The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (24 page)

Still, the book worked for me not only because I could hear the beating heart underneath the narrative flourish, but because the stories created a whole: the loner, poet, psychologist and the self-explorer are the same. In the last story, Roscoe faces his family history and himself without disguise. He tells his brother he needs to finish writing “this damned book.” The voice is honest and emotional. He’s tough on himself. In telling his story, he is also recounting how memory plays tricks on you. How complex, untrustworthy, and important our stories are. “We will never tell you the true story of our lives.” At the end of the book, Roscoe does offer a few slim pages of warmth as the long-alone narrator seems to have found companionship.

With so many other gay books on my shelf at the time – the
Men on Men
collections, Edmund White, David Leavitt – it’s odd that this is the one that stuck with me, because it does little exploration of gay identity, which I was obsessed with and went on to explore in my first short story collection. The various Richard incarnations show no allegiance to a gay “community,” nor do they take part in any gay “culture.” There are mentions of bars and clubs, but they are places the narrator returns from, not where any action takes place. AIDS appears, but at a distance from the narrator. If there is identification here, it is as a sex worker.

Birthmarks
was not alone as a book featuring gay narrators who stepped outside of the prototype of middle-class gay white men in New York City or San Francisco. But while I’d read other authors who portrayed tough, hard gay men and boys who lived on the wrong side of the tracks and had thoughts that weren’t pretty, Roscoe felt the most authentic. The hallways of hotels where “[o]ne of the other prostitutes or addicts had stolen the bulb,” and the narrators who knew “[h]ow to make the most money. How to fix the shots. How to mistrust strangers.” seemed not a literary experiment but a smudge of blood on the page.

If
Birthmarks
is a gay book, it is in the sense of portraying an outsider’s experiences, of exploring the self, of being an outlaw. The stories portray a darker existence than I would ever experience. I would never engage in sex work. It would be years before I would recognize the drugs that are mentioned. On rereading the book, I’m still shocked by the story, “My Lover’s Touch,” where a young boy is imprisoned, kept slave, and beaten brutally, and as a young man searches for this same man who will make him feel this “love” again.

Yet all of these stories are about wanting to connect, and understand one’s self. The deep aloneness that seeps out of the pages was what I often felt those years, feeling that everyone else was happier than me, and that I would never quite fit in with the world as it was. I longed for something that would make me feel happy, accepted, perhaps a boy, who would appear, as in “Angie, Short for Angel.” “I found you, he would say, for the first time speaking my real name out loud, and that would be the final end of being lost.”

It was not only a sense of missing romantic love. There is a disconnection from family, a state of being broken; more than another banal story of a broken heart. Something went wrong long before that, almost at the beginning. The always slightly altered narrator of
Birthmarks
is detached from his own family, and from nearly everyone. He has a profound sense of difference from the world that for many of us is our first sense of being gay.

Far away from the land of my birth, I was in Spain when I read
Birthmarks
, but reading stories of my birthplace of Vancouver, parts of British Columbia where I’d studied and done outdoors trips; Toronto, the closest city to my university; Europe, where I’d backpacked in the last year; and even the “Third World,” though my Ecuador was far away from his Africa.

How strange that the book would end in Seville. Yes, I’d read the author bio at the front of the book that told me Roscoe “currently lives in Seville, Spain” but the timing still shocked me. I was on a bus from Sagres, Portugal, headed back to Seville at the same time that Roscoe’s narrative moves to Spain, where he meets his younger brother and recounts his parents in “perpetual motion,” dragging their children with them through Africa and Europe, leaving Roscoe’s narrators as restless drifters uncertain of their next destination.

That, too, was a similarity I was drawn to, for after my summer in Spain, I was only to live in Canada two more years before returning to Europe for four years and then Australia ever since. Unlike Roscoe, I had no particular reason for feeling such wanderlust but I could feel the strand of rootlessness that runs through the book and let myself become also entangled in it. Another commonality that I hoped to share but could only imagine was that I wanted to be a writer.

Of course, it is what writers do: imagine. He’d published books. He was living the life of a writer. I later heard that he did not give “readings;” instead he performed and recited long parts of his work from memory. More so, there was something about both the author and the book that allowed me to dream that I would have my own books. The contents of
Birthmarks
were not traditional stories, they were pieces of lives, and he was using his own experience as material, crafting and shaping it, and then bringing it out into the world. They showed me how momentary portraits and events can hint at larger stories. You can deal readers a few hands, and they’ll play. You don’t have to give them the whole deck. Most of all, it was the intensity and fire of his voice, his vulnerability and openness: I wanted to do that.
I could do that
.

Crushes are about fantasy as much as anything and it helped that I was great at living in my head rather than trying to figure out the world as a young gay man. The book didn’t have an author photo, but a newspaper interview I’d seen at the time showed a darkly handsome, athletic man in a crouching pose, I believe. I think his arms were bare and he was possibly wearing only underwear. His expression and eyes were intense and I found him beautiful. Meanwhile, the interview and the book told of his work as a prostitute. At the time, sexually naïve, he possessed a sexual wisdom which I wanted. It was a silly young crush, all the more ridiculous because I’d never seen him in the flesh, but I remember an erotic surge at the two clicks as his name ran off of my tongue.

