Hidden History: Five and Change

TNG contributor Philip submitted this post.

Beginning this week, Hidden History will appear on Mondays at noon, exploring the nooks and crannies of gay and lesbian history. Because I have had difficulty maintaining a weekly pace and I do not want the column to be rushed and of poor quality, Hidden History will now run biweekly.

It was the Monday before inauguration, and I had just finishing viewing the Manifest Hope:DC exhibit on M St. in Georgetown. To get to the gallery, I had walked from Rosslyn across Key Bridge, sliding past masses of tourists. At the show, more crowds thronged through the two cavernous floors of paintings, prints, sculptures, and mixed media, so many people that it took me over a half-hour of browsing the Obama-filled, change-themed art to find the friends I was meeting.

By the time I was ready to leave, eschewing the winding merchandise line that my friends couldn’t resist, I had had enough of jostling and noise. I love being around people, but after any mob scene like that, I need a chance at calm, to collect my thoughts in private. Running my mind through what places I could go in Georgetown for quiet, I remembered a cozy, two-floor used bookshop on P St. off of Wisconsin Avenue. With dust motes streaming through the windows and its books filed and piled onto wooden shelves, The Lantern placidly continues its operations, staffed by volunteers associated with Bryn Mawr College. It was there I retreated after the art show.

It was also there, up the narrow stairs and in a bookcase around the corner, amid straight rows of anthologies, that I found five books I knew from high school, the time when I was coming out as gay. The mid-nineties: not long ago, but a quantum leap in gay years, a time when movies with gay characters were almost entirely small-release and Ellen, Will, and other glbt figures had yet to appear on TV. These books—some of which I read, some of which I only skimmed or knew on sight—were where I discovered a history, realized a literature, saw reflections of the erotic, and made a choice: yes, I would be a part of this.


I.

The red spine of Edmund White’s short story collection Skinned Alive caught my eye first. Even though I own a copy of it, I still took it off the shelf. Inside, on the front endpaper, was an inscription:

Christmas Eve ‘95
To John –

Our 20th Christmas Eve together, it’s a wonderful life!

Love,
Rick

Of course, I wondered why the book was for sale at The Lantern. Had this long relationship finally foundered and run its course? Or perhaps more likely, had either John or Rick died, the other finding it too painful to keep this memento of a happier time? Maybe both had passed, the book with its note of love going unnoticed by whichever family member broke down their possessions, making the lonely choice of what should stay and what must go.

Whatever the reason, some change in Rick and John’s fortunes caused this book to fall into my hands. It was with a sense of honor that I read Rick’s message to his beloved. They had come together in the middle of the 1970s, the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS zone of gay sexual liberation. As they reached their 20th anniversary, I was fifteen, making my way into the stacks in Arlington, VA.’s Central Library, looking for signs of the lives of men like me. That’s where I first read Edmund White and first saw Skinned Alive.

II. and III.

Three shelves above, the thick and distinct orange spines of two Penguin anthologies drew my attention: The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, and The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing, which Mitchell had edited alone.

David Leavitt was among the first gay writers I turned to, in part because he was the easiest to find. In the early 1980s, while still a student at Yale, he had published short stories in The New Yorker and, with his tales of suburban gay life, become a gay author acceptable to the literary establishment. At the time, I didn’t know this history, but I knew that his novels The Lost Language of Cranes and Equal Affections and short story collections like Family Dancing and A Place I’ve Never Been were readily available in the library. Leavitt has been derided in the gay literary community in part because of his almost-exclusive focus on the suburban middle class, but as a suburban teenager, that also made his work more accessible to me. His novels in particular can be bland, but it was a blandness of landscape that I lived in and understood.

Leavitt and Mitchell were partners—they’ve published two books together about their life in Italy—which made their collaboration on The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories logical. It was Mitchell’s own anthology of International Gay Writing that made the most impression on me when I was younger, though. I knew of a number of American and British writers by the time I saw it, but finding names like Yukio Mishima and André Gide and Reinaldo Arenas opened up to me the lives of gay men living, literally, worlds away.

Somewhere, I heard that Leavitt and Mitchell had broken up, although I do not know whether that is true. In The Lantern, their anthologies are separated by a nondescript book in purple covers. I rearrange the volumes so that the two stand side by side. Call me sentimental, but I prefer those stories where the men end up together.

