The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (14 page)

In the book's last scene, Mickey attends an event at his father's country club. Wandering the golf course after dark, he comes upon two men setting up the fireworks that will serve as the evening's entertainment. James and his father. Subtly and poignantly, the scene underscores the gulf of class and race that lies between them. Mickey's eager to find the perfect thing to say to make everything better between them, but of course there's no such thing. There's no rapturous reunion, or acrimonious confrontation. Just two men, and the unremarkable sadness of growing up.

Does it make me a bad homo — or an ignorant one, which is maybe the same thing — if I say I never really liked the political reading of
The Wizard of Oz
that views Dorothy’s adventure as a metaphor for gay identity? I was on board with it for 99 percent of the film, when Dorothy leaves drab prim Kansas for the flamboyant fabulous Land of Oz, while Glinda sings “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” when the Cowardly Lion self-identifies as a “sissy,” and a “dandy lion.” But then there’s the end, that bullshit about “there’s no place like home,” Dorothy desperate to leave her queer friends and rush back to sappy sepia-tinted Kansas. To me it always seemed like your standard tacked-on Hollywood ending where patriarchy, in the form of the censorial Production Code, smacks you down for enjoying transgression; where Bette Davis’ triumphant bitchiness gives her cholera or condemns her to a lifetime of spinsterly loneliness; or where Jimmy Cagney, whose bloody savage antics we’ve been applauding for an hour and a half, gets gunned down by god-fearing G-men. After reading
Life Drawing
, though, I happened to catch
The Wizard of Oz
again, and suddenly the ending of both works made sense. Developing a queer sensibility does not necessarily mean that we can never go back to the world we came from. Sometimes it does, and that’s fine. The Tin Woodsman has no place in small-town America, and I’ve always identified as a Tin Woodsman. Mickey is a changed man, but the change does not mean that he must turn his back on his family and their way of life, which has always been supportive and loving of him.

Why is this book
out of print? Part of me wants to get angry and judgmental and say that gay audiences are just as shallow and sex-and-violence-obsessed as the straights are, and that a book like
Life Drawing
is too smart and too subtle and too radical, in its refusal to push the buttons we expect it to push, to gain a wide following. On the other hand, this book’s disappearance points to a broader tragedy, where a young and thriving queer literature, like so much else, was demolished by AIDS.

AIDS did not just kill the brilliant writers and artists whose names we know. AIDS also killed the literary agents and the editors and the publicists and the
audiences
that nurtured and supported those artists, and in the process an overwhelming amount of art and talent has been lost. In a very real sense, Michael Grumley is part of a lost generation, and
Life Drawing
is only one more casualty in a tragic war whose death toll continues to mount.

But a book is more durable than a man, just ask any scholar of Soviet history. In this age of eBay and Amazon, an out-of-print book does not vanish into the sea of oblivion so easily. The estates of Michael Grumley and his lover, Robert Ferro (another unforgivably-out-of-print gay writer represented in this anthology), endowed the annual Ferro-Grumley Awards for queer writers, which, since 1989, has honored the best of queer lit, including such luminaries as Edmund White, Christopher Bram, Sarah Schulman, and Felice Picano.
Life Drawing
survives to move readers in ways at once more ineffable and more devastating than the mainstream emotional juggernauts. It's a sketch, a simple thing, really, but no less moving for being simple.
Life Drawing
has the same slow emotional impact of fireworks bursting over a suburban golf course or the sight of a boat on a river at dusk, dark against the bright sky.

Follett, 1972

Sean Meriwether

“Hey, Fairyweather. Yo, faggot! How’s the weather, Mary?” The taunts, which made up in venom what they lacked in originality, started in seventh grade. It was a harsh reversal from grammar school where I’d always had a “boyfriend,” that one kid that I would be infatuated with. We would talk during lunch and recess, and in the best of all possible worlds, sit next to each other on the long bus ride to and from school. My serial monogamy started in kindergarten with a shy boy named Karl, then progressed to the stoic intellectual, Robert, to rough-houser Chuck, then sincere and awkward Tom. There were a dozen other boys sprinkled in between, along with a few tomboyish girls. My parade of boyhood crushes were mutually entertained and no one, least of all me, found anything wrong with my unwavering attraction to other boys.

