“Gay people are just like straight people. But straight people lie about who they really are.” Michael Bronski, “The Future of Gay Politics,” forum at the Kennedy School of Government, 1994. Verified by Bronski in conversation with the author, June 2009.
“what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel,… Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 2.
The names are only approximations, anyway. I do not want to get too deep into the “essentialist vs. constructionist” debate about sexual identity. Gore Vidal famously argued that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts. It was a good strategy, a smart way to outmaneuver prejudice. Academics later picked up the idea when Michel Foucault proposed that there was no such thing as a homosexual before 1869, when the word was first coined. Queer theorists imagined a wonderful arcadian past where men and women simply did what they did and only their actions were judged, not their souls.
Graham Robb points out in his very fine book Strangers that Foucault proposed this idea only as a possibility and never explored it. And it’s a pretty idea, but I don’t buy it, simply because I’ve read too much Victorian fiction. People in the nineteenth century were their acts. Men who embezzled were embezzlers, even if they were clergymen. Women who committed adultery were adulteresses, no matter what saintly deeds they performed later. Novelists like Anthony Trollope and Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to separate action from identity, but they were fighting against an established custom of thinking. You were your sin, whether it was the jilting of a fiancée or an adulterous affair or an unspeakable act of sodomy.
“America when will you be angelic?” Allen Ginsberg, “America,” Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 39.
Vidal and Merrill wrote letters to the editor… Deirdre Bair, Anaïs Nin (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995), 318.
“I think you are everything, man, woman, and child… Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar (New York: Dutton, 1948 edition), 165.
“ ‘You’re a queer,’ he said… Vidal, The City and the Pillar, 306.
“He listened content and untroubled… Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 26.
“Honey… you stay away from him” John Malcolm Brinnin, Truman Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy (New York: Delacourt Press, 1986), 34.
“the faggots’ Huckleberry Finn.” The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lehrman, ed. Stephen Pascal (New York: Knopf, 2007), 63.
“A short novel which is as dazzling a phenomenon… Quotes from Chicago Tribune and Time; from Gerald Clarke, Capote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 155–156.
“The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told… Carlos Baker, “Deep South Guignol,” New York Times Book Review, January 18, 1948. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-guignol.html.
“Is no member of society, then, to be held accountable for himself, not even Hitler?” Diana Trilling, Reviewing the Forties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 232.
“Presented as the case history of a standard homosexual… C. V. Terry, “The City and the Pillar,” New York Times Book Review, January 11, 1948. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-pillar.html?scp=2&sq=City%20and%20the%20Pillar%20by%20Gore%20Vidal&st=cse.
“Essentially it’s an attempt to clarify the inner stresses of our time… Charles Rolo, “Reader’s Choice,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1948, 110.
“Aside from its sociological demonstrations, Mr. Vidal’s book is undistinguished… J. S. Shrike, “Recent Phenomena,” Hudson Review, Spring 1948, 136. (I suspect Shrike is film critic Vernon Young, but only because Young was a regular contributor to the quarterly and cited Kinsey in another review.)
“Many a first novel is sounder, better balanced… Orville Prescott, New York Times, January 21, 1948. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-voices.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=orville%20prescott,%20%22other%20voices,%20other%20rooms%22&st=cse.
not bad for the hardcover book slump of the early Fifties… Fred Kaplan mentions this slump in passing in Gore Vidal, but the best account I’ve found is in Heavy Traffic and High Culture by Thomas L. Bonn, a detailed history of New American Library from 1945 to 1982. Bonn reports that in 1952 sales figures were down for hardcover, and it was rumored that big houses were kept in the black only by the sale of reprint rights (32). This was followed in 1954 by huge paperback returns—44 percent (before, the returns had been 25 percent). Bennett Cerf in At Random says the returns were so high that people joked books were now landfill. The earnings for authors for paperbacks were shockingly low. Getting one cent on a twenty-five cent book, an author could sell 100,000 copies but see only five hundred dollars (after dividing the money with his publisher). Only as the decade progressed and paperback prices rose to thirty-five and fifty cents did the market level out.
“Most people seem to be born knowing their way through literature… Quoted in Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 329.
“I am back amongst my people… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 287.
“He did something I longed to do… Donald Windham, Lost Friendships (New York: Morrow, 1987), 113. Windham was an excellent novelist himself, writing several first-rate books, including Two People (1965), a novel about the love affair between a married American businessman and a hustler in Rome.
“The richness of words in Tennessee’s stories and plays… Windham, Lost Friendships, 179.
[a] poetry-reciting waiter at the Beggar’s Bar in Greenwich Village… The bar’s owner, Valeska Gert, was a brilliant character actress in German cinema, appearing in Joyless Street and The Threepenny Opera, but Williams never knew that.
“What you have done is removed my style… Vidal, introduction to Collected Stories, by Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1985), xx.
“You know, you spoiled it with that ending… Vidal, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” in Matters of Fact and Fiction: Essays 1973–1976 (New York: Random House, 1977), 137.
“I liked him…” Tennesse Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, ed. Donald Windham (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 216.
“Between Tennessee’s solemn analyses of the play and Cocteau’s rhetoric… Vidal, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” 143.
“full of fantasies and mischief.” Quoted in Vidal, ibid., 142.
Section 1140-A of New York City’s Criminal Code, known as the Wales Padlock Law… There’s an excellent account of this in the pioneering study of gay and lesbian theater, We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians, by Kaier Curtin.
Walter Kerr compared the accusation in Cat… Michael Paller, Gentlemen Callers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 102. (Paller’s account of the writing of Cat and its reception is invaluable.)
“He said I wrote cheap melodramas… Quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 130.
“He said I was overworked… Williams to Elia Kazan, June 4, 1958, in Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. by Margaret Bradham Thornton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 711.
“How could you give up The Novel?… Quoted in Vidal, “Dawn Powell: The American Writer,” in At Home: Essays 1982–1988, (New York: Random House, 1988), 242.
“Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide./(It’s heaven!)… Frank O’Hara, “At the Old Place,” in Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2008), 85.
including Lionel Trilling… Trilling wrote about a student like Ginsberg, a mentally ill boy wonder named Tertan, in a short story, “Of This Time, Of That Place.” But the story was published a couple of months before Trilling first met Ginsberg. Ginsberg seemed to fit the type, and many assumed he was as fragile as Tertan, especially when they heard about his mother. Yet Ginsberg was remarkably resilient.
“At 26, I am shy, go out with girls… Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: Grove Press, 1977), 17.
“If you ever catch me talking the way Chester did tonight… Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 39.
“Oh, you’re a nice person… There’s always people who will like you.” Quoted in Barry Miles, Ginsberg (London: Virgin Publishing, 2001), 180.
“I saw the best minds of my generation… Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 9.
“who let themselves be fucked in the ass… Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 13.
“I’m with you in Rockland… Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 26.
“America I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 43.
“My expression, at first blush… Quoted in Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg, ed. Michael Schumacher (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2002), 46.
“Don’t go in for ridiculous things.” Naomi Ginsberg to Allen Ginsberg, June 1956, quoted in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 234.
“Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality… Richard Eberhart, New York Times Book Review, September 2, 1956, BR4.
“a dreadful little volume… John Hollander as well as quotes from James Dickey and Ezra Pound, quoted in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 239.
“like any work of literature, attempts and intends to make a significant comment… Mark Schorer, quoted in Howl on Trial, ed. Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), 135.
“the work of a thoroughly honest poet” Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quoted in Howl on Trial, 154.
“is probably the most remarkable single poem, published by a young man… Kenneth Rexroth, quoted in Howl on Trial, 166.
“Therefore, I conclude the book Howl and Other Poems does have some redeeming social importance… Quoted in Howl on Trial, 199.
“I quoted the first line of Whitman… Ginsberg to Louis Ginsberg, August 1, 1957, quoted in Family Business: Selected Letters, 69–70.
“Natch was glad and thankful… Ginsberg to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, October 10, 1957, quoted in Howl on Trial, 78.
“You must’ve thought to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’ ” James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, documentary, produced and directed by Karen Thoren, Nobody Knows Productions and Maysles Films, 1991, distributed on video by California Newsreels.
“I have not written about being a Negro… James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 8.
“As they were born… James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” 5.
“a cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis… David Leeming, James Baldwin (New York: Random House, 1994), 270.
“There were very few black people in the Village… James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” (later retitled “Here Be Dragons”), in Collected Essays, 823.
“I was far too terrified… Ibid., 822.
“all these strangers called Jimmy Baldwin.” Quoted in James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (New York: Viking, 1991), 56.
“My agent told me to burn it.” Fern Maja Eckmann, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (New York: M. Evans, 1966), 137.
“The thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates the thought… Langston Hughes, “Notes of a Native Son,” New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1956.
“Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts… James Baldwin, in “Sermons and Blues,” Collected Essays (Library of America), 614.
“as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in Proust’s Cities of the Plain… Granville Hicks, “Tormented Triangle,” New York Times Book Review, October 14, 1956. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-giovanni.html?scp=1&sq=granville%20hicks%20on%20james%20baldwin&st=cse.
Giovanni murdered the boss. Years later, in his Paris Review interview, Baldwin said the murder was inspired by the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucian Carr, Allen Ginsberg’s friend. It would make a nice link between Baldwin and Ginsberg, only the two killings have nothing in common. The situations are completely different, as are the murder weapons. I suspect Baldwin confused his use of the Carr murder in an earlier, unfinished novel, Ignorant Armies, with the invented murder by Giovanni. An author’s imaginings can become more real than his facts.
