The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (12 page)

We’ve seen this before, the aside that tells us that the character gets to grow up and write an autobiography about his salad days — the book we are holding in our hands. It blurs the line between author and character, suggesting that the former is really writing about his own life. I would hold that no one who inhabits Stevie’s life and times as thoroughly as this author does could possibly be writing anything other than autobiography.

In the case of John Gilgun, his life took some turns that allowed him to escape from South Boston, all the way to a college in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he taught literature for many years. He is now retired and divides his time between St. Joseph and Des Moines, where his partner lives.

8.
Books Are Short, Art is Long

Music
weighs in at 145 pages and 10 chapters. It comes at you all in one piece, with few breaks in time and only a few half-scene flashbacks. It’s as if it were written in one sitting, or meant to be consumed in one sitting, like a short story. In fact, this novel’s history is a long and torturous one. John wrote the first draft in 1959, and it wasn’t published till 1989, after 30 years of effort. At one point the manuscript swelled to 800 pages; that was when an editor at Macmillan got hold of it, chopped it down to 300 pages, and effectively killed it. It is a testament to John’s perseverance and, yes, good fortune that the book finally saw print.

The headlong nature of the narrative — the sense that, yes, it
must
have been written in one sitting — has a special place in my heart, because my own first (unpublished) novel was similar in this respect. I didn’t even divide mine into chapters, because I wanted no “breaks” between the story and the reader; I wanted the novel to be experienced as a long dream from which the reader couldn’t awaken.

9.
Compassionate Conservatism
circa
1954

Guess what? Stevie’s mother has a brother. Uncle Tim is the kind of Republican fascist who, in our current decade, has brought our country to the brink of moral and financial bankruptcy while making it the most hated nation in the world. A big shot at a company that manufactures fire ex-tinguishers, Tim has everything that a man who is “making it” is supposed to have: “a ranch-type house with a breezeway and a two-car garage and a patio in the suburbs, a cocker spaniel, a new Pontiac Chieftain, an attractive wife and that daughter in dancing school.” And he has a God-given mission to make sure that Stevie and his brother Brian will “make it,” too.

He promises Brian a job at the fire extinguisher company that will lead to a management position within a year. To his credit, Brian recognizes that this offer is nothing that he wants. But he has a wife to provide for, and that includes buying a house; he’s feeling a squeeze.

Tim has plans for Stevie, too. Unlike his brother, who has a heart condition, Stevie is bound to be drafted any day now. Tim arranges an interview for Stevie with an Army captain who can pull strings to get Stevie into OTC, so he won’t have to “waste his time” as a private. Like his brother Brian, Stevie is repulsed by his uncle, yet feels he has to go along with this plan. He can’t quite make a complete break with the belief that his elders know what’s best for him.

10.
The Ubiquity of Ignorance

The pleasure of reading this novel is exquisitely tempered by pain, as the naïve Stevie encounters one crisis after another while striving to do the right thing. Stevie keeps the appointment that Tim sets up for him with the Army captain, and for a while he feels good about doing the right thing. But his natural inquisitiveness, his yearning for growth, gets the better of him: when he meets his friend Luanne again, she mentions a counselor that she and her little boy are seeing. Stevie sees an opportunity: if he talks to this counselor, maybe he can find out
why
he’s queer.

Luanne wangles Stevie onto the counselor’s overbooked calendar, and Stevie, filled with anticipation and hope, walks into a familiar trap: when the counselor learns of Stevie’s homosexuality, he responds with obvious contempt. He also gives Stevie one piece of information that he didn’t have: at his pre-induction Army physical he will be asked if he has homosexual tendencies; and if he admits that he does, he’ll be rejected. Stevie is horrified. He can’t lie on the induction form, yet he’ll have to, or he’ll be letting everyone down. It’s another crisis, and it provides the tension for the last few chapters of the novel.

The sinister counselor is the worst kind of straight hypocrite: “I despise what you are, and at the same time, I don’t believe you.” We may be safely removed in time from Stevie’s 1954, but this type of ignorance is very much operational today. It powers, among other things, the ex-gay movement. The so-called ex-gays have even been lobbying for a voice in the public schools: imagine the damage
that
will do.

