When I was in college in the early 1980s, you couldn't do a keyword search for "gay fiction," and get 1,000 hits. I sometimes found fiction with gay characters or gay themes by accident. Death in Venice and Billy Budd were assigned by professors who didn't mention the gay content, and vociferously denied it when I asked.
Left: The Death in Venice ballet.
After receiving my M.A., I spent a horrible, soul-destroying year teaching Bonehead English in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas. There was a gay neighborhood in Houston, but it was 17 miles away, which meant two hours in the worst traffic I have ever seen, there and back, probably a flat tire from the endless construction. and guys who were so deeply closeted that they had a wife back home and wouldn't tell you their real name.
The one bright spot was the Wilde n Stein Bookstore on Westheimer. It sold honest to goodness gay books. I couldn't afford many, but those few opened up a whole world of gay history and culture:
The fiction, not so much. Sure, they had open, overt gay characters and contemporary settings, but: Dancer from the Dance, The Kryptonite Kid, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, Dance on My Grave, Nocturnes for the King of Naples...
The worst offender was The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren. I bought the second edition, printed in 1978, with the beefcake drawing of a muscle daddy horrified by the idea of being gay as he gazed at a skinny blond twink.
A carefully-worded inquiry to my artistic, sophisticated friend Aaron led me to Samuel Delaney's Neveryon.
Fred the Ministerial Student, my first boyfriend, told me about The City and the Pillar.
But usually I just scanned the shelves in the library stacks, looking for titles that evoked evil: A Thirsty Evil, The Young and the Evil
Or loneliness: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Well of Loneliness.
Or the need to be somewhere else: Other Voices, Other Rooms, Another Country
It was easy, but rather depressing. I wondered if this was what gay life was like: tawdry, empty, despairing, doomed?
After receiving my M.A., I spent a horrible, soul-destroying year teaching Bonehead English in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas. There was a gay neighborhood in Houston, but it was 17 miles away, which meant two hours in the worst traffic I have ever seen, there and back, probably a flat tire from the endless construction. and guys who were so deeply closeted that they had a wife back home and wouldn't tell you their real name.
The one bright spot was the Wilde n Stein Bookstore on Westheimer. It sold honest to goodness gay books. I couldn't afford many, but those few opened up a whole world of gay history and culture:
Hidden from History
The Celluloid Closet
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Byron and Greek Love
The fiction, not so much. Sure, they had open, overt gay characters and contemporary settings, but: Dancer from the Dance, The Kryptonite Kid, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, Dance on My Grave, Nocturnes for the King of Naples...
They still had key words about death, darkness, sadness, and evil, and they still painted gay life as tawdry, empty, and doomed.
I don't remember much about the plot, just a feeling of palpable disgust at four scenes that traumatized me for life.
1. Muscle Daddy Harlan, fired from his job as athletic director at a major university, goes to work at a gay-friendly college in upstate New York founded by a guy who brags about how he and his lover fool the straights: the lover pretends to be a woman, dressing in drag and flaunting around. "Have another cocktail -- darling!" "Fooled them all the time." Thhe partner wasn't transgender, or even a drag queen; he simply had to pretend to be a woman. Two men together can never survive in the straight world. They must be male and female. Yuck.
More after the break