“an unpleasant attempt… Otto Friedrich, The Grave of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Holt, 1989), 372.
“marred by a portentous tone that at times feels cheaply secondhand… Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Another Country,” New Yorker, February 9, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/02/09/090209crbo_books_pierpont.
“James Baldwin is too charming a writer to be major… Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959), 407.
“They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat… James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in Collected Essays, 272.
“His work, after all, is all that will be left… Ibid., 284–285.
“Oh, I’m a genius, too?” Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal, ed. Robert V. Stanton and Gore Vidal (Secaucus: Lyle Stuart, 1980), 219 (quoting an interview in Newsweek, “Gore Vidal on… Gore Vidal” by Arthur Cooper, November 18, 1974).
“ ‘Don’t,’ he said with great intensity,… Gore Vidal, “Christopher Isherwood’s Kind,” The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 37.
“I’ll try to be absolutely honest about this…. Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 83–84.
“Dramatically and psychologically, I find it entirely plausible…. Quoted in Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (London: Picador, 2004), 572–573.
“He is a big husky boy… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 401.
“He’s a strange boy… Ibid., 290.
“We are the dreaded fog queens… Christopher Isherwood, The Lost Years, 145.
“Christopher has with him the youngest boy ever… Leo Lehrman, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lehrman, 150.
“much too hearty… Parker, Isherwood, 630.
“I have received lots and lots of fan-mail… Ibid.
“He has pockmarks and a vertically lined face… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 506.
“He was tanned and youthful-looking… Thom Gunn, “Getting Things Right,” in Shelf Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 173.
“Perhaps I’ll never write another novel… Ibid., 456.
“I believe he really thinks about ‘posterity’… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 521.
“Two days ago, for example, I was quite blue… Ibid., 533.
Abbey “was very funny… Ibid., 588.
“There was one wonderful thing about Truman… John Gregory Dunne, quoted in George Plimpton, Truman Capote (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997), 432.
Donald Windham… had hoped to use the title himself… Windham, Lost Friendships, 57.
“As boys they were lovers… Vidal, The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 144.
“but for God’s sake don’t tell Ralph.” Charlton Heston, In the Arena (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 187.
“Gore is running for Congress… Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 859.
“Get that ass!” Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” At Home, 50.
“Poison… Windham, Lost Friendships, 212.
Merlo’s Italian nickname for Williams’s grandfather… Donald Spoto, Kindness of Strangers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 245.
“It is time to speak openly and candidly about the increasing incidence and influence of homosexuality… Howard Taubman, “Not What It Seems,” New York Times, November 5, 1961, Art X1. (This article was brought to my attention by Michael Paller in Gentlemen Callers. His chapter on the homosexual theater scare is excellent.)
“I took to it, as they say, as a duck to water.” Gussow, 49.
the Sisters Grimm… Ned Rorem, quoted in Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 80.
“Why do homosexuals always write rotten love poetry…?” Ibid., 85.
“That’s the best fucking one-act play… Quoted in Gussow, 120.
Richard Howard could hear echoes… Ibid., 158.
“Martha: Hey, put some more ice in my drink… Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: New American Library, 2006), 15.
“Like Strindberg, Mr. Albee treats his women remorselessly… Howard Taubman, New York Times, October 15, 1962. http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=FC77E7DF1730E062BC4D52DFB6678389679EDE&scp=2&sq=Howard%20Taubman/Edward%20Albee&st=cse.
“a homosexual daydream… Philip Roth, “The Play That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” New York Review of Books, February 25, 1965. ://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/feb/25/the-play-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/. (But en-lightenment can come at a slant. Critic Michael Bronski reports that in his early teens in the 1960s in New Jersey, his parents were afraid he might become gay. His father spoke to a psychiatrist who suggested that he bond with his son. He should find some activity they both enjoyed. They both liked theater, so the father regularly took Michael into New York to see new plays. As Bronski points out, he still became gay, but he and his father saw some good shows and they now have a pretty good relationship. Among the plays they saw was Tiny Alice, which puzzled both of them.)
Wilfrid Sheed… in Commentary… Quoted in Michael Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imaginary Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 130. (Sherry concentrates on American music, but his book is a gold mine of material and ideas about theater, too.)
Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily… Quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 179.
“The principal charge against homosexual dramatists is well known… Stanley Kauffmann, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises,” New York Times, January 23, 1966, Arts and Leisure, 93.
“[T]he great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity… “The Homosexual in America,” Time, January 21, 1966, 40. (Michael Sherry’s book brought this essay to my attention.)
“The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility… Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982), 118.
“brilliant” became “admirable.” Gussow, 179.
“There’s not that much difference between straight and gay couples in their fights.” Ibid., 159.
“I know I did not write the play about two male couples… Ibid.
“If I am writing a female character, goddamnit, I’m going to write a female character… Quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 190.
“Yes, those first two acts of Virginia Woolf are marvelous bitch dialogue… William Goldman, The Season (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 411. (This book is recommended for anyone who wants to see just how ugly and unrelenting fag-baiting could get in the 1960s.)
“With Frank ill, Tennessee just couldn’t cope for himself… Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 257.
“Frankie was the only one who really understood him… Ibid., 258.
“I’ve grown used to you… Williams, Memoirs (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 194.
“They say he just gasped… Tennessee Williams, Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just (New York: Knopf, 1990), 185.
“Never pass up the opportunity to have sex… This is frequently attributed to Gore Vidal, but not even he can remember exactly when he said it. Vidal, Point to Point Navigation (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 251.
“Capote did not look small on the show… Norman Mailer, Pieces and Pontifications (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 41.
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains… Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 3.
Capote and Infamous… The first movie is a grim slog that treats the author as an autistic robot whose exploitation of Smith and Hickock is a worse crime than the murder of the Clutters. Philip Seymour Hoffman works hard to overcome the fact that he is miscast as Capote, and for this he won an Academy Award. The second movie, Infamous, is livelier, funnier, smarter, and more emotionally complex; its Capote, Toby Jones, is so effortless that he doesn’t seem to be acting at all. The movie is a neglected masterpiece.
“Steps, noose, mask… Capote, In Cold Blood, 340–341.
“Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty… Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, January 22, 1966; quoted in Gerald Clarke, Capote.
“For the first time an influential writer in the front rank… Kenneth Tynan, “The Coldest of Blood,” The Observer, March 13, 1966, reprinted in Tynan Left and Right (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 445.
“For although the word ‘friends’ should be put into quotation marks… Windham, Lost Friendships, 74. Windham also writes intelligently about the liberties Capote took with facts, which he knew about since his boyfriend, Sandy Campbell, spent time with Capote in Kansas as a fact-checker for the New Yorker. “His triumph is the accuracy of his imaginative invention, the instinctive truths he found in himself, which enabled him to create convincingly and movingly within the confines of the known facts the inner workings of his major characters, especially of the killer Perry Smith” (78).
“A hotel’s enormous neon name… James Baldwin, Early Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 1998), 368.
“they do not matter…” Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953), 112.
“incessant homosexuality” Quoted in Magdalena Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 49. A weird, fascinating book that asks all the right questions but rarely gives direct answers.
“I read late last night… Another Country… Donald Vining, A Gay Diary, vol. 3, 1954–1967 (New York: Pepys Press, 1981), 308.
“If we do not now dare everything… Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in Collected Essays (Library of America), 347.
“Bobby Kennedy’s assurance… Ibid., 340.
“Ask any Negro…. Ibid., 345.
a conversation that can be seen on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy3ounRw9Q&playnext=1&list=PLE7353AF1FDA22441).
“the only hope this country has… Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 895.
“love of his people in his writing… Quoted in James Campbell, Talking at the Gates (New York: Viking, 1991), 205.
“If there is ever a Black Muslim nation… Philip Roth, “Channel X: Two Plays on Race Conflict,” New York Review of Books, May 28, 1964. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/may/28/channel-x-two-plays-on-the-race-conflict/.
“One cannot let one’s name be associated with shits… Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 319.
“By the time you are thirty… “James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley,” YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v+nbkObXxSUus. (Baldwin later reworked his remarks for a strong article in the New York Times Magazine, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” reprinted in Collected Essays, 714.)
did not want to live like a Henry James character. Leeming, James Baldwin, 258. Leeming can only paraphrase this important letter… see “Notes on a Native Son” by James Campbell, The Guardian, February 12, 2005. (Campbell originally quoted from Baldwin’s correspondence but had to go back and paraphrase. Sol Stein was able to include letters in his book, but nobody else was able to do likewise. Hilton Als has argued that Baldwin’s letters are his unpublished masterpiece.)
“as brutal as Pal Joey” Quoted in Parker, Isherwood: A Life, 664.
“At last!” quoted in Parker, 667.
“There were businessmen with flesh-roll necks… Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 340.
“I see my twenty-three-year-old face… Ibid., 29.
“You know, you really are a tourist, to your bones… Ibid., 349.
“World Is Just One Big Sodom to Him…” Reviews from Miami News, Detroit Free Press, and Oxford Times, quoted in Parker, 695.
“It’s saying a great deal about Isherwood’s ability as a novelist… Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, March 23, 1962, 31. Gerald Sykes in the New York Times Book Review, in one of the rare good reviews, saw Down There as a gay novel: “Even readers who feel they have had more than enough in recent years of the modern Sodom and Gomorrah will be surprised, I believe, to find how freshly and movingly these men are presented.” “Compulsively Detached,” March 18, 1962, Times Book Review, 288. (It’s hard to guess what this overdose of Sodom and Gomorrah refers to: Another Country was not published until June and Virginia Woolf didn’t open until the end of the year.)
