Between Men

by Richard Canning

  Nowadays, it may be tempting to consider that the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and early literary responses to it, have become historical. AIDS-related fiction might likewise seem just one of many “waves” of gay self-expression which followed Stonewall. (Ethan Mordden’s gay fiction anthology was entitled Waves.) There are apparently useful chronological and cultural lines of demarcation. Drug treatments have offered many in the West—though far from all—an extended, often near-normal experience of life. For some, it’s a happy tale, if subject, like so much else, to the “for now” formulation. But it isn’t, and cannot be, the only story. Gay men now, more than ever, have our ghosts to remember as people, and to reanimate as writers.

  Holleran’s latest novel, Grief (2006), pulls few punches in grounding us in the foundations of contemporary gay life. Its narrator moves between the Scylla of the temptation to forget his burdensome “lost” and the Charybdis of the all-too-human, only intermittently silence-able desires of his animate, sentient body. This oscillation is brilliantly summed up in two scenes. In one, the narrator tells his friend Frank that you should never get over grief: “It’s the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing, them.” Just as the reader may suspect Holleran of idealization, his narrator adds the critical, credible note of self-interest: “And as long as you have that, you’re not alone—you have them.”

  In the second scene, he accompanies his landlord to an improbably cruisey Quaker meeting. The landlord articulates just the sort of simplified, truncated “AIDS survivor” story that the zeitgeist demands—and which Holleran here deftly ironizes:

  “That one’s so hot,” my landlord whispered as he nodded at a man two pews away from us. “His lover died two years ago and left him a lot of money, which he spent on travel and drugs. Then he got sick, and looked really awful, but the cocktail brought him back, and now he’s gorgeous again!”

  In Between Men, John Weir’s “Neorealism at the Infiniplex” reminds us that, in ever speedier circumstances, the AIDS dead are especially subject to the same simplifying and truncating handling. A rabbi instructs the narrator moments before the memorial service: “Quick, tell me about your friend. Say what he was like. Say three things. I don’t need more than three. Add some color, make it personal, and make it fast.” The less said, the better.

  Holleran’s Grief and Weir’s equally extraordinary What I Did Wrong both contribute to a recent resurgence in AIDS fiction, after a hiatus—precipitated perhaps by uncertainty as to how to accommodate the new “treatment” culture in narrative. Still, British writer Adam Mars-Jones had argued back in 1992’s introduction to Monopolies of Loss that the short story form afforded possibilities for writing about AIDS which were unique. That claim is borne out in a number of memorable pieces here. Mack Friedman’s “A Joint and a Nice Piece of Ass” has all the virtues of his novel Setting the Lawn on Fire (2005) in miniature. Knowing, opinionated, poignant, and vulnerable by turns, Friedman’s narrator—a health advisor—tells us ofthe boys, always the boys, drinking and smoking and losing their teeth to crystal, wearing insouciance like cologne. “Cool, I’m not positive yet,” they’d say. Or, “Oh well, guess I should see a doctor now?” I cried for them when they left because they could not cry for themselves, and the girl who was raped returned for results and gave me a trembling, feathery hug.

  His summary of the Central Region AIDS Project dinners—“parodies of function, marked as they were by inedible catering, incoherent speakers, and the absurd resurfacing of volunteers who hadn’t done anything for the place in years”—is devastating; angry as well as sad; then, unexpectedly, funny, too (if darkly so):This annual commingling always made me think of parties thrown by high-ranking Nazis to honor the rank and file, but maybe I’d just talked to one too many menopausal “buddies” who loved their collies, hated their husbands, and aspired to appear philanthropic with their time.

  Weir’s comparable black humor returns us to 1994 and the demise of his friend, novelist David Feinberg. His prose typically concentrates a bewildering series of experiences that only begin at the surreal experience of his friend’s body melting as they wait for a last-minute rabbi: “I said, ‘Dead guy on ice,’ which sounds like a hard-core band.” The surreal gives way to the absurd, the unpalatable, and, finally, the incredible. Kurt Vonnegut chorused “So it goes” every time the narrative of his Slaughterhouse-five stumbled upon death. Weir offers a comparably self-aware tiredness: “I’m through with stuff that really happens, like, people die and you don’t. Or, they die and you don’t feel bad in the way that you want.” The image of his narrator “avoiding them [Feinberg’s parents], crouched under coat hooks” crying is among the most moving, and truest, here.

