Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  I owe a special thank you to Ed Sikov and Sam Wasson for a happy accident. When Sam began research on Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., his book about the movie of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Ed suggested he talk to me about Truman Capote. We had a good, long conversation on the phone while I gave Sam a quick overview of gay literary history. Afterward he said, “This is great stuff. Where can I read it?” And I realized no such book existed. So I began work on this one.

  Many writers took the time to talk with me, either face-to-face or by telephone or e-mail. In particular I want to thank: Mart Crowley, Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Arnie Kantrowitz, Lawrence Mass, Rakesh Satyal, and J. D. McClatchy.

  My print sources are all cited in the notes, but I must thank the biographers and historians whose heavy labor proved invaluable to me. Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan and Isherwood by Peter Parker were especially useful. I’d also like to mention a few books that gave me real pleasure as a reader. Lost Friendships by Donald Windham is a neglected gem, a fine memoir that brings Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams fully to life with their charms as well as their vices. Also wonderful on Williams is Gentlemen Callers by Michael Paller, a sympathetic exploration of the playwright as a gay writer—not always the self-hating one of reputation. Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara by Joe LeSueur is an intimate account of the poet and his friends. Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers by Philip Gambone, and Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists and Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists, both by Richard Canning, are full of gold. And Armistead Maupin by Patrick Gale is a short bio so deftly done that I want to forgive Gale for the bad review he gave to my first novel.

  At Twelve Books I owe deep thanks to Jonathan Karp, who initially took on this project. I owe further gratitude to Colin Shepherd, who took over after Jon left and provided close, detailed readings and constant support. Colin has been a joy to work with, full of smart ideas and good conversation. Susan Lehman and Cary Goldstein also gave much helpful advice and support. My production editors, Leah Tracosas and Dorothea Halliday, and my copy editor, Mark Steven Long, were invaluable. And as always, my agent, Edward Hibbert, has been a wise adviser and an excellent friend.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  “Gay people are just like straight people. But straight people lie about who they really are.” Michael Bronski, “The Future of Gay Politics,” forum at the Kennedy School of Government, 1994. Verified by Bronski in conversation with the author, June 2009.

  “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel,… Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 2.

  The names are only approximations, anyway. I do not want to get too deep into the “essentialist vs. constructionist” debate about sexual identity. Gore Vidal famously argued that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts. It was a good strategy, a smart way to outmaneuver prejudice. Academics later picked up the idea when Michel Foucault proposed that there was no such thing as a homosexual before 1869, when the word was first coined. Queer theorists imagined a wonderful arcadian past where men and women simply did what they did and only their actions were judged, not their souls.

  Graham Robb points out in his very fine book Strangers that Foucault proposed this idea only as a possibility and never explored it. And it’s a pretty idea, but I don’t buy it, simply because I’ve read too much Victorian fiction. People in the nineteenth century were their acts. Men who embezzled were embezzlers, even if they were clergymen. Women who committed adultery were adulteresses, no matter what saintly deeds they performed later. Novelists like Anthony Trollope and Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to separate action from identity, but they were fighting against an established custom of thinking. You were your sin, whether it was the jilting of a fiancée or an adulterous affair or an unspeakable act of sodomy.

  PART I: INTO THE FIFTIES

  “America when will you be angelic?” Allen Ginsberg, “America,” Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 39.

  CHAPTER 1. INNOCENCE

  Vidal and Merrill wrote letters to the editor… Deirdre Bair, Anaïs Nin (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995), 318.

  “I think you are everything, man, woman, and child… Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar (New York: Dutton, 1948 edition), 165.

  “ ‘You’re a queer,’ he said… Vidal, The City and the Pillar, 306.

  “He listened content and untroubled… Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 26.

  “Honey… you stay away from him” John Malcolm Brinnin, Truman Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy (New York: Delacourt Press, 1986), 34.

  “the faggots’ Huckleberry Finn.” The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lehrman, ed. Stephen Pascal (New York: Knopf, 2007), 63.

  “A short novel which is as dazzling a phenomenon… Quotes from Chicago Tribune and Time; from Gerald Clarke, Capote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 155–156.

  “The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told… Carlos Baker, “Deep South Guignol,” New York Times Book Review, January 18, 1948. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-guignol.html.

  “Is no member of society, then, to be held accountable for himself, not even Hitler?” Diana Trilling, Reviewing the Forties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 232.

  “Presented as the case history of a standard homosexual… C. V. Terry, “The City and the Pillar,” New York Times Book Review, January 11, 1948. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-pillar.html?scp=2&sq=City%20and%20the%20Pillar%20by%20Gore%20Vidal&st=cse.