Welcome to Berlin, to star Julie Andrews… Keith Garebian, The Making of Cabaret (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1999), 3.
“Right now he is nerve-strung almost to screaming point… Quoted in Parker, 702. (One of several odd things about the Parker bio is how in most of the book he takes the side of almost anyone except Isherwood, but in the last third he takes Isherwood’s side against Bachardy.)
“When I suffer, I suffer like a dumb animal… Quoted in Parker, 709.
“And in no time at all the blindingly simple truth was revealed… Christopher Isherwood, diary, September 19, 1962; quoted in Parker, 706.
“And I’ll tell you something else… Isherwood, A Single Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 72.
“As long as one precious drop of hate remained… Ibid., 102.
“George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction… Ibid., 180.
“Then one by one the lights go out… Ibid., 186.
“Let us even go so far as to say… Ibid., 28.
“While I can believe this novel, I don’t find it particularly interesting… Roger Angell, quoted in Parker, 715.
“a small masterpiece… as well as reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Catholic Standard, The Daily Worker the Catholic Herald, and the Nashville Tennessean, quoted in Parker, 727.
“Poor Corydon is now in California… Elizabeth Hardwick, “Sex and the Single Man,” New York Review of Books, August 20, 1964. Other Hardwick quotes: “His is a fairly modest anal disposition, respectable enough, with a finicky, faggoty interest in the look of things—far from the corruption and splendor of his type in French fiction.” One cannot win in the eyes of straight intellectuals. You’re either a flaming criminal in a Jean Genet novel or you’re nobody. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/aug/20/sex-and-the-single-man/.
“The most honest book ever written about a homosexual… Quoted by David Garnes, “A Single Man, Then and Now” in The Isherwood Century, ed. by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 199.
“As long as I quite unashamedly get drunk… Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 271.
“When Don isn’t here… Isherwood, diary, November 2, 1964; quoted in Parker, 721.
“I decided to examine the homosexual underworld… Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1965), 245. (Michel Foucault said something similar fifteen years later in History of Sexuality, but he read it back into history, proposing that an innocence existed before doctors named “the illness” at the end of the nineteenth century.)
“had too much ego to be a writer of fiction… Jason Epstein, quoted in Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 771.
“Then Enid was right. You do love Clay. And you are mad.” Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 374.
“My entire life is now devoted to appearing on television… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 593.
“things tending toward the final erosion of our cultural values…” CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, CBS, March 7, 1967; available at http://www.akawilliam.com/watch-cbs-reports-the-homosexuals-from-1967.
“I am Myra Breckinridge… Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 1.
“The novel being dead… Vidal, Myra Breckinridge, 4.
“I AM HONORED AND DELIGHTED… Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, August 12, 1967, quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 584.
“A funny novel, but it requires an iron stomach… Eliot Fremont-Smith, “Like Fay Wray If the Light Is Right,” New York Times, February 3, 1968. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-myra.html?scp=1&sq=myra%20breckinridge&st=cse.
“the pokerfaced jacket art… James McBridge, “What Did Myra Want?” New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1968. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/22/reviews/hollywood-myra.html?scp=4&sq=myra%20breckinridge&st=cse.
Ginsberg calmed a group of protesters… Mailer, Miami, 167. One year later, on the witness stand at the trial of the Chicago Seven, Ginsberg would OM in an attempt to make peace between defense attorney William Kunstler and angry judge Julius Hoffman.
“And some people were pro-Nazi…” ABC News, August 28, 1968. The famous exchange can be watched on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uajX661byMw&NR=1). People have accused Vidal of making the crypto-Nazi charge out of nowhere, but the pro-Nazi line was introduced by Buckley. Presumably he was referring to George Lincoln Rockwell, whom he discussed later, but he didn’t explain himself yet. (Incidentally, Buckley was in the army during World War II and attended Officer Candidates School, but never went overseas.)
That should have been the end of it… Buckley supporters pretend that Buckley did not instigate the articles. The details here are drawn almost entirely from Kaplan, Gore Vidal, pp. 603–612, who backs up his account of the order of events with many sources, most importantly an unpublished manuscript by Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire.
“almost obsession with homosexuality… William F. Buckley, “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” Esquire, August 1969, 110.
“faggotry is countenanced… Ibid., 128.
“Can there be any justification in calling a man a pro crypto Nazi…?” Gore Vidal, “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr.,” Esquire, September 1969, 140.
“They were younger than they thought they were… James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 454.
“the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks… Cleaver, “Notes on a Native Son,” in Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 124.
“It seems that many Negro homosexuals… Ibid., 127.
“I, for one, do not think that homosexuality… Ibid., 136.
He closes by quoting Murray Kempton out of context… Ibid. Cleaver’s full quote from Kempton reads, “When I was a boy Stepin Fetchit was the only Negro actor who worked regularly in the movies…. The fashion changes, but I sometimes think that Malcolm X and, to a degree even James Baldwin, are our Stepin Fetchits.” Kempton appears to say that black militants, including Baldwin, are the only blacks one hears about anymore, but that’s not how Cleaver uses the quote.
“the silent ally, indirectly but effectively… Cleaver, “The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs,” Soul on Ice, 162. There’s a smart defense of Baldwin by Michele Wallace in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, where she argues that Cleaver was put off not only by Baldwin’s inclusion of gay men in his fiction but also by his inclusion of tough, sympathetic black women.
“All that toy soldier has done is call me gay… W. J. Weatherby, James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (New York: D. I. Fine, 1989), 292.
“I thought I could see why he felt impelled… James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, in Collected Essays, 459.
“Since Martin’s death in Memphis… Ibid., 357.
“I think both sides, Hanoi and Washington, are terribly, tragically… Eric Norden, “Playboy Interview: Truman Capote,” Playboy, March 1968; reprinted in Truman Capote: Conversations, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 146.
“a roman à clef, drawn from life… Ibid., 161.
“a bloody mary before lunch… Windham, Lost Friendships, 87.
“looking suspiciously like a fat and aged version of tough Truman Capote on ugly pills… Mailer, Miami, 223.
“[He] began to talk to me as though I knew no more about him… Windham, 87.
“Oh, my God, it’s Lily Law!” Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (New York: Alyson, 2008), 32.
“habitués of the place were reported to embrace each other… Chas. K. Robinson, “The Raid,” ONE, July 1960; excerpted in Neil Miller, Out of the Past (New York: Vintage, 1995), 323.
The most famous case is that of Newton Arvin… The fullest account of Arvin’s arrest is Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor (New York: Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2001), 193–280.
“It’s happened to many others—” Truman Capote, Too Brief a Treat: Letters of Truman Capote, ed. Gerald Clarke (New York: Random House, 2004), 293.
“Bill of Rights for Homosexuals!” Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), 113.
“Book reviews? Who reads books these days?” ONE, July–December 1967.
a new male magazine, DRUM… Diarist Donald Vining bought an early issue of DRUM: “I wouldn’t waste my money on it soon again but at least it has some dignity as it tells of efforts to amend the law and reviews some of the books on the subject, giving the back of the hand to trashy ones.” Gay Diary, vol. 3, 471 (entry dated March 4, 1967).
He first came to New York in 1957… Mart Crowley, conversation with the author, November 16, 2009.
Every Sunday, Crowley liked to buy the New York Times, go to the Swiss Cafe… Ibid.
“The homosexual dramatist must be free… Stanley Kauffmann, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises,” New York Times, January 23, 1966.
He was surprised at how quickly the writing went… Mart Crowley, conversation with the author, November 16, 2009.
“sphinx-like and inscrutable… Mart Crowley, conversation with the author, November 30, 2009.
“a forties-movie bomber-crew cast… Pauline Kael, Deeper into Movies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 137.
memorable one-liners… Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (New York: Alyson, 2008); “Connie Casserole,” and “Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?” (23), “You look like you been rimming a snow man” (54), “Life is a goddamn laff-riot” (53).
“The one on the floor is vicuna.” Ibid., 56.
“thirty-two-year-old, ugly, pockmarked Jew fairy… Ibid., 53.
“You are a sad and pathetic man… Ibid., 108.
“Crowley’s most original creation… Tony Kushner, introduction to Boys in the Band, xiv.
As playwright Charles Busch later said… Charles Busch, conversation with the author, December 2009.
“If we… if we could just… not hate ourselves… Crowley, Boys in the Band, 111.
“Oh Michael… thanks for the laughs… Ibid., 109.
“In the first act we screamed with laughter… Vining, Gay Diary, vol. 4, 37 (entry dated April 20, 1968). Vining goes on to say that he and his partner quoted favorite lines on the way home. “Ken rather acted as tho we had never been part of that world, which amused me since he fitted into it better than I did.”
One friend of mine, now in his seventies… Scott Fuchs, conversation with the author, October 2009; Schuyler Bishop, conversation with the author, October 2009.
“A bunch of gay friends hang out… Joe Keenan, conversation with the author, July 1997.
“one of the best acted plays of the season… Clive Barnes, “ ‘The Boys in the Band’ Opens Off Broadway,” New York Times, April 15, 1968, 48.
“the best American play for some few seasons… Clive Barnes, “ ‘The Boys in the Band’ Is Still a Sad Gay Romp,” New York Times, February 18, 1969, 36. People wrote differently back then, and Barnes could feel free to say, “Michael, a slightly aging Roman Catholic fag, is giving a birthday party for Harold, a slightly aging Jewish fag.”
