Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture

I am in the sixth grade. My mother, who is a teacher, will not be home from school for another hour, hour and a half. The only relief I have for persistent back pain is lying flat on the living room floor, my head supported by a small pillow. One day—I can hardly remember the first time I pulled the book from its bottom shelf—but one day I opened the formidable tome entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, by the even-then-discredited contemporary of Freud’s, Krafft-Ebing. Who had bought it and why, I have never learned, but like all the books on the bottom shelf of the living room bookcase, it was dusty and old, there as long as I had been, right next to Arthur Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson. Psychopathia Sexualis became my mid-afternoon tales of the Arabian nights. Each page was full of stories, one stranger than the other—not that I completely understood them, for they would mysteriously switch to Latin at important junctures. They suggested a world even richer in erotic obsession than my own pubescent imagination. Eventually I arrived, as one always does, at the long section on homosexuality, and I learned the name for my feelings and gained a sense that I was not alone with them.

I retell this piece of autobiography for several reasons but, chief among them, because it was an experience common among gay men of my generation and earlier. No other group has been so reliant in its social formation on literature than 38 the gay community. Unlike other ethnicities, few gay children—even today—have found themselves raised within the gay community. In 1971, two years after Stonewall, the sociologist Barry Dank surveyed gay men to find out how they came to understand their sexual orientation. Although a plurality came to this recognition as a result of socializing with other gay men, 15 percent said that they had come to this realization through their reading (Dank 1979). When one considers how little Americans read, this is an astounding figure. The process of self-discovery through reading has not stopped even now, when television airwaves (especially on daytime talk shows) gab on and on about homosexuality. Just last weekend I met a man who had married, divorced, and found himself at sea, not knowing what to do next. By-not-quite-accident he bought a copy of Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man. In the process of reading it, he realized he was gay and that he had always been gay. For many young people isolated in small towns or in suburbs, the only way to get to know about gay people is through reading, although now the text may be the glowing amber of online computer bulletin boards rather than the dusty pages of Psychopathia Sexualis.

The Violet Quill was no different from any other group of gay men. They, too, constructed a notion of what it meant to be homosexual from the books they read. In his highly autobiographical short story, “Reprise,” Edmund White describes how a boy who was fourteen in 1954 (thus, White’s exact age), the son of a divorced mother who was a psychologist (as was White’s mother), ransacks her library for information about desires he has come to understand as sick: “sick because I knew from my mother’s psychology textbooks, which I’d secretly consulted, just how pathological my longings were. I had looked up ‘homosexuality’ and read through the frightening, damning diagnosis and prognosis so many times with an erection that finally, through Pavlovian conditioning, fear instantly triggered excitement, guilt automatically entailed salivating love or lust or both” (SA:161). Nor was his search for knowledge limited to his mother’s textbooks.

As a teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me and assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together. In the early 1950s the only books I could find in the Evanston, Illinois, Public Library were Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (which suggested that homosexuality was fetid, platonic and death-dealing) and the biography of Nijinsky by his wife (in which she obliquely deplored the demonic influence of the impresario Diaghilev on her saintly husband, the great dancer—an influence that in this instance had produced not death but madness). (The Burning Library, 275)

An outsider might think such sophisticated reading astonishing for a teenager, a fabrication White has woven to suggest an impossibly precocious adolescence; yet I also read Death in Venice as a teenager (I think I was fourteen), and although I don’t recall exactly at what age I read about Nijinsky—but not his wife’s biography—it was surely in high school. To that I added a good dollop of Gide—The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters—before I went off to college. It seems to me that the curious gay adolescent before Stonewall was forced to turn to European literature and cultural history of a very high quality because it was the only place on the library shelves where one could find information (Europeans were given much more license to depict such matters than Americans). I think this early and formative experience of high culture gave a particular cast to gay society in the 1970s: gay men employed a range of cultural reference that was rare in American society. For example, when I first arrived in Baltimore in the early seventies, I tricked with a butcher’s assistant—a rough, blue-collar boy, with hands at once probing and precise—who spent much of the night reciting scenes from Noël Coward’s comedies.

White is not the only member of the Violet Quill who has recorded his early reading. In Ambidextrous, Felice Picano writes about the awakening of his literary sense in the sixth grade when he happens upon a prose translation of The Iliad. What is remarkable (and accurate) in this account is how the homoerotic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is not consciously picked up by the ten-year-old Picano. Yet the book stirs him in ways that, although he can’t put his finger on them, he knows intuitively must be hidden. The illustrations in his edition were by John Flaxman, the late eighteenth-century sculptor and engraver, and they excited Picano to make his own drawings.

I would copy an illustration of a woman … but I would swell or elongate her breasts. Or I would draw another woman, facing forward, wearing a short chiton, holding a spear. Then I would remove the kiltlike skirt and add in her genitals where I knew they belonged, then draw them separately on another piece of paper, outlined by a hint of a V of thighs. Then I would draw that V larger and larger, until it completely filled an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch sheet of paper and become almost unrecognizable, abstract. I drew men too, narrowing their waists until they were absurdly small, or ridiculously squaring their buttocks, or extending their shoulders enormously. … Sometimes I drew slender large-breasted women, then added male genitalia. Or I drafted out robust, chunky warrior men and gave them sharply-pointed breasts, large nipples. …

I hid these drawings, naturally, but I looked at them often, adding outrageous new details, feeling a strange pleasure in the monsters I created. (Ambidextrous, 77–78)

But if drawing brought “a strange pleasure,” such delights could not compare to the erotic stimulation of writing about The Iliad. Assigned to produce a book report for Mrs. Campanella, his much-beleaguered sixth grade teacher, Picano takes to the task in a trance that seems like ecstasy. He tells us he felt “as though I’d been flying, but it was a calmer, more controlled high than sniffing glue while Ricky [a classmate] brought me to a teeth-gripping orgasm” (103). The Iliad had given Picano a lesson not only in the repressed erotics of reading but also in the sublimated erotics of writing. Thus, their sexual awakening drove White and Picano to explore literature far beyond the usual fare of even exceptional children, and it cast upon the linguistic process a sexual excitement.

But the possibility of a truly gay fiction—namely, one that was written for gay men by gay men in the language and with the assumptions of gay men—seemed, at least to Andrew Holleran, almost impossible. Indeed, the impossibility of gay fiction is one of the topics of Dancer from the Dance, that central founding text of contemporary gay writing. The novel begins with a series of letters sent between the “author” of the novel living in New York and his friend, who has left New York for a life in the South. The friend writes the author:

I must caution you, love: Those things may be amusing to us, but who, after all, wants to read about sissies? Gay life fascinates you because it is the life you were condemned to live. But if you were a family man going home on the 5:43 to Chappaqua, I don’t think you’d want to read about men who suck each other’s wee-wees! Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don’t want to know WHAT THEY DO. Canons of taste must be observed, darling. People are tired of hearing about sex, anyway. And the story of a boy’s love for a boy will never capture the world’s heart as the story of a boy’s love for a girl. (Or a boy’s love for his DOG—if you could tell that story again this country would make you rich as Croesus!). … The whole world wants to be like My Three Sons. So (a) people will puke over a novel about men who suck dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would ultimately demand it to be ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give in to them. (15)

Why give in to them, indeed! What is interesting about this passage is that it assumes that any published novel would have to be directed to straight readers. Dancer from the Dance situates itself as an unpublishable novel that is circulated among friends; in short, it assumes a gay readership that the novel does not know how to bring into existence except by positing such a readership. Nevertheless, when the Violet Quill came to write, they had already before them a body of homoerotic and homosexual writing to guide, inspire, and resist. Robert Ferro, lecturing at Oberlin College, listed among his “literary forebears” such writers as “Baldwin, Burroughs, Williams, Genet, Isherwood, Forster,” and added: “Homosexual literature is measured by these artifacts assembled in the last fifty or sixty years in a still growing body of work comparable in quality and cohesion to any movement in the century” (VQR:392).

What Ferro describes is one of the jobs of the Violet Quill: to construct a genealogy of gay writing that would connect their work to the works of the past without hemming themselves or the future into a specific mode. The VQ wasn’t so much interested in creating a canon of gay writing—White rejects the idea in his address “The Personal Is Political”—as triangulating a position from which to start. For as White argues: “A canon is for people who don’t like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer” (BL:375). And it was more and more books that the Violet Quill wished to exhume from the past and the distracted present, works wholly ignored or whose erotic content had been erased or papered over. In his work cataloging Virgil Thomson’s papers, Chris Cox, for example, had developed a particularly acute sense not just of the major arteries of cultural history, without which the body of a culture dies, but of the capillaries as well.

Since Stonewall, two narratives of gay literary history have competed for attention. The first is the gay liberation version, and it goes something like this: For the most part, before gay liberation there was no literature about gay men except dreary novels that ended in murder, alcoholism or suicide, or pornography in which the various computations of bodily position and libidinal hydraulics are calculated. With Stonewall young men opened their hearts and wrote. To be sure, the works came slowly at first—one can’t expect an overnight miracle—but by the late seventies events moved rapidly, until the bookshelves were hothouses burgeoning with the beautiful and exotic flowers of gay expression. This tale of repression and liberation has been the generally accepted account. White, for example, has written, “Before Stonewall there were by and large only two kinds of gay male novels—the apology (aimed at mainly straight readers), a genre designed to prove that gay men are doomed, sensitive creatures who usually have the good grace to commit suicide, so, hey, let’s not beat them up; and the pornographic rag, aimed at the gay reader, and sold at exorbitant price under the counter” (“Joy of Gay Lit”:110). But the very simplicity of the tale, its classic narrative dimensions and satisfying happy ending, should alert us to the fact that it couldn’t possibly be true. And it’s not.

There is a homophobic account of gay literature as well, and it goes something like this: Most homosexual men cannot be artists of any quality because, psychologically, they are too narcissistic and immature to have the necessary empathy and the understanding to write on universal (that is, heterosexual) themes. Usually, gay writers devote themselves to the more decorative literary pursuits—lyrics to musical comedies and the light fluffy novels of the E. F. Benson variety—which they do admittedly with enormous skill. Occasionally, but this is much rarer in homosexual men than in “real” men—I’ve used the expression “real men” because this is, after all, the homophobic version, and straight men regard themselves as the only authentic males—occasionally homosexuals do have a certain kind of genius. But they must be saved from themselves. Gay writers in the past were, to their own advantage, forced to hide their sexual obsession and create heterosexual characters and plots and depict those universal themes that they would have ignored had they been left to their own devices. The adoption of the conventions of heterosexuality forced the homosexual to go beyond his narrow, narcissistic interests and the trivial, shallow course of his tragic life, to something deeper, wiser, more truly passionate—topics such as marriage, children, war, and business. Unfortunately, since the sixties—when all criteria for great writing broke down—the homosexual writer has been allowed to indulge himself, and consequently he has not produced such works as Proust, Gide, Wilde or—dare we concede the fact—Whitman were able to compose. And the future looks bleaker.

