I have decided to read instead of watch the war

[Guest coololdguy]

What is the best gay novel you have read recently -- also best gay non fiction -- any subject. THANKS!

[Guest pshaw]

Novels:

"At Swim, Two Boys" - Jamie O'Neill

Two boys fall in love in the days leading up to the Easter Uprising. One of the best novels - gay or straight - that I've read over the past year.

 

"Confessions of a Mask" - Yukio Mishima

A high school boy in World War II Japan comes to terms with being gay. I reread this book every couple of years. It is perhaps my favorite gay novel.

[Guest tcd31]

"The Year of Ice" by Brian Malloy: a high school senior mourns his dead mother, hangs with his friends, dates, doesn't deal with his alcoholic father--all while realizing he's gay and wants to jump a cute classmate.

 

I read "At Swim Two Boys," last spring. While I found much to admire there, it's written with a Joycean complexity that sometimes makes it hard to follow exactly what's happening on a simple narrative level.

[Will]

What a wonderful topic. Here are some of my favorite gay novels, in no particular order other than the sequence in which they occur to me:

 

1. James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works

 

2. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers.

 

3. __________, Querelle of Brest

 

4. Edmund White, The Beautiful Room is Empty

 

5. Annie Proulx, (Phooey: Now I can't remember the title; it's a recent collection of long stories that take place in Montana or Wyoming and includes THE best gay love story I've ever read.)

 

6. John Rechy, City of Night.

 

7. Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt. (Briefly discussed in yesterday's NYTimes Book Review, p. 20. It isn't serious art, unlike the other novels I've listed are, but it's a wonderful, wonderful read, particularly if you like well-researched historical novels, as I do.)

 

8. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room.

 

9. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms. (Some of the most beautiful prose you'll ever read.)

 

and, of course,

 

10. E.M. Forster, Maurice.

[+ Charlie]

"City of Night" was the first gay novel that I can remember straight people talking about. I read it around 1962, and discovered that my next door neighbor, a young straight woman, had read it, too. She said that for the first time, she understood what she was seeing when she walked through the Times Square neighborhhod on her way home from work at night. Then I discovered that my office mate, a young woman from El Paso, knew him personally. There is a new biography of Rechy that has just been released in paperback, and I think we may be due for a Rechy revival.

[spiro3]

I’ve recently been going through the series of books that Mary Renault wrote in the late ‘60’s about the life of Alexander the Great, “Fire from Heaven” and “The Persian Boy”. Both are beautifully written and surprisingly detailed about homosexuality given the times in which they were written.

 

“The Persian Boy” is especially relevant not only to this site but to the times in which we live. Though it is a work of historical fiction, it is based on an actual figure mentioned in the histories of Alexander. Bagoas, a young eunuch much beloved by him, must be the first male escort mentioned in written records, and Alexander took him everywhere on campaign as he set out to conquer the world. What fascinates particularly today is that the setting for much of this book carries us across so much of today’s troubled Middle East – Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. I keep racing to my Atlas to see where the ancient locales are now.

 

These are very satisfying reads, not only because the subject is engrossing, and the writing is beautiful, but because Renault does such a fantastic job of recreating a time when homosexuality was a natural and generally accepted aspect of life among all types of people in the world ( before Christianity came along and made it shameful). Certainly, it didn’t slow Alexander down a bit.

 

It seems so much of so-called gay literature leaves you feeling empty and sad. I can assure you these two novels will not.

 

P.S. to Will: The Annie Proulx book of short stories you refer to is called “Wyoming Stories” and the particular story involving two gay cowboys is “Broke-Back Mountain”. It is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read, and THE best, bar none, gay short story ever written. Though heart-breaking, it certainly doesn’t leave you feeling empty…….

 

P.P.S. Lots of chatter abt making a movie of Alexander The Great ……wonder how Hollywood , as is its habit, will manage to turn him into a soul tormented by his sexuality, or will they ignore his sexual tastes altogether?

[Luv2play]

My favorite collection of gay-inspired short stories is Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories published by New Directions in 1985, two years after his death. Contains about 50 stories of various length and some are simply the most inspired stories containing some great characters. You can jump around although the stories are ordered chronologically. May be out of print but available at libraries. Enjoy!

[Will]

Charlie, thanks. There are plenty of straight people who think John Rechy is a wonderful writer. If testimony were needed, I know first-hand that his agents in New York also represent authors of the stature of Elie Wiesel and Francine duPlessix Gray, as well as the late lamented John Boswell ("Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality"). An extremely distinguished (and very straight) European social historian lists Rechy among the acknowledgments in his most famous book, and I know that Rechy has been a popular and effective writing teacher in L.A. for years.