I like to think that there was something more to the attraction that can’t quite be pinned down, a connection perhaps, a book’s “aura, the ineffable, almost psychic pulse emitted by its pages” as Tom Bissell said on Salon.com, discussing writers we know have great talent, but don’t connect with. What is it that attracts us to our favorites? And why do we remember of them what we do — magic talismans we wear around our necks, invisible to all, but still leaving the imprints of their chains?

Rereading
Birthmarks
14 years later, I wonder about others’ opinions of the book. For me, it was like an encounter with a handsome stranger that no one you knew ever met, someone so compelling that you thought about him for years after, but didn’t know what your friends would have thought. These days, I’ve settled down, I’ve found a home, that old loneliness only seldom returns, but reading the book again, I felt some of the same excitement of long ago. I remembered how it felt to be drifting from place to place and wondering if I’d find somewhere to settle down. I was doubtful at the time that I’d ever feel close to my parents and family – though have since been proved wrong.

I was reminded that it was not only the sadness in his pages that I echoed, but hope and beauty, characters that rose up from the gritty pavement to a whirling, swooping sense of joy: “We are singing, and every wondrous shape we wish for appears like the present stars above.”

St. Martin’s, 1994

Tom Cardamone

In proposing and then editing
The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered
, I felt a certain amount of sheepish guilt approaching my own contribution. Having asked so many writers to champion a book they cherish, I never actually finished the one I stated I would write about. Yet there was a very strong reason why I never completed Douglas Sadownick’s
Sacred Lips of the Bronx
, one that made me revisit the text and my first months in New York.

Moving to the city in August of 1998 with two bags, my old life in storage and a new one waiting to be discovered, I had purposefully chosen New York City as the place where I could finally be gay. I was coming from such a closeted existence in Florida that when I made my first foray into a gay bar (friends still don’t believe this) I was genuinely baffled to find only men and no lesbians. Utopian solidarity aside, as I looked for myself by walking down new streets and into midnight bars, I also foraged the city’s bookstores. I knew nothing about gay books or gay authors, only that I have always relied on books to take me
there
, not caring or knowing where I was going, the journey being of more importance than the destination. So I stumbled through the shelves at the Strand; the first two books I bought were filled with cold sex and predictable prostitutes giving their bodies to everyone, their hearts to none. I was turned off.

I burned through several couches and friendships before landing in Brooklyn, renting an unfurnished room from a pregnant woman with a baby who didn’t necessarily want me there but needed my four hundred bucks a month. I slept in a sleeping bag on the bare floor, temped a variety of strange jobs in different neighborhoods and absolutely marveled as the leaves changed; growing up in Florida, I had never experienced the seasons and was excited by the prospect of snow. The Central Library of Brooklyn, an Art Deco masterpiece designed to resemble an open book, was across the street and allowed me to continue my journey. Within this secular temple I hit pay dirt. It’s interesting how we can identify the queer essence of a text by the poetry of the title, the cover art which might not communicate obviously gay content with the now typical torso but nonetheless it draws our eyes to it. My radar was flickering to life. I read most of Edmund White’s
A Boy’s Own Story
while standing in the stacks. Much later I intuited that Mark Merlis has something to tell me as well. Douglas Sadownick’s
Sacred Lips of the Bronx
was an early find. Something about it grabbed my attention. Enough so that, riffling through a few pages, I put it back on the library shelf and bought the remaindered hardback at the Strand. I knew there was something here to covet.

The story was mildly complicated; chapters alternated between the main character Mike Kaplan’s gay journalist adult life in Los Angeles and vignettes from his teen years growing up within a shrinking Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. I skipped the contemporary chapters with their ominous politics and difficult relationships and devoured only those of his youth. The young Mike’s emerging sexuality seems to mirror the ethnic changes within the Bronx of his boyhood; the Puerto Ricans moving into the neighborhood threaten his cultural roots in the same way his gay desire subverts the identity his faith and family expect of him. He is attracted to shirtless, menacing boys. The social circus of high school teaches him to camouflage his desires. But one boy, Hector, sees through his facade. I read and re-read certain passages, hungry to capture for myself what I found on the page.

Reading that over and over I knew I was going to live.

At the time this book clarified an important aspect of my budding existence as a young gay man. “Gay” didn’t define the type of sex I was after, but the type of love I required and wanted to give. But I had only read half of the novel. The contemporary chapters I couldn’t read represented the reality I still did not want to face. And this was absolute, so much so that when a new friend to whom I had praised the book passed me a copy of Douglas Sadownick’s nonfiction follow-up,
Sex between Men: An Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men Postwar to Present
, abandoned by one of a succession of roommates, I quickly shelved it. The cover, half of a pair of naked men, one shamefully covering his face while clutching the genitals of the other, who in turn reaches to conceal his compatriot’s cock as well — doubly obscured by the outsized and reddened “sex” of the title — frankly embarrassed me. I didn’t want to dissect sex, know our history or in any way examine life. I was too busy chasing overdue kisses. I felt that my previous life had been a dishonest waste, that I had lived past the opportunity to experience young love; so I rushed to fill every moment, dance to every song. I was too madly busy for introspection, politics, and even, sometimes, condoms; they represented caution, the opposite of the natural youthfulness and freedom I was desperately looking to recapture. I used my next move as an excuse to dump
Sex Between Men
at Housing Works Used Bookstore and Café, a bookstore in SoHo that, at the time, I considered more a convenient downtown bathroom stop than a place to browse.