  AIDS is an important presence in other pieces, such as Dale Peck’s “The Piers,” Vestal McIntyre’s “A Good Squeeze,” and Robert Glück’s “Bisexual Pussy Boy.” It permeates, too, the opening and closing stories, by Andrew Holleran and Edmund White, respectively. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) was set in the summer of 1983, “the last summer of its kind there was ever to be.” Britain’s AIDS-RELATED angst began then; America’s began two years earlier; hence the poignant sense of decay around Holleran’s San Martin idyll. “Hello, Young Lovers,” set in “the winter of 1981,” says nothing overt about the epidemic. But in focusing on the moment before it, Holleran conjures up a remarkable foreshadowing: “This was a place people came to collapse,” his narrator notes. There’s the funereal stage manager, who feels “people . . . look at you and see only one thing—old age and death!” There’s Dennis, ready to dispatch his lover with this line: “I mean one is simply aware that there are magic moments in life that do not last—if you get my drift.” Knowing what we do, it is just as shocking to read some lines of euphoria here, too, like Dennis’s “He has a body that would sink ships . . . I’d kill for his stomach. And chest. And shoulders.” It’s still more startling to recognize this as gay argot now, as then.

  “Hello, Young Lovers,” like a gentleman caller, pays attention—no more—to the stories of Tennessee Williams, with more than a nod, too, to the torrid, unfocused play Suddenly Last Summer. It not only transcends but outshines such sources. (As a Brit, incidentally, I have a lot of affection for Kent and his winning, toxic volatility: “Let’s get stinko! Let’s get something started! It’s all too dull!”)

  White’s “The Painted Boy” features some of his finest prose. Fortunately for us, the author himself will never hear what his narrator, Stephen Crane, is told by his friend Garland: “These are the best pages you’ve ever written and if you don’t tear them up, every last word, you’ll never have a career.” It would be easy, and too little, to state that many stories in Between Men, including “The Painted Boy,” transcend gay themes. I was more struck by the fact that so many of the eighteen pieces offer accounts of gay life somehow “authored” by those outside it. White, typically, trailblazes, with the account of the heterosexual Crane’s affection for Elliott, a “queer little boy tart” with syphilis:Standing in the doorway was a slight youth with a thin face and dark violet eyes set close together and nearly crossed. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen but he already had circles under his eyes. He smiled and revealed small, bad teeth, each sculpted by decay into something individual. He stepped towards us and naturally we thought he was begging but then I saw his face was painted—carmined lips and kohled eyes (the dark circles I’d noticed were just mascara smudged by the snow).

  The boundaries of his feeling for Elliott are yet unclear to Crane, and he looks to his friend, the “womanizer” critic James Huneker, to figure them out, since “Huneker also had a quasiscientific interest in inversion. Usually he’d scorn it. He condemned Leaves of Grass as the ‘Bible of the third sex.’”

  White’s brilliant description of fin de siècle New York illustrates how much more there must be to human relations, empathy, and identification than sexuality. But it is, startlingly, in their mortality that Crane and the
youth find one another:I had to convince him that he needed to take care or he’d be dead by thirty. Though that threat frightened him no more than it did me. I expected to be dead by thirty or thirty-two—maybe that was why I was so fearless in battle.

  Beyond this, Crane the storyteller recognizes in his counterpart an ideal subject for fiction—something just as rare for the novelist, perhaps, as spotting one’s life partner should be for a gay man: “He counted for something and his story as well. I sensed that he’d guessed his young life might make a good story but he hadn’t told it yet.”