 

I'm glad to know there's a biography of him, and will order it as soon as I log out from M4M. As for a revival, you're absolutely right. It's such a shame, to me, that a lot of gay people think that writers like Andrew Holleran and Ethan Morden are serious literary artists. Yes, they write great stories that are impossible to put down. But by comparison with authors like Genet, Rechy, and White, they really are second-rate, "popular" in the worst sense of the word.

 

A lot of very, very good writers died in the 1980s, of course, just as they were beginning to hit their stride. The New York ones formed a group called The Lavender Quill, and a lot of good stuff came out before the Plague carried them off. Robert Ferro's SECOND SON comes to mind as an example.

[Will]

>These are very satisfying reads, not only because the subject

>is engrossing, and the writing is beautiful, but because

>Renault does such a fantastic job of recreating a time when

>homosexuality was a natural and generally accepted aspect of

>life among all types of people in the world ( before

>Christianity came along and made it shameful). Certainly, it

>didn’t slow Alexander down a bit.

 

It wasn't Christianity that came along and made homosexuality shameful. Even in Greco-Roman antiquity homosexual behavior was acceptable in highly circumscribed circumstances, and apart from the occasional reference to male romance among warriors in Homer or Thucydides, "proper" homosexual relationships were never between social or chronological equals. The Romans in particular regarded same-sex sex as just another form of debauchery; certainly it had no moral status, as it did among the Athenians five hundred years earlier. There's a ton of new scholarly literature on homosexuality in the ancient Mediterranean, and it ought to be read against Mary Renault's rather saccharine view of the past. As for Christianity, it simply imported -- lock, stock, and barrel -- the social mores then common among Jews. There's nothing inherently "Christian" about the fear of homosexuality, just as there's nothing inherently "Christian" about a whole lot of other things that were simply Jewish, whether a particular group of Jews believed in Jesus as the Messiah or not. In any case, apart from Judaism, I know of no dominant religion in pre-Christian antiquity whose beliefs and practices were accompanied by a moral code believed to have divine sanction.

 

>P.S. to Will: The Annie Proulx book of short stories you refer

>to is called “Wyoming Stories” and the particular story

>involving two gay cowboys is “Broke-Back Mountain”. It is one

>of the best short stories I’ve ever read, and THE best, bar

>none, gay short story ever written. Though heart-breaking, it

>certainly doesn’t leave you feeling empty…….

 

I couldn't agree with you more. I really do think that it's the greatest short story I ever read, by anyone about anything. The sheer genius of it becomes all the more breath-taking when one stops to think that the author is a woman.

 

P.S. See my comment about Hadrian below.

[Will]

Spiro3's reminding us of Mary Renault, who wrote the only really gay books that you could check out of the public library right under your mother's nose, reminded me of a book I stupidly forgot yesterday.

 

A lot of people think that Marguerite Yourcenar's THE MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN is one of the great literary achievements, in any language, of the twentieth century. Certainly, to me Yourcenar is right up there with George Eliot and Tolstoy -- something recognized shortly before she died, when the Academie Francaise elected her as the first woman member.

 

She wrote THE MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN in French, but it was magnificently translated by Yourcenar's life-partner, who was a native English-speaker. As a work of art, it's astonishing because you would swear that somehow the Emperor Hadrian really had written a diary, and that it was at a level of meditative seriousness reached only by Hadrian's adopted son, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But Hadrian didn't write his memoirs: Yourcenar made the whole thing up, although she used every known fact about Hadrian in doing so.

 

The parts about the death of Hadrian's young lover, Antinous, and about Hadrian's subsequent madness (there's no other way to describe the quality and duration of his grief) will break your heart. And if after reading the novel you then go to Rome, and from there visit the ruins of Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, and stand quietly in the setting sun at the Canopus, which Hadrian designed and built in memory of Antinous, you will have the most exquisite, if eerie and almost unbearably sad, feeling that their shades are there, as silent as you are, just behind your shoulders. Afterwards, every time you see the beautiful face of Antinous (there's a marble portrait of him in practically every museum in the world, even the United States), you'll experience what Hadrian must have experienced, which is love and longing so deeply rooted and so intertwined as to escape any rational description except in art, whether verbal or visual.

[+ Charlie]

Your comment about young writers who died during the plague in the 1980s reminded me of George Whitmore, another talented writer who wrote a moving book about AIDS called "Someone Was Here" shortly before his death.

