"The Front Runner," homophobia, and angst in the gay bookstore in Hell-fer-Sartain

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.

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 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.

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.  

 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

2. Harlan's lesbian friend who works for a lady who says "Homosexuals!  Terrible!  They should all be in concentration camps!"  She asks "Do you want me in a concentration camp?" "My dear, of course not, just homosexuals!"  Har-har, I guess.

3. Harlan falls in love with Billy, a track star training for the Olympics.  Of course, he can't compete in the Olympics if he is out, so he stays closeted.  But a homophobe figures it out anyway, and shoots him.

4. Fortunately, Billy left some sperm in a sperm bank, so the lesbian friend uses it to get pregnant, and she and Harlan raise the baby together.  So the purpose of life remains reproduction, even if you have to give birth to the son of your platonic pal's lover.  Shudder.

I also bought Patricia Nell Warren's next book, The Fancy Dancer (1976), about a priest, Father Tom, whose parish in rural Montana is going under. He falls in love with Vidal, a half-Blackfood "fancy dancer."  I thought the term referred to a gay dancer, but it just means an energetic dance.   

 Again, I don't recall much, just two disgusting scenes.

1. When they spend the night in a hotel, Father Tom calls down for room service and orders "a big breakfast," but they have to eat with the same fork and spoon.   Just order two breakfasts, or go out to a diner.

2. Fancy Dancer Vidal introduces Father Tom to a gay rancher couple who pretend to be straight roommates.  They share a bedroom, but the other one has the second guy's clothes in it, and the bed is "made hurriedly,' the way you do when you sleep there. Who the heck is going to notice?  But hiding, and staying hiding, was what being gay meant.

The novel ends with the two parting, because you can't be gay and have a career, as a priest or a dancer.  At least they don't die, but still, we always end with emptiness.

The minute that my teaching job at Homophobia U. ended -- literally the minute -- I got in my car and started driving, and didn't stop until the Texas border was far behind me.  And a month later, I was driving crosscountry to West Hollywood and freedom. And, eventually gay books that weren't about dissolution and death.  Science fiction, horror, epic fantasy, cozy mystery, romance.  

10 Things That Never Happened

Catered All the Way: A M-M Holiday Christmas Romance

Boyfriend Material

Legends and Lattes

He's to Die For

Red White and Royal Blue

Who needs Proust?

See also: How Proust Can Bore You to Death

My Date with Michael J. Fox. Plus Marcus and the Scary Bulgarian Bodybuilder

Indiana University: My first visit to an adult bookstore

Isaac Ordonez models at Paris Fashion Week, with some boyfriends, Lucas from "Stranger Things," some random twinks, and Taylor's d*ck

When Doves Cry

My Boyfriend's Secret Bookshelf