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

A gay man is a person who comes from someplace else. Or at least that’s how it used to be when gay men typically had to leave their hometowns behind to start new lives far from the families and social ties that threatened to restrict them. Today, for better or worse, gay groups are flourishing in suburbs and small towns as well as in big cities. But for the men who lived at the time of the Violet Quill, living as an openly gay person meant going to a big city—usually New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. The gay migration to coastal urban centers mirrors in some respects the vast African American migration to the North during and after World War II, when blacks from the rural South moved to industrial centers where they hoped to find better-paying jobs, more opportunities, and an escape from the Jim Crow laws that degraded them.

To be reborn, to be remade, to come out of the closet of our denial we must go away. … Gay liberation was, in this sense, no different from all the other subordinate-identity movements that have populated American history. Not only did we migrate to the great urban enclaves of the East and West Coasts as our immigrant forebears did. We even interpolated the metaphors of place and movement into a psychological praxis of gay identity. By “coming out” of our psychological closets we asserted a neat geography of identity. We visualized our psychic torment in clear, spatial terms. (28)

Browning celebrates the journey to the big city as a release from the “psychic torment” of small-town existence, but the journey also meant a terrible rupture in the lives of many gay men who had to leave everything they had known to re-create themselves. It split them from their roots, their families, their friends, and from those homosexuals whom they had left behind. As John Preston has written: “To be gay on Castro Street … meant severing connections with wherever one had come from. … He was expected to give his all to the new community” (Hometowns:xiii). In the early days of gay liberation, a great divide separated those homosexuals who left to make a life for themselves elsewhere and those who remained where they were born.

Everyone I knew was more or less closeted & spent a lot of time in the workaday world passing for straight. Save for a few artists & hairdressers & decorators & dancers, we were all terrified of being found out. … During one of my own terrified escapes [from a police raid], I was fleeing out the back when I saw a fat man I knew wedged in the bathroom window leading to the alley. The next day, his name appeared in the papers along with the names of the other men arrested in the raid—a couple of dozen all told, an average take. He was fired of course, & evicted from his apartment, & there was nothing he could do about it. (75)

Even in New York, an arrest record on morals charges usually meant the end of whatever career one had. One reason the June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn hit such a nerve for gay men was not that they wished to make bars safe for hustlers and drag queens, but that they didn’t want to put their careers and their homes on the line every time they entered a gay bar, since both jobs and homes were generally lost once their names made the newspapers. The real punishment for being in a gay bar was not the night in jail or the tiny fines that judges usually meted out, but the losses that followed from being “a known homosexual.” In fact, the hustlers and drag queens who started the Stonewall Riots had actually less to lose than those like Edmund White, who joined the fracas and might easily have been fired by Time/Life Books had he gotten stuck in a window.

In States of Desire (1980), White’s travel book of gay America, the divide between those gay men who stayed home and those who left is clearly drawn. For White it is the difference between those who have embraced “gay liberation” and those who have locked themselves into the closet mentality of the 1950s. The gay men of Kansas City “hate gay people,” by which they mean people who have failed so far to find a partner. Their entire lives are focused on courtship and forming a pseudo-heterosexual marriage of a particularly retrograde variety: a submissive younger man and the assertive older one. Unfortunately, even this stultifying arrangement didn’t bring security, for when the younger man grew too old—that is, past thirty—he was dropped for a younger one. For White, “The self-hatred that underlies this attitude is poisonous. This is a game in which everyone loses” (SOD:158). Worse still is that the gay man who finds himself unhappy with this way of life—and who could be content with it?—sees his unhappiness as a personal failing rather than as a social condition that needs correction. This is a culture where all economic and social questions are “reduced to issues of personality” and so you have only yourself to blame for any dissatisfaction (158). As a result, gay men of the heartland regarded gay liberation not just with contempt but with incomprehension; they clung to the world of the fifties in which they found pleasure in sneaking around and trying to pass—just the sort of things from which White wanted to free himself.

The men who made up the Violet Quill were part of the gay migration. Although the Violet Quill is inextricably linked to New York, only one of its members, Felice Picano, grew up in New York City. But the Queens communities in which his parents lived were psychologically and culturally as far away from the gay communities of Manhattan as the farm in Alabama from which Chris Cox hailed. Having grown up in Queens not far from one of the neighborhoods in which the Picanos lived, I know how invisible Manhattan could be even within the geographical borders of the city. Robert Ferro grew up in New Jersey, but in an environment, like so many suburban communities, which had turned its back on the big bad city even as it was anchored to it economically. The other members of the Violet Quill hailed from regions far more distant. Edmund White was born in Cincinnati (“the Queen City”), moved to Chicago as an adolescent, and spent long periods of time in rural Texas. Michael Grumley was born and raised in Lillienthal, Iowa. George Whitmore hailed from Denver. Andrew Holleran grew up in Aruba and Florida.

They were not, of course, the first writers to make this gay journey to New York. Before them had been Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes, Virgil Thomson, James Purdy, Glenway Wescott, Tennessee Williams, Frank O’Hara, Truman Capote, and Andy Warhol to name but a few. Coming to New York has been an inevitable move for virtually all gay American artists in the twentieth century since the city provided the anonymity necessary for sexual exploration, the stimulation needed for artistic development, the opportunity for performance, publication, and exhibition, and, finally, the community of other bohemian artists helpful in pursuing one’s art outside of commercial success.

The journey to Manhattan was the first journey that a gay writer needed to make, a journey that began with Walt Whitman. Things are different now. Gay writers are everywhere; indeed, L.A. writers have developed a different ethos than those from the Pacific Northwest. Gay literary Boston is different from gay literary San Francisco. But through the 1970s the field was much narrower. James Saslow, the art historian, who was for a time the New York correspondent for the Advocate, remarks that in the seventies he had the feeling that he either knew every gay person who was doing something important in the arts or was going to meet him. What looks like strange coincidences of literary history were really a function of the smallness of the gay literary world at the time. That the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Howard should meet Edmund White through a contact at the bars and find an editor for White’s first novel is not some wild stroke of luck but a conjunction bound to happen sooner or later. That Andrew Holleran’s gym buddy should be Larry Kramer, who assisted him in placing Dancer from the Dance, is again a perfectly reasonable happening. That Holleran, Robert Ferro, and Michael Grumley should meet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then end up in New York was an eventuality anyone could have easily predicted—if you were gay and a writer, you were not going to settle in Des Moines. You had no place else to go but New York or San Francisco.