[+ Charlie]

Two very different non-fiction works I would recommend are Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Elusive Embrace," and Ina Russell's "Jeb and Dash", a biography of her cousin, a government worker in DC who led a typical gay life there between 1918 and 1945--it is based largely on his diaries and gives a fascinating picture of "normal" gay life in a period that is invisible to most of us. The two books read together produce an interesting comparison/contrast.

[Guest Bitchboy]

I'm reading "The Martian Child" by David Gerrold - a novel, based on a true story, about a single gay man adopting a son. It's stupendous. What can I say? I'm just a "mother" at heart.

[Guest drock56]

George Whitmore, another talented

>writer who wrote a moving book about AIDS called "Someone Was

>Here" shortly before his death.

 

He also wrote an excellent novel "Nebraska".

 

For current non-fiction, I strongly recommend

 

"Evenings at Kirmser's" - a memoir written about

gay life in St. Paul right at the end of WWII.

The author was in fact given a dishonorable discharge

for "deviant activities"

 

Another is "A Mind of Its Own: a cultural History of

the Penis" It is brilliant, scholarly, makes you think

about how male sexuality has been viewed differently

over the centuries (western male sexuality, to be more

precise)....Not salacious, but breezy and mind expanding.

 

davidr

[Rod Hagen]

I have "Outlaw: John Rechy" and will read it shortly. I have paged through it, and here are a couple neat items. Rechy's incredibly insecure about his body, something I can certainly relate too. This need to be desired, on his terms, pushed him to travel the country in search of wet, subservient, mouths. Lucky for us, he wrote about it, and did so (does so) better than most. Interestingly, when men would compliment him on his looks, he'd feign "HardOfHearingness" and ask them to repeat it, just so he could be validated twice.

 

If that's not wonderful enough, there was an afternoon on a beach, Rechy was wearing revealing, Europeanesque, swim trunks, when a man said to him, "You have a great body." As usual John asked him to please repeat that. The man became nervous, and did so, but under his breath. Rechy's insecurity actually did muck his ears this time, and he took of after the fleeing man calling, "What was that?" Rechy suspected that the man said, "You have a GRAY body." Great stuff.

 

Also, when Rechy's UCLA (USC?) students would run into him at night on Hollywood Boulevard, they knew full well what he was up to, cruising, and would smile and say, "Hey Teach!" Fellow professors also noticed him out hunting.

 

Patrick Gale's "Rough Music" is supposedly as captivating and stylish as "Kavalier And Clay". I ordered it last night, but then regretted doing so as I probably should have bought it at a gay bookstore. However, I suspect "A Different Light" would not have had it, and I don't know where "Stonewall Books" is in the Village. Probably near the old Stonewall bar, correct?

-Hagen

[Will]

Are you in New York? I thought you lived in LA. If you like OUTLAWS, you'll love CITY OF NIGHT and NUMBERS, which are earlier and less polemical. Rechy must be in his sixties now; I've seen pictures of him when he was writing those early novels, and I find it incredible -- emotionally incredible, I mean -- that he could possibly have been insecure about the way he looked. He was the definition of "hot" when "hot" really meant something (that is, when Rip Colt was the official iconographer of Hot).

 

I also find it incredible in the same way, as well as powerfully moving, that you confess to sharing the young Rechy's feelings. I don't recall that I've ever seen a post on this board in which an escort acknowledged any form of insecurity, particularly regarding his sexuality and sex-appeal. I admire you very much.

 

The only gay bookstore I know of in the vicinity of the real Stonewall was the Oscar Wilde, NYC's oldest gay bookstore. It went out of business recently, sometime this winter. So did A Different Light. Both of them done in by the "Gay and Bisexual Interest" sections at B&N and Borders. Dammit.

[Guest Bitchboy]

Two notes:

 

Oscar Wilde Bookstore has REMAINED open in NYC. It was scheduled to close, but a last minute infusion of $$$ is keeping it open.

 

Outlaw, if I'm correct, is the biography of Rechy. I read it a couple of months ago. While there are many interesting points made, I was a bit disappointed with the overall quality of the writing. However, it's worthwhile because you can get a sense of where he came from. There is also a current picture of him (well, 1998 or 1999) in which he still looks great.

[Rod Hagen]

Oh Dear, I've confused everyone, including myself.

 

I am in LA, I travel to NYC frequently. I meant "Oscar Wild" books, not Stonewall. I was happy to read in the last Advocate that "OW" did happen to remain open. I didn't know, until now, where in the village OW is, and I don't know why I called it "Stonewall". Maybe I was thinking of Stonewall Publications.