This homophobic version of gay literary history was used to beat down the Violet Quill. John Yohalem, for example, in reviewing White’s second novel, the openly gay Nocturnes for the King of Naples, argues in the New York Times Book Review that, “External constraints imposed on creativity, in such ways as form or even censorship, can itself be inspiring. The artist is challenged to surmount restrictions and turn them to his own account.” But, alas, since White has refused to “disguise his own sexuality,” as he did in Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes lacks the earlier book’s “nervous, mysterious charm, a bewildering but wonderful evasion of certainty” and, consequently, seems “more self-indulgent and excessive.” Censorship is good for the gay writer, Yohalem argues, because it forces him into the “wonderful evasion of certainty,” and it’s in the never-never land of evaded certainty that the gay artist works his delicate best. Truth, for gay novelists, only ends in “self-indulgence and excess,” because they have the audacity to speak about their lives, which are self-indulgent and excessive. For their own good, gay novelists should be encouraged—indeed, forced by censorship or the marketplace—to maintain their “disguised … sexuality.”

On the surface, these versions of gay literary history could not be more opposed to one another. Where the gay version of literary history is filled with the Whiggish paean of progress, the homophobic version of literary history is the Tory wail of decline. Where one saw a robust flowering of gay expression, the other saw the increased excessiveness of homosexual self-indulgence. But in many ways they are similar. They are both simple. They both have pat endings. It is just the direction that is different. We must ask ourselves: Is it true that before Stonewall there was only apology or pornography to turn to? Is it true that once they gave expression to their sexual lives, gay writers descended into excess and self-indulgence?

The years between 1945 and 1953 are perhaps the least understood period of American political and cultural life because they were so unstable and because so many forces were at work in unprecedented ways in America. It is during this period that the Violet Quill grew up. On the one hand, the country faced an opportunity for some of the most progressive politics we had ever seen, and on the other it was a field day for some of the most reactionary forces in our culture. In the election of 1948, not only did Harry Truman win an upset victory over Thomas Dewey but two minor party candidates won significant votes: Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and Strom Thurmond of the States’ Rights Party.

What we are just beginning to understand is that there was a flowering of homosexual expression in those years. Some of the novels, like Michael de Forrest’s The Gay Year (1949), are rather conservative works that show the disintegration of a young man when thrown into the company of homosexuals. The most famous novel of that period, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), is also a conservative work, beginning with the gay protagonist as an alcoholic and ending with him as either a murderer or a rapist (Vidal wrote two versions, revising the novel in 1965). Indeed, The City and the Pillar is a target in George Whitmore’s 1978 essay “The Gay Novel Now,” which attacks “the naturalism of Vidal’s City and the Pillar.” Whitmore goes on to say, “What is now being written by gay fiction writers shows that Vidal’s book is as remote from mainstream gay literature as Wonder Bread is from kosher rye: It’s a matter of style” (11). Vidal is absent from any of the lists drawn up by the Violet Quill of important precursors. White, who wrote scores of articles and reviews on many of the authors of this period—including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and William S. Burroughs—never devoted a single one to Vidal although he described him as one of three authors of that period “with the widest culture and interests” (BL:188). The City and the Pillar is exactly the kind of novel that the Violet Quill refused to write not because it ends so unhappily—Dancer from the Dance, for example, ends with a suicide and a drug overdose—but because its protagonist is stunted so completely by his idyll of adolescent sex, a fiction that he would rather kill to preserve than recognize as having ended. White’s rendering of the summer love of teenagers by the water in A Boy’s Own Story is made wonderfully ironic by the rest of the book, and George Whitmore turns it into something grotesque in Nebraska. The Violet Quill stands opposed in many ways to the classical influence of early gay literature—a literature of ephebes and older lovers, where both are poised against the Ionian columns of some pagan temple, the world of that most popular of 1950s homoerotic writers, Mary Renault.

Indeed, the whole Greek and Roman world, which had provided homosexual writers and artists since the Renaissance with an entire vocabulary of symbols, narratives, and references, is either ignored by the Violet Quill or stood on its head. One of the achievements of the Violet Quill and the first generation of gay writers is how thoroughly they did away with the classical claptrap of earlier homosexual writing. George Whitmore, in his essay “The Gay Novel Now,” exhorts writers to “pay attention … to the present” and derides the “homophilic morbidity” that led “most recent gay novels” to have been set in the past. The only member to explore the possibilities of classical mythology is Felice Picano in An Asian Minor, whose punning title suggests the not-entirely-serious nature of the work. In some ways it is an homage to the early influence Homer had on him, yet An Asian Minor, with its illustrations and colloquial style, is like a comic book—an adult comic book to be sure, but one that lets the air out of any serious classical pretensions (like the beefcake photos of fig-leafed teenagers wrestling before classical statues, for which Michael Grumley posed as a teenager). Troy, for example, is described by Picano as a city where “everything was pretty hunky-dory” (14) and “kings and princes and merchants” are said to go “gaga” when they “took one look” at Ganymede (19), a place where people are “thrown out of the army P. D. Q.” (64) and toss “around an early version of a Frisbee” or find themselves “further in Dutch” with their fathers (70). When Ganymede meets Hermes, the god of thieves, they “bicker over terms” before he beds him, keeping the god up nearly all night with putting the finishing touches on what sounds very much like a publisher’s contract, for it stipulates “whether the renown I was to have in letters was to be local or international, fleeting or widely popular or limited but enduring” (41). In fact, Ganymede is the very picture of a hustler on the make, some beautiful actor/waiter/model who finds himself on Fire Island trying to lay claim to the wealthiest and most powerful sugar daddy so that if he’s kept, it will be at least in the style he always dreamed of. In one of the best and campiest moments, Ganymede rejects Apollo’s suit (he’s holding out for Zeus), but declares, “I simply can’t settle for the ideal” (84). And, indeed, the Violet Quill never settled for an idealized version of gay life—they wanted something grittier, sexier, closer to the life they lived.

The Violet Quill did not know or care very much about the novels of the late forties and early fifties. George Whitmore writes about being pleased to see writers like John Horne Burns “revived and reprinted” (“Phil Andros”:163) but speaks disparagingly of “the last-chapter suicide that was an obligatory fixture of gay novels of the ’50s.” Both Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano have told me that they weren’t particularly aware of or influenced by these earlier novels, although they might have heard about such authors as Burns, Loren Wahl, and James Barr. The work of Tennessee Williams, James Purdy, Truman Capote, and Paul Bowles they knew, because they continued to write in their day.

An exception is Fritz Peters, one of the young postwar talents whose work—except for some remarkable memoirs—ended before the sixties. White had read Peters’s best novel, Finistère (1951), which is about a teacher who has an affair with a student. Fritz Peters is a compelling figure, linking gay writing of the postwar era with the literary avant-garde of the 1920s. Peters was the nephew and adopted son of Margaret Anderson, the lesbian editor of the Little Review, who, when she had to leave France where Peters attended school, placed the boy in the care of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who looked after him every weekend. White and Cox may have known about Peters through Virgil Thomson, Stein’s collaborator. Indeed, Peters may have had an unconscious effect on White. Both Finistère and A Boy’s Own Story concern teenage boys of divorced mothers who use their sons as social accessories to advertise that they were once sexual beings and to protect themselves from undesired advances. Both boys are sent to boarding school, and each in the end betrays his teacher. In Finistère, the boy, Matthew, is so overwhelmed by the beauty and propriety of his love for his teacher, Michel, that he can’t resist telling his mother about their romance. In A Boy’s Own Story, the unnamed narrator reveals the sexual relations he has had with his music teacher to school authorities as a way of buttressing his own collapsing edifice of heterosexuality and to prove to himself his own sickness and sinfulness. What proved especially exceptional about Finistère is that, though Matthew ends in suicide, his love for Michel is the healthiest, truest, most human love in the novel. Without editorializing (too much), Peters is able to affirm Matthew’s belief that his love for Michel is beautiful and right, and the actions of those who would act to “protect” him are destructive, corrupt, and perverse.

The novels that appeared immediately after World War II through the early fifties and dealt with same-sex relations are far more “queer” than many of the novels that appeared in the seventies. By queer, I mean novels that didn’t group people as either homosexual or heterosexual but, following Alfred Kinsey’s research, placed sexual orientation along a fluid continuum. More important, these novels did not go unnoticed at the time. John W. Aldridge in a highly regarded book of its day, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars—published first in 1951 and issued in paperback in 1958—identifies homosexuality as one of the two new topics to emerge in American fiction in the second half of the 1940s:

The importance of homosexuality in the development of a writer is always difficult to determine. At its best it is probably no more crippling than a strong taste for women or dry martinis. It may be beneficial in so far as it frees the writer from the dangers of premature domesticity and enables him to go on having fresh emotional experiences long after his normal contemporaries have settled into a comfortable emotional fog. But the homosexual experience is of one special kind, it can develop in only one direction, and it can never take the place of the whole range of human experience which the writer must know intimately if he is to be great. Sooner or later it forces him away from the center to the outer edges of the common life of his society where he is almost sure to become a mere grotesque, a parasite, or a clown. The homosexual talent is nearly always a precocious talent, but it must necessarily be a narrow one, subject to all the ills of chronic excitation and threatened always with an end too often bitter and tragic. (After the Lost Generation, 101–102)

I have quoted Aldridge at some length because I think this is a remarkable passage. No matter how condescending or belittling it may sound to us now—and Aldridge’s misogyny is only a little less intense than his homophobia—the passage expresses some of the most “enlightened” views straight people voiced at the time. It also makes clear that not only was this outpouring of homosexual works obvious to attentive if unsympathetic critics of the day but also, that through such critics, the wider public was becoming aware of the gay presence. The homosexual was hardly as invisible as some people have thought; indeed, to Aldridge, he appeared everywhere. Perhaps more unnerving is the way Aldridge’s language is coded with Cold War ideology. By saying that the homosexual is “almost sure to become a mere grotesque, a parasite, or a clown,” he places gay people at best as an inconsequential amusement, and at worse a positive threat to the common life of society. As a parasite, he lives off the society, endangering it by infecting it with his “ills” or by draining it of its vitality. He is not a part of the “common life,” but a foreign invader or grotesque mutant who can be recognized by its precocity and excitation. Since he is “threatened always with an end” that is bitter and tragic, one had better—the passage implies—watch out for him. It is not surprising that Aldridge is writing just as Congress was turning its attention to the supposed infiltration of homosexuals into the government.