In New York, as Edmund White points out, “there was a tradition … of honorable poverty amongst artists and intellectuals” that existed in few other places in America, a poverty which was not an obstacle to the homosexual (“American Sublime”:4). White reminds us that being gay and being an artist are both acts of rebellion in American society. “Perhaps in Europe, at least Catholic Europe, few artists would have felt they had to reject conventionality in order to make art. For them, high culture was—and is—all too annoyingly an ornament of the grande bourgeoisie. … Art was a national industry in most European countries, not a weird act of rebellion as in America” (4).

“What the fuck are we doing? What are we doing with our lives? I think about this all the time now and I can’t figure out what category I’m in.”

“Category?”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t have any money but I’m not poor. I have aspirations but they’re spiritual ones, not careers. I look around at how people are really living and I can’t identify. But when I turn on the TV I don’t understand that either. What the hell is going on, Killer?” I asked. “Who the hell do we think we are?”

“We’re bohemians,” she said. (29)

Schulman is forced to reach back to that nineteenth-century term to identify her particular band of lesbian activist-artists. What is a bohemian? After giving a definition of Bohemian (with a capital B) as a group of Czech dialects, my dictionary goes on to define the term (with a lower case b) as “Vagabond, wanderer … a writer or artist living an unconventional life.” Between these jumps in definition an entire cultural history has been written. What immediately concerns us is that the term appears repeatedly in the work of the Violet Quill. In Nights in Aruba Holleran writes: “I thought I was [in New York] because I was homosexual. This put me in the bohemian world, among certain aspects of behavior which perhaps might have been unthinkable had I been heterosexual. Sleeping with men was so radical a departure from my life I was brought up with that nothing it led me to surprised me in any way” (159). White uses the same term. The style of life he was developing in New York—“someone young, white, innocent, loving, and permissive, someone who drank wine and smoked pot, but avoided heroin, someone who put into spiritual practice the socialist injunctions against owning personal property”—was merely “a new eruption of the old bohemian spirit” (BRE:165–66). Bohemian is an interesting term, because it suggests not so much a fully formed ideology of the rejection of bourgeois values as a spirit of artistic liberty and libertinism—sex and art.

Chris Cox hoped to write a book about the famed Chelsea Hotel, where he lived for many years, and the book would have been a way to celebrate bohemianism in New York. In his thirty-page book proposal—he never got to write the book—he links the building with a bygone era of wealth and fame. A co-operative apartment building opened in 1883, it is, as he wrote, “the last word in Gilded Age opulence.” But it was more. It was begun “by a group of artists who wanted spacious studio accommodations in comfortable hotel surroundings.” Throughout its history, it catered to bohemians. After its grand beginnings, when it was home to such luminaries as Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, and O. Henry, it fell into a less lustrous state, at which point Brendan Behan, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, James T. Farrell, Willem De Kooning, and Larry Rivers lived there. More recently, Paul America (an Andy Warhol superstar), Janis Joplin, and Leonard Cohen were residents; but at the time Cox was writing, its most infamous recent resident had been Sid Vicious, who killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in the Chelsea. Cox’s initiation to the Chelsea occurred in the 1970s when, for two years, he worked for Virgil Thomson, cataloging Thomson’s papers. Thus, from the outset, the Chelsea was linked in Cox’s mind with bohemian life. Over its one hundred years of existence, the Chelsea Hotel, according to Cox, “has acquired a sort of raffish charm, composed in … equal parts of unconventional creative people, informality, tolerance [of] both sociability and solitude.” In the sixties it became known through Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls (1966), which showed “assorted drug addicts, freaks, and transvestites who were supposed to be residents of the hotel.” Sex, art, freedom from restraint, living a life beyond the American conventions and pieties—this is what the Chelsea Hotel meant to Christopher Cox. It’s a pity he never got the chance to write the book.

Although politically the most radical of all the members of the Violet Quill, Chris Cox was surprised in that era in which everything seemed possible that bohemianism didn’t come easily or without a fight. Perhaps the transformation that swept through Cox—who was also the youngest member of the group—came so rapidly that he hadn’t taken time to assess how difficult that would be to maintain. He started out in the best-little-boy-in-the-world mode, but in virtually every way he threw off the shackles of respectability. Raised in Gadsden, Alabama, in a socially and politically prominent family—George Wallace made his father a trustee of the University of Alabama—he became president of his high school senior class and the yearbook editor. At sixteen, he went to Washington to work as a page for the archconservative Sen. John Sparkman. Instead of confirming his sense of privilege, the experience radicalized him. When he entered the University of Alabama, he not only joined a fraternity but also founded the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), among the most radical student groups of the 1960s. He moved back to Washington to work for Robert Kennedy—who was much hated by whites in the South—on the very day Robert Kennedy was assassinated. He returned to Alabama, but at nineteen, “I decided to leave for New York—run away, to be exact. A lot of us were running away, dropping out and all that back then,” he wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch. He arrived in New York with $50 and the intention “to get into the theatre.”

I came to New York in the spring of 1969, when the sixties was breathing its last deep breath. BARS, GAY STUFF. A month later, I was at the Stonewall bar on Christopher Street the night the police raided it for the last time. It didn’t mean much to me; I was nineteen and I didn’t even know gay people had to fight for their rights. We skipped down to another bar, and later on, when we walked past Sheridan Square, we saw the huge crowd assembled outside the Stonewall in the dark. The drag queens were throwing bottles, making a fuss; people were chanting. It seemed like such a natural thing to happen that year. We were young and everything was changing so fast. It was a long sweet summer. HOTEL EMPIRE, DOG ON THE ROOF, HAVING ARRIVED WITH NO MONEY (YOU COULD DO THAT THEN, WHEN YOUNG PEOPLE COULD STILL COME TO NY). It seemed possible to live on nothing and to do everything and go everywhere; nobody seemed to worry about how to do it.

Turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, Cox finds in New York during the last gasp of the sixties that, although everything seemed possible and he could “do everything and go everywhere,” he hadn’t understood that “gay people had to fight for their rights” or perhaps that they had rights worth fighting for. He was to learn that necessity firsthand. He had already figured out how a penniless nineteen-year-old runaway could survive in New York. His appearance in the Stonewall, a notorious hangout for drag queens and hustlers, tells us that within a month of arriving Cox had found his way into gay life. Clearly, sex, politics, and art were intimately linked for him as part of his New York adventure.

In retrospect, my decision to move here looks as crazy to me as it did to my worried parents. Yet the same ineffable force pulled me to New York that had pulled countless westerners here before me. My experience[s] in this city, even in those grim years when it seemed New York was falling down around our heads, were not so different from the people before me. But of course, they were. My parents, who considered themselves great patriots, were even less sympathetic to my political stand than were strangers in New Hampshire. There was no place other than New York to go.”

No runaway making his money by hustling, Whitmore is concerned with how his principled resistance to the Vietnam War would be viewed not only by his parents but also by unsympathetic “strangers in New Hampshire.” This sensitivity to the feelings of others is reflected in the discrete logical gaps of this opening paragraph. Whitmore says that he came to New York ostensibly because it is the only place that would welcome conscientious objectors and provide them work, yet that couldn’t be the reason that “countless westerners” had settled in New York before him. Nor could pacifism alone be the “ineffable force” that drew so many for so long to the Big Apple. What he leaves unsaid is that coming to New York gave him a chance to come out. His move to New York “looks as crazy” to Whitmore only because he wants to hide not only from his patriotic parents and those strangers in New Hampshire but, most strenuously, from himself: his sexual motivation. Whitmore was the only member of the Violet Quill who came to New York relatively unconscious of his gay desires.

Tea Dance is the reason he moved to New York: one afternoon in 1970, visiting Fire Island with three other men from Philadelphia, he wandered out of their room at the Botel to dry his hair with a towel, looked down, and shouted, “Tommy! Come here!” Four hundred men stood beneath him on the wooden deck with glasses and bottles in their hands. No one was drinking tea. Only a fraction were dancing. But this was Tea Dance. He had never seen so many stunning homosexual men gathered in one space in his life. He thought: I must move into this city. (“Fire Island,” 305)

It’s not just the possibility of sex that makes Holleran decide to move to New York (although he is clearly excited by the beauty of the men he sees), but the possibility of community, so large a group together, talking, dancing, drinking.

He gives the characters in his novels similar, if not identical, histories. Unlike Holleran, Malone, the hero of Dancer from the Dance, loses his virginity before coming to New York; yet although Malone realizes that his “only hope … is with those men circling the fountain” (75) in Dupont Circle, he isn’t prepared to join them. It takes coming to New York on business to arrange “a promissory note for the Republic of Zaire.” The moment of epiphany—and I use the word in its theological as well as literary sense—comes when a messenger boy drops off Telexes from Malone’s boss in London.

That kiss—a kiss of life—releases him like some Sleeping Beauty from the living death in which he had been cast. Malone leaves his office and finds that “every street his taxi passed seemed to hold a terrible promise.” He goes to the Yale Club and writes a letter to his parents and the next day resigns from the law firm to “pursue a career in journalism” he tells them, but really “to pursue … a career in love” (77). Less overtly political than either Cox or Whitmore, Holleran nevertheless insists that to pursue “a career in love” requires dropping out of bourgeois careers and joining a bohemian community. New York, unlike Washington, is the place that careers in love are made.

Edmund White comes to live in New York in 1962, earlier than the other members of the Violet Quill. Having decided not to pursue graduate work in Chinese at Harvard, he followed to the city Stanley Redfern, a young actor whom he had met at the University of Michigan. What struck White most strongly when he arrived in New York was the existence of a gay community. To be sure, that community was rigid, self-hating, and strife-torn but, nevertheless, it was—unlike Chicago—a community that has nonsexual interests. On his first night in New York, he is taken to a gay restaurant. “I had heard of gay baths,” he writes, “and been to gay bars, but a gay restaurant sounded unexpectedly civilized as though there were something to gay life beyond sex and cruising for sex” (SOD:251). Today, when the phrase “gay liberation” is so often attacked as an ideology whose only concern is promiscuity, it is important to remember that for White and the men of the Violet Quill an essential part of gay liberation was freeing the community from its self-destructiveness so that it could concentrate on something “beyond sex and cruising for sex.” It meant, particularly, creating space other than bars where gay men could gather safe from police.

In The Beautiful Room Is Empty, the events are heightened, so that the narrator witnesses something more dramatic than merely a gay restaurant. Having arrived in New York with his older friend Lou, the narrator strolls down Sixth Avenue and stops before the Women’s House of Detention (which has since been torn down and the lot turned into a park beside the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library). From the sidewalk, a woman is calling up, “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save yo’ love for mama.” Lou responds: “Look, at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah! … It’s so beautiful, this poetry of gay life” (163). They continue on down the east side of Sixth Avenue, but when they don’t see any gay men, they cross back and instantly discover

what Lou called the “cha-cha queens, hairburners, and glandular cases.” A hissing trio like rattled snakes in an agitated basket were hanging out on a stoop, their lips flecked with foam. Another pair were dancing in the water of an open fire hydrant, shirts tied to expose their tummies. Lou is in delirium: “Bunny we’re home, you can press your ear to the pavement, and hear the heartbeat,” and even though he made me feel such a prig, my heart did leap at all the possibilities this city offered to meet men. Before, I’d caught only half glimpses of queers, but like a hunter who pursues his deer deep into the night forest, at last I’d come upon a moon-lit clearing filled with thousands of moving antlers, all these men.” (The Beautiful Room Is Empty, 164)

Too scared to celebrate out loud this “poetry of gay life,” the unnamed narrator leaps at the possibilities the city holds. Still ashamed of his sexuality, he resists feeling at home, but he can’t resist the city’s enchantment or those hard and upturned antlers waiting for him to mount.

