The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (13 page)

The drama of the novel occurs in the province of Almeria, Spain, the same province where Gomez-Arcos was born in 1939, at the start of the Spanish Civil War. At the age of twenty-seven, in rebellion against Franco’s fascist regime, he went into exile in 1966, and wrote all of his major works in the language of his exile. The Spanish Civil War and its fascist aftermath impact all his work, and particularly pervade this text.

The novel describes the living death of Spain under Franco’s fascist rule and the ways in which a failed Republican family subverts the fascist state and the Church Politic. The drama explores the relationship among a family of self-labeled anarchists. The mother is of the aristocratic class, who marries below her station as an act of defiance to the social restrictions placed on her as an elite woman. Her husband is a Republican, who survives the Civil War a broken man, kept alive by his wife’s money, but he is walking dead, repressed daily by Franco’s incessant chanting of “peace and victory” on the radio. She gives birth to two boys who are groomed to fulfill their parents’ abortive revolutionary activities. As they grow, the two boys commit terrorist activities by perverting Catholic rituals within their incestuous, homosexual love affair. One of the most beautifully written moments in the novel is also one of the most sacrilegious: having passed through the rituals of his baptism and first communion, allowing him to enter Spanish society, the youngest experiences his first penetrative sexual experience as the culmination of his entry into manhood. The elder brother takes his sibling to an Edenic cave full of butterflies for this deflowering:

The novel is replete with lyric descriptions of scenes devastatingly taboo which function to contest, banish, and overwhelm the oppressive fascism which engenders such graphic revolts.

Such scenes aroused me. I devoured the book. I fell in love with the novel. I wanted to live that life. Well, not exactly, but I wanted sex like that, love like that. I wanted to be IN the book. Alas, in Western Michigan in the 80s there was no way I could find a copy of an out-of-print book from a foreign writer (this was, of course, before the internet and Amazon.com). So, I photocopied it, and kept it like a rescued treasure, and returned it to the library to let it sink back into the dark recesses of the stacks for some other intrepid, frightened, confused student to stumble upon.

Years later, as a graduate student, I was allowed to start teaching literature, and, once I had proven my capacities in teaching benign topics, I was finally given the chance to design my own special topics course. The course I designed was The Body Erotic/The Body Politic: Deviant Sexuality as Political Discourse. I have continued to teach versions of that course throughout my academic career, at a variety of different institutions and departments. I don’t always get a chance to teach Gomez-Arcos, but when I do, his is always the first novel we read. This isn’t merely a tribute to my youth, it is, rather, an homage to a wonderful book that articulates beautifully the intersections of the body erotic and the body politic, since the core relationship takes place with the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, and the love affair exists in direct conflict to the fascist regime. However, I am always nervous teaching the novel and feel a need to explain it before it is read: to excuse its behavior, to justify it, because the novel is frankly erotic, and details an intergenerational, homosexual, incestuous love affair between and older brother and his young sibling. Now I realize, of course, that this is ridiculous, and judgmental, and probably homophobic, ashamed as I am to even consider that notion. It should be noted, however, that the cover of the French edition is decidedly reserved, representing a stern woman and two children standing in the large shadow of a cross. This is in stark contrast to the various English language editions which are significantly more romantic and erotic. And yet, incestuous, homosexual love is not the point of the novel at all. The novel is an indictment of the Spanish Civil War, of Franco and his regime, of the powerless republicans who remain in the country, of a nation mired in a repressive, backward-looking fascism that dooms its people to the despair of a living tomb. All these themes of exile, of sexual behavior used as a political weapon, of children rebelling against a crazy mother and a passive father all coalesced in my own personal experience as something with which I could identify. The story of the brotherly love in Gomez-Arcos is both so political, and so beautifully told, that the issue of incest is almost forgotten. In fact, the beauty of the language, the poetic prose, is so overwhelming, that one often forgets one is reading something that celebrates every taboo of society, from incestuous homosexuality to parental abuse of children, to thorough desecration of all things sacred. Time and time again my students tell me how they were seduced by the prose and forgot that they were supposed to be unsettled, so enmeshed were they with the narrative exuberance.

And every year I teach this novel and am nervous, I am reminded by my students’ reactions that there is no need for that fear. At the end of the semester when I’ve taught this novel, I ask them which book they liked the most, which book they would suggest I eliminate. Almost to a person, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or other factors of difference, their favorite novel is
The Carnivorous Lamb
. They talk about how the body erotic and the body politic so perfectly interact in the novel; how the body becomes the territory upon which political violence is enacted, a metonym of the geographical national body. They are fascinated by the novel’s terrorist critique of fascist Spain. Mostly, however, they respond to the same things I did, all those years ago: the beautifully written love story; the engaging descriptions of eroticism; the beauty of their first penetrative sexual encounter in an Edenic cave, surrounded by a colony of white butterflies, the sacrilegious exuberance of love. Mind you, the majority of my students over the years are straight, with a preponderance of females. Gomez-Arcos’ writing, despite the obvious rage against Franco and his regime, is seductive, charming his audience, luring readers in to a reality that converts them, in the best tradition of the novel, into terrorists themselves: they see the world differently after this novel. When I ask them about the impedimentary taboos of incest, of intergenerational sex, let alone the frankly erotic depictions of gay sex, they barely bat an eye. And these are not, at least initially, the most sophisticated of readers. Common comments are “I forgot they were brothers,”or “It didn’t bother me because it was so beautiful,” or “I didn’t think about it that way, I just saw it as a metaphor.” Now granted, my worried introduction to the novel always includes caveats such as “The sexuality in the novel is one of the metaphors used to contest fascism, just as the color symbolism of red and yellow, which permeate the novel, is a metaphor to deconstruct the Franco regime and Spanish fascism.” Those caveats are true, but they would not suffice for students to overlook the obvious taboos unless the narrative itself were so beguiling, bewitching us into accepting the closed world of the brotherly love as something transcendentally beautiful, offering that possibility of hope that compels us to wander among the library stacks, bravely reaching for forgotten texts and finding a bit of ourselves, and, perhaps, love.

