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!

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.