A distinction needs to be made between having sex with men and finding a place to be gay. White, Cox, Holleran, Ferro, and Grumley all had sex with other men before settling in New York, but only when they came to New York did they feel free to become part of a gay community. Indeed, they became part of that important social phenomenon—the creation of a gay community. For as John Preston notes in his introduction to Hometowns, a collection of essays dedicated to the problem of making a place for gay men: “Those exiled souls who moved to New York, San Francisco, Paris … coalesced into a community of their own. They became something more than the accumulation of individuals, they formed a social structure for themselves that meant they had a new hometown. Having been thrown out of one tribe, they created their own new tribe” (xii). Of course, for Felice Picano the problem was more complicated. As the only member of the Violet Quill to grow up in New York, he had to leave Manhattan to start his gay life. Although he had sex with other boys for many years, he traveled to Rome, of all place, “to become homosexual” (MWLM:22).

My own experience was similar to Picano’s. I came to Baltimore in 1972, directly from college, having grown up in one of the neighborhoods at the very borderline of New York City. I am sure that my coming out would have been far more difficult and protracted had I stayed in New York. In Baltimore I knew no one and so was able to assemble an entirely new set of friends. Strangely enough, Baltimore had been a place where many people had come in order to experience gay life. It was the city to which good Southern families sent their black sheep, since it was as far north as they could be and still reside below the Mason-Dixon line. Many of these Southerners had first come to the city to “attend” Sheppherd-Pratt, the famous psychiatric hospital at the city’s edge. The authorities as Sheppherd-Pratt were among the first to stop treating homosexuality as a disease, but they did help people with their drinking problems. I knew several gay men who had first dried out at Sheppherd-Pratt before becoming part of the gay community. The saddest men at the bars in 1972 were the men who grew up in Baltimore. They lived in fear or in disgrace since the newspapers still printed the names of those arrested for minor “morals” crimes; and although the courts had ruled that it was illegal to arrest men for dancing together, the police still came into the bars trying to collar people for other offenses to decency. Memories were still fresh about men who had committed suicide when their families and neighbors were about to learn they were gay from some article in the Sun, Baltimore’s leading daily.

When we consider the effect of New York for the Violet Quill and their generation of gay men, we must recognize that some of its liberating qualities comes from the fact that it was not their hometown. To be gay and to be home are two radically different things for these writers. As John Preston writes: “There was no way for a gay man to have a hometown and still be honest with himself. He had to hide his social and sexual proclivities, or else he had to give up communal life in pursuit of them” (Hometowns:xii). No one explores that difference as thoroughly as does Andrew Holleran.

Holleran’s highly autobiographical novels make New York a central character much more than a setting. For Holleran, the city has a life more vital and complex than the people who inhabit it. He arrived in New York in the midst of “an historical moment,” a period that would change American society, what he called “The Age of the Clone, 1971–79 AD” (“My Harvard”:8–9). In an essay about his education, he muses about the waste of time he spent at college and graduate schools and how badly they prepared him for life as a gay man. “I sometimes wish I’d never gone to Harvard, had moved right to a city like New York, say, right after high school” (7).

Yet in the course of Holleran’s writing career, his attitude toward New York changed. In Dancer from the Dance, Holleran’s misgivings about the city’s cruelty and indifference are more than offset by its energy, beauty, opportunity, and romance. But by the time he came to write Nights in Aruba, he sees the city as less romantic and life-giving. The narrator, Paul, views being in New York as an escape from not only the bourgeois life but the success expected of him. New York offers a way to hide the seemingly inevitable failure to meet familial expectations.

If in Dancer from the Dance, Malone goes to New York to draft a promissory note for the Republic of Zaire, Paul in Nights in Aruba believes he’s entered the heart of darkness itself, the colonial outpost where one can, on the pretext of finding riches, actually succeed in disappearing in the pursuit of outlawed love. Paul knows what it means to be a colonial, having grown up, as Holleran had, in Aruba where the privilege of power is purchased at the expense of belonging. By referring to himself as a colonial, Holleran emphasizes the way that the gay migration to the city is simultaneously an act of disengagement from middle-class attitudes and a capitulation to them. For the gay colonial is punished for his sexual transgressions even as he escapes to sexual freedom. He is both sexual exile and pilgrim.

Along with representing an escape from bourgeois notions of success, New York is also a way of being “confronted with the consciousness of life’s essential emptiness” (95). For Holleran, being a gay man—which is to live for the love and beauty of other gay men—means moving not just into different cities but into a different class. Where straight men sublimated their erotic energy into business, commerce, economic success, gay men act on it directly. Holleran isn’t able, as White is, to celebrate the bohemianism of being a gay writer. Like Whitmore, who was concerned about offending his patriotic parents, Holleran struggles with his rebellion against bourgeois values. He keeps bohemian life a secret from those back home. Indeed, leaving home was the tactful strategy to maintain the impression of normality and the family’s reputation. In one of those perverse reversals in American life, Holleran hid from his mother the fact that he was a celebrated author because he was afraid of her reaction to the contents of his books. Being thought a complete failure was, he imagined, preferable to being a gay writer.

The men in Nights in Aruba go to excruciating lengths to protect their families from knowledge that might hurt them. They live a “double life,” and although the New York life loves hearing about family back home, the life back home knows almost nothing about New York. “So shrouded in mystery was my [gay] life,” Paul tells us, “that when we went to a coffee shop during my parents’ visit to New York one day, my mother gave me a quarter to put in the jukebox and said, ‘I want to hear what you like.’” But even this avenue of communications is closed to the parents since the music that Paul likes is “black music played in homosexual clubs … which seldom surfaced on the radio, much less the jukebox of hotel coffee shops—so we sat there listening to Carole King sing ‘It’s Too Late, Baby’ as we ate our pancakes, and I hoped she would not read anything into the lyrics” (102). Parental visits are a horror for Paul, who fears he’ll bump into someone he knows, and so he inflicts on his parents a relentless tour of “all the beads of the tourist’s Rosary,” which leaves him agonized with guilt for his “cruelty” and “inhospitality.”

