Picano and Me

So I’ve been reading a lot in two areas:  Let’s call them “counter-culture” and “gay.”  By counter-culture I mean of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and maybe ‘70s:  The Beat writers and their offshoots:  Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs…Kesey, Hunter Thompson.  And the gay writers I’m talking about are the people associated with the Violet Quill of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but have been writing ever since; people like Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Felice Picano.

 

I have some mixed feelings about all of them.  The Beats I respect, but they certainly were a bunch of highly individualistic people.  I’m more conflicted about the Violet Quill; is it some kind of latent residual homophobia on my part?

I’m now halfway through Picano’s “memoir in the form of a novel, Ambidextrous.  I wasn’t expecting to like it.  My first attempt to read it ended when I got bored with his descriptions of being able to write with both hands as a child.  It just didn’t seem interesting.  And I seen reviews talking about all the childhood sex he describes in the book.

But I’ve gotten interested in his story, for reasons I hadn’t anticipated.  I’d read the sequel, Men Who Loved Me, first; so I knew about the years of his young adulthood.  He seemed much more freewheeling than I.  In fact we seemed quite different.  But now—

Well, I discover he had a run-in with a teacher in the fifth grade; quite a bit of trouble with that teacher, actually.

I had trouble in the fifth grade.  Whereas Picano’s teacher bullied him, my own teacher merely teased me.  My perception—well, it might as well have been bullying.  Now it might be considered mild psychological bullying.

But I believe my teacher simply liked me and didn’t know how to express it.  I was fairly shy at the time, in a new school and a new environment because of my own circumstances of growing up with the U.S. military.  Anyway, I hadn’t been expecting that Picano and I would have an unpleasant fifth-grade experience in common.

And a bit further on into the story:  Descriptions of model airplanes.  Picano’s friend makes airplanes out of balsa wood.  I myself bought plastic models and assembled them.  Picano describes the different airplanes that were modeled, plus the decals, the paints, etc.; and hanging them from the ceiling.  

As a child, I assembled some airplane models; though I didn’t concentrate on planes.  I made several large ship models; a large model of the Eiffel Tower; cars; etc.  

In short, as far as Picano’s description of himself at the age of eleven or twelve, I could relate to that; in spite of the fact that he was talking about New York City and its suburbs, while I would be talking about the tidewater area of Virginia, about seven years later than he is describing.

Picano’s descriptions have moved me along a bit towards continuing with my own novel based on my early life.  And for that I thank him!

I’ve also been taking another look at Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, another novel dealing with a boy who is eleven or twelve—but that is a totally different type of work!

Experiences Poly…Gay

I’ve been back rereading some books and rewatching some films of gay literature, in particular Andrew Holleran’s novel Grief and the film The Naked Civil Servant, dealing with Quentin Crisp.  I tried to go on to the film’s sequel, An Englishman in New York, made thirty years after the first film, but the DVD was damaged.  I’ve also read the autobiographical novels of Edmund White, and one of his memoirs; plus the earlier novels of Christopher Isherwood.

Isherwood left England in 1929 to live in Germany.  When Hitler came to power, he spent some years moving from country to country, before settling in California in 1939.

Crisp spent most of his life in England, where homosexuality was illegal, but spent his last years in New York, in the time “after Stonewall.”

Andrew Holleran was a member of the “Violet Quill,” a group of gay writers who met and exchanged ideas in New York in the early 1980s.  Several have since dealt with life since the AIDS pandemic.

One theme I’ve picked up on is the great sense of liberation which followed the gradual loosening of anti-gay laws, leading to many people feeling that “anything goes.”  Edmund White remarks that, during the first years of the AIDS epidemic, he was puzzled by the advice to “know your partners.”  Wasn’t the whole point that you could just have sex with anyone, as many strangers and however often you wanted?  Holleran’s novel Dancer From the Dance apparently deals with drugs and gay orgies at Fire Island.  In An Englishman in New York, Quentin Crisp and his friend are asked to leave a gay club in New York because they’re dressed “normally” rather than bare to the waist or in leather.

I’m still tossing around the question of how much “poly” is an orientation (“I’m naturally happier with several lovers”) and how much it’s an ethic we can choose.

For me, “anything goes” has to have limits:  I need openness and honesty.  I need mutual respect and caring.  Then “anything that works for all involved goes.”

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).

Review: "The Most Golden Bulgari" (2 of 2)

The story does entertain.  You have the interaction of Djanko and Picano.  You have the comic relief of the expatriate actresses and Mr. Muscle.  You have, as well, the escapades of Djanko’s various friends and hangers on.

And yet…this story also disquiets.  Are these the people one really wants to spend one’s life—or even a year—with?  The expatriates are not stupid—but they do seem superficial.  Picano himself…seems confused, uncertain.  Of course, people are often confused in their early twenties.  But if Picano is looking for love, it’s not clear how well he’s doing.  He seems happy enough with Djanko—at least until he realizes he isn’t.  And when he leaves Rome for a weekend motorcycle trip to France, he realizes how unhappy he actually is and decides never to return; writing a brief letter to inform Djanko of his decision.

And, despite a sexual escapade earlier that causes him to reflect on his betrayal of his “fidelity,” it’s not clear exactly what “fidelity” means to him.  He’d already gone to bed with a variety of men during this year in Rome.  Did any of this sex bring him any closer to love?  Did the sex have any significance at all for him?

Indeed, in common with Edmund White, Picano finds casual sex liberating.  Heading across southern France at the end of this section, Picano has sex with a stranger in Marseille.  “[T]his nameless French sailor taught me that neither love nor even attraction was needed for sex, and that indeed, somehow it became sharper, more encompassing, when it was free of all that.”

The liberation of pure sex—not love, not even attraction; just the experience of sex—what some of us may have experienced in our first solitary childhood masturbations.  Of course, Picano is describing the mid-1960s, well before the era of AIDS—even before Stonewall!  Later, when AIDS surfaced and people were urged to “know your partners,” Edmund White remarked on how strange this phrase seemed.  Wasn’t the whole point to simply have as much sex as you could?  Wasn’t sex supposed to free you?  Why on earth would you bother with “knowing your partners?”  Picano certainly chronicles a bye gone age.

So this is a disquieting book.  Picano has sex, and it seems to satisfy.  Presumably he succeeded in “becoming a homosexual” (but doesn’t that phrasing sound a bit quaint in retrospect?).  At least in this first section of the book, he doesn’t succeed in finding love.  What he does gain is a beautiful gold Bulgari watch—which years later will come in handy when Picano finds himself in dire circumstances back in New York.

An interesting read, certainly—but prone to provoking mild indigestion.