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  MEN ON MEN

  Best New Gay Fiction 1986

  edited by George Stambolian

  Plume / Signet / NAL Books • New York

  1986

  MEN ON MEN

  Best New Gay Fiction 1986

  edited by George Stambolian

  First Edition Nov 1986

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  A Plume / Signet / New American Library Book, New York

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1986 by the individual authors and as follows:

  • Introduction by George Stambolian

  • “David’s Charm” by Bruce Boone

  • “A Queer Red Spirit” by C. F. Borgman

  • “The Outsiders” by Dennis Cooper

  • “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” by Sam D’Allesandro. First published in No Apologies. Copyright © 1984 by Sam D’Allesandro

  • “Second Son” by Robert Ferro

  • “Choice” by John Fox

  • “Sex Story” by Robert Gluck. Published in Elements of a Coffee Service. Copyright © 1982 by Robert Gluck. Reprinted by permission of Four Seasons Foundation.

  • “Maine” by Brad Gooch. Published in Jailbait and Other Stories. Copyright © 1984 by Brad Gooch. Reprinted by permission of the SeaHorse Press.

  • “Life Drawing” by Michael Grumley

  • “Backwards” by Richard Hall. Published in Letter From a Great-Uncle and Other Stories. Copyright © 1985 by Richard Hall. Reprinted by permission of the Grey Fox Press.

  • “Bad Pictures” by Patrick Hoctel. First published in Mirage. Copyright © 1985 by Patrick Hoctel

  • “Friends at Evening” by Andrew Holleran

  • “September” by Kevin Killian

  • “Hardhats” by Ethan Mordden. First published in Christopher Street. Copyright © 1985 by Ethan Mordden

  • “Street Star” by Wallace Parr

  • “The Most Golden Bulgari” by Felice Picano

  • “Speech” by Richard Umans. First published in The James White Review. Copyright © 1984 by Richard Umans. Reprinted by permission of Michael Brennen.

  • “An Oracle” by Edmund White. First published in Christopher Street.

  MEN ON MEN

  Best New Gay Fiction 1986

  DENNIS COOPER ... ROBERT FERRO ... JOHN FOX ... ROBERT GLUCK

  BRAD GOOCH ...MICHAEL CRUMLEY ...RICHARD HALL ... ANDREW HOLLERAN

  ETHAN MORDDEN ... FELICE PICANO ... EDMUND WHITE ... AND OTHERS

  EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE STAMBOLIAN

  TODAY’S BEST GAY FICTION

  This extraordinary collection gathers together the most popular and gifted voices in gay fiction today. Compiled from works in progress and originals written especially for this collection, as well as previously published fiction, these brilliant stories come from such renowned writers as Robert Ferro, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano and Edmund White; from such bright rising talents as Dennis Cooper, John Fox and Robert Gluck; and from some remarkable newcomers, including C.F Borgman, Kevin Killian and Wallace Parr.

  Told from a variety of perspectives, these eighteen pieces examine the troubling questions that most concern gay men—and all of us: Is romance still possible? What are the ties that bind individuals in the face of adversity or death? And what can our desires teach us about our weaknesses and strengths? At once a lyrical, humorous and realistic portrait of contemporary gay sensibilities, Men On Men is a wonderful introduction to the latest works by America’s top and up-and-coming gay writers.

  “THE SPECIAL PATHOS, THE AMBIGUOUS HOPELESSNESS, THE SURREALIST COURAGE AND WIT THAT EMANATE FROM THESE PAGES ARE UNIQUE TO THE GAY MALE AUTHOR TODAY... He is a writer beleaguered and thus must be heeded. The humor and sorrow of his words stem from the mystery of the AIDS plague as surely as Boccaccio’s Decameron stemmed from the Bubonic Plague, and every one of us can learn from him.”

  —Ned Rorem

  “SOME OF THE BEST GAY FICTION, PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. . . . It’s a treat to have it conveniently collected. And it’s a treat to read. Hopefully the word will now spread about the riches of gay writing.”

  —Martin Bauml Duberman,

  Distinguished Professor of History

  Lehman College of the City University of New York

  “A DAZZLING COLLECTION OF SOME OF THE BEST NEW FICTION I’VE READ IN YEARS... should be of interest to all readers who are interested in the contemporary world and in contemporary literature.”

  —Julia Markus

  “MEMORABLE... NOTHING IN THIS COLLECTION SHOULD BE OVERLOOKED . . . DESERVES WIDE READERSHIP.”

  —James Purdy

  GEORGE STAMBOLIAN teaches at Wellesley College. The author of Martel Proust and the Creative Encounter and Male Fantasies/Gay Realities and editor of Twentieth Century French Fiction and Homosexualities and French Literature, he contributes to Christopher Street, The Advocate and The New York Native.

  MEN ON MEN

  Best New Gay Fiction 1986

  edited by George Stambolian

  To Richard Umans

  INTRODUCTION

  I AGREED TO EDIT THIS ANTHOLOGY because its publisher, New American Library, expressed a lively interest in giving it a large printing and wide distribution. In matters of gay writing I confess to having the zeal of a missionary for whom nothing is more tempting than a chance to reach new audiences. This book celebrates those readers, new and old, whose numbers have grown steadily over the past ten years, just as it celebrates the richness and variety of the works that are offered here for their pleasure.