But even the best-known gay social critic of his time is rather harsh and condescending in his attitude toward the gay novels of the late forties and early fifties. Donald Webster Cory, the pseudonym for the sociologist Edward Sagarin, attacks the way so many homosexual novels of the period end in murder, alcoholism, or suicide. In his historic book, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, published in 1951, the same year as Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation, Cory, while acknowledging that many people believe that there is “a gentleman’s agreement among publishers that there shall be no such happy endings to [homosexual] novels,” attacks these books on psychoanalytic grounds: the problem is the “identification of the authors themselves with their protagonists.” By killing off the heroes of their novels, the authors can “purge themselves of the responsibility for the [homosexual] activities of their lives. … By inflicting this verdict on their fictional rather than their real selves, the authors continue to live a free life … benefiting by the rewards of a purging chastisement.” Cory concludes with this regret: “It is unfortunate, but true, that many homosexual writers have used their books to ‘cure’ themselves of their guilt, and the reading audience becomes the unwitting confessor or the ill-paid analyst” (177). What Cory fails to see is that by his logic some readers, by identifying with the protagonists, were able to purge the chastisement they felt and “cure” themselves of their guilt.

Yet despite his harsh judgment of the work of gay novelists, Cory realizes they are unusually and unreasonably burdened by critical and social expectations. According to Cory, the gay novel must “be judged on three separate and distinct though interrelated levels: first, as literary efforts; second, as accurate portrayals of a phase of gay life; third, as a social document on behalf of a minority group” (172). When the Violet Quill came to write some twenty-five years after Cory’s study, they found themselves still expected to fulfill these three levels; in fact, Larry Kramer’s infamous attack on gay writers in 1997 (as discussed in the preceding chapter) is based on his sense that gay novelists have failed to fulfill these three obligations—or at least they don’t fulfill them in the way that Kramer likes. But the Violet Quill has always rejected that it has any obligation other than literary excellence, or to be more precise, it has maintained that only by writing literary works of the highest quality can they be true to gay life and serve gay people.

Why didn’t these novels of the late forties and early fifties, despite their limitations, start a continuous line of gay writing? Why, after so large an outpouring of works that dealt with homosexuality, did the number slow to a trickle? Why did it take a quarter century for the development of a Violet Quill? The short answer is that Cold War policy directly blocked the publication of gay books by commercial publishers. Through the use of obscenity laws and postal department regulations, the federal government was able to freeze gay commercial publishing for twenty-five years.

It was not so difficult to do. The major publisher of gay material was Greenberg, a small house, which got its start in the twenties. Jay Greenberg, the founder, was a straight man who was married many times, yet he was willing to test the market on lesbian and gay literature. In the early thirties he had considerable success with André Tellier’s Twilight Men (1931), Richard Meeker’s The Better Angel (1933), and two novels by Anna Elisabet Weirauch—The Scorpion (1932) and The Outcast (1933)—that deal with lesbianism. The Depression put his efforts to an end, but after the war the firm published Nial Kent’s The Divided Path (1949), Loren Wahl’s The Invisible Glass (1950), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950) and Derricks (1951). It also published Cory’s The Homosexual in America. All these books made money for Greenberg.

What is more important is that the general manager of Greenberg, Brandt Aymar, with Donald Webster Cory, using the mailing list that grew out of personal orders for The Homosexual in America, started the Cory Book Service, which had 2,000 subscribers. For about a year, it offered a gay book a month to readers across America. But Greenberg was charged with publishing obscenity and was forced to stop publishing gay books, and other publishers, frightened by similar charges, stopped as well. Need I mention that there is nothing pornographic about any of Greenberg’s titles; if anything, they suffer from the moral earnestness of the reformer. After a year, the Cory Book Service shut down, not because business was slow—in fact, it was a much greater success than Aymar and Cory had anticipated—but because they couldn’t find any more gay-themed books to offer their subscribers.

The gay novel before Stonewall tried to create sympathy for homosexuality by depicting gay males as “sad young men,” to use the phrase Richard Dyer has borrowed from a popular song of the period (Dyer 1993). These works presented gay men as harmless creatures more in need of pity and sympathy than fear and scorn. But such representations are true only of books from respectable commercial publishers who would even publish gay-themed books. Pornography was very different; indeed, many people at the time deemed as pornographic any gay story that ended happily. Much of what was sold as pulp fiction doesn’t have much sex in it; it became suspect simply by concluding with a happy ending for the queer hero. Although lesbians have explored the importance of pulp novels (especially the work of Ann Bannon in the construction of lesbian self-awareness), little has been done in the way of studying gay pulp fiction and pornography in pre-Stonewall gay culture.

Exclusively gay publishing seems to have originated with producers of pornography. As far as I can tell, the first gay publishing house was the Guild Press, owned and operated by Lynn Womack, a strange but remarkable figure. Married with children, Womack received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University. He taught philosophy for a time at George Washington University before beginning his publishing career. An obese albino—he weighed over three hundred pounds—he was a crafty entrepreneur willing to do anything to keep going. To avoid prosecution by the government and creditors, he committed himself for a while to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (where Ezra Pound had been committed), running his publishing business from his hospital room. Womack took the U.S. Postal Service all the way to the Supreme Court and in the early sixties won a landmark obscenity case in which the justices ruled that gay works could not be judged by a different scale of obscenity from straight works. Although the Mattachine Society originally opposed Womack, it came to value him as an ally, and Dr. Franklin Kameny, one of the early gay activists, testified for Womack at a trial in the early seventies that convicted him. According to Kameny, Womack published for free the pamphlet Gay, Proud and Healthy, which was distributed to members of the American Psychological Association and eventually led to the de-medicalization of homosexuality. Womack clearly saw himself as being a social activist. The unsigned introduction to The Team (1969), a rather unremarkable piece of smut which Womack published in his Classics of the Homosexual Underground series, states: “The publication of works such as these is a joyous occasion for all who love freedom and want America to be a society in which the rights of minorities as well as the rights for a literature of the erotic are upheld” (Womack:17). Nor did he try to justify the work on the grounds of having “social value,” although he does argue that the stories indicate “social injustices that need correction” (14). His claim is that “sexual desire, inverted or ‘normal,’ is part and parcel of [a person’s] humanity and cannot and should not be legislated out of existence by any censor, prude or literary sniper looking for ‘prurience’” (13).

The relationship between soft-core pornography and political activism is even clearer in the case of Drum, published by the Philadelphia-based homophile organization Janus. Drum, according to historian Marc Stein, “in promoting a radical and entertaining vision of sexual liberation … challenged the carefully constructed image of respectability cultivated by much of the homophile movement,” and financed most of Janus’s political and social activities.

Among the works that Womack published was a hardcover reissue of Wahl’s The Invisible Glass and the first edition of Phil Andros’s $tud. Andros is another link between the literary avant-garde before the war and gay writing, for he, too, was a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and participated in perhaps the first conference on gay writing, held in San Francisco on June 15, 1970, less than a year after Stonewall. Among the discussants were Phil Andros, Dirk Vanden (author of Leather Queens and I Want It All), and Richard Armory, author of the Loon trilogy, the sixties’ most popular series of gay pornographic novels. The writers of this period saw themselves in the vanguard of a social movement “to bring about necessary humanistic changes within the framework of our existing culture” (Townsend:19).

Perhaps pornography had a much greater social force than respectable novels with gay themes because it was not hemmed in by the marketing networks, which hampered their distribution. One of the problems with mainstream books was that they were difficult to find; bookstores would not handle them. Although John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night sold a reported 65,000 in hardcover, in 1978—some fifteen years later—when his Sexual Outlaw appeared, his publisher could place the book in only two cities in the Southeast. Chains refused to carry it. In contrast, pornography had developed its own distribution networks, which in many ways brought gay pornography to the most remote corners of America. Jonathan Williams, the poet-publisher, reports that such “one-handed classix” as Louis Stout’s Long Time Coming, Richard Manbow and Lyn Pederson’s Do My Thing, and Richard Armory’s enormously popular Loon trilogy (Song of the Loon, Song of Aaron, and Listen, the Loon Sings) had “warmed the hearts of thousands in places like Statesville, North Carolina, when only the seamy newsstands on the town square affords the crumbs of literacy” (171). Pornography didn’t explain or apologize—it wasn’t about dreary facts—the foot-long penises of gay novels were dizzily unconcerned with even the constraints of anatomy. In the 1960s, works that aspired to literary respectability took on the tragic story of gay life—these were the novels of suicide, murder, and drunkenness. But pornography, which eschewed such respectability, was free to enjoy sex, gay companionship, and a breezy campy tone as well as a kind of resistance to oppression. It is hard to gauge the impact of gay pornography—there were no reviews, and sales figures are hard to get (although not entirely impossible). But sales figures would give only a small piece of the picture of how they were read and by how many people. I suspect they were passed from one one-handed reader to the next in a daisy chain of masturbators. What we do know is that they reached a much wider spectrum of readers—both intellectuals and blue-collar readers alike came under the spell of such books. And pornography offered a wide range of styles and literary quality.

If the writers who came after Stonewall complained that they had either “apologia or pornography” to choose from, the pre-Stonewall novelists bemoaned the fact that they were forced into the straitjacket of pornography. At one panel session of the San Francisco conference on gay writing, Dirk Vanden told the audience of two hundred men who had gathered that “none of us are overly pleased with [being forced into the “adult” market] as it restricts our range of expression … we are limited to an exposition of 50,000 to 65,000 words—too short for proper development of character and plot, especially when it is necessary to devote approximately 20 percent of our text to ‘hots’” (Townsend:19). Yet it must be said that sixties pornography—although hardly of high literary value—has a buoyancy and edge that is all-too-often missing in pornography today. And it could be very funny. My favorite of the pre-Stonewall period is a series of novels by Don Holliday that followed the exploits of The Man from C.A.M.P, the daring secret agent Jackie Holmes. C.A.M.P. is an international organization that protects gay people from the homophobic organization B.U.T.C.H., which is out to destroy all homosexuals. Of course, B.U.T.C.H. doesn’t succeed. Sometimes Jackie, who runs the local San Francisco office out of the back of a public men’s room, has to contact headquarters, known as High C.A.M.P. What is singular about these novels is how far removed they are from the “sad young men” syndrome.

The speakers at that first conference realized that “commercial considerations must always be a serious determinant of what is written and published,” and saw the problem not as one of quality of authorship but of the publishing infrastructure. There were few gay bookstores, magazines, newsletters, or newspapers. “There are too many people scattered across the country who are afraid to buy or subscribe to a gay newspaper. Many more don’t know about it. And these are the people who should be reached,” the participants felt. What emerged in the 1970s was just this kind of infrastructure—even more solid than the Cory Book Service—in which enough gay books could be sold to readers to be profitable to publishers.