In Holleran’s fiction, New York is viewed from the perspective of the rural South, where Holleran has actually lived more or less full time since 1983. Dancer from the Dance begins with an exchange of letters in which the narrator tells us he has moved to Florida. In The Beauty of Men, New York is glimpsed in flashbacks. In Nights in Aruba, there is a vertiginous shift between Jasper (Florida) and the Big Apple, each maintained in splendid isolation from the other. For Holleran, the journey to New York always presupposes the journey away from New York. The colonial is not an immigrant—immigrants, after all, move permanently to their new homes—but a resident alien, to use Quentin Crisp’s pointed phrase, a temporary if long-term dweller who will eventually move on.

In all of Holleran’s work, hometown and gay ghetto are kept rigidly apart. He is just as careful to ward off all traces of New York on his visits home as he is to keep his parents, when they visit New York, away from his gay friends. After his first trip back home, he tartly comments on the gulf that yawned between his mother and him: “We were different now: I had a secret, and she had a new cashmere coat” (57). However, he finds keeping the two worlds distinct a difficult task, made harder by the fact that his closest friend in New York, Vittorio—an even more closeted and conservative homosexual than Paul—also has parents living in Jasper.

Vittorio and Paul make every effort so that it doesn’t “begin to show,” but it is impossible. One danger comes from out-of-town visitors. When an Englishman and “some guy who was in a Fassbinder film” threaten with a visit, Vittorio is relieved when “they got sick in Miami—some fever—and one of them died” (165). When Paul is threatened by a similar visit from New York friends, he rails against the “collision of [his] two selves.” “Why should I submit myself to this?” he asks himself. “Why can’t I say no? Why does he insist on coming by?” (165). But it’s not just the appearance of a flaming queen that can tip people off; even small, seemingly innocuous, activities can be dangerous signs of homosexuality. During another visit to Jasper—and his visits grow longer and more frequent as his parents become frailer and less able to take care of themselves—he tries to keep in shape. But his father is “furious.” His mother reports, “He wants to know what a man your age is doing practicing handstands” (160).

Paul and Vittorio’s desire to find a gay community in rural Florida is only halfhearted. When they read a personals ad from two lovers living near Jasper, who are looking for “a third partner,” they ride out to the “tiny town in which the postmistress said Box 569 could be found.” What they discover is a black box with no names. Vittorio decides it’s a bad sign (“Like someone in New York with an unlisted phone number, the person is either fleeing a credit card company or has delusions of grandeur”), and they drive back. Paul concludes: “Now this just shows how impossible it is to be homosexual in the country. So much for my dream of love under the live oaks” (172).

Why do Vittorio and Paul expend so much energy at keeping Jasper and New York separate when such a separation flies in the face of Paul’s expressed desire “to unite the two: my past family and the one I was hoping to establish [in New York]” (107)? As the novel goes on, the more obvious reasons drop away. Paul’s mother seems particularly at home with gay men; indeed, she has real potential as a fag hag. Nor are Vittorio’s and Paul’s parents particularly concerned with their sons’ worldly success. “Years ago my mother wanted me to be President,” Vittorio comments. “Now all she wants me to do is sit with her when she watches Love Boat” (224). Nor can they claim that keeping their sexuality secret from their parents is based on the bad experiences their friends have had. To the contrary, the results of such disclosures have led—if not to active vocal support—at least to quiet acceptance. One mother tells her son, “It’s not so bad. Look at the bitch your brother married.” Another interrupts her son with, “There are things a mother has a right not to know.” Still a third, a childhood friend of Paul, is told, “Oh, good. We were afraid you didn’t know” (103–104).

I jumped up from the sofa, said “No! Of course not!” in a voice as sharp as my father’s when he was angry, and left the room. My heart hammered as I stood in the kitchen, however, thinking of the scene in the Gospels in which Peter denies knowing Christ when the woman asks him if she had not seen him with the Galilean. The comparison was disproportionate but in a sense exact: for if the Gospels told us one would have to leave one’s family to follow Christ, the curious thing was that loving men had the same effect. Had I not converted my hopes from celestial to earthly ones, exchanged Christ for the boy at the baths? (Nights in Aruba, 156)

This incident (taken from Holleran’s life) is a central one for the novel, and the analogy that he draws between Peter’s denial of Jesus and Paul’s denial of homosexuality may be “exact” in several paradoxical ways. The analogy equates both the devotion to Christ and a devotion to homosexuality as spiritual callings—Christ on the cross and the boy in the baths are not only objects of equal veneration, requiring similar disciplines of denial and pain, but also they are both a means to salvation. Following Christ and following the boy in the baths both require leaving the family behind, but they can’t both be good. Thus New York and Jasper are kept apart just as the sacred and the profane are isolated one from the other for fear that contact with the profane will corrupt the sacred. Holleran’s problem—the problem that animates so much of his books—is his inability to be certain of which is sacred and which profane.

I should point out that the importance of the journey to the big city is not especially an invention of gay writers or of gay experience. It is part of the structure of one of the oldest forms of the novel—the bildungsroman. Nights in Aruba looks like it should be a bildungsroman, a novel of education, which charts, according to one standard literary reference, “the development of the protagonist’s mind and character, as he passes from childhood through varied experiences—and usually through a spiritual crisis—into maturity and the recognition of his identity and role in the world” (Abrams:113). The bildungsroman follows its hero on a journey into adulthood, and quite frequently the hero is a young man from the provinces who makes his way, with the assistance of the women he loves, to the city, where he can advance a career at the center of culture, society, and power. There certainly is a kind of education that Holleran’s novels record: “There was a sense of learning new codes, living in New York as a gay man; of going to school all over again in a society which did not recognize the diploma you earned” (“My Harvard”:8). But there is nothing progressive or gradual in this movement. Holleran’s characters don’t journey to New York so much as they impale themselves on it, and then, just as abruptly, disappear from it. Recalling in one essay an incident that is retold in Nights in Aruba, Holleran writes:

New York, which is a metonym for Gay Life, is not a process or a journey but a state-of-being—just as Jasper is not a process but a self-enclosed world. It strikes me that Holleran keeps them radically opposed in order to keep them complete, unified, and therefore sacred. They need each other, as oscillating polarities in some quantum equation of the soul. As long as they are states, rather than processes; as long as they are absolutes removed from a dialectic that could produce a new synthesis, they exist in a timeless realm in which death—if not banished—is at least kept at bay. As long as Jasper can be pitted against New York, Paul can maintain the illusion that nothing has changed or can change—he lives in an eternal war of contraries. Sometimes he presents himself as a man who is passing through a series of experiences that should lead to his development, but in fact, he does not change; he merely oscillates, tormented and enraptured by both.