Not long after I moved to Kansas City, I became involved with a peculiar institution called the School of Metaphysics. The free classes that were held on weeknights covered topics such as meditation, kundalini yoga, and dream analysis. It was during one of the dream-analysis sessions that a female student mentioned a dream about having sex with another woman. “That’s not possible,” the instructor snapped. Curious, I stayed after class to ask the instructor why she had said that. “It’s not possible for two people of the same gender to have sex with each other,” she said. “Oh, honey,” I told her, “it’s not only
possible,
it’s been
done
.” She continued to argue, saying that homosexuality violated the “male-female principle of the universe.”

That was when I walked away from the School of Metaphysics. Who were these straight people to think that their sexual orientation could even co-opt the stars?

11.
So What Do They Do with Each Other?

The counselor Stevie visits does him another disservice: when he asks Stevie what he does with men in his sexual fantasies, Stevie can only reply: “I hold them. We hold each other. We touch each other. Look, this isn’t easy for me! We . . . We just love each other.” The counselor’s response is casually cruel: “You have the fantasies of a boy of twelve. They may be normal in a boy of twelve, but it’s time you outgrew them.”

It’s true that Stevie doesn’t know
exactly
what men who love each other do in bed. He does know about sucking cock, if only because that activity is such a cherished and loathed staple of schoolboy lore. Maybe his fantasies aren’t far removed from a twelve-year-old’s, after all. But it’s 1954, and there’s no shrink-wrapped
Joy of Gay Sex
waiting for him on some bookstore’s top shelf.

Family and friends are no help. Stevie’s friend Luanne and brother Brian both love him, but they have difficulty understanding or accepting him. Even Luanne, who knows Stevie better than anyone, won’t give up on the cherished heterosexual belief that all Stevie has to do is find the right girl. Sympathetic characters like Luanne and Brian remind us that there is nothing more heartbreaking than the ignorance of decent people. And so it is, in 1954 Boston, decades before sex of every stripe becomes part of our public discourse, that the fate of a young man like Stevie depends quite literally on the kindness of a stranger.

12.
To Be Nineteen and Losing It

If I were to fault
Music I Never Dreamed Of
for anything, it might be its title. It gives the impression that this is a lyrical kind of work, which it isn’t. There are no flights of fancy; no dense, allusive, “literary” passages. Instead we find gritty realism, tempered by Stevie’s lust for life and naïve observations.

Stevie is drawn toward art and literature, but there is little mention of music in this novel. This seems strange since, by the mid-1950’s, American popular music had exploded with the sounds of African-American influences, and infectious beats were heard everywhere. Stevie’s only encounter with recorded music appears near the end of the novel, when he spends his first night with a man.

The character of Hal, Stevie’s first, whom he meets at Luanne’s, is well drawn and all too believable as the kind of first lover that a naïve kid might bump into. Older — he’s just graduating from college — and somewhat cynical, self-involved, and defensive, Hal has no interest in seducing Stevie or even being particularly nice to him. His first impression of the younger man is, “I thought you were a dyke” — hardly the stuff of romance.

Yet Stevie is drawn to Hal, who is handsome and has a “compact little body.” We can further understand the attraction when we remember that Stevie is nineteen and dying to lose his virginity. The two men leave the party at Luanne’s together, against Hal’s better judgment; he declares, in his typically blunt way, “I’m not going to bring you out.” After the two of them get kicked out of a coffee shop for ordering only coffee, they make their circuitous way to Hal’s house. It is here that Stevie encounters Debussy’s
Preludes
, which seem to speak to him.

Hal is unhappy and snarky, but in a short while he learns to be nice to Stevie. And he does, of course, sleep with him. Their lovemaking is both tentative and satisfying. Hal even drives Stevie to his pre-induction physical the next day. It’s here that Stevie faces his greatest test: can he lie about his sexuality? No one who has read this far could have any doubt about what he will do, but it’s still elating to see him do it. The
bildungsroman
ends as it should, with Stevie preparing to take his first giant steps away from home.

13.
Liberation: It’s Not Just for Fictional Characters

John dedicated
Music I Never Dreamed Of
to his friend Jerry Rosco, an accomplished fiction writer, literary biographer (
Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography
) and journalist. Jerry was instrumental in getting
Music
published, because he happened to have a copy of the manuscript at the right time and place — terrifying confirmation that publication depends on luck as much as anything else.