  From the beginning, I decided to limit the collection to works of fiction by contemporary writers most directly concerned with issues confronting gay men in America. This meant that poetry and plays, fiction by foreign and older American writers, as well as works by women would not be included. I also decided to exclude genres like science fiction and murder mysteries even though they represent a significant portion of recent gay fiction and have attracted many gifted writers. My purpose throughout was to maintain a focus for the collection that would at the same time reveal a range of expression within the limits I had established.

  I invited writers to submit, whenever possible, new and preferably unpublished stories or autonomous sections of novels in progress. By abandoning the usual procedure of making a selection from published works only, I knew I would introduce an element of risk and would be obliged to involve myself more deeply in the editorial process. My intention was not simply to entice readers with fresh works, especially by more established authors, but to make certain that the collection would reflect the rapid changes taking place in the gay world—particularly those changes produced by the devastation of AIDS. This was essential because the collection is dedicated to a close friend who recently died of an AIDS-related illness, and who symbolizes for all of us the loss of so many talented men.

  The first writers I contacted were Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White. These men, together with Christopher Cox and George Whitmore, had all been members of the legendary Violet Quill Club, the most productive workshop for gay writers in the post-Stonewall period. Building on the unprecedented success of novels by Holleran, White, and Picano—Dancer From the Dance, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, The Lure—the VQ met informally between the summer of 1979 and the winter of 1981 to explore the problems of autobiographical fiction which represented a second and more delicate stage of a literary coming-out process. The works that grew from these meetings have now been widely
read: Whitmore’s The Confessions of Danny Slocum, White’s A Boy’s Own Story, Holleran’s Nights in Aruba, Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir, Picano’s Ambidextrous.

  With other writers of the same period, such as Richard Hall, Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin, Rita Mae Brown, Bertha Harris, and Jane DeLynn, these men were also among the first to produce works that testified to the emergence of a self-aware gay community in America. Their novels and stories effectively moved the focus of gay literature away from the lonely homosexual figure doomed to unhappiness toward the elaboration of a world in which homosexuality was no longer an exclusively psychological issue shrouded in secrecy and guilt but a social reality. Above all, the new literary forms and subjects they developed, and are still exploring, encouraged a whole generation of writers by forever dispelling the notion so often repeated by hostile critics that gay fiction must inevitably be second-rate because homosexuality itself is somehow incomplete.

  Once I had received commitments from this first group of writers, I decided to devote as much of the remaining space in the collection as possible to stories by younger or less established authors. I contacted John Fox, whose novel Boys on the Rock had made a powerful debut, and Brad Gooch, whose Jailbait and Other Stories had received much praise. I also wrote to four present or former Californians who, like Gooch, had impressed me by their interest in literary experimentation: Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, Bruce Boone, and Kevin Killian. In works such as Cooper’s Safe and Gluck’s Jack the Modernist these men, like many other contemporary American writers, had moved away from traditional narrative forms by freely using elements drawn from poetry, drama, pornography, and the philosophical essay. Admired by a small but devoted following, they seemed ready to attract a larger audience.

  I discovered the remaining writers in the collection through extensive reading and a few fortuitous introductions. My investigation of the California literary scene led me to Sam D’Allesandro’s story in No Apologies and Patrick Hoctel’s in Mirage. Robert Gluck sent me copies of stories that Wallace Parr had presented to his San Francisco Writers’ Workshop. After reading several unpublished pieces by Richard Umans, I chose one that had appeared in The James White Review, a journal that has provided an important forum for writers in the Midwest. Thanks to Stan Leventhal, I read C. F. Borgman’s work, which satisfied for me the dream every editor has of presenting a new author’s first published story. Finally, I selected a new piece from Ethan Mordden’s popular series in Christopher Street.

  There were disappointments: One writer was unable to finish his story because of illness. Another could not withdraw from contractual obligations to his publisher. Two sent novel length manuscripts from which it was impossible to extract shorter sections. In my search for stories by gay black men I discovered that a number of authors had already committed new works to a forthcoming anthology of black writing. And most regrettably, unavoidable restrictions in space forced me to abandon excellent stories by Steve Abbott, Christopher Davis, and Harlan Greene.

  Every collection reflects its editor’s tastes, and this one is no exception. Although I tried to present works on a variety of topics, my final choices were determined, as they must be, by judgments of artistic quality. Nothing would delight me more than to speak about the pleasure I had in reading each of these pieces—to describe, for example, Holleran’s masterful use of dialogue, the richness of White’s or Ferro’s prose, Picano’s narrative exuberance, or the stylistic precision Cooper and Gluck reveal in their writing. But the relative newness of gay fiction and the fact that it continues to exist in a politically charged climate require some discussion of its evolving historical and critical context in order to enhance the reader’s own enjoyment of its artistic achievements.