In September, the Light Changes contains a story entitled “A Sentimental Education,” Holleran’s tribute to Flaubert’s novel of the same name. He summarizes Flaubert’s novel as “the story of two friends who move to Paris from the provinces, take lovers, start a magazine, go to parties, and then return home, years later … older and different men.” But it’s not just the plot that bears a striking resemblance to Nights in Aruba, it’s the ethos of “just one damn thing after another” that the two have in common (ISLC:107; italics in original). Things happen, but there is no direction to this movement, no clear purpose that is being fulfilled or frustrated. Nights in Aruba is a bildungsroman in the same way Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is a bildungsroman—a work whose one lesson is that there is no lesson to be learned.

Because Holleran’s Nights in Aruba seems suspended against the very notion of time, and since without time there can be no plot of development, the novel is a very strange thing indeed. One might say that, for Holleran, place serves as a substitute for time, and that we only know time through changes of place. At the end of the novel, Holleran tries to joke about its enormously strange structure: “I am certain,” he writes, “that even death would provide no illumination—that we died ignorant, confused, like novelists who cannot bring an aesthetic shape to their material” (NIA:239). But the struggle of Nights in Aruba is to put off a conclusion as long as possible—to undermine any sense of shape that would lead to closure, to elaborate upon mutually exclusive positions in a manner so baroque that one can avoid coming to any point. Holleran’s self-admitted dream is to write a work as long, as self-enclosed, as exquisite as Proust, where only the faintest threads of plot give the illusion of the passage of time, but which is sustained by an unaltering and constantly fascinating voice. The elegiac tone of all of Holleran’s writings provides a ruse to give the illusion that the narrator is concerned with time past. But the true subject of Holleran’s novels is always the moments of iteration—the speaker talking on and on, like one of Beckett’s characters. It is like the sex in Nights in Aruba. For all the talk, we rarely see anyone getting laid. What concerns most of the characters is romantic yearnings for an inaccessible object of desire (and the objects they find are far too accessible to fill the bill). Orgasms would mean an end to this tension. Even foreplay suggests a before and after. But as long as the physical act can be postponed, as long as the narrative of lovemaking can be delayed, Holleran can maintain the sense that there is no past and no future. This postponement of sexual rapture and fulfillment is taken to its neurotic and logical extremes in The Beauty of Men, in which the narrator is torn between caring for his paralyzed mother and pursuing Becker, a man who already has a lover and shows no interest in the narrator. In neither case—the Oedipal romance of the mother or the unrequited romance of Becker—is there any hope of fulfillment, which is why they are so satisfying, or at least sustaining. The book ends, as it began, at the boat ramp—a pickup point in the Florida swamplands—but with the mother dead, and Becker having humiliated his unsought admirer.

For all their love of New York, the Violet Quill writers maintain a certain desire to leave the city, and it is telling that of the three surviving members of the group, only Edmund White, after a long period of living in Paris, has returned there. George Whitmore admits in his journal (12/25/84) that “I am a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, have been for many years now,” yet he was continually searching for some place quieter where he might live in peace—he considered Ireland or England as (NIA:232).alternatives, but he always returned to New York. The other members of the Violet Quill weren’t looking toward Europe for quiet, however; what they wanted was release from the puritanism of American life. As Felice Picano has written in Men Who Loved Me: “I’d come to Europe only partly to get away from social work and New York City. My real reason had been deeper, more insidious: to break all my ties with the past—and to become homosexual. I longed for this, knew with naïve certainty it would only happen outside of my home ground” (22). The ironies of this declaration are significant. As a first-generation American, Picano, one might say, is hardly breaking “all [his] ties with the past” as he returns to Italy; indeed, it could be argued he is returning to the very “home ground” he thinks he is escaping. Yet the Italy of the 1960s—and it is Italy that so many of the Violet Quill first visit—does not feel like home. Like so many sons of immigrants, Picano is thoroughly Americanized. His Italian is “imprecise … flavored with college French and Spanish, which I knew far better” (MWLM:43). French is the language of culture; Spanish the language of the new immigrant classes. Italian has fallen between the cracks. Then there is the tension between his naïveté, on the one hand, and his insidiousness and certainty on the other. He is naïve both in the sense that he is morally innocent and unknowing—he neither is a homosexual nor does he know how to become one—and yet he has his insidious intent and certainty that in Europe he will gain the knowledge to become gay. Picano’s idea of Europe—like so many of the Violet Quill’s notions—could have come from Henry James, for whom Europe is the place that unfetters the inhibitions that keep Americans from experiencing life and where wickedness is in direct proportion to knowledge of the human heart. The European, as Picano tells us, “possessed all knowledge, all culture” while the American was a “barbarian” (MWLM:59). You go to Walden to discover whether you can survive alone; you go to Rome or Venice, Paris or London, to learn how to take pleasure with others.

Roman Fever, as Edith Wharton shows us, always threatens the Roman holiday. You can find love among the ruins, but you can also find the ruins of love. Yet for the American who is both naïve and insidious, getting lost is, in fact, the point. Like Daisy Miller, Picano sets out to the Coliseum (by the sixties—the era of La Dolce Vita—a notorious gay cruising ground) but may or may not arrive there. As in James, the European presents both an opportunity and a temptation to the curious American. It brings him knowledge of good and evil by tempting him with both. It unsettles the certainty of the American naïf and can destroy him by placing him into contact with forces he (or she) little understands or controls. “Free, impatient, bored”—this is the unstable mixture that can explode into both creative opportunity and destructive obsession.

Insidious, sinister are the words Picano uses to describe his desire to be in Rome and the effects Rome has on him. The root of insidious comes from the Latin word for ambush and the French for sitting on or in. No wonder Picano walks the streets of Rome, impatiently, because he is afraid that by sitting he’ll be ambushed by the very thing he desires. Having come to Europe to escape that workaday goal-directed world of his past, he ironically feels threatened by his seeming lack of direction and afraid he might be lost, a word loaded with theological and psychological implications. For Ferro—as we will see—as for Picano, getting lost is the prerequisite for being found.