Although their effect on the Violet Quill was limited, these pornographic novels of the 1960s did inspire at least one Violet Quill member—George Whitmore, who wrote an essay about Phil Andros, the pen name for Samuel Steward. Steward thus wrote under the name of Phil Andros, while the novels and short story collections are usually first-person narratives of a character named Phil Andros, a hustler and sometime tattoo artist (a trade that Steward pursued). As described by Whitmore, Andros is “a Greek-American, 6 feet tall, well-muscled, hairy, macho and an unabashed narcissist. In addition [to] … his small, solid butt … he has a heart of gold.” Whitmore spends much of the essay discussing the literary aspects of $tud. He muses:

In discussing Andros’s first (and inferior) novel The Joy Spot, Whitmore argues that it is the later literary touches in the other novels which keep the sex there from becoming “stale and limp.” The Joy Spot is Andros’s “most pornographic [novel] simply because its characters are most standard, its situations most mechanical”—that is, the pornography here becomes failed art, its degradation of human beings no different from the degradation that occurs in any book that relies on clichés of character and plot, and in so doing it sucks the life out of human experience. The other Andros novels are good because, in them, “Phil Andros the hustler is a life-giver,” whereas the stereotyped characters in The Joy Spot are “the most degraded figures a bored pornographer might draw.” Whitmore does not wish to deride or lessen the value of a genre whose main purpose is to provide sexual arousal. He comments: “Andros once said himself that he only writes for lonely old men in hotel rooms. So, I think, he manages to write for all of us” (167). Ultimately, Whitmore’s strategy is to blur the distinction between “jack-off books” and literature. Jack-off books succeed in arousing the reader because they are good literature. In fact, Whitmore wishes not to make any hierarchy of categories. In discussing the use of a pseudonym—which seemed a questionable act in post-Stonewall America, when coming out became a moral and political imperative—Whitmore defends Steward’s use of the “Phil Andros” pen name. “It seems somehow exemplary to me—that so much pleasure is the gift of an imagined life led through an imagined character. Which is what Phil Andros is, of course. And which is, of course, what art is, too.”

Whitmore’s tribute to Phil Andros—both character and author—is not an empty academic exercise. Whitmore’s first novel, written after his tribute to Andros, is a graphic account of his own sex therapy in which he attempts to cure secondary impotence. For the book, Whitmore wrapped himself in the disguise of “Danny Slocum.” Whitmore in this homage to Andros seems to be laying the foundation not only for regarding a book about sex as literature but for the legitimacy of using a fictional mask (167).

In 1980, George Whitmore chaired a symposium on the gay novel held at Millennium 4 workshops in New York. Members of the panel were Edmund White; Seymour Kleinberg, a professor at Long Island University and editor of an important early anthology of lesbian and gay writing, The Other Persuasion (1977); Byrne Fone, who currently teaches at City College; and Scott Tucker, a writer and activist. Andrew Holleran had been slated for the panel but was unable to attend. The hall was filled with what Felice Picano, who was in the audience, called “a glittering company,” including Arthur Bell, a columnist for the Village Voice; Richard Goldstein of the Advocate; and Larry Kramer. At the symposium, each of the panelists read from a work of his own choice by a “pre-Stonewall gay voice” and discussed “how the novel represented a tradition.” White read from Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Tucker from Isherwood’s A Single Man, Kleinberg from Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Fone from a variety of nineteenth-century texts (VQR:53).

The choices are interesting. A Single Man and Last Exit to Brooklyn are both novels of the 1960s. Our Lady of the Flowers was originally published in France in 1943 and translated into English as early as 1949, but importation of this first English-language edition (also published in France) was banned in England and the United States, and so the book could be obtained in the States only surreptitiously. Not until 1963, when Grove Press issued a revised translation, was Our Lady of the Flowers widely available to American readers. The book, thus, for all intents and purposes was a sixties work. Clearly then, for the panelists the living tradition of the gay novel was barely twenty years old. The gay literary field is replete with examples of long gaps when works are relatively unavailable. The most famous case, I suppose, is the half-century gap between E. M. Forster’s composition of Maurice in 1914 and its posthumous publication in 1971, although typescripts were circulating among Forster’s friends for many years. It is odd to speak of Maurice as a work of the seventies, and yet in a real sense, as George Whitmore points out in an unpublished essay, it was.

Edmund White’s decision to read from Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers is noteworthy in a number of ways. In his biography of Genet (1993), White never speaks of Genet’s importance to him as a writer, but obviously White had recognized long before he began the biography—itself a work of many years—the importance of Genet as part of a gay tradition in which he worked. Some of Genet’s accomplishments were not particularly useful to White. Genet may have, as White claims, “invented the drag queen for literature,” but, in fact, except for Caracole, White’s one novel where everyone is heterosexual, cross-dressing is not a subject. Indeed, in his panoramic story of New York in the seventies, A Farewell Symphony, there is not a single drag queen (one indication that the book is, after all, fiction). However, there are many areas in which Genet’s influence can be detected. Stylistically, Genet’s mixture of the purest, most elevated diction and the language of the street was useful to White. Although English doesn’t quite have an equivalent to French argot, White’s use of Black English in Forgetting Elena—where all the white characters have to master the use of back to mean thoroughly—may owe some debt to Genet. Even more of a debt to Genet’s style may be found in the opening of Nocturnes for the King of Naples, in which White sacramentalizes the profane environment of the piers off West Street. In those abandoned docking areas, the unnamed narrator of the novel, cruising for sex, is momentarily stopped by the floodlights of a barge moving down the river.

This same confounding of the sacred and the profane happens over and over again in Andrew Holleran’s work. One piece in his collection of essays about AIDS, Ground Zero, concludes by remembering a deceased friend, Michael, who painted on the ceiling of his bedroom a scene of pagan deities observing the earth below. Holleran imagines that, “sometime this summer, some ignorant tenant will move into that apartment, unpack his bags, kill the first cockroach, lie down to rest, and find himself staring in surprise at a host of gods and goddesses, angels bearing trumpets, golden clouds—all painted by a man the germs needed, for what I do not know” (GZ:36). Like Genet, Holleran is compelled to record the killing of the first cockroach, a compulsion no less imperative than the one possessed by germs, who must consume the bodies of men who are capable of imagining something much greater, something divine. Holleran also revels in the combination of argot and high diction. In a passage from Dancer from the Dance, singled out by George Whitmore as a model of the contemporary gay novel, Holleran has a character “regard his gleaming refrigerator which contained a kind of emblem of life on the circuit: a leftover salmon mousse and a box of poppers.” Here the gay terms the circuit and poppers—terms that few heterosexual readers at the time were likely to have understood—are made to serve the hieratic function of forming “a kind of emblem of life.”

Genet’s greatest appeal is as an author who defied conventional morality and the approved rules of social hygiene. About Genet’s novels, Edmund White has written:

The Violet Quill learned from Genet to reject the medical model, and returned homosexuality to religious and ethical modes. Holleran, for example, prefers tragedy in its classical form to the sanitized society we have now with its pop psych nostrums, rejecting “a culture whose solution to grief is grief counseling, whose reaction to catastrophe is stress management” (GZ:97). Like Genet, another lapsed Catholic, Holleran prefers the ritual—even tragic ritual—to the medicalization of deep emotion. Similarly White, who called the psychiatrist’s office the homosexual’s “primal scene,” depicts the psychiatrist in A Boy’s Own Story as a madman, the greatest object of his scorn and the most persistent target of his satirical barbs. Of course, White was a coauthor of The Joy of Gay Sex, but that book is not so much a handbook to produce a “healthy homosexual” (although, of course, it does suggest ways to avoid disease) as a cultural guide to withdrawing from bourgeois society. In the introduction White and his coauthor Charles Silverstein praise gay sex “whether it be between lovers or strangers.” They need to praise these pleasures because even “the imaginative literature produced by homosexuals still hovers in the gloomy shadow of Freud” and seems “written half by Kraft-Ebbing [sic] and half by Cotton Mather” (JGS:14). The Joy of Gay Sex embraces its hedonist Satanism as the only counterbalance to the increased medicalization of desire.

The Violet Quill turned to Genet as a guide out of the moralizing apologetics that had hobbled gay writing. Forgotten now is John Gardener’s polemic On Moral Fiction (1978), an extremely popular work in its time and one that challenged the VQ writers at just the point that they were formulating their aesthetic and emerging as writers. They saw Gardner and his view of fiction as a direct threat to the work they were doing. The degree of danger that Gardner posed for emerging gay novelists can be calculated by the fact that more than fifteen years after Gardner published On Moral Fiction—and a decade after Gardner’s death—White was still answering him in his talk, “The Personal Is Political.” A well-respected novelist in his day, John Gardner argued that American fiction was in decline because it no longer “clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns. It does not rant. It does not sneer or giggle in the face of death, it invents prayers and weapons.” George Whitmore quotes this passage in “The Gay Novel Now,” and responds:

Clearly this is nonsense, especially in the case of gay writing. (Witness Jean Genet alone.). … The gay novel doesn’t clarify life; instead it stamps a greasy handprint on the small windowpane through which we view it. It doesn’t establish models of human action; instead, it cheerfully hacks at the plaster saints society has erected to our own delusions about ethical conduct. … The gay novel is liable to rant, and it certainly can sneer and giggle in the face of death. …

The trick of the gay novel is not to approach life down such sacred aisles as Gardner’s but to treat life and death with absolute, unwavering absorption in what moralists would traditionally decry as trivial, degenerate, or at the very least ephemeral. If we do have any social function as gay writers, this is surely it. In other words, pay attention to the poppers and the salmon mousse. (12)

Whitmore regards Genet as the prime example of a gay novelist who has refused conventional bourgeois morality for a more sacred duty, an intensity, an ecstasy, a visionary power missing in Gardner’s “moral fiction.” In Gardner’s insistence on moderation and high seriousness, Whitmore hears an attack on the extremity of the gay novel, its tragic intensity or its campy gallows humor, the sort of style we find when PWAs paint putti on the bedroom ceilings or when Genet describes the execution of the drag queen Divine at the end of Our Lady of the Flowers: “A vast physical peace relaxed Divine. Filth, an almost liquid shit, spread out beneath her like a warm little lake, into which she gently, very gently—as the vessel of a hopeless emperor sinks, still warm, into the waters of Lake Nemi—was engulfed, and with this relief she heaved another sigh, which rose to her mouth with blood, then another sigh, the last” (315). In such a passage, Genet exemplifies what Whitmore means when he says that the gay novel treats “life and death with absolute, unwavering absorption in what moralists would traditionally decry as trivial, degenerate, or at the very least ephemeral.” White says that Genet is never funny, and he is correct, because Genet’s rhetoric—the impassioned raving of a drama queen—never allows us to fall back to the distance that would allow the material to be funny. Yet the sneer and the giggle are not kept far at bay. In his investment in Divine’s “almost liquid shit” we see the strange path that would lead Holleran to find in a refrigerator containing only “a leftover salmon mousse and a box of poppers” a kind of “emblem of life.”

