The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (28 page)

And for Forrest? What is he searching for? What Forrest most wants from Marcello is to “enter the boy’s life,” to enter the life of Roman Italians, indeed, to enter “any life at all.” Like so many generations of travelers before him, he discovers that in Italy “the heaven and the earth are mixed up.” Goethe called Rome the place in which to be reborn. Forrest is not exactly “reborn” here — Windham is too sober for that kind of earth-shattering epiphany — but he does achieve a kind of quiet, peaceful reconciliation to what has been, to what is possible, to what may be. For Forrest, Marcello has made things — Rome, and everything — real again. Glad is the word Forrest applies to himself toward the end of the novel — “glad that he had been in Rome and glad that he was returning home.”

E. M. Forster, who also became a literary friend and correspondent (his letters to Windham, a much slighter volume, were privately published in 1975), appreciated Windham’s art and volunteered to write an introduction to Windham’s collection of stories. In that little essay — a model of economy, lucidity, and insight — Forster notes that “warmth” is the hallmark of Windham’s style. “He knows that human beings are not statues but contain flesh and blood and a heart, and he believes that creatures so constituted must contact one another or they will decay. Isolation means death.”

If there is anything “political” about
Two People
, it’s to be found in an understated subplot involving some research that Forrest is doing at the Vatican Archives on Giordano Bruno, the 16
^th
-century Italian monk and philosopher, who was burned alive for not retracting his heretical works. Forrest is interested in Bruno because the monk did not “falsify his declarations to achieve a nominal accord.” Perhaps Windham threw in these references to suggest a parallel with Forrest’s unapologetic acceptance of his relationship with Marcello. This is not a novel that pleads for understanding or tolerance, or indeed makes any apologies for Forrest’s behavior, an amazing stance for a pre-Stonewall novelist to take.

I will not give away the ending. That would spoil the sweet, poignant pleasure of reading the novel’s closing chapter, pages in which Windham nicely, but not facilely, wraps up the several themes he’s been weaving. Instead, my original intention was to encourage you to go out and find a used copy of this long-out-of-print little gem and read it for yourself. But how wonderful to discover, just before I finished the final draft of this essay, that Mondial, a small, independent publisher of “rare and unusual books in English and Esperanto,” has reissued
Two People
in a new, paperback edition graced with a handsome cover drawing by Fritz Bultman.

And while you’re at it, pick up as well a copy of Windham’s
Emblems of Conduct
, published two years before
Two People
. A memoir about his youth in Atlanta during the Depression, it’s another model of clarity, wisdom, and restraint. Toward the end of that book, Windham wrote: “The wonder of beauty is that it does not lie in any identifiable quality. It cannot be isolated; it exists outside the sum of its parts; and until you are aware of it, nothing is wonderful. But once you are aware of beauty, the wonder goes out of it into all that is beyond your understanding. You may make no effort to understand it, or you may track it down as far as ‘wholeness,’ ‘harmony,’ ‘radiance.’ But it remains outside what you can pin down. And from it wonder enters life.”

A quiet wonder will enter the life of any reader lucky enough to read
Two People
, or any of Donald Windham’s other gracious, generous, intelligent, and beautiful books.

Philip Clark

An anthology like
The Lost Library
initially looks rather grim: See all the wonderful gay books that are out of print? Except for some small coterie of dedicated fans, these books are dead. No one’s going to reprint a gay novel — a midlist title, at best — in this era of media conglomerates, corporate profits, and blockbuster bestsellers.

At first glance, a downbeat assessment seems accurate. In this digital moment, where books themselves sometimes appear to be on their way to extinction, will even new gay-themed fiction survive, let alone titles from what may now seem the musty past?

If a look at the history of the reprinting of gay novels is any indication, these books may enjoy a longer and more varied life than we can imagine.

While there are echoes of a gay presence in such mid-19
^th
century works as Herman Melville’s
Typee
(1846) and
Moby Dick
(1851), travel writer Bayard Taylor’s
Joseph and His Friend
(1870) is generally considered the earliest example of a consciously gay novel. This makes the publishing of gay fiction a relatively recent endeavor. Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890-91) was reprinted as early as 1895, directly before Wilde’s trials, and then again in Paris in 1905. A few other isolated titles received quiet republication in the first half of the 20
^th
century, but the effort to reprint earlier gay novels in a gay-specific context is even more recent.