Jerry is a friend of mine also, dating back to the time I lived in New York; it was his idea that John and I should meet, which we did, early in 1987. I had recently moved to Kansas City, and John was teaching at Western Missouri State University in St. Joseph, about an hour’s drive away.

Outside of the relatively gay-friendly metropolitan areas like Kansas City and St. Louis, the state of Missouri is like so many others: just one redneck town after another. When I met John during that winter of 1987 I found him to be convivial and articulate — and bitter about the closeted life he was living in St. Joseph. Fortunately, he was about to take a sabbatical and go live in San Francisco for a while. He had visited there many times, and it felt like home to him.

When John returned to his teaching job in St. Joseph, his novel came out. So did he, in a public address. To their great credit his students were behind him, petitioning the college to add John’s novel to the curriculum. As a result, John was able to teach
Music I Never Dreamed Of
to his literature classes. When I think of those students, most of them encountering an authentic gay voice for the first time in this heartfelt, exuberant novel, it gives me a great feeling. Suddenly I’m right back there in South Boston in 1954, with Stevie Riley, and we’re both feeling frightened and confused, yet alive — gloriously alive, in ways we never dreamed of.

Godine, 1984 (1
^st
edition in English translation)

Richard Reitsma

As frequently happens when bookish gay men are exploring their sexuality, I assumed the library was my best bet for discovery. Not for cruising, mind you, I was too terrified of actual human contact. No, my hope was for vicarious pleasures, enjoying the exploratory homosexual awakenings of others made vivid in books. The stacks became my refuge. Granted, I grew up in small town West Michigan, which meant the stacks were rather limited, and the gay material even more limited, but they did have some things in the HQ section (the section in libraries for cataloguing books on gay and lesbian issues, frequently difficult to find, at least in the past). Nowadays, of course, libraries are more and more online, from the card catalogue to articles and even books. There is something wonderful, however, in just going into the stacks, wandering around, pulling out a book, putting it back, only to discover that the book next to it, or on the shelf above is REALLY the book you want.

As a professor of literature today, I still find that thrill of bookish discovery to be invigorating, and am saddened at how little my students avail themselves of simply wandering among books, addicted as they are to shallow internet noodling. Young — I was a college freshman, mind you — overly literate, untouched by human hands; my censored sexuality directed me to the stacks, a particularly darkened, forgotten, and dusty corner of the library where I tremulously reached for different volumes. As Poncia says about the Alba sisters in Lorca’s
The House of Bernarda Alba
, “no one can deny their true inclinations.” I, of course, could not resist either. Somehow, in one of those serendipitous moments of chance, an inconspicuous book found its way into my hand. The title was intriguing —
The Carnivorous Lamb —
and immediately appealed to my hyper-Christian sensibilities associated with the word “lamb,” not to mention the lamb imagery replete in Lorca’s aforementioned play. First impressions are always lasting ones, and my first encounter with Gomez-Arcos was shrouded mythic possibilities which my mind has continued to romanticize ever since.

As is my custom, either out of an insatiable curiosity, or dyslexia, or both, I always start a book at the end, opening to the last pages and reading, to decide if I like it. It drives everyone I know crazy, but after all these years of reading, I’ve never, ever read anything without first reading the end. The end, which describes a same-sex wedding scene, and associates it with anti-Franco terrorism and filial rebellion against repressive parents, was certainly sufficiently compelling for me to take the book, sit on the floor in the middle of the stacks, and begin reading (from the beginning). In fact, the power of the narrative was so seductive that I was able to overcome all my internalized homophobic anxieties and actually check out the book. I was bewitched by its transgressions, enchanted by its beautiful prose, and utterly tempted by its violent rejection of family and country, with which I could so closely identify as a repressed and oppressed youth uncertain of what it was about me that made people withdraw warmth and affection. Of course, it helped that the title was utterly innocuous so as not to call attention to the fact that I was checking out a gay book, but still, it took courage to claim allegiance to its contents, to go on record that, however momentarily, the book was with
me,
was of
me . . .
the book
was me
.