Although for the most part the Violet Quill rejected bourgeois life and aspired to a bohemian existence, they did not embrace the underworld of prostitutes, pimps, and drug addicts that was Genet’s terrain. To be sure, Grumley and White posed for pornography, but in both cases it was a single act, never repeated, of momentary rebellion and narcissistic satisfaction enfolded with the glamorous sense of slumming. By and large the Violet Quill were children of the middle class and lower upper classes, who opted for a particularly American bohemian existence. They were social workers, waiters, night copyeditors in law firms, freelance ghost writers, and shop clerks—jobs that didn’t bring in much money but left them time to write. But what American fiction needed was not more accounts of the lower depths of gay existence, which had been admirably handled by John Rechy in City of Night, or Hubert Selby Jr. in Last Exit to Brooklyn (one of the foundational texts read at Whitmore’s symposium on the gay novel), or William S. Burroughs in any number of works, or by James Purdy in his magnificent Eustace Chisholm and the Works. What needed to be explored was what happened to men from the middle class who identified as gay and who attempted to live their lives not in the closet but as gay men. In this project Genet, of course, was no help. Indeed, he may have been a hindrance by providing yet one more powerful version of the gay lower depths from which the Violet Quill would have to distance itself in order to work. (Since the Violet Quill, gay fiction has mostly given up representing the demimonde, and one can sympathize with Bruce Benderson [1997], who bemoans this loss because of the riches such experiences can bring to fiction.)

The most important contribution Burroughs, Rechy, Selby, and Genet made to the Violet Quill was through the autobiographical nature of their work. Burroughs, of course, is on the surface the least autobiographical. White’s critical portrait of him as “a great misanthropic humorist in the tradition of Céline and W. C. Fields” is respectful but remote (BL:111). Yet behind Burroughs’s paranoid fantasies of cosmic mayhem is a concrete personal pederastic reality, perhaps as impenetrable as “The Bunker” in which he lived but, nevertheless, solid. As Burroughs claims, paranoia is “having all the facts.” Still, Genet is probably the more useful example for writers who wish to merge clearly autobiographical material with a dreamlike lyricism that provides the room for fiction—that is, invention that heightens and fills in the autobiographical. Genet formed one of the examples of lyrical autobiographical fiction that would be the general mode of the work of the Violet Quill.

On the night that George Whitmore chaired the symposium on the gay novel, Scott Tucker, politically the most radical of all the speakers, read from Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Isherwood, it seems to me, was the more directly important influence on the Violet Quill—at least of living authors—the one who provided the most easily assimilable lessons for their fiction. Isherwood is one of the ten most important writers on Robert Ferro’s list of gay greats, and A Single Man—“one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement,” according to Edmund White—still poses challenges to the surviving members of the Violet Quill as they push their art into their middle ages.

Isherwood’s fiction always tended to be autobiographical. Goodbye to Berlin (1937) and Prater Violet (1945) are works that trade on autobiographical experience, and Lions and Shadows (1938) is an early autobiography that reads more like a novel. During the 1970s, Isherwood composed a series of autobiographies, which include Kathleen and Frank (a memoir of his parents), Christopher and His Kind, 1929–1939, and My Guru and His Disciple. Only the last of these is written in the first person. In the others, Isherwood speaks of himself as a different and separate person. Thus, although these books try, in Isherwood’s words, to be as “frank and factual” as he could make them, they still have the feel of novels. A Single Man, which is a novel, is strangely like an autobiography, and it contains many autobiographical elements. It is about a middle-aged Englishman, a longtime resident of California, who teaches English at a California college. Isherwood was all these things. Moreover, the Englishman’s crush on a college student draws, at least in part, from Isherwood’s relationship with Don Bachardy, whom he met in 1953 when Bachardy was an eighteen-year-old college student and Isherwood a man in his late forties. By crossing and recrossing the boundaries of genre, Isherwood gave the Violet Quill one of its most dramatic lessons in creating autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiographies.

Robert Ferro, for one, thinks that the autobiographical novel is the great contribution that gay writers have made to postwar fiction. In his essay “Gay Literature Today,” Ferro sees gay fiction standing against canonical taste, which has chosen to view autobiographical fiction as “the recourse of a limited imagination” (VQR:389). But by rejecting autobiographical fiction, heterosexuals have hastened the death of the narrator and emptied the novel of any vital connection with contemporary life. For Ferro, heterosexuals are “intimidated and beleaguered by modern chaos and its plethora of possibilities” that they have created and, thus, “American fiction today, with exceptions, seems the result of a philosophy of the limited in the face of the too great.” Gay writers, in contrast, are not overwhelmed by their success; indeed, “the problems of the gay writer have been all too clearly laid out and defined.” In other words, according to Ferro, whereas straight novelists feel no need for their work, gay novelists are vitalized by their mission to answer a clear and pressing need, which is first “the removal from fiction of various negative and stereotypical myths” about gay people and, second, the invention of “new myths, new themes.” How do gay novelists remove homophobic myths? By “telling their own stories” (390). Autobiographical fiction is the means that gay novelists have of “telling their own story,” and in so doing, defying the homophobic stereotypes of the past and creating new myths for the future. Gay writers aren’t alone in feeling the vitalizing energy of “telling their own stories.” According to Ferro, “Blacks, certain women writers, Jews—in fact, the return of the narrator has been effected by those with a story to tell, and for whom the particularized devices of realism are again useful” (391). As we will see, Ferro, following Isherwood’s example, believes that only through the particulars of autobiographical fiction can gay writers create new myths for the larger society, and only by stressing the singularity of their lives can they create a force strong enough to countervail the weight of homophobic stereotypes.

Ferro listed Isherwood in his small pantheon of gay precursors because Isherwood has a story to tell, a story drawn from his own experience, rather than through stereotyped representations. In A Single Man, Isherwood paints a portrait of a homosexual that stands, not unlike Isherwood himself, in marked contrast to the two reigning images of the homosexual in his time: the denizen of the demimonde and the beautiful ephebe. George, the central figure of the novel, is as far apart from the underworld figures of Genet as possible. Nor is he the golden young man of so many other gay novels. Yet Isherwood does not reject these as possible modes of representation. For example, he had explored the world of prostitutes in Goodbye to Berlin, and in Kenny, one of George’s students, he affirms the attractiveness of youth. In fact, George’s relationship to Kenny recalls the Greek model of erastes and eromenos, older man and prepubescent adolescent. Yet even as Isherwood invokes this model, he plays with it, describing George’s conversation with Kenny as “dialogue … but not a Platonic dialogue.” Later in the same scene, after George and Kenny go skinny-dipping in the Pacific, they exchange roles. Kenny becomes the authority while George becomes the child under his control; only now the Greek model is abandoned and replaced by nanny and infant charge. Like some grotesque Mary Poppins blown up to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon, Kenny looms over the shrinking George. But Isherwood is not finished with this Swiftian reversal of perspective; this nanny in the last moment becomes something of a Tom of Finland as “everything about [Kenny grows] larger than life: the white teeth of his grin, the wide dripping shoulders, the tall slim torso with its heavy-hung sex” (136). This constant shifting of perspective—an essential part of Isherwood’s moral and spiritual project—breaks down any established model into which one might try to fit George. A Single Man is a novel not only about one unmarried man, a gay widower, but a singular man who escapes the stereotypes so often forced on homosexuals. The novel escapes those stereotypes because, Ferro would argue, it draws so heavily on Isherwood’s own experience.

Isherwood’s fun with the requirement of the “serious” gay novel is evident in the conclusion. Although pornography may have a happy ending, the “realistic” gay novel is required to end in death. Yet as A Single Man closes, the tragic ending seems quite out of sight. True, George has drunk a little too much for his own good, but his behavior isn’t a sign of alcoholism. Nor is George a sedentary academic. He regularly attends a gym where on the particular day of the novel he does eighty sit-ups and twice his normal number of exercises. He goes to bed happy, and falls asleep with a smile on his face. Nothing’s amiss; his heart “works on and on, needing no rest. … Everything seems set for a routine run from here to morning. The odds are enormously against any kind of accident.” If readers were insurance actuaries, they would find “the safety record of this vehicle is outstanding.” How then to effect the death that is required of the serious gay novel? Isherwood’s answer is to ask, “Just let us suppose, however …” (Isherwood’s ellipses). In this hypothetical mood the novel ends, ironically giving the homophobic reader the required “tragic” ending, and yet undercutting it by the hypothetical language. Isherwood comically throws into the readers’ faces their need to see the gay character die in the end. For even if we suppose that George does die, his death is not the wages of sin, the penalty he has paid for being gay. Instead it is a quiet, gentle, painless death—the “good death” we believe granted only to the virtuous, and the biological death that all mortals—good or bad—must eventually suffer. In his remarkably rhetorical and ironic ending, Isherwood plays deftly with the requirements of the gay novel, both recognizing and rejecting them simultaneously.

Not only does Isherwood defy the received structure of the gay novel, and turn stereotypes on their head, but he also uses “the particularized devices of realism” that Ferro thinks are the tools most important to the gay novelist. As Claude J. Summers has pointed out, in A Single Man Isherwood “captures the fullness of an individual life in a particular place at a specific time,” yet in doing so, George becomes “an emblem of the human condition in any place at any time” (121). For Isherwood, this particularization is not opposed to a universalizing strategy, but the very means of connecting George to a larger consciousness.

Isherwood is extremely careful to indicate George’s exact social and economic position. Like virtually all of Isherwood’s central characters, George is a person of the upper middle class. At the faculty dining room, George runs into Grant Lefanu, an untenured colleague, who has dared in a local obscenity trial to defend a work that a senior member of the department, testifying as an expert, has called “dirty, degenerate and dangerous” (71). Isherwood comments: “Grant treats George as a fellow subverter, a compliment which George hardly deserves, since, with his seniority, his license to play the British eccentric, and, in the last resort, his little private income, he can afford to say pretty much anything he likes on campus. Whereas poor Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children” (72). Unlike the characters in Rechy, Genet, or Burroughs, George is no “sexual outlaw.” The risks of his rebellions are contained by his economic and social circumstances—his “little private income” and his English origins. Both give him protection in an otherwise hostile environment. Yet although he possesses his “little private income,” he does not identify with the power structure, and despite a certain license for eccentricity given to the English, he never uses it to win favor with Americans. Thus the figure of George, while less exotic than the standard underworld homosexuals of sixties gay fiction, is in many ways far more iconoclastic.