H. Lynn Womack, the founder of Washington D.C.-based Guild Press, was already publishing male physique magazines like
Fizeek
and
Grecian Guild Pictorial
in the late 1950s. With the assistance and encouragement of bookseller Howard Frisch, owner of New York City’s Village Books and Press, Womack briefly dabbled in hardcover books. These included American editions of British titles like
The Leather Boys
(1965; Anthony Blond, 1961) by “Eliot George;” memoirs such as journalist Michael Davidson’s “life story of a lover of boys,”
The World, the Flesh, and Myself
(1962; Arthur Barker, 1961); and reprints of more obscure gay works. Famed French writer Georges Eekhoud, little-known in America, had his novel
Strange Love
(1909) reprinted in a small quantity by Panurge Press in 1930 before Womack stepped in with a new edition in 1965. Similar re-releases awaited John Selby’s melodramatic
Madame
(1963; Dodd, Mead, 1961) and the interracial World War II “problem” novel
The Invisible Glass
(1965; Greenberg, 1950) by the pseudonymous “Loren Wahl” (Lawrence Madalena). This initial run soon faded as Womack realized there was more profit to be made in a steady diet of pornographic novelettes and magazines than in hardbacks, either original or reprint. Still, Womack deserves to be recognized as a pioneer for his pre-1967 output.

The gay liberation movement, increasing in size and intensity after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, provided impetus for more gay publishing activities. Two major projects in the 1970s were the Arno Press series on homosexuality spearheaded by historian Jonathan Ned Katz and Winston Leyland’s founding of Gay Sunshine Press. While working on the research for his monumental
Gay American History
(1976), Katz came into contact with Arnold Zone, Arno Press’s president. Zone was willing to hire Katz to edit a series of gay reprints, especially since Arno had printed a similar, successful series of books on black history topics edited by Katz’s brother, William. The Arno reprints were mostly nonfiction, but also lesbian fiction (Jane Rule, Gale Wilhelm, and Ann Bannon, among others) and a few decades-old gay-themed novels. These notable works included Reginald Underwood’s once-scandalous
Bachelor’s Hall
(Fortune Press, 1937), A.T. Fitzroy’s immediately censored anti-war novel,
Despised and Rejected
(Daniel, 1917), Blair Niles’s New York City-set
Strange Brother
(Liveright, 1931), and
Imre: A Memorandum
(privately printed, 1908) by the pseudo-nymous “Xavier Mayne.” Mayne was actually the American travel writer Edward Iranaeus Prime-Stevenson, author of
The Intersexes
(1908), an apparent attempt to gather between two covers every known fact – and quite a bit of gossip – about homosexuals and homosexuality.
The Intersexes
would make the lineup in Katz’s Arno series, and, improbably,
Imre
would again receive new life in the 1990s in the form of an abridged paperback reprint from erotic publisher Badboy.

At the same time that Jonathan Ned Katz was beginning work with Arno Press, Winston Leyland was pursuing expansion of his publishing activities on the West Coast. The founder of the San Francisco radical gay liberationist newspaper
Gay Sunshine Journal
in 1970, Leyland began Gay Sunshine Press in 1975. Originally publishing mostly poetry (the second modern gay poetry anthology,
Angels of the Lyre
, and Erskine Lane’s translations of Arabic boy-love poetry in 1975; Aaron Shurin’s
The Night Sun
in 1976), Leyland soon diversified the Gay Sunshine Press list. Beginning with short stories and novel excerpts in
Now the Volcano: An Anthology of Latin American Gay Literature
(1979), Leyland would release both fiction originals and reprints for the next two decades, many of them in translation. These include books of such high quality or noted historical value as Gore Vidal’s short stories in
A Thirsty Evil
(1981; Zero Press, 1956);
Bom-Crioulo: The Black Man and the Cabin Boy
(1982), an interracial, intergenerational love story written by the Brazilian author Adolfo Caminha and first published in 1895; Charles Warren Stoddard’s early gay American novel
For the Pleasure of His Company
(1987; A.W. Robertson, 1903); K.B. Raul’s
Naked to the Night
(1986; Paperback Library, 1964); gay mystery writer Joseph Hansen’s
Pretty Boy Dead
(1984) – the second title change since its original publication as
Known Homosexual
by Brandon House in 1968; and
Teleny
, the 19
^th
century erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde and a possible host of other hands. Leyland would continue his contributions to reprinting gay fiction well into the 1990s, with such anthologies as the Japanese-themed
Partings at Dawn
and
Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature
(both 1996).

