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.