What Isherwood is at pains to achieve in this novel, and what made him a challenge to the Violet Quill, is to make George worth following for a day not because he does anything heroic—he’s not an inverted martyr like the characters in Genet—and not because he’s “dirty, degenerate and dangerous,” but merely because he is a single man, and any one person is worthy of our attention. In the only sustained apologetics in the novel—Isherwood can’t quite free himself entirely of the need to defend the rights of homosexuals—George defends Aldous Huxley in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan against charges of anti-Semitism. (Like Proust, Isherwood sees the homosexual and the Jew as analogous cases.) Huxley has the central character of the novel say that “the stupidest text in the Bible is ‘they hated me without a cause.’” George’s student Myron Hirsch, described as “the indefatigable heckler of the goyim,” asks whether Huxley believes the “Nazis were right to hate the Jews.” George’s long explanation of Huxley’s position is a defense that minorities deserve rights not because they are particularly worthy people, nor because they are the same as the majority, but because no matter how different they may be or how much they may give cause to hate them, no one has a right to deny anyone else his or her full humanity. Indeed, George taunts his class—which contains Asian, African, and Jewish Americans—that minorities, by the fact of being a minority, are probably more unpleasant than the majority:

Similarly, the novelists of the Violet Quill have often made their central characters rather unlikable, certainly unheroic. For example, Roger Sansarc, the protagonist of Felice Picano’s Like People in History, is hardly a model of love and respect. The framing action of the novel is his conflicted mission to help his cousin, Alistair, who is suffering from AIDS, commit suicide. Nor is this ostensibly merciful activity clearly distinguished from murder, for Alistair has for nearly their entire life tried to undermine Roger in every way he could. Whitmore’s Danny Slocum is a hostile, neurotic mess who doesn’t feel, to use the words Whitmore used in “The Gay Novel Now,” “the obligation to explain or apologize for the hard, cold truths, the dreary facts about gay life” (11). The unnamed narrator of White’s autobiographical trilogy is, in White’s own description, a man “so self-hating that even the most retrograde reader would become impatient with his inner torment and welcome with relief the Stonewall uprising” (BL:372).

But if Isherwood’s protagonist escapes gay stereotypes and the tendency for minorities to be regarded either as heroic or demonic, if he insists on his singularity, on being understood within the context of specifics of class, race, age, gender, and national origin, he nevertheless must also be regarded as a symbol of all gay men, as in his dialogue with Kenny when they become symbols of Age and Youth. The passage, which White quotes in his memorial for Isherwood, develops the central conceit of the rock pool. It is worth quoting at some length:

Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are lots of rock pools. … Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny. … You may think of the rock pool as an entity; though of course it is not. The waters of consciousness—so to speak—are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.

But the long day ends at last; yields to the night-time of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean—the consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything. … Some of the creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. … Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell—except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool? (A Single Man, 155)

On the one hand, the individual must be recognized in all her or his specificity although Isherwood is careful not to make the individual a unified or unitary entity; rather, the individual is first and foremost a contained fluid and within that fluidity there are “protean organisms,” ever-changing components. Thus, the individual, for Isherwood, is not a solid but a dynamic and complex amalgam of not entirely coherent or harmonized elements batched rather accidentally together. On the other hand, this very individuality, which he honors in all its specificity, is an illusion of the moment. Not that we are all the same—Isherwood clearly repudiates that notion—but that all individuals come out of the same dynamic and complex amalgam of incoherent and inharmonious elements. One is both an individual and a synecdochical sample of the whole; but since the whole is not homogenized, no sample can give a precise measure of the whole, or necessarily contains all the same ingredients as the whole. Yet by rendering the individual in all her or his specificity, we gain a notion of the whole. The final pun of Isherwood’s title is that only by studying a single man in all his singularity can we discover that all humanity is one.

For White, Isherwood is not alone in exploring the relationship between the isolated individual and a common spiritual existence. The same tension can be found in late Genet as well. Although Genet, according to White, began with the notion that “saintliness is singular,” and cuts the saint off from the rest of humanity, in Prisoner of Love he came to reconcile “the tension between the romantic cult of the unique individual and the Christian faith in spiritual equality.” This transformation in Genet’s attitude occurred one day when he was riding a train “opposite a dirty, ugly little man.” As White retells it, Genet suddenly “felt a strange exchange of personality with this stranger. Genet flowed into the man’s body at the same time as the man flowed into Genet’s body,” and Genet “realized that everyone is of the same value” (BL:306). White is able to see in other writers important to the Violet Quill the same lessons he learned in Isherwood.

But Isherwood goes further than Genet, because he is less involved in Christian formulations of the problem. In a passage cited by White in his Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction from Isherwood’s short story, “Mr. Lancaster,” he writes, “What I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, and until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious. And that consciousness belongs to everybody; it isn’t a particular person” (emphasis Isherwood’s). As a Hindu, Isherwood has gone much further than any of the writers in the Violet Quill in emphasizing adherence to “the mere awareness of being conscious,” yet this sense of constant refashioning, the destabilizing of a sense of self even as it is being created, is something that the Violet Quill develops as an important part of its aesthetic.

In A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay, the third volume of his “memoir in the form of a novel,” yet another formulation of autobiographical fiction, Felice Picano discusses how he hoped to become a writer. He first consulted, as he does throughout the book, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. He reads such classic authors as “James, Balzac, Mann, Tolstoy, Dinesen” and such popular books of the time as “Carlos Castenaneda’s Don Juan books, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; Black Elk Speaks, Autobiography of a Yogi.” But it is The Tibetan Book of the Dead that gives Picano “hints and ideas about how I could change myself from the middle-class postgrad with little work experience into an entirely new person: totally individual and never before seen on earth.” Picano would subject himself to psychic alchemy, which would bring him through “the difficult states of the metamorphosis” (14). Clearly, Picano doesn’t imagine a constant reformation as Isherwood does, but he does sees selfhood as plastic, capable of a metamorphosis, and as something constructed by class, education, and work and, therefore, capable of reconstruction. Picano’s aim is not the egolessness that appears to be Isherwood’s; rather it is an individuality that, paradoxically, is open to everyone willing to subject heror himself to the discipline.

Andrew Holleran also emphasizes this need for self-creation and self-transformation, but differs from Isherwood by positioning such changes within a tragic and Catholic context. The title Dancer from the Dance, taken from Yeats’s poem “Among School Children,” alludes to Yeats’s formulation of Asian concepts about the indivisibility of the self from the universal flux. Although recent scholars have tried to pin the label of essentialists to the Violet Quill, Holleran refuses to believe that there is a core self-independent of contingent circumstance. The dancer cannot be extracted from the dance, the metaphor for historical, natural, and psychic flux. One destroys oneself, in fact, by not giving in to change, even if the moment one holds on to seems so full of wonder and beauty that one fears no experience will ever be so valuable again. The poignancy that is part of Holleran’s entire work is not the excitement of new opportunity but the sense of loss that the spiritual imperative of constant self-construction necessitates. In the exchange of letters that concludes Dancer from the Dance, the narrator’s friend tells the narrator that they must forget about Malone, the protagonist of the novel: “Malone was determined.” By determined, the friend means that Malone was obstinate, single-minded, monomaniacal. But he also means that Malone—at least the figure as he appears in the book—is fixed, incapable of development (or, as psychologists might say, “arrested in his development”), and Holleran rejects that psychological explanation of the homosexual. The friend tells the narrator that “now that you’ve [written the novel], you have to go” (248). Living on “the circuit” is by definition circular, a repeating, closed existence, and they were all “addicted” to it. He complains it was “something I lived with so long it had become a technique, a routine. That was the real sin. I was too smart, I built a wall around myself” (250). The theme of all of Holleran’s novels is the danger of a kind of psychic entropy, the failure to create new selves and to leave old ones behind, the inability finally to break down the walls around you and escape your latest self-construction. The aged mother in Nights in Aruba warns her son, “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.” When he doesn’t understand, she repeats her injunction. But doing it now, making oneself new, means giving up those attachments that one has found most valuable and has made one happy. Yet as the narrator’s best friend tells him, “Happiness is not life.” The brutalities and discomforts of self-creation are the necessities of living.

The Beauty of Men is a retelling of A Single Man within the context of post-AIDS realities. One of Isherwood’s achievements is in trying to tell a story of a gay man in his fifties, the point at which popular belief and gay social patterns have determined active homoeroticism should end: by general consensus, a fifty-year-old man still wanting sex is a “dirty old man.” In most gay fiction he is simply unrepresented; the few times he does appear, he is a reptilian letch. Isherwood’s motivation for representing the middle-aged man is not merely that he was George’s age when he wrote A Single Man, but in resisting the belief that self-construction ends at biological maturity. For Isherwood as for Holleran, the imperative for self-transformation cannot stop. Yet showing not the disintegration but the continual reconstitution of the gay man may be even more challenging now than it was during the youth culture of the sixties, for gay culture is now far more stratified by age than it was then. In part this increased age stratification has come about because there is no longer a seamless continuity of ages—AIDS has reduced the size of an entire generation—and in part because the body culture that has developed in post-AIDS gay society so much excludes older men from participation. Moreover there is, according to White, a rift of experience that is opening between AIDS survivors and younger gay men. In a 1997 interview in the Advocate, White told Sarah Schulman: “I think there will be people over 30 now who have survived and who will feel themselves becoming more and more marginalized by younger people who aren’t as aware of the whole battle [over AIDS]. That’s going to be painful in a very different way. It’s one thing to think, We all went through this together and survived, and here’s my story of what I went through. It’s going to be another thing to have nobody want to read those stories.” Because those who can testify to the experience of gay culture before Stonewall are few in number, there is less understanding, more misinformation, and less sympathy with them.