  “Essentially it’s an attempt to clarify the inner stresses of our time… Charles Rolo, “Reader’s Choice,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1948, 110.

  “Aside from its sociological demonstrations, Mr. Vidal’s book is undistinguished… J. S. Shrike, “Recent Phenomena,” Hudson Review, Spring 1948, 136. (I suspect Shrike is film critic Vernon Young, but only because Young was a regular contributor to the quarterly and cited Kinsey in another review.)

  “Many a first novel is sounder, better balanced… Orville Prescott, New York Times, January 21, 1948. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-voices.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=orville%20prescott,%20%22other%20voices,%20other%20rooms%22&st=cse.

  not bad for the hardcover book slump of the early Fifties… Fred Kaplan mentions this slump in passing in Gore Vidal, but the best account I’ve found is in Heavy Traffic and High Culture by Thomas L. Bonn, a detailed history of New American Library from 1945 to 1982. Bonn reports that in 1952 sales figures were down for hardcover, and it was rumored that big houses were kept in the black only by the sale of reprint rights (32). This was followed in 1954 by huge paperback returns—44 percent (before, the returns had been 25 percent). Bennett Cerf in At Random says the returns were so high that people joked books were now landfill. The earnings for authors for paperbacks were shockingly low. Getting one cent on a twenty-five cent book, an author could sell 100,000 copies but see only five hundred dollars (after dividing the money with his publisher). Only as the decade progressed and paperback prices rose to thirty-five and fifty cents did the market level out.

  “Most people seem to be born knowing their way through literature… Quoted in Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 329.

  “I am back amongst my people… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 287.

  CHAPTER 2. THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  “He did something I longed to do… Donald Windham, Lost Friendships (New York: Morrow, 1987), 113. Windham was an excellent novelist himself, writing several first-rate books, including Two People (1965), a novel about the love affair between a married American businessman and a hustler in Rome.

  “The richness of words in Tennessee’s stories and plays… Windham, Lost Friendships, 179.

  [a] poetry-reciting waiter at the Beggar’s Bar in Greenwich Village… The bar’s owner, Valeska Gert, was a brilliant character ac
tress in German cinema, appearing in Joyless Street and The Threepenny Opera, but Williams never knew that.

  “What you have done is removed my style… Vidal, introduction to Collected Stories, by Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1985), xx.

  “You know, you spoiled it with that ending… Vidal, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” in Matters of Fact and Fiction: Essays 1973–1976 (New York: Random House, 1977), 137.

  “I liked him…” Tennesse Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, ed. Donald Windham (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 216.

  “Between Tennessee’s solemn analyses of the play and Cocteau’s rhetoric… Vidal, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” 143.

  “full of fantasies and mischief.” Quoted in Vidal, ibid., 142.

  Section 1140-A of New York City’s Criminal Code, known as the Wales Padlock Law… There’s an excellent account of this in the pioneering study of gay and lesbian theater, We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians, by Kaier Curtin.

  Walter Kerr compared the accusation in Cat… Michael Paller, Gentlemen Callers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 102. (Paller’s account of the writing of Cat and its reception is invaluable.)

  “He said I wrote cheap melodramas… Quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 130.

  “He said I was overworked… Williams to Elia Kazan, June 4, 1958, in Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. by Margaret Bradham Thornton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 711.

  “How could you give up The Novel?… Quoted in Vidal, “Dawn Powell: The American Writer,” in At Home: Essays 1982–1988, (New York: Random House, 1988), 242.

  CHAPTER 3. HOWL

  “Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide./(It’s heaven!)… Frank O’Hara, “At the Old Place,” in Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2008), 85.

  including Lionel Trilling… Trilling wrote about a student like Ginsberg, a mentally ill boy wonder named Tertan, in a short story, “Of This Time, Of That Place.” But the story was published a couple of months before Trilling first met Ginsberg. Ginsberg seemed to fit the type, and many assumed he was as fragile as Tertan, especially when they heard about his mother. Yet Ginsberg was remarkably resilient.

  “At 26, I am shy, go out with girls… Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: Grove Press, 1977), 17.

  “If you ever catch me talking the way Chester did tonight… Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 39.

  “Oh, you’re a nice person… There’s always people who will like you.” Quoted in Barry Miles, Ginsberg (London: Virgin Publishing, 2001), 180.

  “I saw the best minds of my generation… Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 9.