Grove, 1991

Samuel J. Miller

The narrator of Michael Grumley’s
Life Drawing
is an artist — an aspiring painter, we presume, although he never does any painting. Instead he draws, scribbling out pencil sketches of statues in parks or his lover in sleep. Life drawings. The novel itself is a modest work of art. Grumley is not offering a thousand-page portrait of social inequities, or a ruthlessly intimate examination of a run-of-the-mill bourgeois adulteress. His book is content, like a drawing, to depict a little bit of life. No Van Gogh sketch ever fetched tens of millions of dollars the way his big deep dramatic landscapes have. No pencil study of a posing model ever impacted popular culture in the same way as, say,
Die Zauberflote
or
To Kill a Mockingbird
. And
Life Drawing
is not
Death in Venice,
or
Giovanni’s Room
, or
Our Lady of the Flowers,
or any of the other big tragic rambunctious defining works of the queer literary canon. And yet in spite of its modesty, or because of it, the book stands out as one of our most moving novels.

Published in 1991, three years after its author’s death,
Life Drawing
follows its young narrator through one pivotal year. Mickey’s maturation skewers the standard tropes of the coming-out story, reveling in his own power and reckoning with the responsibilities that are part and parcel of being a man. At no point does he grapple with the contempt and violence of his peers, or endure agonies of self-loathing or self-doubt. His first sexual encounter with a boy is at once matter-of-fact and astonishing — the joy of sex with none of the baggage. He is not wracked with shame or fear beforehand and afterwards feels himself “a dynamo of prowess, filled with a rare strength, able to outshine the other guards and halfbacks . . . Something like a moral invincibility cloaked me. The power of an undiscovered life — a truly adult way of being — came over me, and I out-muscled the rest of the team to set the evening’s record in push-ups, sit-ups, and leg raises.”

After that, Mickey’s small-town high school life goes on for another five months, until one afternoon, after wrestling practice, when out of nowhere he “got drunk and headed for New Orleans.” Not because he’s fleeing cruelty or a broken heart or even any specific malaise, but because his hunger for life has outstripped what his small town life can feed. On the way, on a river boat, he meets a young black man named James, with whom he begins a love affair.

Huckleberry Finn
first established a truly American literature not only through its engaging grasp of the Southern vernacular, but because it was the first book to really grapple with the racial violence on which this country was founded. Unlike
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and the pamphleteer novels that came before and after it,
Huckleberry Finn
grasped what many Americans still haven’t understood: that racism’s legacy is so big and broad and fundamental to American society that it cannot be encapsulated inside an “issue,” and any attempt to do so will distort our understanding of who we are. Racism shapes the way people live their lives, and the way that people interact, and our attempts to form real relationships. This is one of the many secret storylines in Huckleberry Finn, and in
Life Drawing
.

Mickey does not objectify or exoticize James, and their love is neither predatory nor exploitative. But Mickey, raised in a world of social and material privilege where one rarely has to grapple with the consequences of one's actions, has been shielded from life in a way that James has not been. Mickey doesn’t know how rare and wonderful their love affair is, and when he destroys it by sleeping with another man, he barely realizes he has done anything wrong.

Unable to remain in New Orleans after James leaves him, furious with himself and his own affectations, Mickey goes west. He turns his back on “the artist in the park, the lover in the bedroom, the whore in the street. Perhaps not completely on the whore on the street — let that person in me have his way, let him be led along, led by the flesh. A kind of greed commenced to grow in me, a greed of experience.” Like the young men of the 19
^th
Century, who Horace Greeley urged west to set up shop on land freshly stolen from the native Americans — like Huck Finn fleeing from his aunt’s attempts to “sivilize” him. He hitchhikes through the oil towns and red deserts, watching “thoughts like tumbleweeds and tumbleweeds like thoughts flashing quick and raggedy across the road.”

In California, he dedicates himself to “playing around with decadence.” “Swimming in a big blue pool at night,” savoring “sand from the beach, and the smell and feel of VO5 hair cream, new tastes, new smells, a new me.” He becomes a kept boy; he learns about “reefer and hallucinogenic morning glory seeds;” he meets real cowboys and female impersonators; he models for Cal Tech students (the artist become the art object); he poses for beefcakey naked photographs.

But in the end, Mickey goes home. It’s not that he’s unable to build a life for himself in this glossy sunlit world of crocodile wrestlers and pornographers — it’s just that this is not the life he’s looking for. The family he finds there is not the family he needs. Mickey needed to grow up and see the world and test the extent of his appetites, but he cannot live without the family he was born into. In this respect,
Life Drawing
stands alongside James Baldwin’s masterful
Just Above My Head
as one of the few great queer novels to truly show how gloriously, irremediably, and terrifyingly we are intertwined with our families; how essential their love is to our happiness. From the first sentence of
Life Drawing —
“the first thing I remember is dancing with my brother” — a note of gentle love and acceptance is sustained throughout. “We held each other by the hand and bounced along, while the war sputtered away in the distance; the only echo we heard was in the male camaraderie of the Big Band choruses, persuading America that war or no war, we were all one big happy family, healthy, optimistic, and strong.”