The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (8 page)

Something You Do in the Dark
has been described (in Amazon.com) as “the first gay protest novel” and as a “revenge novel with a social protest theme.” Georges-Michel Sarotte, in his literary study
Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin
(1978), called
Dark
“a well-written, lucid, intelligent
and
militant novel” and Cole himself “the faithful image of the American — the Western — homosexual of the 1970s.” When I first read
Dark
29 years ago, I viewed Cole Ruffner as a post-Stonewall, “angry young gay” who was informed by the new gay militancy. However, as Curzon himself said in a recent published conversation with his life partner John W. Gettys,

Like Curzon himself, who came of age in the 1960s but managed to hit his stride in the 1970s, Cole Ruffner is both pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. Sarotte described him as being “a creature in transition; still a prisoner of social taboos and fears, he resolutely looks toward the future, a future where bisexuality (more hetero or homo according to the individual) will be the rule” — an apt description, if you leave out the part about the future of bisexuality. A pre-Stonewall Cole Ruffner would have dealt with his problems by killing himself, or by going to a shrink. A post-Stonewall Ruffner would have taken his problems to a gay activist or support group. Ruffner resists oppression, but does so as an individual and not as an organized member of a persecuted minority. Only occasionally does he interact with other members of the tribe. Early in the book Cole tries to help a gay man who, like himself, was a victim of police entrapment. Later in the book Cole tries to help his fellows after the bathhouse that he and they were in was raided. But nowhere in the novel does he join or seek the assistance of a gay or gay-friendly organization. Cole has no political platform or beliefs, save for the wish to be left alone.

Something You Do in the Dark
begins with a fantasy sequence, set in a world where homosexuality is accepted and heterosexuality is persecuted. From that starting point, Curzon sets out to describe and condemns what he perceived to be the negative consequences of being openly gay in a homophobic society, as they were experienced by one particularly unfortunate individual. Though all of Cole’s misfortunes really happened to somebody somewhere, they did not all happen to the same person, as unfriendly critics were quick to point out. Had AIDS been around at the time Curzon wrote this novel, no doubt Cole would have had it (which Curzon confronts in 1984's
The World Can Break Your Heart
). To a large degree,
Something You Do in the Dark
is one big tale of woe. Cole Ruffner is entrapped in a men’s room, and is sentenced to six months in jail, to which the judge then adds two years for contempt of court (even then Cole’s temper was a wonder to behold). Later he is gang-raped in prison, an act for which his sentence (along with those of his rapists) is extended for six more months. For all his troubles, Cole loses his government job, his family practically disowns him, and his lover Teddy deserts him. All this turmoil makes Cole Ruffner a very angry man; and he directs his anger at those who tried to destroy him, at those who love him, and at himself. The main target of Cole’s anger is Officer Keel, a particularly homophobic vice cop who entrapped him in the rest room and who has made it his life’s goal to persecute gay men everywhere. Killing Keel, it seems, becomes Cole Ruffner’s primary goal in life.

Though Cole’s misfortunes are real, to a large extent he is his own worst enemy. His post-prison visit with Teddy — who now has a new lover — is a disaster. His reunion with Angie, his old girl friend, is equally disastrous, and not just because Cole’s attempt to rekindle their old sexual relationship is doomed to failure. Angie sympathizes with Cole, even invites him to a party, but to no avail. Another friend, Bud, is a closeted homosexual who (like many other men, then and now) is engaged. When Cole presses Bud to accept his true feelings, Bud runs away. Later, Cole is reconciled with his invalid father, and moves in to help the older man. This effort, too, ends disastrously when the older Ruffner catches his son having sex with another man, Jerry, in his own home. Cole seeks solace in a bathhouse but that, too, gets raided, and by his old enemy Officer Keel. Cole then tries to kill Keel, but this too fails; and Cole ends his tale wailing, “My God, why don’t I die!” An inferior author would have made Cole Ruffner a more lovable and thus more sympathetic character. Curzon instead makes Cole Ruffner thoroughly unlikeable, which is why some readers found it hard to relate. Critic James Levin may be forgiven for thinking, in his study
The Gay Novel in America
, “that capricious fate more than homophobia seems responsible for [Cole’s] plight.”