  “who let themselves be fucked in the ass… Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 13.

  “I’m with you in Rockland… Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 26.

  “America I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 43.

  “My expression, at first blush… Quoted in Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg, ed. Michael Schumacher (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2002), 46.

  “Don’t go in for ridiculous things.” Naomi Ginsberg to Allen Ginsberg, June 1956, quoted in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 234.

  “Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality… Richard Eberhart, New York Times Book Review, September 2, 1956, BR4.

  “a dreadful little volume… John Hollander as well as quotes from James Dickey and Ezra Pound, quoted in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 239.

  “like any work of literature, attempts and intends to make a significant comment… Mark Schorer, quoted in Howl on Trial, ed. Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), 135.

  “the work of a thoroughly honest poet” Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quoted in Howl on Trial, 154.

  “is probably the most remarkable single poem, published by a young man… Kenneth Rexroth, quoted in Howl on Trial, 166.

  “Therefore, I conclude the book Howl and Other Poems does have some redeeming social importance… Quoted in Howl on Trial, 199.

  “I quoted the first line of Whitman… Ginsberg to Louis Ginsberg, August 1, 1957, quoted in Family Business: Selected Letters, 69–70.

  “Natch was glad and thankful… Ginsberg to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, October 10, 1957, quoted in Howl on Trial, 78.

  CHAPTER 4. SOUL KISS

  “You must’ve thought to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’ ” James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, documentary, produced and directed by Karen Thoren, Nobody Knows Productions and Maysles Films, 1991, distributed on video by California Newsreels.

  “I have not written about being a Negro… James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 8.

  “As they were born… James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” 5.

  “a cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis… David Leeming, James Baldwin (New York: Random House, 1994), 270.

  “There were very few black people in the Village… James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” (later retitled “Here Be Dragons”), in Collected Essays, 823.

  “I was far too terrified… Ibid., 822.

  “all these strangers called Jimmy Baldwin.” Quoted in James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (New York: Viking, 1991), 56.

  “My agent told me to burn it.” Fern Maja Eckmann, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (New York: M. Evans, 1966), 137.

  “The thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates the thought… Langston Hughes, “Notes of a Native Son,” New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1956.

  “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts… James Baldwin, in “Sermons and Blues,” Collected Essays (Library of America), 614.

  “as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in Proust’s Cities of the Plain… Granville Hicks, “Tormented Triangle,” New York Times Book Review, October 14, 1956. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-giovanni.html?scp=1&sq=granville%20hicks%20on%20james%20baldwin&st=cse.

  Giovanni murdered the boss. Years later, in his Paris Review interview, Baldwin said the murder was inspired by the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucian Carr, Allen Ginsberg’s friend. It would make a nice link between Baldwin and Ginsberg, only the two killings have nothing in common. The situations are completely different, as are the murder weapons. I suspect Baldwin confused his use of the Carr murder in an earlier, unfinished novel, Ignorant Armies, with the invented murder by Giovanni. An author’s imaginings can become more real than his facts.

  “an unpleasant attempt… Otto Friedrich, The Grave of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Holt, 1989), 372.

  “marred by a portentous tone that at times feels cheaply secondhand… Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Another Country,” New Yorker, February 9, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/02/09/090209crbo_books_pierpont.

  “James Baldwin is too charming a writer to be major… Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959), 407.

  “They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat… James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in Collected Essays, 272.

  “His work, after all, is all that will be left… Ibid., 284–285.

  CHAPTER 5. GOING HOLLYWOOD

  “Oh, I’m a genius, too?” Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal, ed. Robert V. Stanton and Gore Vidal (Secaucus: Lyle Stuart, 1980), 219 (quoting an interview in Newsweek, “Gore Vidal on… Gore Vidal” by Arthur Cooper, November 18, 1974).

  “ ‘Don’t,’ he said with great intensity,… Gore Vidal, “Christopher Isherwood’s Kind,” The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 37.

  “I’ll try to
be absolutely honest about this…. Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 83–84.

  “Dramatically and psychologically, I find it entirely plausible…. Quoted in Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (London: Picador, 2004), 572–573.

  “He is a big husky boy… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 401.

  “He’s a strange boy… Ibid., 290.

  “We are the dreaded fog queens… Christopher Isherwood, The Lost Years, 145.

  “Christopher has with him the youngest boy ever… Leo Lehrman, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lehrman, 150.

  “much too hearty… Parker, Isherwood, 630.

  “I have received lots and lots of fan-mail… Ibid.

  “He has pockmarks and a vertically lined face… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 506.