Of course, if creative opportunity and destructive obsession were easily distinguished, Europe would be less interesting and more easily managed for the insidiously naïve American, and less productive for the gay writer. Because they bleed into one another, they pose the kind of tantalizing problem that makes them worth exploring. In his first weeks in Italy, Picano is asked, “What’s your ambition?” His answer, “Sometimes I think it’s writing. But first I have to live, I guess” (MWLM:53). For the writers of the Violet Quill, Europe offered the chance to become a writer because it gave them space to live, which is to say to be “free, impatient, bored”—in other words, to fall in love.

The same sort of language is repeated in Robert Ferro’s account of going to Europe in The Family of Max Desir and in The Blue Star. Like Picano, Ferro came from an Italian American family, only his family remained far more in touch with Europe. Ferro first comes to Europe in 1962 as a junior in college. The trip, as recorded in Max Desir, is not without its homosexual incident, in which Max goes back to a man’s hotel room for the night, but “they did not actually have sex beyond frottage” (53). Frottage is not really having sex, for Max or for Ferro. It remains on the surface; what counts is penetration, whether anal or oral, because—quite literally—it gets beneath the skin. In short, it has psychologically significance. Thus when Max returns to Europe, he regards himself as still someone who has not experienced gay sex.

The day after his graduation from college Max returned to Italy, to Florence, which he had seen the summer before, entering the city as if on the trail of closely interpreted clues left for him by something outside himself. He had come to write but arrived to find he had nothing to write about, that his ideas and experiences were banal and frivolous—frivolous in the wrong way. Each night, too warm and too exhilarated to sleep, he took walks through the narrow, benign, empty streets. … He made the connection between dissatisfaction over his writing attempts and the quality of his experience. He had put himself in the wrong places, learned the wrong attitudes—about himself, so that he didn’t know who he was; about his education, so that he hadn’t learned anything; and about sex. At twenty-two … he was still a virgin. (The Family of Max Desir, 54–55)

Like Picano, Max Desir is a flaneur, walking in a desultory way through the city, “free, impatient, bored.” Like Picano, Max understands that to write he must live, improve “the quality of his experience.” For both men, that means experiencing sex in a way that it penetrates their defenses. But whereas Picano knows that what he wants is to become a homosexual, Ferro, in the guise of Max Desir, hides from the very truth he longs for. It is only through self-deception that he can learn the truth, only by convincing himself that the key is without can he open the doors within.

The strange, subconscious way sexual desire is experienced is highlighted even more clearly in The Blue Star, which begins by retelling the same narrative recorded in The Family of Max Desir. The narrator, a young American, comes to live in Florence to write. At the hotel where he stays (associated, significantly, with E. M. Forster), he meets Rashid, “A Moroccan homosexual … exotic and effeminate, the first such person I had ever seen at close range” (BS:7). The narrator knows that he is not like Rashid, “but I was not completely unlike him.” In that double negative lies the resistance to self-knowledge. Finally, in one of his evening walks through Florence, he encounters Rashid.

Rashid looked at me strangely and said, “Are you drugged?”

“No,” I said firmly.

Then what was it, Rashid wanted to know. “Are you in love? Are you with child? I can always tell.”

“I’m free,” I said rather simply.

“Well, you have the strangest look in your eyes,” Rashid said. “I suppose it might be freeness.”

“Freedom,” I corrected.

“You mean, of course, freedom to chase men,” he went on, with a great cheap wryness. … Regarding me speculatively, he said, “In Morocco they would take you like a ripe melon. Wait … they will come to you.” (The Blue Star, 8)

The journey to Europe offers freedom to the American, but it is not clear what sort of freedom. Rashid’s term freeness takes the word away from its political connotation and makes it sexual. The narrator wants to correct his error, but in fact Rashid has spoken correctly. What the narrator desires is the “freedom to chase men,” which he cannot do in the States. Of course, it is the “exotic” Rashid who can see through the narrator’s high-sounding term to the cruder truth that motivates the narrator. It is the decadence of Europe that allows such freeness without the fearful liberties of Morocco, where the men would take him like a ripe melon, just as Sebastian Venable is consumed by the waifs in Suddenly Last Summer. The usefulness of Europe for Ferro (and for the American imagination since James) is that it stands at the midpoint between the puritanical strictures of the States and the heart of darkness of the undeveloped world: not quite horrible but suitably decadent—loose without being amorphous. Thus it allows a freedom that the United States as leader of the Free World cannot allow. The very ambiguity and fluidity of experience in Europe is what makes it so valuable for the writer: destabilizing puritanical perceptions so that new experiences can penetrate the well-defended psyche and make it into the stuff of fiction.

In one of the more successful passages in Atlantis, Michael Grumley shows how Europe is transformed before the eyes of the American gay writer. According to Grumley, three sorts of flowers cover the Spanish Steps in Rome. “The first is one of living flowers, coddled in separate gardens throughout Rome.” The second kind of flowering is artistic—the paintings of sidewalk artists “with tack-boards filled with press clippings,” who “stand at various levels on the steps turning their canvases this way and that in the sun for buyers and tourists.”

Nature is changed into art, which, in turn, is transformed into heightened sexuality. The fluidity of reality on the Spanish Steps cultivates not les fleurs du mal but the “true flowers of Rome,” which include baby-hustlers and budding drag queens. If the passage possesses an almost cinematic vividness—the Felliniesque view of La Dolce Vita—perhaps it is because Grumley (like Picano) was involved in Italian moviemaking, having appeared in a few cheap spaghetti westerns and sword-and-sandal gladiator flicks churned out at Cinecittá, and, indeed, is waiting to hear at the outset of Atlantis whether he has gotten a supporting role in a Napoleonic epic to be shot in Rome. History is thus quickly recast in the lurid terms of Technicolor melodrama, the astringencies of military life redefined by the decadent sexual heart of the Eternal City.