The similarities between A Single Man and The Beauty of Men are striking, especially since they were written thirty years apart and distanced by Stonewall and AIDS. For example, they both concern men who are isolated by death—George by the sudden death of his lover Jim; Mister Lark by all his friends who have died of AIDS. They are men who are isolated from the communities in which they live by their sexuality. George has seen the bohemian community along Camphor Tree Lane (Isherwood has as much fun as Nabokov in making fun of the phony pastoralism of American place names) die off and replaced by veterans and “their just-married wives, in search of new and better breeding grounds.” George bitterly reflects on how “one by one, the cottages which used to reek of bathtub gin and reverberate with the poetry of Hart Crane have fallen to the occupying army of Coke-drinking television watchers” (16). Holleran is even more bitter about the changes he’s watched happen to northern Florida:

When Lark comes to a stop at the red light on Orange Heights, he watches the station wagons go flying past Highway 301 with their luggage strapped to the roof and tarps flapping in the wind, hell-bent for the Magic Kingdom, and he thinks, That’s right! Keep going! How nice of Disney to build a park with artificial rivers, man-made lakes, trucked-in beaches; it drains off the hordes who otherwise might visit the real thing. Leaving untouched for at least a few more years the rural patchwork of farm, field, pecan grove, Baptist church. … South Florida is backing up like a septic tank, sending people up north to places they had never even heard of two decades ago: Kissimmee, Ocala, High Springs, Lake City—the heart of the heart of the country. He wants to send away for a T-shirt he saw advertised in Out magazine: CAN’T FEED ‘EM, DON’T BREED ‘EM. (The Beauty of Men, 19)

There are a number of small parallels between George and Mister Lark. They are torn between two places—George between England and California, Lark between New York and Florida. They both make regular visits to the hospital—George to see his friend Doris, who is dying; Lark to take care of his quadriplegic mother.

And there are major differences, too. George seems to have no contact with a gay community. He and Jim have lived as a couple removed from any larger gay network. Lark is not only in touch with gay friends in New York, and the few gay men in his little community, but the wider gay culture exemplified in his reading of Out, in his trips to the baths, or his cruising of the boat ramp. George is seemingly more integrated into the straight community and far more isolated. He refuses to tell his neighbors that Jim has died in an auto accident, preferring that they believe that he has left George to take care of his aging parents (in the way Lark has gone to Florida to take care of his paralyzed mother). George’s refusal to permit his neighbors to know his grief plays into their homophobic beliefs that the relationship between the two men was not as emotionally binding as that between husband and wife. Only his longtime English friend Charlene is allowed to equate her widowhood with his. Lark is, of course, closeted from his neighbors and so may seem less socially integrated, but in point of fact he has a number of gay men with whom to share his grief and his obsessions.

Yet what most forcefully unites these two works is the insistence that gay men—even in middle age—have the need for love that we automatically expect the young to have and a sexual desire, if somewhat diminished, nevertheless just as urgently in need of satisfaction. Yet George and Lark have very different attitudes toward the search. George is extremely hopeful (“he believes he will find another Jim. … He believes he will because he must”); Lark, however, is in despair. With the death of his mother and the end of his obsession with Becker (the object of his pursuit), Lark returns to the boat ramp, the local cruising spot, to see if he can meet “the security guard from the prison north of Starke,” who he has heard is very handsome. But although Lark goes to the boat ramp, approaching the possibility of love, he puts up barriers to it. He tints the windows of the car so that no one can see him and “sits in his car till dark, without once getting out; while other people wonder who it is and finally drive off, tired of waiting” (272). Lark is too traumatized by age, death, and displacement to seize whatever love he might find. No doubt the differences in personality between Isherwood and Holleran mostly account for the very different attitudes their protagonists have to the likelihood of finding that love, and yet I can’t help feeling that it is also the cultural shifts that affect these endings as well. George has lived through World War II; that wholesale murder of young men has ended. But Lark leaves in the aftermath of AIDS, blown far from the “ground zero” of an epidemic that continues on. His rural Florida in the shadow of tourism is, to use Yeats’s phrase, “no country for old men.” The despair of the novel is not just Holleran’s personal depression but a cultural depression as well.

Edmund White is perhaps the writer in the Violet Quill most indebted to Isherwood, whom he knew. White has credited the simplifying of his style to Isherwood’s influence—not that either has a simple style (Isherwood’s is only superficially plain). But in A Boy’s Own Story, White adopts a style that is considerably less baroque than the one he uses in Nocturnes for the King of Naples. Indeed, it is in A Boy’s Own Story that White followed Isherwood’s practice of suggesting the collective by attending to the very particularities of the individual. White has repeatedly expressed his surprise at the success of A Boy’s Own Story. In a 1997 interview, White tells Brendon Lemon about recently receiving “a letter from a nineteen-year-old black kid from South Africa who said ‘Your life is exactly like mine as you describe it in A Boy’s Own Story.’” White is amazed by this complete identification, “that given racial, cultural, and temporal differences, a book could still have that kind of appeal” (Lemon:124). Robert McRuer gets a similar response when he asks his class about why the narrator is nameless in A Boy’s Own Story, and a Filipino American student answers back, unsure whether he has the right answer, “So we can put ourselves into the story?”

McRuer berates White for not naming the protagonist, claiming that this gesture shows that White wants to give his character “invisibility,” and that the protagonist’s “gay identity is rendered representative precisely because the ‘naturalness’ of his racial identity is maintained through White’s ‘god-trick’ or ‘invisibility’” (43). Yet as McRuer has to acknowledge, although the protagonist is nameless, he is not invisible; he is rather clearly “raceand class-coded.” McRuer never entertains the notions—probably because it would counter an argument to which he is slavishly wedded—that the protagonist is unnamed to indicate he does not have “a unitary, essential gay subject position,” as McRuer claims he must have since “White’s power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular.” McRuer refuses to even imagine that since this is the boy’s own story—and couldn’t be anyone else’s—it might yet have the power to communicate the specificities of the boy’s subject position, and across to others in seemingly different racial, cultural, and historical contexts. To be sure, the work of the Violet Quill is about white gay men—but being white (particularly in Edmund White’s work) is not taken for granted. As I will discuss in a later chapter, race is an important category of representation in the work of the Violet Quill. Much of postmodern theory cannot credit an analysis of identity such as Isherwood’s. Since much of postmodern theory presumes that identity must of necessity be proscriptive, clearly bound, and highly defended, no author who writes works that have been subsumed in identity politics—such as Isherwood’s and the Violet Quill’s—can have a theory of identity that is fluid, nonproscriptive, and highly contingent. McRuer quotes the narrator of A Boy’s Own Story, who asks, “What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion” (41). McRuer comments, “The point is, however, that he cannot, given the normative versions of gender and sexuality available to him” (39). McRuer’s rhetoric obscures two related points: first, that the narrator is quite aware that it is impossible to write a work that revealed “my life exactly as it was” and, second, that White also knows it. Indeed McRuer stops the quotation exactly at the point where the narrator states how impossible such a work would be; since its “density and tedium and its concealed passion” can “never [be] divined or expressed,” the text would be a “dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth.” In short, the narrator of A Boy’s Own Story is aware that such autobiographical writing is not only unachievable (because self-consuming) but also unstable, as is the metaphor that turns the text first into a geode and then into an animal eating itself alive. Yet if one cannot write about “life exactly as it was,” one can still create characters that are specific, individual, and fluid.

White himself has often commented on the odd relationship between autobiography and fiction. Interview magazine on the occasion of the publication of A Farewell Symphony—which, because it covers the part of his life that is the more publicly known, is also the novel most open to misunderstanding—asked White whether it bothered him that people mistake “autobiographical fiction for a direct, factual memoir.” White answered that it did. “If I had told [readers] in advance this was a memoir, and then put in all those details about the precise way a boy’s hair was combed, how he slouched around the room, the precise words he said, how he smelled, how he sat down, and so on, you would laugh at me. Because no one could possibly have remembered all that” (Lemon:124). White paradoxically argues that fiction is better than memory for rendering things in all their particularity and individuality. Perceptions blur people into categories, just as critical positions freeze writers into certain slots. What is possible in fiction, and impossible in memoir or even within the confines of memory, is to return the specificity and individuality that has been lost while also suggesting the larger contexts that give experience coherence and meaning.

For White, as for Isherwood, the writer’s job is not merely to present people as they now are but as they move through the process of their own continual construction. “If gays tell each other—or the hostile world around them—the stories of their lives,” writes White in the foreword to The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, “they’re not reporting the past but also shaping the future, forging an identity as much as revealing it.” The very act of representation in opposition to their invisibility alters them, makes them visible to themselves and, perhaps more important, validates their importance since so many gays believed their lives were not important enough to write about. White describes how, in his writing, he tries to depict gay characters free from the homophobia that White has himself internalized. “I knew as well as anyone else that homosexuality was an aberration, a disease, but in my fiction I pretended otherwise. I gave my characters problems, minor problems that struck me as decorous, rather than one irrevocable tragedy from the start. I showed my homosexual characters living their lives openly and parallel to those of their heterosexual friends: pure fiction. … But my greatest invention was that I let my queers think about everything except the one subject that obsessed them: how they came to be that way, how they could evince the world’s compassion rather than hate, and how they could be cured of their malady. I knew I didn’t have the equilibrium or self-acceptance of my characters, but I thought by pretending as if … this utopia already existed I could authenticate my gay readers if not myself” (BL:311). For White, the consciousness of gay people—their sense of identity—is not static; it is affected not only by the outside forces of a hostile world but by the internal resistance which benefits not the resistors, but those who might come after. White traces this sense of the dialectics of identity to Isherwood and Isherwood’s sense of a constantly refashioning consciousness.

Finally, one of Isherwood’s gifts to the gay writers who came after him is that he continued to place himself in a line of gay fiction that is spiritual or religious. The gay writer’s exploration of such spiritual issues as life and death are not achieved, George Whitmore argued in “The Gay Novel Now,” by taking the conventional moralistic line, but by moving through specifics that others might consider “trivial, degenerate, or at least ephemeral.” Whitmore sees the possibility of transcendence in the campy. White follows a similar line. His Nocturnes for the King of Naples was described as the reinvention of “devotional literature” by no one less than Mary Gordon, the reawakened Catholic novelist. White regards the work as one that “blends the carnal with the spiritual, a tradition that includes Saint John of the Cross, the Sufi poet Rumi and Baroque poets such as John Donne.” He might have added such gay novelists as Baron Corvo or Ronald Firbank, though these two give the subject a gaily comic twist. Moreover, for White, coming out is essentially a spiritual exercise, as he writes (in the The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction): “‘Coming out’ is the rite that marks the passage from homosexual desire to gay identity, and this transition begins and ends in avowal [which is based] on Christian confession and assuming … that sexual identity is profound, hidden, constitutive, more a matter of being than doing”(foreword:ix).