  GAY FICTION OFTEN TELLS US “tales of the city,” to borrow the title of Armistead Maupin’s popular novel, because it was in cities like New York and San Francisco that gay communities first developed in the post-Stonewall period. “The city gives you the chance to make yourself up,” Richard Sennett has remarked, and gay culture is to a large extent a made-up thing, an existential invention constantly proposing new values and codes of conduct. Even today much of the excitement of gay fiction comes from this sense of witnessing the creation of a new life.

  The central importance of the modem city gives an added interest to variations on this setting. Felice Picano’s description of Rome in “The Most Golden Bulgari” reminds us that European cities were gay meccas at a time when American cities were still repressive. Part of the fascination of Edmund White’s story, “An Oracle,” comes from placing a highly evolved gay New Yorker in the very different homosexual world of Crete, whereas the resolutely rural setting of Brad Gooch’s “Maine” strikes us with its simplicity compared with the bustling intensity of San Francisco in the stories by Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone.

  A growing number of writers in recent years have remained outside the gay capitals and have written about their own regions of the country—Kevin Esser in Illinois, Harlan Greene in South Carolina, Roy F. Wood in rural Georgia. But even the stories and novels of Andrew Holleran, so closely associated with the fast-paced life of New York City, reveal a sensitivity to social and regional differences. When I asked Holleran recently if he had an ideal reader, he replied: “It would be an odd combination of a youth I’ve never seen in a library in Kansas and a queen from Fire Island who is very witty and critical. If you can please both, you’ve done it right.”

  Holleran’s remark provides an interesting perspective on his own story in this collection, but it also reveals a desire to reach different segments of the gay community. In the 1970s writers such as Holleran, Picano, White, Maupin, and Brown crisscrossed the country in a conscious effort to develop new audiences for their work. Thanks to their readings, book signings, and lectures thousands learned for the first time that a whole new body of gay fiction was being created. The excitement their novels and stories generated was accompanied, however, by criticism from competing political groups within the gay community. 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. There were even people who felt uncomfortable with the entire enterprise of “making public” previously secret aspects of our lives.

  The rapid expansion of the gay community and the broadening of its political base have somewhat diminished these fears. At the same time, the fact that books now exist on almost every aspect of gay life means that no one can view any single work as representing the entire gay world. This growing pluralism of gay literature and its readers explains why attempts to define an overall “gay sensibility” have all but ceased. Readers are more interested in particular genres and more conscious of the individual sensibilities of their favorite authors. The proliferation of gay books and their increasing availability throughout the country have also served to familiarize readers with the new signs, codes, and narrative forms of gay writing. A significant number of readers now share with writers a “common language” that transcends social and political differences.

  Fiction frequently includes its readers within its cast of characters. When writers in the 1970s began showing gay people in groups, as friends and as members of a community, that same emerging community was also the primary audience for their work One way of defining contemporary gay fiction is to say that it now assumes the existence of a more or less sympathetic gay audience. Earlier writers usually addressed an audience assumed to be heterosexual and generally hostile. This often forced them to explain homosexuality to their readers and to justify it. For many writers Gay Liberation signaled the end of this obligation. Instead of explaining homosexuality they could now describe the diverse expressions of gay life.

  The stories in this collection present a variety of gay subcultures. C. E. Borgman’s “A Queer Red Spirit” reproduces the world of a fifties homosexual and juxtaposes it to the easier life of a very contemporary gay man. Wallace Parr’s “St
reet Star” introduces us to the strange and eerily comic existence of a sixties street queen, whereas Ethan Mordden in “Hardhats” explores the uncharted brotherhood and sexuality of construction workers. Even those writers who make no reference to the gay world or its history know that many of their readers will have some understanding of the place of their work within this larger context.

  Gay stories, like heterosexual stories, are often about love affairs that dramatize the passionate conflicts of human relations —but there is a difference. Homosexual relationships usually operate with fewer conventions governing sexual roles. There are also fewer literary conventions or patterns of inherited imagery for the writer to fall back on. A long tradition of writing on homosexual love certainly exists, but given the changes in those few conventions that used to surround same-sex relationships, its value to the contemporary writer is limited. Gay love today continues to be a testing of possibilities that is often quite varied, because the relative absence of conventions makes it easier for homosexuals to cross social, economic, racial, and cultural barriers.

  I he stories in this collection describe many such crossings made all the more intriguing by unexpected complications. In Richard Umans’s “Speech” a young man’s love for an older man is dramatized by the mutual need to overcome the obstacle of mutism. The menace of compulsive behavior adds a new dimension to the interracial adventure portrayed in Michael Grumley’s “Life Drawing.” Edmund White’s account of an affair between a middle-aged American and a Cretan boy takes place under the shadow of death. And Felice Picano treats us to the surprising liaison between a young American social worker and an older European film director who happens to be a former Communist. These last three narratives are also interesting in the way they follow the movement of an affair through its different crises and resolutions. Sam D’Allesandro does a poetic variation on this form by concentrating on the essential moments of a relationship. By telling his story backward, Richard Hall gives us a startlingly new perspective on how one relationship fits into the broader pattern of a man’s life.