Everything changed in middle school. I’d shot up six gangly inches in one year and went from a charismatic boy to a waifish pimpled teen. It was more than the physical differences that divided me from the other boys — the softcore infatuations I’d harbored for them were no longer tolerated, and the girls cliqued together to discuss boys and makeup. I was left behind with a handful of outcasts who treated me like an exotic refugee, but never as one of their own.

The boys frequently called each other queerbait, faggot and homo in playful rivalry, but when they turned those words on me, they were used to attack. I looked the words up hoping I could figure out what was wrong with me and stop
being
that. Instead I discovered that I was exactly what they were calling me — a boy who liked other boys. My silence only confirmed their suspicions; the accusations grew in strength and number.

I had never considered what I felt to be wrong, nor even unconventional. I believed my daydreams about kissing boys or seeing them naked were perfectly normal and the same jack-off fodder employed by my peers. When they confronted me with a different reality — that my desires were abnormal, even immoral — I turned to a stonewalling God and asked,
Why me?
I immediately heaped blame on my parents’ divorce and my distant father; had he been a stronger masculine influence on my childhood I never would have turned out
that way
.

I read what little I could find on the subject, which amounted to one chapter of
All You Wanted to Know About Sex, but Were Afraid to Ask
. Homosexuals
cruised
dark bars,
tearooms
, and parks to have anonymous sex with strangers. These undesirables could only live out their perversions in the twilight world, while maintaining a “normal” life during the day. Worse, there were reports on the news, including an episode of
Donahue
, about an unknown disease killing gay men. I refused this future and tried to change myself before it was too late.

I tried to be “normal.” I cut my hair short, competed in gym, honed an extensive knowledge of all things carnal. I learned everything I could about sex,
regular
sex, so I could lure in an audience. I even tried to dress like my tormentors to blend in, but my mother did not have the budget to wardrobe my fledgling persona. I started cutting lawns and doing odd jobs so I could afford to buy my own clothes.

My efforts were negligible. The verbal attacks escalated and stopped just short of physical violence — AIDS-inspired fear saved me from that; I might have bled and infected them. Most teachers did not notice my dilemma and one particularly ignorant one used my unpopularity as a comedic device to get the students on his side, taking every opportunity to belittle me in front of the class. I switched tactics in my freshman year of high school and tried to disappear. I slipped quietly from class to class, sat in the back, grew my hair long to hide my face, and started testing poorly to avoid the attention of good grades. My radical change in behavior was noted and my status as queer kid on campus was modified to freaky-druggie-faggot. My desire to become invisible drew more attention and authenticated my role as outcast.

I always had a passion for books, but they became my true companions during my social isolation. They allowed me to enter the insulated safety of another writer’s imagination. My hometown in rural New Jersey may have been bucolic, but it was no haven for readers. The nearest bookstore was at the mall more than an hour away and the town’s two-room library had a meager selection. Undeterred by the lack of literary choices, my mother and I became professional book vultures, able to rip through garage sales and thrift stores with skills honed by necessity. We’d pay up to a quarter for a paperback, a dollar for a hardback, but our goal was a dime a book. Since the toss-offs would have landed in the trash after a garage sale, we normally walked off with a bagful of booty for less than the asking price.

The summer before my sophomore year, my mother drove us a hundred miles away to a remainder sale in a small college town. She wanted to load us up with advanced texts to get a jump on the school year. I was eager to go, albeit for less academic reasons; I’d discovered Steven King and had devoured everything I could get my hands on. I’d championed King’s revenge on high school bullies in
Carrie
, and enjoyed his macabre twists on the everyday. I was confident that I’d be able to increase my collection of horror and science fiction at a
real
bookstore.