  Sometimes anthologies like this are criticized for what they lack. The question of “representativeness” haunted Stambolian in 1986; it’s surprising if we haven’t got over it. As James McCourt’s scribe S. D. J. phrases it in “Thermopylae”: “Many things said to have happened never did.” Stambolian noted how the book tours of early success stories in gay fiction publishing brought criticism alongside the adrenaline rush of new opportunity: “Writers were attacked for supposedly favoring one lifestyle over another or for offering images of gay life that were not representative of the majority of gay men and women.” He countered this by saluting the “growing pluralism of gay literature,” according to which “no one can view any single work as representing the entire gay world.”

  Stambolian was reacting to the emerging boom time I’ve already described. Between Men enters the game at a different juncture. The mid-to late ’90s saw the tightening of corporate budgets in bigger publishing houses. Niche fiction, including gay fiction, with its reliable but unremarkable sales base, stopped being in vogue. Especially unmarketable were novels that had too much of gay men’s beyond-the-rainbow realities: illness, death, loss. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “Humankind cannot stand very much reality.” Many of the best gay writers found themselves removed from high-profile lists, even as they wrote the best books of their lives.

  Still, “reality is something you rise above,” said Liza Minnelli, and she knows. The present for gay fiction publishing arguably isn’t all bleak, despite jeremiads. A few years ago, Karl Woelz wrote an epitaph for gay literary fiction in the afterword to M2M: New Literary Fiction (2003). Given the apparently steep demise in gay men and women’s consumption of serious fiction, in five years, Woelz wrote, “there’s a real chance that reading literary fiction may no longer be an option.” This means that, by now, there’s simply no audience for Between Men. With respect, dear reader, you do not exist.

  The sentiment was understandable. Woelz had the demise of Men on Men, Little, Brown’s Best American Gay Fiction, and Faber & Faber’s His series to lament, and added: “Nor are gay publishers rushing in to fill the void.” Meantime, however, many intrepid smaller presses—not exclusively gay by any means—have entered the breach; Serpent’s Tail, I suppose, being the pioneer. (Any list that houses Juan Goytisolo deserves mention.) Soft Skull, Suspect Thoughts, Clear Cut, Terrace Books (from the University of Wisconsin Press), and Carroll & Graf: from these five lists, you could conjure up a roster of exceptional talent, and reading lists to endure. Most material submitted for Between Men came from authors published by smaller houses, and all but five or so of the eighteen featured are in the same camp. It may make living a struggle—hand-to-mouth—for gay writers, but being published and read by engaged editors and readers is feasible. There is a gay literary community.

  Without straying too far in the direction of “representativeness,” I found it interesting to consider plausible objections to Between Men. Is it, for instance, too urban? It’s a long-standing concern, to which perhaps the only fair (and ludicrous) retort is: “Are gay lives too urban?” Consider asking: “Is my life too urban?” or, “Is my life not urban enough?” and the idea deconstructs. There’s a jokey reference to the worry in John Weir’s narrator’s flight from New York for a rural idyll. He soon realizes:I hate back roads and country lanes. How had I forgotten that? I hate views. I especially dislike chicken coops. Mine still smelled faintly of chickens. When I looked up from my work, through my kitchen window, I could see an open field, trees in the distance, and the sky everywhere. Not the reassuringly man-made chemical sky of lower Manhattan, but an intimidating sky so awesome and inhuman that, in order to explain it, you were forced to invent God.

  In 1986, Stambolian had pointed to the confluence between the urban and gay men’s growing self-awareness. He quoted Richard Sennett: “The city gives you the chance to make yourself up.” It remains true for many gay men today. Still, there’s nothing metropolitan in the stories by Holleran, Ethan Mordden, Tennessee Jones, and Bruce Benderson, and the city isn’t integral to that many others. After all the excitement concerning the film Brokeback Mountain’s daring representation of desire between apparently straight men, far from the poly-sexual metropolis, Mordden’s “The Ballad of Jimmy Pie” and Jones’s “Pennsylvania Story” in particular remind us that the film’s transgressiveness originated in the E. Annie Proulx story it was based on. Moreover, fiction as good as “Pennsylvania Story” tells us much more about the threat, as well as the promise, in unreckoned longing than anything showing at the multiplex:Dale wanted so much to turn around, brace his hands on the coal-covered tire, feel Kenneth’s hands covered with black dust and carrion wind rake down his jeans, his cheek bruised or flayed open by one of the bolts in the wheel. Instead, Kenneth pulled him forward and split his upper lip open with the force of his kiss. A moment of sacredness in a devastated place, a moment that could make you free or get you killed.