Ferro, Grumley, and Picano were all involved in their writing with such New Age phenomena: tarot cards, the I Ching, reincarnation, pyramids, time travel, extraterrestrials. In his remembrance of Ferro, Picano writes that their conversations typically ran on “the teachings of I Ching, current publishing and problematic Tarot readings, the niceties of Mahayana Buddhism and manner in the most au courant downtown sex club” (121). And while Ferro and Picano maintain a certain skepticism about such matters in public, “in truth [Ferro] allowed the occult, the arcane, the not quite visible or material a larger than ordinary place in his life” (119). Ferro, who indulges in such speculation quite freely, always keeps in mind that such things are not only psychologically useful but also great camp fun. His first book, coauthored with Grumley, is based on Edgar Cayce’s prophecies. I will discuss Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search in more detail later. But here it is useful to show how Ferro kept his distance from Grumley’s more gullible attitudes toward the supernatural. Toward the end of Atlantis, Grumley is involved in an exercise in regression to previous lives. He sees himself as an English knight with an L marked on his shield. This detail causes Ferro to “nearly burst out laughing.” Ferro comments: “It seems to me that people are not content with having lived before, they have also to have been major figures in the past—kings, queens, conquerors, famous pirates, etc., including myself, the late, great king of Minoa” (146). At the end of the book, Ferro refuses to claim that they discovered Atlantis, only that they found something that had to be taken very seriously.

In The Family of Max Desir, a highly autobiographical novel pervaded by the Ferro family’s Italian Catholicism (so very different from Holleran’s more austere and rational German Catholicism), the issues of the life of the spirit and the spiritual life again emerge. As in Atlantis, Ferro explores the issue of reincarnation, specifically what has happened to Max’s beloved mother Marie, who dies from cancer in the course of the novel (just as Ferro’s mother had died). The priest tells the Desirs that Marie is in Purgatory, and although the priest’s statement presupposes that the soul is immortal, Max wonders whether there is an afterlife and whether there is a soul. He decides there is a soul:

It was all his functions, memory, imagination. It was fear, love, and all the emotions. It was the total of these faculties and more, which he himself could never have calculated. It was itself a place, a point from which everything within himself was knowable, from which all was visible and clear. … The part about immortality meant only that time had nothing to do with it, nor space, except to say that if a spirit lived within him, the caretaker of a big empty house, and did not have to move about, but stayed somewhere in the attic, then what happened if the place burned down? (The Family of Max Desir, 206)

He imagines the soul as a character out of Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic, the loveless Bertha Rochester, whose invisible presence disturbs the house and whose destruction is necessary for the other characters to go on with their lives. But this image of a soul attached to the body suggests that, for Ferro, the soul was not necessarily part of a universal spirit with which it unites after death. One may join the father in his house of many mansions, one may even be able to change hotels (Max’s metaphor for the transition from Purgatory to Paradise) by exchanging “cramped and overheated” accommodations for something like “the big white romantic rooms in Flying Down to Rio,” but one will always be alone, separate, a rock pool rather than part of the ocean. Yet Ferro’s skepticism even questioned this concept of the eternal, if individuated, spirit. In the allegorical story that concludes The Family of Max Desir, Ferro narrates the tale of a European who falls among Amazonian natives who mistake him for a god. “The natives,” we are told, “are pleased to have this specific and immediate way of propitiation” (218). In short, “god” makes life easier; it serves psychic needs, and Ferro considers that a belief in any god, in the afterlife, in Purgatory and Paradise, are merely illusions we construct to make a painful life easier, to satisfy our guilt, our needs to have an “immediate way of propitiation.”

After Ferro and Grumley were diagnosed with AIDS, these questions of soul grew understandably more urgent, yet Ferro’s ability to resolve them grows weaker or, to be more precise, more complicated. His comment in The Family of Max Desir—that Paradise may resemble the rooms in Flying Down to Rio—indicates the campy terms in which he fended off the solemnity with which these issues are usually regarded. (Isherwood may have been of some help in establishing this particular tone of campy metaphysical discourse.)

In Second Son, Ferro’s last novel, the camping is quite pronounced. Mark Valerian and his lover Bill have both been stricken by “the Plague.” They are given two possible solutions. The first is an experimental drug treatment which uses antiviral elements in the blood of relatives with close DNA. The second is the rather fantastic Lambda Project, the creation of a spacecraft to take a select number of gay men to the planet Splendora near the star Sirius, where an advanced society of males may have found the cure. “I’m Sirius,” their friend, the author Matthew Black (modeled on Andrew Holleran), writes Mark and Bill. They reject the proposal, commenting on “just how dotty you are. Is it fear of It? Is it the horror of writing books? Middle age?” (170). Black replies, “You must at this point suppress an apparently universal prejudice, a cultural, religious, visceral feeling of skepticism, even cynicism regarding these matters: other planets, aliens, space travel, UFO-ology, science fiction” (186). The novel concludes neither with the suppression of skepticism nor its assertion. Mark and Bill enroll in the experimental treatment; Mark writes to their friend, “If I must believe something I believe that when it’s time for you to leave [for Splendora] we will be well again. And if we aren’t, then perhaps we can reconsider” (210). Mark places both scientific and the supernatural in the subjunctive. If he must believe, he will believe in medical science, but he doesn’t quite believe in it. In fact he isn’t certain that he must believe in anything. He is unsure whether believing in science or in the supernatural is anything but a safety hatch from the misery and death he and his lover are facing. Yet he also knows that without belief in the yet-as-not-real, there would be no scientific, social, or technological advances. As the narrator tells us in regard to Mark’s father, religion was “the great buttress of his own defense system” (21). Yet at the beginning of the novel Mark senses “the warp of experience folding back on itself, as did time, it was all on a great tape—racial memory, the Collective Unconscious” (17). This is as close as Ferro comes to the sense of this Isherwoodian ocean of consciousness.

Holleran, like Ferro, uses campiness to distance his metaphysical meditations from pomposity, piety, and solemnity. Yet Holleran, like Malone, absents himself from the frenzied hubbub of gay life on the circuit to go somewhere far down the beach to read the collected works of Saint Augustine (DFTD:216). It is hard to know how seriously to take Sutherland’s effusion at the end of the novel as he surveys the party he has arranged for Malone and John Schaeffer: “Forget the sheer style, and beauty … in this room. It’s all we’ll ever see of the Beatific Vision!” (227). In such passages, Holleran suggests the sanctification of the profane, a kind of eternal moment that elevates worldly experience into something greater. Yet Malone undercuts Sutherland, for “as a child Malone had consecrated his life to Christ; as an adult, to some adventurous ideal of homosexual love—well, both had left him flat.” Holleran holds out the possibility of a sacred epiphany, tentatively, then knocks it out of his own hands. In Nights in Aruba, Mister Friel, one of Holleran’s recurring figures, campily suggests like Ferro that religion may be an escape hatch to the existential absurdity of life. The monumental boredom of most people’s lives “only confirms,” for Friel, “Schopenhauer’s dictum that once a man is free of his material needs he is only confronted with the consciousness of life’s essential emptiness. … And where is the mother ship when we need it?” (95). Holleran even wonders whether the desire for religion isn’t some Oedipal backlash since “the child who senses that in a secular world of conspicuous sinners, the most rebellious thing he can do is to take religion seriously” (45).

Yet in Holleran’s latest novel The Beauty of Men (in many ways his darkest), the main character, Lark, is obsessed with the quotation of St. John that his roommate has attached by a magnet to the refrigerator door before committing suicide: “In the twilight of Life, there is only Love.” How does one interpret this message: the ironic denunciation of the most saccharine of platitudes? Or a heroic assertion at the very moment of despair? In a passage that recalls similar incidents in A Single Man where Isherwood invests the most abject bodily moments with metaphysical significance, Lark wakes at night to urinate: “Where’s God?” he wonders:

Isherwood provided the Violet Quill with a precedent it would find useful. First, I suppose, he provided a model of a gay writer who was out not because he was a source of scandal like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, or William S. Burroughs, or one who carried himself with a dignity that didn’t border on arrogance, like Gore Vidal. Isherwood presented his gayness, both in his fiction and his life, with a matter-of-factness that was entirely new. This matter-of-factness didn’t derive merely because he possessed the British stiff upper lip. Many of his British contemporaries never managed to gain the same balance of unself-consciousness and awareness. Indeed, I think the members of the Violet Quill, in part because they came to write at a time when sexuality was more highly politicized, never found the same assured perspective that organizes A Single Man. More than any other work before the Violet Quill, A Single Man discusses a gay man’s experience without apologetics or sexual titillation, as though the reader will regard this life as any other life—that is, as something unique in itself, as part of a class of similar lives, and as connected to all of human experience. George is neither a freak nor a blank, not a gargoyle nor an idealized figure.

It is important to see the Violet Quill as part of the project that informs A Single Man, however much the works differ, because readers have often mistaken the Violet Quill’s representation of a certain kind of gay life, indeed of individual gay lives, as attempts to represent the Gay Life. That was never its project. White’s States of Desire documents the variety of gay life that he was able to witness, and White is quite conscious of all the other various lifestyles he left out or didn’t see. Indeed, one of the revelations the characters have in Dancer from the Dance is that theirs is not the only way gay men live, that the circuit is not the fate of all gay men but a symptom of their limited imaginations. Malone and Sutherland are no more representatives of the Gay Life than Hamlet is a representative of Danish life, or George of California life. Readers may have wanted to find in the unnamed narrator of A Boy’s Own Story, the Ur-comingout tale, and indeed part of its commercial success is that so many readers did project their own lives onto this very precisely etched figure. But the narrator—unnamed though he may be—is not, nor ever was meant to be, an Everyboy. The singular indefinite article that begins the title, the A, should alert us that there are many boys, each with his own story to tell, just as George’s is A single life, and that there are many singular stories to be written. Furthermore—now that it is fashionable to flog the fiction of the seventies and eighties as being all about sex—by seeing this work as advancing from Isherwood, we can better note not the simple spiritual concerns of this work but the complex (and often ambivalent) ways it deals with spirituality. For Isherwood was the best example—but far from the only example—of how one could combine both spiritual and sexual concerns.

No writer exists in a vacuum. He or she is the product of a specific cultural context that influences and, to some extent, determines the kind of writing a person does. Yet the best writers have a capacity, however fleeting or subtle, to go beyond what has been done in the past and what can be explained by the historical and cultural context in which they worked, and produce something unprecedented, expanding the form and the resources of language. In the past, this was called genius, and because the very word with its Romantic exuberance sounds hollow on the postmodern ear, such a capacity for transcendence is thrown into doubt or denied. It is no surprise that the very idea of genius is scoffed at because it has through overuse become cheap and debased, a way of selling writing by mystifying what in reality is commonplace and banal. Furthermore, the unprecedented is less discernible in retrospect when the advances have been absorbed and already in need of shattering. We find ourselves in the position of the woman who didn’t like Hamlet because it was so full of clichés. And, finally, we may deny the existence of genius because its recognition underscores our own failures of transcendence. Since the unprecedented cannot be explained, only marveled at, its recognition requires a humility rare at any time, but particularly scarce today when commentators are competing for their own little spot in the intellectual food chain.