 

Different Light here in WeHo is horrible now. It's a lot more like an adult bookstore than a real store, which is why I was asking about Oscar Wilde (Stonewall) books.

 

I have read, and largely re-read, City of Night. Yes, "Outlaw" is the biography, and I will read it soon.

 

Much of what I get out of escorting, and it certainly isn't just money, not this last year, is validation. It's enough to be "so hot" that men pay me, I also need the constant reassurance. I think that's true of lots of people who sell themselves, whether they know it or not.

[Rod Hagen]

> It's enough to

>be "so hot" that men pay me, I also need the constant

>reassurance. I think that's true of lots of people who sell

>themselves, whether they know it or not.

 

I meant to say, "it's NOT enough to be "so hot" that men pay me,"

 

 

"Having these balls makes

me feel something close to

joy, I think. I must caress

them." -FRIEZA

-Hagen

[+ Charlie]

The Oscar Wilde bookstore is on Christopher Street, about one block east of the legendary Stonewall bar. I was there last week and it was definitely functioning.

[Guest pshaw]

After the owner of Oscar Wilde announced that he was closing the store, Deacon Maccubbin, owner of DC's Lambda Rising bookstore, stepped in and bought the remaining stock and name and took over the lease. He anticipated that the store would continue to be a money loser, but hoped to pare down the losses to a manageable level. He decided to keep the store open because of its gay historical significance and because a visit to Oscar Wilde had inspired him to open the first Lambda Rising store in DC.

[Will]

I am very happy to know that. I'm on my way to New York tomorrow morning, and will stop in at the Oscar Wilde and spend more money than I can afford just as a kind of positive protest, if there is such a thing.

[Guest tcd31]

RE: Gay Bookstores in Greenwich Village, etc.

 

Oscar Wilde is on Christopher St. between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place.

Creative Visions is on Hudson St. between Charles and Perry (I think).

 

Both are independent stores and deserve your support.

 

I'm glad to see that someone mentioned Patrick Gale and "Rough Music". I worked in the 1980s at a publisher here and we issued his first 5 novels in America. Compared to his latest, they are shorter, lighter, and some are less explicitly gay in subject matter--although he always writes from a gay sensibility. I'm sure they're all out of print in America, although British paperbacks may still be around (by the way, Abebooks.com is a great site to buy used, out of print books online). Patrick by the way is one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet--we've lost touch by now, but I was fortunate to get to know him and be friends for a few years after our professional association ended.

 

In terms of nonfiction, I second the recommendation of "The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's".

Also worth picking up:

Sex-Crime Panic, by Neil Miller, about an incident in Iowa in the 1950s, another "lost" bit of gay history.

Love in a Dark Time by Colm Toibin, insightful essays on Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bishop, and other gay writers and artists.

[Rod Hagen]

RE: Gay Bookstores in Greenwich Village, etc.

 

>I'm glad to see that someone mentioned Patrick Gale and "Rough

>Music". I worked in the 1980s at a publisher here and we

 

Just finished "Rough Music." I don't know which I enjoyed more, the childish giddiness I felt at each knew discovery of the parallels between the two stories within, or the happyPain from the periodic hearttwisters. I feel fulfilled. The mother was a remarkable character; such vulnerability and strength. Sandy was poorly written, thin. Sexuality in men is just not that fluid. Argue with me as much as you want, but I have more experience and insight into this phenomenom than practically anybody else now don't I? [Grin] Nevertheless, it's a psychologicaly thrilling novel (yet certainly not a Psycological thriller.)

 

Currently reading The Flaneur (purchased at Oscar Wilde bookstore, thank you very much) by Edmund White. It's engaging, but I think I would have squeezed more out of it had it not been 10 years since my last Parisian vacation; much of the setting, and history, are too unfamiliar to me. I persist in giving Edmund White another chance, and every darn time I'm simultaneously impressed and disappointed. Maybe I should stop?

[dick_nyc]

I find it funny that Rod needs validation, but not surprising. I went through a period in the mid 80's when I went out with some of the big muscle men such as Frank Vickers and Big Max of Colt fame. What I found was that none of them liked their bodies, they all wanted to be bigger, more defined, something other than what they were. In the case of the two mentioned in particular these were men who were truly big and built and defined. They were also intelligent and fun to be with, but under it all was a kind of insecurity such that they wanted muscle worship but didn't believe that they were in their best shape. They had either been better or else they said see me in 3 or 4 months when I will be bigger. When they did get bigger they thought they were better even though they had ruined the very beautiful proportions they already had. In the case of Rod I think that is why I think he has such a beautiful body; his proportions are so close to ideal. If he needs validation, then I think that proves my point.