As Leyland continued expansion of Gay Sunshine, the 1980s would mark the largest outpouring of gay reprints, with presses in both England and America publishing more titles than ever before. A conscious effort was being made to preserve gay novels in danger of disappearing from the scene. Adding to its larger line of original gay novels, London-based Gay Men’s Press (GMP) inaugurated the Gay Modern Classics series, bringing such rare works as Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s
The Young and Evil
(Obelisk Press, 1933) back to public attention. Francis King (
The Firewalkers
;
A Domestic Animal
), John Lehmann (
In a Purely Pagan Sense
), Kenneth Martin (
Aubade
, first published when Martin was just 16), Michael Nelson (
A Room in Chelsea Square
), and James Purdy (
Eustace Chisholm and the Works
;
I Am Elijah Thrush
;
Narrow Rooms
) were some of the other authors to receive the Gay Modern Classics treatment. Further, GMP followed Arno with second reprints of A.T. Fitzroy’s
Despised and Rejected
and Blair Niles’s
Strange Brother
and Gay Sunshine with Wilde’s
Teleny
. They even found time to print a new edition of the “Eliot George”-penned
The Leather Boys
(Guild Press, 1965; Anthony Blond, 1961) under its author’s real name, Gillian Freeman.

In order to get its titles marketed widely in America, Gay Men’s Press entered into a distribution agreement with an American publisher newly minted for the 1980s: Alyson. Still in business today as part of the Regent Media conglomerate, Alyson Publications was originally founded by Sasha Alyson in Boston in 1979. Some of Alyson’s earliest publications were reprints of gay novels. The “Phil Andros”/Samuel Steward erotic classic
$tud
(1982; Guild Press, 1966); Richard Friedel’s still popular
The Movie Lover
(1983; Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981); Richard Hall’s
The Butterscotch Prince
(1983; Pyramid Books, 1975), a mystery that was ill-promoted in its first edition; “Richard Meeker”/Forman Brown’s much-beloved
Better Angel
(1987; Greenberg, 1933); and
Quatrefoil
(1981; Greenberg, 1950), a long out-of-print response by its author, “James Barr”/James Fugaté, to a suicidal and doomed fraternity brother’s plea: all reappeared in Alyson’s distinctive paperback format. These were obviously popular with readers, as Alyson continued to reprint a book like
Quatrefoil
into the 1990s. Alyson was even willing to reprint works of historical value by truly obscure authors; the radical German-bred anarchist John Henry Mackay’s
The Hustler
(privately printed, 1926) resurfaced in an English-language edition in 1985, nearly sixty years after its original publication. It remains one of Mackay's only novels to be printed in English. Alyson would provide a home for republishing gay work into the late 1990s, with editions of such novels as John Weir’s
The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket
(1999; HarperCollins, 1989) and Paul Monette’s
The Gold Diggers
(1999; Avon, 1979) as part of its Alyson Classics Library. This imprint also worked to keep gay genre fiction alive, with mysteries by Nathan Aldyne, Michael Nava, and George Baxt. Alyson was one of several publishers to revive Baxt’s
A Queer Kind of Death
(Simon & Schuster, 1966).

Even some major publishers made an attempt to attract gay book buyers by launching reprint projects in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. New York’s independent giant, St. Martin’s, had shown commitment to gay work for many years. In fiction, they had had success with books ranging from Edmund White’s
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
(1978) to Renaud Camus’ controversial
Tricks
(1981) to Steve Kluger’s gay baseball novel,
Changing Pitches
(1984). In 1987, editor Michael Denneny proposed an all-gay and lesbian imprint, the first of its kind at a major publisher. Dubbed Stonewall Inn, the imprint went on to publish over 120 titles in its first ten years. While most titles were simply paperback versions of novels St. Martin’s had originally published, Denneny and his successor as series editor, Keith Kahla, brought a diverse group of reprints under the Stonewall Inn banner. These included novels with devoted followings, like John Preston’s
Franny, the Queen of Provincetown
(1996; Alyson, 1983); offerings from writers in the Violet Quill gay writing collective, such as Felice Picano’s
Late in the Season
(1997; Delacorte, 1981); and novels from writers who gained more fame for their work in other genres, as with
Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll
(1988; Little, Brown, 1978) by Paul Monette.