IV.

Perhaps appropriate to its subject, the John Preston-edited Flesh and the Word lurked in the far bottom corner of the case. Preston was famous in gay sexual communities as a dominant leather top, the author of the renowned Mr. Benson, and in gay literary communities as a prolific writer and editor of everything from ‘serious’ essay collections to the kind of pornography that gets stopped at the borders. A collection of erotic gay short stories and novel excerpts by various authors, Flesh and the Word was turning into a series at the time of Preston’s death from AIDS in 1994. He died the same month that I came out to my parents, and it couldn’t have been long afterward that I first saw his name, on the cover of this very anthology.

My parents were relatively tolerant of my reading habits. They knew, I think, that I was in the process of figuring out who I was, and that for me, reading was a large part of that process. But there was no way I would be bringing home Flesh and the Word. It was there, though, among the short story collections along one wall of Central Library. I remember strolling casually into the stacks on multiple occasions, finding the book, standing to read for 10 or 15 minutes at a time, my heart pounding for more than one reason. To a casual observer, I was just a serious and studious boy, and I kept the book’s covers firmly facing the floor to avoid upsetting that impression.

There were all sorts of writers whose names I was encountering for the first time, from Aaron Travis to Alan Hollinghurst to Anne Rice publishing under various odd pseudonyms. I remember that the piece of writing that turned me on the most, though, was not originally intended for publication. Preston had access to letters that Samuel Steward—a writer and tattoo artist who published under the penname “Phil Andros” (“Lover of Men”)—had sent to gay photographer George Platt Lynes in the 1950s. In one of them, Steward describes a boyhood encounter where he tongue-bathed and was fucked in a barn by an older classmate. I remember mentally trying on both roles, and…no, I won’t say which I wanted more to be…but I remember the sly and teasing final line of Steward’s letter, vividly enough that, even after this many years, standing in The Lantern, I do not need to open the book: “So is there any wonder I’ve always liked the smell of hay and leather?”

V.

I almost turn away from the shelves before I see it: Allan Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers.

Allen Barnett lived long enough to see his book win acclaim as a major work of gay fiction, including winning the 1990 Lambda Literary Award and a special mention from the PEN/Hemingway award committee. He did not live long enough to write any more stories.

I grew up as part of the first generation of gay youth with relatively full and accurate health information about HIV and AIDS. At the same time I was beginning to learn, in fits and starts, what would be necessary to stay safe when I began having sex, the gay world was still being ravaged by, to quote the poet Michael Lynch, “these waves of dying friends.” This is the world of the characters in The Body and Its Dangers.

In health classes, reports in the paper, and TV news accounts, AIDS took on two guises, either as frightening menace or cold statistics. Hearing of tens or hundreds of thousands dead is impressive, but too abstract to be anything but academic. Knowing that sex could open the door to death makes the disease personal, but paralyzing: how does one exist and interact and love with such a present curse?

Books by David Feinberg and John Weir and Allen Barnett, books like The Body and Its Dangers, helped me to understand the gravity of AIDS in an extremely personal way, reading of characters who had to confront the way the disease had changed their lives. But they also pointed to a gay community that had struggled yet cohered in the years since an enemy, seemingly overwhelming in its complexity, had risen and caused such destruction. In showing their characters discovering a path even in the face of such devastating loss, these books were somehow strengthening to me as a reader.


Actually, I’m a bit worried about change. I know that for the gay kids growing up and coming out now, there is a vast array of places from which to draw strength: gay characters in movies and on TV, openly gay politicians and actors and singers, the Internet providing a wealth of resources with a few searches and clicks. But the place of books in all our lives, including those of teenagers, seems under assault. Reading’s meditative effects, the attention it demands, the opportunity to contemplate that it provides: this activity and its attendant benefits are diminishing. Places like The Lantern, quiet spaces for finding and learning, are going, too, closing down and not being replaced.

I don’t buy any of the books, preferring to return them to the shelves. This is something I know: there is another boy who needs them.


Have a suggestion for a Hidden History topic? Love, hate, agree, or disagree with something I wrote? Just want to talk? Feel free to direct e-mail to philipclark@hotmail.com.