  Another objection: there’s a lot of youth in Between Men. I’m not surprised. Adolescence is where we situate many of our thoughts, worries, and hopes about sex, romance, and relationships. Postadolescent youth marks, moreover—and, yes, as a generalization—the period where gay men most fully realize themselves sexually (“Hello, Young Lovers” indeed). It’s not exclusively true, but it is true—and it’s as true of our heterosexual peers. Still, stories here by Benderson, Glück, Holleran, David McConnell, Mordden, Ryan, and White are as concerned with the wide range of responses to youth on the part of the—chronologically, anyhow—mature. In several cases—notably McConnell’s masterly “Rivals”—part of the reader’s pleasure lies in a reversal of expectations. Nobody’s development could be more arrested than that of Barry and Darius’s teacher, Jane. “Adulthood looks unbearably beautiful and energetic and free” to the boys, writes McConnell—but such visions of the future, we readers sense (or know), are chimerical. Alan Bennett—again speaking of his History Boys—“wanted to show that the boys know more than any of the teachers.” McConnell’s arresting miniature—as idiosyncratic as his debut, The Firebrat (2003)—does likewise. As in Bennett’s play, McConnell’s drama contains judgment everywhere, yet nowhere. It’s up to the reader.

  Robert Glück’s narrator finds himself flattened by the circumscribed erotics demanded of his encounter with Bill, the young “Bisexual Pussy Boy”: “It was just Age watching Youth, that’s what it took to transform his straight ass into a sexual organ.” Glück’s stories and novels have long pressed the erotic into unexpected philosophical service. (Conversely, his narrator’s mental processes have an orgasmic reach.) “Bisexual Pussy Boy” characteristically dares to ask: “What can be said about sex when one is old? Since each experience could be the last? It’s hard not to feel sex as some mistake.” Now, from youth to (non)senescence: Benderson’s “Mouth of the River” offers us Delilah/Aamu, who, at 102, may be the oldest character ever to appear in gay fiction, depending upon whether you count Ronald Firbank’s novel of 1919, Valmouth, in which most protagonists are proudly centenarian.

  If Between Men runs the gamut of age, and traverses the United States geographically—Florida, California, the Midwest, as well as, inevitably, the urban East Coast—it also crosses national borders. Vestal McIntyre’s Rand finds his break in Montreal interrupted by Jean’s insistence that American gays are, in culturally assimilating, entirely on the wrong track: “The destiny of gays is pointlessness, just as the destiny
of straights is ugliness. Don’t try to jump the track. It is better to be pointless and laugh.” It’s an arresting and cautionary moment.

  Paul Russell’s 1994 novel Sea of Tranquillity remains the only gay fiction to take readers—literally—to the moon (outside of science fiction). Still, London resident Shaun Levin’s “The Big Fry-Up at the Crazy Horse Café” effortlessly spans several continents, as well as sweetly, casually, introducing his narrator’s son and extended family in a manner to provoke conservatives anywhere: “Three gods it took to create our Francis. God the wanker. God the go-between. And God the girl on her back with her legs in the air.” If that doesn’t disturb you, try the hand job Levin’s narrator gives boyfriend Mark on a flight to San Francisco. It’s an original use of toast.

  Levin’s story closes by celebrating the “beauty of the ordinary,” concentrated and perceptible when one stops moving on and on. What I most treasured was his ordering, not making-ordinary, of the mess of everyday life (“It’s always messy,” says friend Anne-Marie in Tel Aviv). Levin’s narrator betrays his emotional investment in this ordering of the past through moments of lyrical conciseness; in a reference to “the man who broke the heart my boyfriend had to fix,” or in this heart-stopping paragraph:Jam