in Los Angeles, but the two talked every night by telephone.

  Everyone who ever spoke to Tony was impressed by how smart and upbeat the boy was despite all he had suffered. He had also had syphilis, suffered a stroke, and lost a testicle and a leg. Monette encouraged him to write his story, which Tony did. Monette sent the manuscript to his editor at Crown, David Groff, one of the founders of Publishing Triangle. Groff loved the book and bought it, paying a moderate advance of five thousand dollars. When he sent the galleys to Armistead Maupin for a quote, Maupin was so taken with the tale that he wanted to get in touch with Tony. They too began to talk regularly on the phone.

  A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by Anthony Godby Johnson appeared in the spring of 1993. It received a lot of attention, and Tony was treated as the Anne Frank of AIDS. But when TV newsmagazines asked to interview him, Vicki Johnson said no, insisting she needed to protect him from the pedophile ring.

  Maupin and Tony never met face-to-face—nobody ever met Tony Johnson face-to-face. Years later, after The Night Listener, Tad Friend wrote a remarkable article for the New Yorker, “Virtual Love,” where he tried to discover the truth about the boy. Reading it is like falling down a rabbit hole of secret identities and multiple personalities. Tony appears to have been the persona of Vicki Johnson, whose real name was Joanne Fraginals, but we can’t even be sure who she is.

  Tony had been very busy by mail and telephone, winning over not only Monette, Maupin, and Groff, but many others, including Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, baseball star Mickey Mantle, and Keith Olbermann, then still a sports commentator. Doubts sometimes set in, but they were guiltily willed away. When Monette died in 1995, he was less certain that Tony existed. Maupin didn’t begin to doubt until the night Anderson spoke on the phone to both the boy and Vicki Johnson. They sounded so much alike, he said afterward, that they must be the same person. Maupin resisted, but then asked Groff if he’d met Tony. Groff admitted he hadn’t but insisted, “Tony’s like God. He’s someone you just have to believe in.” Maupin signed a contract for a novel about a long-distance friendship with a boy with AIDS, but found himself blocked, unsure if Johnson were real or not, for the next three years. Then he decided that was the story.

  A different man would’ve been ashamed of being so gullible. But Maupin understood this was a great story and it was not just about him. It opened into public realms of fact and fantasy and the solace of storytelling.

  He tells this tale beautifully in The Night Listener. His prose has a new, quiet authority announced in the first paragraph:

  I know how it sounds when I call him my son. There’s something a little precious about it, a little too wishful to be taken seriously. I’ve noticed the looks on people’s faces, those dim, indulgent smiles that vanish in a heartbeat. It’s easy enough to see how they’ve pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else’s child.

  Maupin changes a few details of place and chronology—and he gives the story a different outcome—but he remains true to the soul of what happened. He deftly lays it out, starting with his narrator’s daily reality: Gabriel is depressed over losing Jess, blocked with his writing, and full of family issues, especially about his father. Then another reality breaks into his world in the form of phone calls. The boy, called Pete here, is described as sounding like the “Artful Dodger by way of Bart Simpson.” He is a foul-mouthed kid who talks to Gabriel every night. He discusses his past, reports the ups and downs of his health, wishes he had a girlfriend, but mostly asks Gabriel about himself—the boy is the real night listener of the title. He tries to get Gabriel to explain his break-up with Jess.

  “Do you know why he left?”

  “No,” I said. “Not completely.”

  “What do you know?”

  I couldn’t let him take me there. “Peter, look… this is sweet but—”

  “Fuck you, I’m not sweet! Talk to me, man.”

  I hesitated a moment. “I’m just not comfortable with that, Pete.”

  “Why?”

  “I just…”

  “Because I’m not a dicksmoker?”

  I startled myself with a noise that resembled laughter. “No, it’s just that it’s kind of personal and… you know, sexual. I don’t think it’s really appropriate, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  I didn’t have an answer ready.

  “Are you calling me a kid or something?”

  “No. Well, yeah, I guess I am.”

  “You think I don’t know about that shit?”

  “Pete…”

  “I bet I know more than you do.”

  Maupin lets the reader’s imagination provide the book’s physical reality. Pete and his adopted mother, Donna, are only voices on the telephone for most of the novel—as voices they are as slippery and porous as ghosts. Best of all, Maupin makes us understand how people could be won over by a child who’s nothing but audio.

  Doubt isn’t introduced until a third of the way in. It’s Jess, the man with AIDS, who first questions Pete’s medical history (which is less horrific than Tony Johnson’s). He then talks with both Pete and Donna and hears how similar their voices are. Explanations are offered—Maupin answers every objection a reader might raise—yet once the idea is introduced that Pete might only be Donna in disguise, it won’t go away; the book becomes very exciting. Pete remains convincing even when we think he’s Donna’s second persona. Readers are usually impressed by an author’s powers of invention; here we’re impressed by Donna’s powers. She might be a con artist or a sociopath, but she’s also a storytelling genius, knowing how to play both Gabriel and us. After doubt sets in, Gabriel’s conversations with Donna/Pete become exchanges between dueling storytellers, each trying to outguess and outplay the other.

  People like to say, “Nobody could make up a story like that” as proof a story must be true. Yet novelists make up wild stories all the time. Pablo Picasso famously said that art is a lie that tells the truth. He might have added that bad art is a lie that only tells more lies. Maupin juxtaposes the sensational, invented life of Pete with the quiet, daily life of Gabriel. That’s one reason why he uses so much actual autobiography: he wants to weigh fact and fiction—good lies and bad lies—against each other. Gabriel’s arguments with Jess, his ex, have genuine emotional weight—I don’t think anyone has written a better quarrel between ex-lovers who remain friends. Maupin also wants to show the emotions that left Gabriel (and himself) hungry for a
son, even a fictional one.

  Determined to meet Pete and prove he exists, Gabriel travels to northern Wisconsin, a prosaic, snowbound place of truck stops, gas stations, and small-town streets that feels grimly real in a book that otherwise happens in the unreal ether of the telephone. But the novel doesn’t end there. The final chapters mix realism, melodrama, and metafiction in a dizzying, satisfying way. Maupin makes us complicit in Gabriel’s wishing: Pete is such an amazing boy we don’t want to see him exposed as fiction. Maupin later said, “I wrote the ending of the book the way I’d like it to be in life, because I’d have great trouble killing that child in my head.” I won’t completely give away the ending, but say only that Maupin closes the story in a subjunctive tense of possibility, leaving the door ajar.

  Maupin understood what a dark, magic story he had been given. After decades of secrets about sexuality followed by years of lies about an epidemic, a mystery woman took advantage of all the silence, fear, and naïveté. We still don’t know why she did it, if it were for profit or out of craziness or simply for the fun of the game. But her tale is not just about gullibility. G. K. Chesterton once wrote (in his book about Dickens, appropriately enough) that people are often being “taken in,” but that isn’t always a bad thing. “To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance…. And the skeptic is cast out by it.”