“in their amused, quick-minded, diminishing address… Walter Kerr, “To Laugh at Oneself—Or Cry,” New York Times, April 28, 1969, Arts and Leisure, D1. Twenty years later Kerr said similar obtuse things about Torch Song Trilogy. He was another smart writer whose brain shut down as soon as homosexuality was mentioned.
“sounds too often as if it had been written by someone at the party… Vincent Canby, “The Boys in the Band,” New York Times, March 18, 1970. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E00E6D8173EE034BC4052DFB566838B669EDE&scp=1&sq=vincent%20canby%20%22boys%20in%20the%20band%22&st=cse.
“Realizing that the author’s attempt… Donn Teal, “How Anguished Are Homosexuals?” New York Times, June 1, 1969, Arts and Leisure, D23. Compare this turgid prose with the annoying prose of Katie Kelly, who wrote about the movie two weeks after Stonewall: “There’s Emory, the Tinker Bell of Third Avenue, flying in armed with his lisp and his lasagna recipe; Harold, the ‘Before’ of an acne medication testimonial, who spreads his spleen like a communicable disease.” Katie Kelly, “The ‘Boys’ Are Having a Bit of a Party Again,” New York Times, Arts and Leisure, D15, July 13, 1969.
a young straight director, William Friedkin… During filming, Friedkin showed Crowley a novel he wanted to make into a movie, Cruising by Gerald Walker. Crowley disliked the story of a cop who goes undercover in the gay S&M scene to discover a gay serial killer. Crowley told Friedkin what he thought and assumed that nothing would come of the project. Ten years later, however, Friedkin made Cruising, which starred Al Pacino, and triggered a string of protests. Mart Crowley, conversation with the author, December 13, 2009.
“The story is about self-destruction…. Katie Kelly, “The ‘Boys’ Are Having…,” New York Times.
“What’s more boring than a queen doing a Judy Garland imitation?… Crowley, Boys in the Band, 8. There’s a rumor that the title came from a line of dialogue in A Star Is Born, but Crowley says he was thinking only of a standard line from the Big Band era: “Let’s all have a round of applause for the boys in the band.” Mart Crowley, commentary, The Boys in the Band, directed by William Friedkin (1970; Hollywood: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008), DVD.
“Is this supposed to be funny?” Edmund White, City Boy (New York: Bloomsbury U.S.A., 2009), 20.
“[A] mammoth paddy wagon as big as a school bus, pulled up to the Wall…. Edmund White, “Letter to Ann and Alfred Corn, July 8, 1969,” The Violet Quill Reader, ed. David Bergman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 1–2.
“We’re one of the largest minorities in the country… Quoted in Martin Duberman, Stonewall, 208.
“Who knows what will happen… Edmund White, “Letter,” 3.
More people heard about Boys than heard about Stonewall that first year. Crowley followed Boys with A Breeze from the Gulf in 1973, an autobiographical play about two alcoholic parents and their gay son. All three protagonists love each other deeply, but love only leaves them more vulnerable to one another. It’s a wonderful play and it received excellent reviews, but it never found an audience. Perhaps nobody wanted to hear a story where straight people are the wounded ones watched over by a gay son who is sane and grounded.
Thirty years after Boys in the Band, Crowley wrote a sequel, The Men from the Boys. The old friends are still friends and they get together for a funeral. Larry has died, though not from AIDS. Three new characters, a trio of younger gay men, are present to show how gay life has and hasn’t changed. It’s a quiet, ruminative play with much talk about love and death, like Plato’s Symposium set in an East Side duplex.
“Does it date?” Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 126.
“Maurice, bad as it is,… Marvin Mudrick, Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 278.
“Elliott, the hairdresser of a lady friend of mine… Joseph Epstein, “Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity,” Harper’s, September 1970, 49.
“If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth… Ibid., 51.
“Nothing they could ever do would make me sadder… Ibid.
They gave the staff coffee and doughnuts… Arnie Kantrowitz, e-mail message to the author, January 15, 2010. Kantrowitz described the staff, with the exception of Decter, as “bemused but not unfriendly. They seemed to enjoy the break in the routine.” There’s also a very funny account in Dancing the Gay Lib Blues by Arthur Bell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971) 131–135.
“The homosexual influence in Forster’s other novels… Joseph Epstein, New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1971, 24.
“homosexual high jinks” Ibid., 25.
“I slept through the Sixties… Tennessee Williams, Memoirs; quoted in Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction, 135.
“Who really gives a damn that Tennessee Williams has finally admitted… Lee Barton, New York Times, January 23, 1972; quoted in Paller, Gentlemen Callers, 192. (Most quotes in this section about Williams were brought to my attention by Paller.)
“I feel sorry for the author… Arthur Bell, Village Voice, February 24, 1972; quoted in Paller, 192.
“You helped me free myself but I can see that you are not free.” Michael Silverstein, “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams,” Gay Sunshine, October 1971; reprinted in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 69.
“a ridiculous weakness… like bedwetting.” “Christopher Isherwood Interview” by Winston Leyland from Gay Sunshine Interviews, reprinted in Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, ed. James Berg and Chris Freeman (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 103.
“I never do see much point in fag-mags—” Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 667.
“Fortunately our people have always preferred legend to reality… Gore Vidal, Burr (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 158.
“Gore has written a hilarious review of Memoirs…” Five O’Clock Angel, 338.
“a chunky, paunchy, booze-puffed runt… Truman Capote, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (New York: Random House, 1986), 58.
Donald Windham was housesitting in Capote’s UN Plaza apartment in 1970… Windham, Lost Friendships, 96.
“just picked Gore up and carried him to the door…” Playgirl, September 1975, quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 71. The story is false but not completely absurd. Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the night in his journals at the time of the lawsuit. He remembered how he and George Plimpton escorted a very drunk Vidal from the party before he got into a fistfight over politics with lawyer Lem Billings, also drunk. They hailed a cab and rode with Vidal back to his hotel, said good-bye to him in the lobby, and returned to the White House. Schlesinger thought it wrong for Vidal to sue Capote when Capote’s career was in such a bad place. Arthur Schlesinger, Journals 1952–2000 (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 407–408.
ranted at length about the Jewish critics… Victor Bumbalo, conversation with the author, February 2010.
its annual circulation had risen to 60,000… This and all circulation figures come from Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1995), 185.
Patricia Nell Warren, an editor at Reader’s Digest who had divorced her husband and come out as a lesbian… Jay Parini, ed., American Writers, Supplement XX (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Son, 2010), 259–260.
Giovanni’s Room… named after the Baldwin novel… Ed Hermance, conversation with the author, October 2009.
“For Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.” Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 2.
“At first I didn’t think about Heinz at all… Ibid., 282.
“He is already living in the city where you will settle… Ibid., 339.
“There is no excess in an Isherwood sentence… Gore Vidal, “Christopher Isherwood’s Kind,” The Second American Revolution, 47. Earlier on the same page, Vidal talks about Isherwood’s beliefs: “Lately he has become a militant spokesman of Gay Liberation. If his defense of Christopher’s kind is sometimes shrill… well, there is a good deal to be shrill about in a society so deeply and so mindlessly homophobic.”
“Suppose, Christopher now said to himself,… Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 335. Isherwood wrote an earlier version of this argument with himself in Down There on a Visit, with the fictional Waldemar standing in for Heinz. The argument is more personal, and poignant, when we know it’s a lover and not just a friend.
“What had actually begun to surface in his muddled mind… Ibid., 336.
“My tits are on fire” Quoted in Parker, Isherwood, 798.
“They’re beginning to believe that Christopher Street is named after you.” Ibid., 797.
“Perhaps it is not possible to fit into American Life… Harold Rosenberg, “Death in the Wilderness, in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 258. The quote continues: “In America everything is a possibility or it is a sham. You cannot fit into American life except as a ‘camp.’ If American intellectuals accepted [Daniel] Bell’s endism and agreed that possibility is an illusion and reality ‘the routines of living,’ their choice would be either the “camp” unto death or their traditional solution: expatriation.” It’s a slippery set of ideas, but the interesting point here is that “camp” was already being discussed in 1961, three years before Susan Sontag publicized it.
“his roommate of the past thirteen years.” Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House, 1969), 22.
“Why do you eat… Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems 1947–1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 305.
“I stare into my head… Ibid., 190.
“I want to be there in your garden party… Ibid.
“To live in fear of matriarchal disapproval, all you have to be is gay and not necessarily young… Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, 226.
“Having a Coke with You… Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke with You,” Selected Poems, 194.
“It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones… Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” Yugen, 1961; reprinted in Selected Poems, 248.
“I never doubted that almost any poem I wrote… James Merrill, A Different Person (New York: Knopf, 1993), 141.
“Oh, God, I left out the human feeling!” Quoted in White, City Boy, 130.
“The Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent… James Merrill, Divine Comedies (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 48.
“(Any reflecting surface worked for him… Ibid., 50.
“LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION,” Ibid., 59.
“There’s a phrase… Ibid., 74.
She reports how Merrill set his left hand on the teacup… Alison Lurie, Familiar Spirits (New York: Viking, 2001), 90–92.
“It is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled… Adrienne Rich, “It Is the Lesbian in Us,” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 200–201.
