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.”

Novels, Memoirs -- And the Territory In Between

Some years back, a friend of mine complained that publishers didn’t want to publish her memoir.  They wanted her to rearrange some of the actions, and invent dialogue to make the scenes more exciting.  “But that isn’t the way things actually happened,” she told the publishers.  Eventually she started her own publishing business to facilitate publishing her book in the form she wanted.

More recently, another friend of mine was telling me how she had written a novel based on her own life and a publisher had told her that the story of the novel “obviously had actually happened,” so she should consider writing a memoir instead.

Now, I don’t think it’s that simple; not as simple as “did this story actually happen or not?”

In my mind, novels and memoirs have different feels.

People say nowadays that you should write memoirs as if they were novels; this makes them more “readable.”  Using fiction techniques in memoirs blurs the truth of the memoir though—and we’ve certainly had several spectacular cases over the past few years where it turned out that not only the writing but the actual facts of the story got embellished along the way.  Indeed, certain aspects of the stories turned out to be complete fiction.

Conversely, think of the novels, particularly first-person novels, that might, with a little encouragement, be mistaken as true-life accounts.  How do we know that books like Huckleberry Finn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Moby Dick, David Copperfield, and The Catcher in the Rye aren’t true life accounts?   We might know that Twain wasn’t Finn, that Salinger wasn’t Caulfield.  We do know that Dickens incorporated his own childhood experiences into several of his novels.  We may know that Melville didn’t live through an experience like Ishmael’s.  But do we know about Joyce’s experiences enough to know how much of himself is in Stephen Daedalus?

Indeed, the 20^th century has given us many novels that are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.  For starts, we have the novels of Jack Kerouac (notice I called them novels), all based on his own life.  Then the novels of Christopher Isherwood (built around his experiences, even when the plots are not strictly autobiographical).  Then a whole series of novels by Edmund White (chronicling his youth and adolescence and young adulthood and adulthood), Andrew Holleran’s Grief , and Felice Picano’s Men Who Loved Me (subtitled, interestingly enough, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel).  It has been argued that one of the great contributions of GLBT writers to American literature is this genre of autobiographical- or semi-autobiographical novel.

Considering that Picano calls his book a “memoir in the form of a novel,” do we need to differentiate any longer between novel and memoir?  I’d say that we usually do, for two reasons:  First we need to know whether or not to take the substance of the work literally.  Second, I at least still think of novels and memoir/non-fiction in different ways.  More about that to come.

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.