The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (19 page)

Or are they truly at cross purposes? One question haunts this novel: why did Kurt abandon a promising career for this trip to hell? And make no mistake about it; the war this novel depicts is hell. Living conditions range from the institutional gloom of a hastily constructed hospital to the squalor of forward encampments, where sanitation, as Kurt frequently and colorfully reminds us, is primitive to nonexistent. Daily life swings from boredom to terrifying encounters with a mostly hidden enemy and the ever present possibility of being blown to bits by a booby-trap.

The war was never broadly popular and lacked the kind of patriotic fervor that swept the country after 9/11. Even ostensible supporters found ways to avoid service (evidence A & B: President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick “Other Priorities” Cheney). The huge manpower demands were sustained by the draft, and those who voluntarily enlisted tended to be earnest and politically ambitious (think of Al Gore and Senator John Kerry). Kurt’s no hippie, and has a hearty contempt for his anti-war peace and love brother-in-law, but he’s also too much of a loner and wise-ass to be a blind believer in the war as a cause.

So why did he enlist? His explanations, such as they are, are distressingly casual — a quart of vodka martinis, a sense of obligation as a dutiful son of the South. A potential major league athletic career is brief and uncertain in the best of circumstances; why put it off if not entirely in jeopardy? Something not told to us must have happened to precipitate Kurt’s decision or there must be something in his character beyond what he reveals to us that would explain or justify this decision.

This mysteriousness of Kurt’s basic motivation in turn suggests that the breezy, brave front he presents to his correspondents hides as much as it reveals. His final, swift emotional disintegration also suggests a barely contained personality undone by the stresses of war. Kurt has reversed the hero’s course: at one point he is actually a prisoner and, at novel’s end, dependent on the good will of a Green Beret.

As it happens Kurt appears again in a second book, Charles Nelson’s
Panthers in the Skins of Men
. Although it, too takes its title from Rimbaud, it is not quite a sequel. Rather than pick up the story from where it left off in
The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up
, Nelson has substituted an alternative ending that finds Kurt recovering from a baseball-career-ending wound in a New Orleans military hospital. More significantly, although told in the first person,
Panthers
does not attempt the epistolary technique of
The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up
. The change in technique illustrates how form is in itself creative. Without the multiple correspondents, Kurt is a flatter, simpler character. And without the pretense of writing a letter,
Panthers
loses the opportunity for the verbal hijinks that give
The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up
much of its ebullience. Kurt’s letters are often devised to amuse; particularly when writing Paul he will switch into high camp (“Tom-toms throb with a message from Kurtala, the Jungle Queen. ‘BWANA! GET ME OUT OF HERE!’” begins one letter). One letter is composed entirely of poetic doggerel:

The direct narration of
Panthers
doesn’t lend itself to these kinds of verbal flourishes, taking away one additional source of interest.

Panthers
, which appears to have been modeled on Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
(with touches of John Rechy’s
City of Night
) also lacks the great compelling theme of the war in Vietnam. While the war in Vietnam has spawned many novels and films, this gay Vietnam novel is pretty much sui generis. The only comparable book would be Christopher Bram’s
Almost History
, which follows a US Foreign Service officer whose career includes time in Vietnam. The contrasts between
Almost History
and
The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up
are revealing. Bram’s novels demonstrate a disciplined talent working to extend his mastery of his craft. In
Almost History
, Bram explores ways of constructing a narrative over an extended period of time, of convincingly portraying a man coming out in early middle age, of setting an individual’s story against the larger narrative of his time, of convincingly portraying distant places. In
Almost History
, the reader can observe an artist imposing his will upon his subject. In
The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up
, it is more as if the story has taken possession of its author, who is compelled to tell the tale.

For those of us who came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Vietnam War was the central precipitating national crisis of our lives. It was begun on false pretenses and conducted with equally dishonest claims. For those of us who opposed it, the war revealed a rottenness, a corruption, a stupidity at the heart of American polity. The Kurt we see at the end of
The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up
reminds me of the Vietnam vets who would show up in writing workshops at the school where I was doing graduate work as the war came to its sad ending. Sent on a fools mission by a careless government, they were lost souls, more than a little bit crazed by the attempt to square their sacrifice with the lack of honor they felt upon returning and the knowledge that their efforts had been in vain. Kurt is no anti-war lefty. Seen through his cynical soldier eyes, the portrait of the war as a disaster seems not political but simple empirical fact.

The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up
retains its relevance. We are again mired in a war dishonestly begun and conducted. The military remains officially anti (openly) gay while mostly turning a blind eye to the many homosexual soldiers whose talents are sorely needed. The trauma of the combat has left many of those returning home as physically and emotionally damaged as those coming home from the jungles of southeast Asia. Literature cannot ameliorate these damages, but perhaps it can convince us of their reality, even if, sadly, we seem unable to learn from them.