“The more I live the more I think… Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-one Love Poems,” The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978), 34.
poem by poem, reader by reader. A special Poetry and Art issue of Christopher Street in October 1977 celebrated the gay presence in poetry, with several major poets publishing in a gay magazine for the first time: James Merrill, Richard Howard, Thom Gunn, James Schuyler, and a new writer, Paul Monette.
both are fond of hustlers. Years later, when White won the first Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the rumor went out that he spent the prize money the night of the award by hiring hustlers for himself and his friends. “That’s a complete lie,” an acquaintance said. “Ed White has never shared a hustler in his life.”
“generous helping of foolish jokes about homosexuality… Howard Taubman, New York Times, May 1, 1963.
“He made you think that having sex with him… Victor Bumbalo, conversation with the author, February 2010.
“such a representative life… Richard Canning, Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 369.
“I am probably his only typist who never had sex with Ed.” Patrick Merla, conversation with the author, January 2010.
“I wonder what sort of an impression I might make… Edmund White, Forgetting Elena (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 4.
“a cultivated heterosexual woman in her sixties… Quoted in Stacy Schiff, Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Random House, 1999), 316.
“Should one of your friends drop by… Charles Silverstein and Edmund White, The Joy of Gay Sex (New York: Crown Publishers, 1977), 170.
“At this point neither of you should succumb to sleep… Ibid., 102.
“It is a word that makes little sense in gay life… Ibid., 178.
“No need to tell you that in the midst of my own… Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 39.
“ ‘But I have no pity to offer… Ibid., 147.
“I didn’t care who knew I was gay… Philip Gambone, Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Writers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 187. Holleran remained in the closet of his double identity. When he was interviewed by Publishers Weekly for Nights in Aruba in 1983, he admitted “Holleran” was a pseudonym but did not give his real name. Meanwhile his mother found out he was a published writer when a neighbor read Aruba and recognized the parents. (So what did Holleran tell her?) He later said he loved “the little envelope of anonymity and a little envelope of distance… There’s something very embarrassing about writing” (187).
“Before you fuck yourself to death… Larry Kramer, Faggots (New York: Random House, 1978), 316.
“It got very hot that summer… Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 194–195.
“Looking for love… Ibid., 142–143.
Faggots sold very well: 40,000 in hardcover and 300,000 in paper. Stephen Holden, “Larry Kramer’s Update on the War at Home,” New York Times, October 9, 1988. http://query.nytimes.com/search/alternate/query?query=stephen+holden+%22faggots%22&st=fromcse.
“a mercurial and strangely moral figure… John Lahr, “Camp Tales,” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1979, 15.
“Here are characters like Randy Dildough… Ibid., 40. (Lahr’s review is not available in the Times online archive. I had to read it on microfilm. I don’t know if the absence is because of a request by Lahr or maybe by Kramer, or if it’s purely accidental?)
The Times wasn’t kind to Nocturnes either. It praised the prose before saying, “But this is narcissistic prose and Nocturnes is a narcissistic novel—which is not to deny the rareness of its beauty, only the breadth of its appeal.” Narcissistic was and still is a code word for “gay.” (John Yohalem, “Apostrophes to a Dead Lover,” New York Times Book Review, December 10, 1978, BR6.)
“Six books by, about, or for homosexuals appear in as many months… Jeffrey Burke, “Of a Certain Persuasion,” Harper’s, March 1979, 122. He also writes: “Both Kramer (intentionally) and Holleran (artlessly) present a gay world worthy of little more than disdain. They do nothing for the cause of literature and less for the cause of gay rights.” Which makes me wonder if Burke were gay. It wouldn’t be the first or last time a gay critic is used by the mainstream to trash gay writers. Several gay men went on to build literary careers out of their willingness to attack their peers. (I won’t name names.)
“John Wayne and Auntie Mame… Patrick Gale, Armistead Maupin (Bath, England: Absolute, 1999), 14.
“suffered a slow process of attrition in a city where no one approved of Nixon… Ibid., 39.
“There were times when he was barely two days ahead… Maupin, Tales of the City (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), P.S. section, “A Pleasing Shock of Recognition,” 5.
“Michael groaned and readjusted his shorts… Ibid., 226.
“We’re gonna be… fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.” Ibid., 311.
“Oh, that marvelous funny thing… Quoted by Maupin in conversation with the author, September 27, 2010.
“As much as I liked Rock… Quoted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 66.
“I wouldn’t have written, I guess,… Armistead Maupin, More Tales of the City, 221–223.
“me too.” Gale, Armistead Maupin, 59.
“Edmund White… is a charming man given to stringent self-analysis… Felice Picano, “Rough Cuts from a Journal,” The Violet Quill Reader, ed. David Bergman, 36–37.
“dessert-and-short-story” Andrew Holleran, “A Place of Their Own,” The Violet Quill Reader, ed. David Bergman, 402.
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America was the brainchild of Charles Ortleb… Patrick Merla, conversation with the author, December 2009. (Merla was editor of Christopher Street at the time.)
“So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated… Edmund White, States of Desire (New York: Dutton, 1980), 1.
“Jeeps—elaborately painted… Ibid., 11.
“When a city slicker has a jerk-off fantasy… Ibid., 132.
“Greenwich Village is the gay ghetto… Ibid., 265.
“gave me a cheek to peck, a purely routine gesture… Edmund White, After Dark; reprinted in The Burning Library: Essays, ed. David Bergman (New York: Knopf, 1994), 105–106.
“a never-ending spectacle… Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1980. (www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-boys-on-the-beach/).
“Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me… Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Second American Revolution, 171.
“a world of perfect illogic… Ibid., 180.
“I was present when Christopher Isherwood… Ibid., 169–170. Readers can’t help but notice that a disproportionate number of antigay critics were Jewish: Stanley Kauffmann, Philip Roth, Joseph Epstein, Midge Decter. One reason for this is that postwar Jewish intellectuals were more fearless and outspoken than the gentiles. Writers with Catholic or Protestant backgrounds were just as intolerant, but did not like talking about sex of any kind. However, I suspect there was also another factor: turf. Jewish writers had broken into American intellectual life after the war. They were not ready to share their importance with the next rising minority group.
“Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” has been regularly quoted ever since… The strain between Vidal and the Podhoretzes continued. Five years later, it erupted into all-out war. In January 1986, Vidal published another essay in the Nation, “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” where he declared that the American empire had died under Reagan, and good riddance. Podhoretz responded in the New York Post that political critics like Vidal and Norman Mailer had never liked America anyway. Decter added her own two cents in Contentions magazine, defending American imperialism. Vidal responded with “The Empire Lovers Strike Back,” later retitled “A Cheerful Response.” He called Podhoretz “a silly billy” and accused the couple of being bad Americans who didn’t know their history and who cared more about Israel. Podhoretz furiously responded with an essay accusing Vidal of anti-Semitism, cleverly titled “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name”—as if anti-Semitism were the moral equivalent of “the love that dare not speak its name.” Before then, however, according to a story heard around town at the time, the indignant couple ran into Victor Navasky on the street. Podhoretz angrily told Navasky, “You are a son of a bitch,” for printing such a piece in the Nation. Navasky only laughed and said, “And you are a silly billy.”
“I am sauntering for the Senate… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 732–733.
“Take time off. Think about things… From Gore Vidal, the Man Who Said No, produced and directed by Gary Conklin (Gary Conklin Films, 1983). Available from Gary Conklin Films.
“old friends…. He’s lived various places, I’ve lived various places… Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 735.
“I mention the constant music… Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (New York: Dutton, 1982), 22.
“I didn’t particularly like getting cornholed… Ibid., 19.
“By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men… Ibid., 153.
“Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie… Ibid., 218.
“White has crossed Catcher in the Rye with De Profundis… Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Bodies and Souls of American Men,” New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1982, 15.
“It is any boy’s story… Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Edmund White’s Tale of a Gay Youth,” New York Times, December 17, 1982. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/17/books/books-of-the-times-edmund-white-s-tale-of-a-gay-youth.html?scp=1&sq=christopher%20lehmann-haupt%20on%20edmund%20white&st=cse. In other cases, one sometimes wonders how closely mainstream reviewers read gay books, even when they praise them. John Banville talking about White’s work in the New York Review of Books years later cited “the unrelenting descriptions of gay shenanigans that so startled early readers of A Boy’s Own Story” (“Coupling,” August 10, 2000). But the only sex scenes are at the beginning and the end. Likewise Malcolm Bradbury, in his overview of postwar fiction, The Modern American Novel, described The Beautiful Room Is Empty as a novel about AIDS, assuming that was what the title meant.
“like a bookstore” Andrew Holleran, “Larry Kramer and the Wall of Books,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, ed. Lawrence Mass (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 119.
Someone who had a brief affair with him… Anonymous, conversation with the author, March 10, 2010.
“I think the concealed meaning in Kramer’s emotionalism… Quoted in Larry Kramer, “The First Defense,” New York Native, December 21, 1981–January 3, 1982; reprinted in Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 16. (In later editions, Kramer used a lower-case h for holocaust to differentiate the AIDS epidemic from the Nazi murder of the Jews. But we are referring here to the first edition and have left it as it stood to avoid confusion.)
“the ‘eroticism’ that has made gay health such a concern… Ibid., 21.
“Gay men certainly have a health crisis… Quoted in Patrick Merla, “A Normal Heart,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, 38.
“I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex… White, City Boy, 288.
“There are drug users and non-drug users… Kramer, “1,112 and Counting,” Reports from the Holocaust, 35.