Through the novel, Cole (or Curzon) makes some interesting points about himself and other gay men. In spite of all his militancy, Cole and his oppressors agree that gay men are basically promiscuous, and incapable of maintaining a stable relationship. For example, while in the midst of his disastrous reunion with ex-lover Teddy, Cole viciously asks if “we [Cole and Teddy] represent the usual homosexual ‘marriage’? A brief couple of years of pseudo-fidelity and lots of cheating and lying about it, and then the break-up, quarrels and sniveling and backbiting?” Later, while actively cruising Jerry, Cole is delighted that he doesn’t have “to pretend that our two bodies are the only ones that you and I will ever need.” At the baths, Cole places the gay community in a “pecking order” where “Homely has to suck Unattractive and Unattractive has to suck Ordinary and Ordinary has to suck Handsome, and even Handsome does to Handsomer.” Later, after having had a three-way with a rather Unattractive pair, Cole comes to the conclusion that he is just an object to them, as he is with every other man that he has sex with at the tubs (and vice versa). Even so, Cole muses, it is “better [to be an] object than in love. Here there was no pain, for any of them. There was uncomplicated lust. They were using one another’s bodies, but thoughtfully; it was simplistic to call it selfishness.” Like the hero of John Rechy’s
The Sexual Outlaw
, Cole Ruffner seeks anonymous sex at the baths or in public parks, both as a sexual release and as an act of defiance against a society that prosecutes homosexual acts as criminal. Cole’s attitude is very different to those of closet case Bud or Cole’s parole officer Mr. Schultz, who insist that straight marriage is the solution to all of their problems.

Almost three decades after I first read it,
Something You Do in the Dark
is still a powerful and provocative reading experience. Having matured a bit since then, I don’t perceive straight society with the same anger or frustration that Cole and I felt in the 1970s. Perhaps, if he had survived his misfortunes, Cole would have mellowed a bit, too. Though
Something You Do in the Dark
is dated to some extent, in many ways it is as relevant as it was when Dan Curzon first wrote it. Gay men still get arrested in public parks and at the baths, though now the officers of the law have added “AIDS prevention” to all of their other excuses. Prison conditions in America today are, if anything, worse than ever, and “sexual offenders” are branded for life by our crime-obsessed society. And closet cases like Bud continue to use religion and a fraudulent marriage as crutches. On the other hand, a book like
Something You Do in the Dark
is taught in gay studies courses (by Curzon himself and others). Today’s Cole Ruffners seek and enjoy a supportive GLBT community that helps them in their hours of need. And many gay men — Curzon included — now enjoy stable, long-lasting relationships, even if state and federal governments refuse to recognize “gay marriage.”

After making allowances for its time, and in spite of its less-than lovable protagonist, I enjoyed
Something You Do in the Dark
as much now as I did when I first read it. Like Curzon’s other great novels — 1978's
Among the Carnivores
and 1984's
The World Can Break Your Heart
—
Something You Do in the Dark
is a hard-hitting novel that tells it as it is, not as we want it to be. This novel’s (and its author’s) refusal to compromise is perhaps why it has been out of print for much of the past 35 years. Most recently republished by Curzon himself through his own IGNA Press,
Something You Do in the Dark
deserves to be back in print, and to be read by a new generation of avid gay readers.

Dutton, 1991

Ian Rafael Titus

I bought my paperback copy of Melvin Dixon’s
Vanishing Rooms
on September 8, 1994. I remember this because I used to deface books by writing my name and the book’s date of purchase on the inside front cover (I no longer commit such crimes against books, except for the occasional highlighting of reference texts).