W.H. Allen, 1966

Michael Bronski

1
Child of the Sun:
Let’s start with the cover
of the 1972 paperback. The art here by noted graphic artist Frank Frazetta is shocking even for early in the 1970s. A mostly naked muscular gladiator-type – he is wearing a red thong – in a chariot, drawn by a white and a black stallion, is racing past an orating Roman citizen, who seems to be entirely naked except for part of a toga tossed over his shoulder and some sandals laced half-way up his calf. Next to him in a subservient position is a crouched man – a slave? – naked except for his sandals. At the bottom of the frame is a naked woman, her back to us, on a red blanket. She is hardly noticeable; faux heterosexual window dressing. On the back cover is a close-up of the gladiator with emphasis on his enormously muscular buttocks. Beneath this overtly homoerotic image is the pitch for the book:

Child of the Sun
, by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, was originally published in 1966 by Gold Medal, one of the most prominent and influential mass market paperback publishers in the country. It was overtly homosexual in theme and content and while marketed to a mainstream, heterodox readership, the jacket copy did not hide its homoerotic subject matter. The cover of the 1972 edition, quoted above, is even more explicit. Curiously, neither cover makes explicit that Varius Avitus Bassianus becomes the infamous Emperor Elagabalus – aka Heliogabalus or Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (not to be confused with Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-Emperor) – whom semi-serious readers of history would have known as the man that Edward Gibbon in
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
claimed “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and un-governed fury.”

Child of the Sun
is an important touchstone in a number of intersections of queer publishing currents. Most obviously, it is a prime example of gay culture’s – and to some degree mainstream culture’s – fascination with the implicit and explicit homoeroticism of the classical world. This was not new to British and American queer male culture. We see the origins in John Addington Symonds’s obsession with the male body in Greek and Renaissance art. We see it in the endless issues of
Physique Pictorial
and
Grecian Guild Quarterly
where the hustler-models posed in faux togas and tacky pieced-together sandals. We certainly see it in the advent of the Italian sword and sandal epics of the late 1950s such as
Hercules,
which starred muscle men like Steve Reeves who had already appeared frequently in
Physical Pictorial
. The classical nude had, from just before the turn of the century, been a coded marker of male queerness. Not very good repro-ductions of Michelangelo’s David were commonly found in gay men’s apartments in the 1950s – it was safe because it was deemed acceptable culture, but more than obvious to anyone in the know that statuettes of naked teenaged boys with slings over their shoulder were pretty direct code for: queer.

But
Child of the Sun
is also a more blatant homo-manifestation of the literary oeuvre of Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner. These are names that were once at the center of popular literary culture in the 1950s and early 1960s and who are now all but forgotten except as minor footnotes. Hell, they don’t even have Wikipedia entries. While they often collaborated on novels, Onstott and Horner – they sound like a two-bit corrupt small town law firm in a Eudora Welty novel – wrote their own works as well. All of these works were historical novels that featured sweaty, heaving sex scenes, light on explicit details and heavy on innuendo, that were very heterosexual except for the fact that the authors were far more fascinated by the male physique and genitalia than they were by the female. Onstott became famous for
Mandingo
in 1957 – a lusty, raucous, and racist look at interracial plantation life before the Civil War. And yes, all of the men, especially the African slaves, had very large penises.
Mandingo
was followed by
Drum
, and then
The Master of Falconhurst
– all set in the south and all dealing, in erotic ways, with slavery. Onstott and Horner then collaborated on sequels to
The Master of Falconhurst
, such as
Falconhurst’s Fancy
and
Heir to Falconhurst
. Like Grace Metalious’s
Peyton Place
, published in 1956,
Mandingo
and its sequels took advantage of the new leniency in mainstream publishing that was allowing more erotic detail and adult plots. And while the African-American Civil Rights movement was struggling for equality under the law and basic human rights Onstott and Horner were providing lurid, sexualized fantasies of interracial sex, enormous amounts of sexualized violence, and a sexualized historical revisionism of the old South that made Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
look like a nursery rhyme.

It is something of a relief, at least for a culturally sensitive reader, that Onstott and Horner left the American south for other realms.
The Tattooed Rood
, (“More Terrible, More Wonderful than the Unforgettable
Mandingo
” reads the back cover) set during the Spanish Inquisition, was published in 1960, and Horner on his own published
Rogue Roman
(“Bloody and Barbaric as
Mandingo
, Corrupt and Sensuous as
La Dolce Vita
”) in 1965.
Child of the Sun
was published a year later and – like
Mandingo
and the other novels – both badly, even terribly, written but compulsively readable. These are men who cannot leave a cliché unearthed, who believe that lurid adjectives are more impressive when used repeatedly, and who eschew subtlety with the faith of a novice. But what is so interesting about
Child of the Sun
is that Onstott’s and Horner’s queer sensibility is able to come to the fore as they detail the depravity of an actual queer person. While this may be startling in the framework of Stonewall which was not to happen for another three years, they are moderately behind the times in regard to other openly gay works of fiction (though its depiction of gay marriage as desirable and just was certainly ahead of the curve).

Novels such as Gore Vidal’s
City and the Pillar
(1948), James Barr’s
Quatrefoil
(1950) and Fritz Peters’s
Finistere
(1951) had all seriously addressed queer themes nearly two decades before. And, in terms of explicit sex, John Rechy’s
City of Night
shocked readers with its life and times of queer hustlers in 1963 and his even more explicit
Numbers
would be published in 1967. More saliently, Mary Renault had been mining the classical-age of homo-lit with
The Last of the Wine
(1956),
The King Must Die
(1958) and
Fire from Heaven
(1969). Of course Renault’s elegant literary peregrinations won her accolades of good taste and insightful characterization – the inverse of the heaving and pulsating antics of
Child of the Sun
.