But Kramer believed that was the real reason for Koch’s silence: he was a closet case… For the longest time, at least in print, Kramer only implied this or said it indirectly. Then he made the accusation through characters in The Normal Heart and included a Koch-like closeted mayor in Just Say No. Finally he began to say it directly, telling New York magazine, for example, that Koch was “a closeted gay man” (Maer Roshan, “Larry Kramer: Queer Conscience,” New York, April 6, 1998). Kramer and others spoke in more depth about the charge in the 2009 documentary Outrage. Journalist David Rothenberg says on camera that Koch as a congressman had a boyfriend, Richard Nathan. He says Koch insisted Nathan leave New York after he became mayor. Nathan died of AIDS in Los Angeles in 1996. On the other hand, others have said Koch was not just asexual but asocial. His friend Bess Myerson said, “You have to remember something. Ed Koch has never lived with a woman. Ed Koch has never lived with a man. Ed Koch has never lived with a dog. That’s why he’s like that.” (quoted in Michael Goodwin, New York Comes Back, 40). It should also be pointed out that Koch had no difficulty signing New York’s gay rights ordinance in 1986, and he backed his health department’s closing of the baths in 1985, which Kramer campaigned for. Kramer later attacked Koch for not providing money to GMHC in the city budget, but Koch was famously stingy with public funds. He had brought the city back from bankruptcy by cutting back on city services; he continued to cut services even with the epidemic of homelessness during the Reagan years.
“I want to apologize to any of the people dear to me… Kramer, “The Mark of Courage,” Reports from the Holocaust, 64.
“Your own son is gay… Quoted in Gail Merrifield Papp, “Larry Kramer at the Public,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, 257.
“tough sledding… Ibid., 259.
“And you think I’m killing people?” Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 97–98.
“Don’t lose that anger… Ibid., 117.
“The only way we’ll have real pride… Ibid., 110.
making his fictional self more difficult and more interesting when he produced multiple drafts of a screenplay… Author’s reading of a later draft of the screenplay in November 1992.
“The blood that’s coursing through The Normal Heart… is boiling hot… Frank Rich, New York Times, April 22, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/22/theater/theater-the-normal-heart-by-larry-kramer.html?scp=1&sq=frank+rich+%22the+normal+heart%22&st=nyt.
“The aesthetic failings of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart… Michael Feingold, Village Voice, April 19, 1985.
“Don’t you sometimes wish that all the faggots… Quoted in Ned Rorem, “The Real John Simon,” New York Native, 1985; reprinted in Ned Rorem, Other Entertainments (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 136. That was how Simon himself remembered it. Liz Smith quoted a cleaner, more succinct version in her column in the Daily News: “Homosexuals in the theater! My God, I can’t wait until AIDS gets all of them!”
“What could have been a mere staged tract… John Simon, New York, May 6, 1985.
“You and your huge assortment of caretakers… Larry Kramer, “An Open Letter to Richard Dunne,” Reports from the Holocaust, 102.
“a good career move.” Quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 707. Capote had settled with Vidal a year earlier in Vidal’s million-dollar libel suit. Capote didn’t have a million dollars—he didn’t even have the money to pay Vidal’s legal costs—but he did write a public letter of apology for what he’d said in Playgirl.
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood… Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” from The Poems of Wilfred Owen (New York: Viking, 1931), 66. The poem was written between 1917 and 1918 and first published in 1920.
“It is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms… Randall Jarrell, “A Verse Chronicle,” in Poetry and the Age, 176.
“No air. Breathe in… Melvin Dixon, “Heartbeats,” in Love’s Instruments (New York: Tia Cucha Press, 1995), reprinted in Persistent Voices, ed. Philip Clark and David Groff (New York: Alyson Books, 2009), 87-88.
“Now I understand why [he] had invented his dress-up party… Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (New York: Knopf, 1997), 414.
“In the sunlit current the white gravel of our friend… James Merrill, “Memorial Tribute to David Kalstone,” reprinted in Collected Prose (New York: Knopf, 2004), 365.
“You are gone…. James Merrill, “Farewell Performance,” Selected Poems, 220.
Merrill never indicated that he himself had tested positive for the virus in 1986…. This was first revealed by J. D. McClatchy in his excellent essay, “Two Deaths, Two Lives” published in Edmund White, ed., Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
“Chains of gold tinsel, baubles of green fire… James Merrill, “Vol. XLIV, No. 3,” Selected Poems, 239. The title, which sounds like an issue of a medical journal, has not been identified by J. D. McClatchy, Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser, or Merrill biographer Lanny Hammer. “I’ve always assumed the title was made up…. It would be like JM to concoct a title whose numerals had some hidden meaning.” J. D. McClatchy e-mail message to the author, September 2010.
“Later I realized what I was doing… James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: BTL, 2000), 40.
“hippy silliness and self-regarding camp.” John Mole, “Two-Gun Gunn,” review of Selected Poems in Poetry Review, September 1980; quoted in Thom Gunn in Conversation, 108.
“A gust of morphine… Thom Gunn, “Lament,” in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 466.
“an unlimited embrace… Thom Gunn, “The Missing,” in Collected Poems, 483.
“Gunn restores poetry to a centrality… Neil Powell, “The Dangerous Edge of Things,” PN Review, May–June 1992; quoted in Thom Gunn in Conversation, 111.
“like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet… Andrew Holleran, Ground Zero (New York: Morrow, 1988), 94.
“Not only is Charles Ludlam gone… Ibid., 99.
“AIDS destroys trust…. Ibid., 189.
“And on the twelfth floor… Mark Doty, “63rd Street Y,” in Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 90.
“Peter died in a paper tiara… Mark Doty, “Tiara,” ibid, 96.
“I don’t feel I know nearly enough about the AIDS situation… from Armistead Maupin, “The First Couple: Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood,” Village Voice, July 2, 1985; reprinted in Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, 191.
“merciless and loving… Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings (London; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990), x.
“The thought occurs to me… Ibid., xiii.
“Oh, the pain, the pain… Ibid.
“I started drawing Chris’s corpse at two o’clock… Ibid., xvii.
By 1992, 10 percent of Plume’s titles would be gay. Esther B. Fein, “The Media Business: Big Publishers Profit as Gay Literature Thrives,” New York Times, July 6, 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/06/business/the-media-business-big-publishers-profit-as-gay-literature-thrives.html?scp=1&sq=gay%20publishing%201992&st=cse.
“Young heterosexual male authors… “Who’s Who in the Literary Power Game,” Esquire, August 1987, 56.
“I couldn’t decide whether the image was more threatening as a homoerotic come-on… Frank Rich, “The Gay Decades,” Esquire, November 1987, 97.
“1. Stop begging for acceptance…. Armistead Maupin, “Design for Living” Advocate, 1985; reprinted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 149–151.
“We were finding instant points of agreement… Quoted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 71.
“increases the intimacy and it increases the dangers of fights… Ibid., 75–76.
“Do you think I should come out?” Ibid., 131.
“Three years of daily fretting… Armistead Maupin, Sure of You, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 225–226.
“He tilted his head and let the sun dry his tears… Ibid., 226.
“Mr. Maupin writes for everyone: gay, straight, single, married,… David Feinberg, “Goodnight, Mrs. Madrigal,” New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/22/books/goodnight-mrs-madrigal.html?scp=1&sq=david%20feinberg%20on%20armistead%20maupin&st=cse.
“Well, at least you got to stay your own gender.” Quoted in Melanie Rehnak, “The Way We Live Now: ShopTalk; Family Affair, New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 30, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/30/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-4-30-00-shoptalk-family-affair.html?scp=2&sq=keith%20fleming/edmund%20white&st=cse.
none other than Susan Sontag… Mathilda argues like Sontag; she has the same strange relationship with a grown son that Sontag had with hers; she even irritably picks at her teeth at parties like Sontag (as White reports in his memoir, City Boy).
“You’ve given me the gift of your completely innocent trust… White, Caracole (New York: Dutton, 1985), 138.
“In Paris people cultivate social life as an art form… Edmund White, “The Paris Review Interview,” Paris Review, Fall 1988; reprinted in Bergman, ed., The Burning Library, 264.
“Even though George had been a baby… Edmund White, “An Oracle,” in The Darker Proof (New York: New American Library, 1988), 180.
“If art is to confront AIDS more honestly… Edmund White, “Esthetics and Loss,” Artforum, January 1987; reprinted in Bergman, ed., The Burning Library, 216. White compares the surprisingly tough An Early Frost to Love Story. Did he ever see Love Story? For that matter, did he ever see Frost?
“pure twaddle” Ed Sikov, New York Native, March 2, 1987, 14. Sikov had a lot of fun at the expense of White’s pomposity. When White cryptically says the prevailing mood in the gay community is one of “evanescence… just like the Middle Ages,” Sikov imagines a scene outside the Chelsea gym: “How ya doin’, Butch?” “I’m feeling evanescent today, Larry—you know, kinda like Chartres in 1348.”
his appearances were often unpredictable. Patrick Merla, interview with the author, October 2009. Baldwin was represented by the Jay Acton agency, where Merla worked. Merla tells a story about going down to Washington, D.C., in 1979 or 1980 with a contract for Baldwin to sign so they could pay him. Merla had to ambush Baldwin at a black church where Baldwin was speaking. There, too, Baldwin was late.
“Whatever the fuck your uncle was… James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (New York: Dial, 1979), 27.
“They walked in the light of each other’s eyes… Ibid., 183.
“There were no X-rated movies then… James Baldwin, “Freaks and the Ideal of American Masculinity,” in Collected Essays, 819.
“I quickly learned that my existence was the punchline… Ibid., 819.
“Laugh and you are free.” Charles Ludlam, “Confessions of a Farceur,” Ridiculous Theater: Scourge of Human Folly, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 50.