I was severely disappointed in the sale, which was held in a small warehouse off campus. There were stacks of hefty college-aged textbooks and large cardboard boxes jumbled with odds and ends, but I did not find a single book of horror, sci-fi or fantasy, not even a thumbed-through paperback. I poked through the boxes marked “fiction,” bypassing Joyce, Woolf and Orwell, writers that I would have no use for until I was old enough to appreciate their unique ideas and use of language. Instead, I rescued one young adult novel from the lot.

The cover had an illustration by Milton Glaser (who created the “I ‘Heart’ NY” logo) depicting a misanthropic boy standing alone in the foreground, hands in pockets. Two figures stood behind him at a pronounced distance, magnifying his isolation. The sticks and stones of the book’s title, missiles that had fallen short of their target, littered the ground around him. There was a worry in the boy’s anxious face that mirrored my own; I felt an instant affinity.

Intrigued, I flipped open the book to read the inside flap and was arrested by the repetition of the word “homosexual.” A chill rushed through me with a mixture of fear and excitement; I knew this was a book about me. I looked up to make sure no one was around, especially my mother, before finishing the description of Lynn Hall’s
Sticks and Stones
. The story centered on seventeen-year old Tom Naylor, the victim of a gay rumor which threatened to “shatter his life” and forced him to question his relationship with his best friend, Ward. Tom’s problems were the same as mine and I wanted him to show me the way out; I had no one else to turn to.

I looked at the cover intently, staring into the hooded eyes of the boy, and calculated the risk of buying it. Owning a book about a homosexual was the same thing as admitting that I
was
a homosexual. However, something in the boy’s story promised help; I decided to chance it. I fished two dollars out of my pocket, thankful that I didn’t have to make my mother pay for it, and rushed up to the cashier. I slid the book to her, face down, along with the money. I couldn’t meet her eyes, fearing that she knew why I was buying it and would expose me. She said nothing, and I raced outside to wait for my mother, concealing the book from her.

It was very easy to empathize with the main character from Lynn Hall’s novel. Tom Naylor is a classically trained pianist and artistic type who is dropped into rural Iowa after his parents’ divorce. His mother’s hometown of Buck Creek has a population one point over the double digits and only a handful of kids his own age, none of whom he has anything in common with. Although he misses his life and friends back in Chicago, he sees how much happier his mother is living on her own. The buoyant youth downshifts into small town life knowing it is worth his personal, and very temporary, sacrifice; he will be off to college in a year’s time.

When he first moved to town, Tom had made friends with Floyd, an overweight, insecure, priggish boy, one who was only too happy to have a male companion his own age. The book opens with Tom beginning to avoid Floyd’s demands for his attention in favor of practicing the piano. The slighted youth turns against him in a fit of jealousy.

At the same time, Ward Alexander returns to Buck Creek after being discharged from the army. In him Tom finds a spirited friend to whom he can relate. Ward is a quiet and worldly writer who takes over an abandoned schoolhouse on his family’s farm. The pair spends hours converting the building into Ward’s writing studio and their relationship flourishes through manual labor, shared meals and quiet coexistence. The young man is adopted into Tom’s family and becomes the older brother he never had.

Problems begin when the rebuffed Floyd learns Ward was discharged because of a homosexual incident. He judges Tom’s artistic leanings, his lack of a girlfriend, and his very intimate relationship with a known homosexual and figures that Tom must be queer too. Floyd salvages his ego by rationalizing Tom’s rejection was based on his not being queer, not because he was unlikable.

Floyd eagerly spreads the rumor to other people in town, who then use it for their own entertainment, passing it on “in confidence” to prove their nosy prowess. The gossip mill churns. Tom, an engaging boy who reads like a precursor to
The Front Runner
’s Billy Sive, is abruptly ostracized from his community without knowing why. People avoid him, giggle behind his back, treat him differently. The hardest part for Tom is that he doesn’t understand why his social standing has changed overnight. He grows paranoid, can’t sleep, and his grades fall off dramatically.