An ad in the Voice Literary Supplement first drew me to the book. In one of the blurbs, Melvin Dixon’s novel was favorably compared to James Baldwin’s writing. I had read Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
and
Another Country
; never before had I experienced such unflinching prose dealing with same-sex relationships and interracial desire. To a young black male who had dated and slept with white men, those books, especially
Another Country
, were a revelation. Baldwin created complex, breathing characters whose explorations of race and sexuality mirrored some of my own concerns about gay interracial attraction.
Vanishing Rooms
promised to pick up where those works left off.

Set in 1970s New York City, the novel (first published in 1991) is narrated in alternating chapters by three characters: Jesse Durand, a black dancer whose white boyfriend Metro is beaten, raped and murdered by teenage thugs; Ruella McPhee, a black dancer who falls for Jesse as she provides a haven for him to work through his grief; and Lonny Russo, a troubled 15-year-old who takes part in Metro’s assault.

The book’s original dust jacket illustration, by Alain Gauthier, features the moonlit silhouette of a black man cradling a white man whose mouth bleeds a heart-shape onto one black forearm, while in the background stand three ominous male figures before an urban landscape; a crescent moon tinged red hovers in the sky. It’s an illustration that daringly shows the novel’s central elements and one of the reasons why I was drawn to
Vanishing Rooms
. In comparison, the cover of the Cleis Press 2001 edition is a photograph of a handsome bare-chested black man in profile. A sensual, attractive cover, yet there is no hint of the gay interracial issues at the heart of the novel.

I have read this book three or four times, and returned to favorite passages more times than I can recall; each reading has brought new insights or raised questions not considered before. A book often changes in recollection and when revisited there can be a conflict between our memories of the book and the book’s reality. When I first read
Vanishing Rooms
I was eager for stories depicting gay interracial relationships, a subject that I rarely saw portrayed convincingly (if at all) in the art, books or films that I would come across. Through imaginative works like those of Baldwin and Dixon, I sought like-minded spirits who were exploring this subject as well as the various challenges faced by individuals in such relationships. How did others feel about their attraction to someone of a different race? What are the various implications of desiring people of a certain color? And in the case of
Vanishing Rooms
, can two men, one black and the other white, love each other in a world that condemns not only their sexuality but also their difference in race?

Melvin Dixon was born May 29, 1950 in Stamford, Connecticut to parents originally from the Carolinas. A Professor of English at Queens College from 1980 to 1992, Dixon was a poet, translator, and novelist whose books include the poetry collection
Change of Territory
(1983),
Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature
(1987), and
The Collected Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor
(1990), a translation of poetry by the one-time president of Senegal. His first novel, 1989’s
Trouble the Water
, combines Dixon’s urban upbringing with his family’s southern roots for a tale featuring his talent for creating the gritty, layered realities and surreal lyricism that would be explored further in
Vanishing Rooms
.

While the protagonist of the first novel is a married teacher at a celebrated New England college, Jesse Durand in
Vanishing Rooms
is a young dancer sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with his white lover. The subject of gay biracial relationships was controversial not only during the novel’s 1970s setting but also at the time of
Vanishing Room
’s publication in 1991, and still to the present day. I admit my own hesitation at approaching the subject; disapproval and misunderstanding remain in the minds of many individuals gay and straight. Maybe part of why I read Melvin Dixon’s book was because at the time I needed some form of validation for my desires, to see an interracial couple explored with the same depth of imagination and complexity as lovers in other works of literature.

Yet from page one, the reader knows that Jesse and Metro’s romance is anything but idyllic. Metro, a night shift reporter for the
Daily News
, has summoned Jesse to a warehouse on a rotting pier where men meet for sex. They emerge covered in dust and splinters, and Jesse is appalled by the experience but will not admit it. Late for a dance class, Jesse leaves Metro to get in a cab, not realizing it will be the last time he sees him alive.