“It’s got great ghosts… Ibid., 89.
“I think that I am the Camille of our era… Ibid., 43.
“No faggots in the house?” Charles Ludlam, Camille, in The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 246. The speech continues: “Open the window, Nanine. See if there are any in the street.”
“that golden hysteria of taking the situations in old movies to a logical extreme… Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 504–505.
“We decided we gays have been through enough… Quoted in David Kaufman, Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (New York: Applause Books, 2002), 405.
McCauley’s tale of friendship between a gay man and straight woman found a huge audience among straight women… I witnessed this firsthand when another novelist, Jesse Green, and I read with McCauley at Scribner’s Bookstore in New York in 1988. After we all read, the audience was told to line up in front of each author for his autograph. Green and I got short lines of four or five readers apiece. McCauley’s line ran the length of the store all the way to the street and was almost entirely female—with a scattering of gay men. Green and I were more amused than envious.
37,000 cases of AIDS in the United States… Patrick Merla, “A Normal Heart,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, 50.
“At the rate we are going, you could be dead in less than five years… Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust, 128.
Michael Petrelis of Lavender Hill was in the audience that night… Michael Petrelis, interview by Sarah Schulman, “Interview #020,” ACT UP Oral History Project, http://www.actuporalhistory.org/interviews/index.html.
“We have to go after the FDA—fast… Merla, “A Normal Heart,” 50.
He decided ACT UP was too ad hoc, too democratic. He wanted more structure… Larry Kramer, interview by Sarah Schulman, “Interview #035,” ACT UP Oral History Project. (The Oral History Project is an invaluable resource.)
“Larry Kramer forms an organization… David Feinberg, Spontaneous Combustion (New York: Viking, 1991), 225.
“White Jew Georgetown Faggot… Larry Kramer, Just Say No: A Play about a Farce (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 10.
“having written the script and articulated his hostilities… Mel Gussow, “Skewers for the Political in Kramer’s ‘Just Say No,’ ” New York Times, October 21, 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/21/theater/reviews-theater-skewers-for-the-political-in-kramer-s-just-say-no.html?scp=1&sq=just%20say%20no%20by%20larry%20kramer&st=cse.
“Molly, that’s the man… Quoted by Calvin Trillin, “Three Friends,” in We Must Love One Another or Die, 310.
“He is very fat… Larry Kramer, “Interview with Gore Vidal,” QW magazine, 1992; reprinted in Conversations with Gore Vidal (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 156.
“There has been talk in gay historical circles… Ibid., 167. One could write a book on gay Lincoln, and people have. The facts are simple: Lincoln shared a room and a bed in his twenties with another man, Joshua Speed, for four years when he was starting out as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. Shared beds were not uncommon in the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth century, before affluence, sexual awareness, and central heating changed people’s sleeping arrangements). There were sometimes other men sleeping in the same room as Lincoln and Speed. Lincoln often shared beds with still other men when he traveled the rural court circuit. He and Speed each married women and they drifted apart until Lincoln became president and they resumed their correspondence. The later letters are mostly about slavery, which Speed supported. (He appears not to have voted for his former bedmate in the 1860 election.) Speed’s older brother became a member of Lincoln’s cabinet.
Neither Lincoln nor Speed was secretive about their friendship or the shared bed. In fact, our prime source is Speed himself, who saved Lincoln’s letters and wrote an account of their friendship for Lincoln’s law partner and early biographer, William Herndon. There’s an intelligent telling of the tale by Jonathan Ned Katz in his book, Love Stories (which is more ambiguous than Kramer claims), and a silly one in The Intimate Abraham Lincoln by C. A. Tripp (which argues, among other things, that Lincoln was not just bisexual but predominantly gay and clearly a “top,” and that Speed must’ve been impotent with his wife since he includes fine descriptions of clouds and landscapes in a letter to her).
Kramer seems to believe two men can’t share a bed without having sex, and they can’t have sex without falling in love. I think he’s wrong on both counts, but especially the second. Nothing I’ve read by or about Lincoln convinces me that he fell in love with men. Politicians are wired differently than other people—and Lincoln lived for politics—but I find no place in his biographical puzzle to put this missing piece. It does not give me new understanding of him. Nor do I see what gay people gain from claiming him as a secret brother. What do we win with an Honest Abe who spent his life lying to himself and to others? It’s hardly a home run for our team.
A gay-related sidenote: Joshua Speed’s younger brother, Philip, married Emma Keats, the niece of poet John Keats. Keats’s brother George had emigrated to Louisville; many of the poet’s famous letters were written to him there. Years later, in 1882, when Oscar Wilde toured America, Emma Keats Speed heard him speak in Louisville. Wilde praised Keats in his talk—the doomed boy poet was an early gay icon—and the niece, who was in her sixties, invited Wilde home and showed him her uncle’s letters and manuscripts. Wilde was so appreciative that she later sent him one of the manuscripts. (Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 203; Ellmann knows nothing about Emma’s brother-in-law or the Lincoln connection.)
He was born in New York in 1956… Most of the biographical material is from John Lahr, “Tony Kushner: After Angels,” in Honky Tonk Parade: New Yorker Profiles of Show People (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2005). This is easily the single best portrait of Kushner as both an artist and a man.
“I wouldn’t want to be the father of Tchaikovsky… William Kushner, quoted in Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, documentary, directed by Frieda Lee Mock (2006). Produced by American Film Foundation, available on DVD from Balcony Releasing.
He wanted to write but was afraid he wasn’t good enough… Tony Kushner, videotaped conversation, Dallas Museum, Dallas, TX, June 10, 2009. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Tony+Kushner&view=detail&mid=3D6628A98D1F6B1A96203D6628A98D1F6B1A9620&first=0&FORM=LKVR.
“my former lover, my forever friend… Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), x.
a long list of favorite writers… Charlotte Stroudt, “The Proust Questionnaire” originally published in a study guide for the 1995 Baltimore Center production of Slavs!; reprinted in Robert Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation, 126.
“You, or/the loss of you… Tony Kushner, “The Second Month of Mourning,” in Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 213.
“The problem is we have a standard of what evil is… Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day; reprinted in Plays by Tony Kushner (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 50–51.
“Perhaps if the world were not actually on the brink of war… Frank Rich, “Making History Repeat, Even Against Its Will,” New York Times, January 8, 1991. http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9D0CE0DB103AF93BA35752C0A967958260&scp=3&sq=bright%20room%20called%20day&st=cse.
A few years earlier Kushner had had a dream about a sick friend… Boris Kachka, “How I Made It: Tony Kushner on ‘Angels in America,’ ” New York, April 7, 2008. http://nymag.com/anniversary/40th/culture/45774/.
“For the first-rate artist, there’s a moment… Quoted in Lahr, “Tony Kushner: After Angels,” 284.
“He sees how ridiculous the world is… Tony Kushner, “A Fan’s Forward,” in Charles Ludlam, The Mystery of Irma Vep and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), vii.
“I never drink. And I never take drugs…. Kushner, Angels in America; Part One, 32.
“Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men… Ibid., 45.
Kushner has said that Louis is the character most like himself. Lahr, “Tony Kushner: After Angels,” 285.
“You sonofabitch… Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 126.
“the most thrilling American play in years… Frank Rich, “Embracing All Possibilities in Art and Life,” New York Times, May 5, 1993. http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9f0ce2dc1431f936a35756c0a965958260&scp=1&sq=angels%20in%20america&st=cse. The review of the Mark Taper production, also full of praise, was titled “Marching Out of the Closet, Into History.” The Times never tired of the closet metaphor.
“a dialectically shaped truth.” Quoted in Lahr, “Tony Kushner: After Angels,” 274.
“Greetings, Prophet;… Kushner, Angels in America; Part One, 119.
“Open me Prophet. I I I I am/The Book… Tony Kushner, Angls in America; Part Two, 47.
“I want more life. I can’t help myself… Ibid., 135–136.
“I had the most remarkable dream… Ibid., 140.
“the play advocates the extinction of moral restraints… Roger Shattuck, “Scandal and Stereotypes on Broadway,” in Salmagundi, Spring–Summer 1995; reprinted in Candor and Perversion, 388. Shattuck can’t even get the subtitle right, calling it “A Gay Fantasy on American Themes.”
“a second-rate play written by a second-rate playwright… Lee Siegel, New Republic, December 29, 2003. http://www.tnr.com/article/angles-america. He claims “the device of the angel is wonderfully campy, akin to the wild farces of Charles Ludlam.” No, it’s not. “The angel is also a woman—with eight vaginas, we are told: the vagina dialogues!—who, in some sense, is tempting Prior to reject his love of men and live a ‘normal’ life….” But she also has eight penises and the future she offers is hardly normal. And so on. One suspects that if Siegel hadn’t been bashing a popular gay writer the New Republic wouldn’t have run such an incoherent essay. But they also ran his equally incoherent essay praising Stanley Kubrick’s last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, as a masterpiece that was hated by Americans because we are all so stupid and corrupt.
“The enormous success of this muddled and pretentious play is a sign… Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69.
“Gay life—and gay death—surely awaits something grander and subtler than this…. never ascended… above a West Village version of Neil Simon… Andrew Sullivan, “Washington Diarist,”The New Republic, June 21, 1993, 46. A curious note: John Simon quoted Sullivan in his generally positive review of Angels in New York magazine. Identifying the naysayer as “the homosexual editor of the New Republic,” Simon could criticize a gay play without being accused again of being homophobic. (His chief criticism of the play was that despite it being well-written and full of good parts for actors, none of its characters come through its seven hours with their beliefs changed. But one could make the same complaint about the characters of two other American classics, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Streetcar Named Desire.)
“I used to have a crush on Andrew… Tony Kushner, “A Socialism of the Skin (Liberation, Honey!),” Nation, July 4, 1994; reprinted in Thinking about the Longstanding Problems, 20.
“Bruce doesn’t like it when gay men get dishy… Ibid., 21–22.
All in all, it was a lively hour of television. Charlie Rose, PBS, June 24, 1994. The show can be seen on Google Video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1121662526008590137); the transcript can be read in Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation, 93–104.
“a pretentious left-wing screed… Quoted, with many other Angel-related entries, in another man’s blog: The Sacred Moment, by Arthur Silber, January 3, 2004. http://thesacredmoment.blogspot.com/2004/01/angels-in-america-hymn-to-life.html. (These are no longer available on Sullivan’s own blog site, The Daily Dish, which does not include an archive.)
Kushner always strove to give Sullivan his due. He acknowledged the real pain in Sullivan’s essay, both in his own essay and on Charlie Rose. Later, in an interview in Salon, he said of Sullivan, “His homosexuality gave him a streak of decency.” To my knowledge, Sullivan has never had a word of praise for Kushner.
The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide… A chapter of the novel is published in Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation.
“We won’t die secret deaths anymore… Kushner, Angels in America; Part Two, 148.
a group of editors and writers… The first organizers of the Publishing Triangle were Michael Denneny of St. Martin’s Press, David Groff of Crown, Trent Duffy of Dutton, and Robert Riger of the Book of the Month Club. They were soon joined by others, including editor Carol DeSantis of Dutton and publicist Michelle Karlsberg.
The first two OutWrites… The panels and readings in San Francisco were organized by Jeffrey Escoffier, those in Boston by Michael Bronski.
“I don’t think being gay is a subject any more than being straight is a subject…. Quoted in Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, 350.
“Boo away… Quoted by Michael Bronski in conversation with the author, June 2010.
“Brothers and sisters!” From the author’s notes, April 1, 1992.
“I still don’t know if the rectum is a grave… Tony Kushner, “On Pretentiousness”; reprinted in Thinking about the Longstanding Problems, 73.
“Baking lasagna has long been my own personal paradigm… Ibid., 61–62.
“Oral support of Edmund White at the Academy Meeting… Ned Rorem, Lies: A Diary 1986–1999 (Washington: Counterpoint, 2000), 307–308.
“Two Deaths, Two Lives” This essay by J. D. McClatchy appears in Edmund White, ed., Loss within Loss (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). McClatchy gives some of Merrill’s reasons for secrecy, and they aren’t pretty: “He didn’t want to become a spokesman, a hero, a case study. He didn’t want to run away with the AIDS circus, in the company of a menagerie of less than minor talents hoisting a banner” (225).
“not good enough… “Michael Cunningham,” in Richard Canning, Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 91.
“I had my head in the oven… “Michael Cunningham,” in Philip Gambone, Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, 143.
“She looked at me as if she were standing on a platform… Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 76.
A few lesbian journalists even complained… One occasionally heard this in conversation, but critic Victoria Brownworth also made the charge in an article, “Someone Has to Say No,” in Lambda Book Report 2, no. 7 (November 1990).
There is no denying that gay male books did better than lesbian books, but other factors were involved. First there was the economics: anecdotally, gay men bought more hardcover books than lesbians did. Whether this was because gay men had more money or because lesbians were more frugal or because gay men outnumbered gay women is a topic for a different history. Whatever the cause, lesbian books were slower to turn a profit. Then there were the choices made by the editors. There were plenty of gay men and gay women in editorial staffs, but the men were in a better position—and were more willing—to stick their necks out for their own books. Carol DeSantis at Dutton took huge risks when she published novelist Sarah Schulman. Few of her peers at other mainstream houses did likewise. Finally, as several lesbian writers have pointed out, the women had fewer “out” elders. No major lesbian novelist spoke about her sexuality in the way that Christopher Isherwood or even Gore Vidal spoke about theirs. Adrienne Rich might talk of it in her poems and essays, but Susan Sontag remained coy about her sex life until she died. Gertrude Stein spent most of her life writing in modernist code. Alice Walker came out only late in her career.
“My own immorality didn’t trouble me… Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (New York: Knopf, 1988), 50–51.
Now everyone is at work on him at once… Ibid., 78.
“ ‘Gay is good.’ We were all chanting it,… Ibid., 226.
“Hubert Sorin, my lover, who just died two hours ago… Edmund White, Our Paris, 131–133.
“intolerable to read in this post-AIDS period… Quoted in Richard Canning, Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists, 84. White expanded on these reasons in his essay “Writing Gay,” which was reprinted in Arts and Letters.
“First I had to finish the Genet book,… Quoted in Stephen Barber, Edmund White: The Burning World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 285.
“In Eddie the man I detected a perversity… Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony, 241. I have removed the phrase “a pear-shaped body,” which is a fictional disguise. Merrill was always lean and unearthly.
“I supposed Ridgefield [Westcott] would assign us both to Brunetto Latini’s [Dante’s] ring in hell… Ibid., 191.
One reviewer, the usually hypercritical Dale Peck… Dale Peck, “True Lies,” Voice Literary Supplement, Fall 1997, 14. Christopher Benfey seemed to praise this gap, too, when he said, “This is an excruciating absence… around which the book, like scar tissue, is constructed.” (“The Dead,” New York Times Book Review, September 14, 1997. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/reviews/970914.14benfeyt.html?scp=1&sq=farewell%20symphony%20by%20edmund%20white&st=cse.)
He continued to revise the screenplay for Barbra Streisand… Patrick Merla, “A Normal Heart,” We Must Love One Another, 67.
Kramer asked to see the advance galleys… Edmund White, e-mail message to the author, October 3, 2010.
“[H]e parades before the reader what seems to be every trick… Larry Kramer, “Sex and Sensibility,” Advocate, May 27, 1997, 59–60. For the record, the narrator of The Farewell Symphony never reports anyone being rimmed or tied up. There is only one reference to watersports, already quoted.
including the op-ed page of the New York Times…. Larry Kramer, “Gay Culture, Redefined,” New York Times, December 12, 1997. http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/121297sci-aids.html?scp=2&sq=larry%20kramer%20%22gay%20culture,%20redefined%22&st=cse. This was couched as an attack on a small, ad hoc group, Sex Panic, which he said “advocates unconditional, unlimited promiscuity.” They didn’t. They only wanted to stop the recent demonization of sex and wave of arrests in public places. But the mere mention of sex seemed to make Kramer irrational.
And he can still appear irrational. Recently, in 2010, Kramer admitted in an interview that he was visiting hook-up sites online, with his partner’s permission. “There must be an awful lot of older men like me who are hungry for another sexual chapter before they die.” He did not think he was being a hypocrite, but said his old denunciation of sex was necessary for the times. (Tony Adams, “The Fresh Bile and Sex Life of Larry Kramer,” South Florida Gay News, May 2, 2010. http://www.southfloridagaynews.com/sfgn-columnists/columnists/tony-adams-column/1297-the-fresh-bile-and-sex-life-of-larry-kramer.html.)
Annual deaths from AIDS peaked in the United States in 1995 at 50,000…. Figures from University of California San Francisco HIV InSite. http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/InSite?page=kb-01-03.
Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz… Joy Episalla, “Dances with Woolf,” Poz magazine, February 2000. http://www.poz.com/articles/198_10543.shtml.
“Learning you’re going to live… Quoted in Gale, Armistead Maupin, 76.
“Tony’s like God… Tad Friend, “Virtual Love,” New Yorker, November 26, 2001, 88. The story gets even weirder and more complicated after the period covered in The Night Listener. Friend reports how a TV producer, Lesley Karstein, became involved, and there was talk of an HBO movie. Tony appeared in a documentary—but it was only an actor playing Tony. Vicki Johnson continued to insist she must protect Tony, since the pedophile ring—which she claimed included Ed Koch and Sammy Davis Jr.—could still be after him. Then Vicki met a psychologist named Dr. Zackheim, moved to Chicago, and left Tony with Ms. Karstein back in New York.
It was Tad Friend who identified Vicki Johnson as Joanne Vicki Fraginals. By the time Friend started writing his article, Tony had disappeared. But in a chilling twist, Friend received a flurry of e-mails from Tony. Then Tony fell silent again. Friend closes his article with the first letter Maupin received from Tony, a Christmas card that included Francis P. Church’s famous quote from the September 21, 1897, New York Sun: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist…. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”
“I know how it sounds when I call him my son…. Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 1.
“Artful Dodger by way of Bart Simpson… Ibid., 28.
“Do you know why he left?… Ibid., 46.
“I wrote the ending of the book the way I’d like it to be in life… Quoted in Friend, “Virtual Love.”
“To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside… G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen & Co., 1906), 70–71.
“Kiss me… Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation, 82.
“As I now move, graciously, I hope,… Ibid., 1.
“That play implies that I am madly in love with McVeigh… Tim Teeman, “Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll Have a Dictatorship Soon in the US,’ ” Times (London), September 30, 2009. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece.
The sales figures tell one story… The figures for City and the Pillar are only hardcover—a paperback wasn’t issued until five years later. Night Listener sold 58,000 in hardcover and 42,000 in trade paper during its first year. (Figures from Rakesh Satyal at HarperCollins.)