Perhaps there is no better example of how going to Europe is a necessary step in becoming a writer than Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search (1970), the first book published by members of what a decade later would become the Violet Quill. Jointly written by Ferro and Grumley, it records their decision to follow up leads from astrologers, tarot readers, and Edgar Cayce in search of the lost continent of Atlantis. The book begins in Rome, travels to the States, and ends in Bimini, off the coast of Florida, where they discover either an enormous stone wall or a road, which they believe is at the very least proof of a preclassical culture in the Americas.

The strangest part of Atlantis is that the discovery of “Atlantis” plays so small a role in the book. In a volume of only 168 pages, it comes on page 151, and the narrative lasts a mere half dozen pages. Ferro himself reports that “Michael and I had never looked for or found anything. And so of course finding these rocks had seemed ridiculously easy. As a child, one had spent more time looking for Easter eggs, and with much less success” (156). Neither Ferro nor Grumley had any training as archaeologists, and they quickly realize they are in no position to analyze or document the discovery. Even the cameras they use to photograph the site fail them; others took the pictures that appear in the book. In all, Ferro and Grumley spend only two days at “Atlantis,” even though it is the ostensible subject of the trip. As they admit (as soon as two of their women companions leave), “the expedition was for us officially ended” (157). Clearly it is not Atlantis itself that excites their imagination. The book ends in a curious section I quote in full:

We left the sea wall, then, not very long after we found it. For two more months we lingered in the Bahamas, and then, having been unable to do any more in the way of group exploration of the Bimini site, we returned up the Waterway to Brielle, New Jersey, arriving there May 3.

Some few days after our return, we were asked to lunch by an editor who had read a New York Times article about us, and was interested in our trip. A few days later we were asked to write a nonfiction account of it by that same editor.

And we have and this is it.

The search autobiographically recorded in Atlantis is, I would argue, only superficially the search for Atlantis, which occupies so little interest for them that it is exhausted in no time. The true goal of Ferro and Grumley, those two graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was, finally, to get their names on the front jacket of a book, at last to become authors. Ferro wrote Holleran that he had “learned so much from the experience (including the art of parenthesis), but if I were pushed to pinpoint the single most exciting moment of the trip, discovery, and ensuing ramifications, I would say it was the first five minutes of holding the book’s galleys in my hands—that, my dear, was the real discovery” (VQR:20). The real goal of the journey was not archaeological but literary. The Violet Quill went to Europe first to become homosexual, and then—having improved the quality of their experience—to become writers. In some sense, acting on their homosexual desires was merely a way of developing material for their writing; they become gay in order to write.

But for Ferro and Grumley the relationship between writing and sex was even more intimately connected. Writing Atlantis together was the way (before gay unions) to join their names, not on a marriage certificate but on the cover of a book, which, in some ways—as the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum has argued—involved them not merely in marriage but in parenthood as joint fathers of the enfant volume. Although in Atlantis they never discuss that they are lovers, there is an intimacy about their relationship that is decidedly homosexual. The photo on the back of the book, taken in Rome by their friend Richard de Combray, shows two darkly handsome young men in what seems to be an alley or a room completely walled in rough masonry. Ferro, bearded, is standing against the wall, his hands behind him; Grumley is at arm’s length from the wall, his arm outstretched, supporting his body, his wrist and forearm grazing the top of Ferro’s shoulder. It is not an embrace, but it is contact—as if the camera caught them in the early stages of a pickup.

But if Picano and Ferro, the two Italian American members of the Violet Quill, come to Italy for love and sex, their response to European men is very different. Picano meets in a café late one night both Angel, an American weight lifter trying to make his way into Italian gladiator movies by showing off his rippling muscles between fits of narcolepsy, and Djanko, a Yugoslav movie producer who “looked like a fashion plate from Gentleman’s Quarterly” (MWLM:58). But although Angel had “pinwheel periwinkle-blue eyes, [an] astonishing expanse of flesh, pectorals like dinner plates, waist-sized biceps, [and] tree-trunk thighs” (45), he can’t compete with Djanko, for Djanko “completely … filled some idealized portrait of the European Man I’d developed, without ever being fully aware of it.” Picano’s sense of the European Man is not his own construction but something built up “over the years from various foreign films I’d seen, from glossy, glamorous, full-color ads in The New Yorker and Esquire, where men … stood aloof, a slight smile on their faces, as someone held their polo pony” (48). Faced with a choice between Marcello Mastroianni and Steve Reeves, Picano has no trouble selecting whom he wants.

What is the European Man? As Picano’s description suggests, he is wealthy, aristocratic—polo after all is the sport of the aristocracy—he holds himself apart with a wry, knowing smile both seductive and world-weary. The European Man is a person who, unlike the sinister, naïve American, is sophisticated and fatalistic, whose touch is a bit dry and cool. Djanko tells Picano that one of them will hurt the other and that he hoped Picano would leave first. When Picano cries out: “Why even talk like that? … So negative.” Djanko replies, “Because I’m a European. What choice do I have?” (MWLM:61).

Ferro, in contrast, doesn’t seem to have the same attraction to the European Man. To be sure, Max Desir loses his virginity to a Florentine who could “play young tourists like piccolos,” a simile with all sorts of erotic suggestion, but the liaison does not blossom into passion. Max and his seducer become only friends who sleep together “as a matter of local custom” (FMD:55). The seducer in The Blue Star is treated even more roughly. He is, in the mind of the mature narrator, “a kind of provincial boy-chaser preying on tourists just outside his door.” Yet the provincial boy-chaser is no country bumpkin in bed. “That night he gently took me to bed and caressed and kissed me—not the approximation or imitation of lovemaking, but the real thing, ending in a physical connection that I had no inkling was possible between men” (BS:13). More important, his seducer introduces Max to the homosexual circuits of the city where the street life “was so extensive.” Max finds his way to “a higher, more exalted set of homosexuals who emerged from and disappeared into the gardens of the aristocracy in the hills toward Pisa” where “stories of life at court” were exchanged “for sex and street gossip—the titled queens and the working class” (FMD:56). Max exhibits a previously unexhibited democratic zeal and rejects the titled queens. He was “not attracted to the ones with manners and rich families—effeminate complications absent in the working class” (57). But then again, it is perhaps that these men aren’t rich or powerful enough for young Max, who seems to be delighted to be helped by the sister of the President of Italy. In any event, although Max seems quite happy to be “quite the little whore” with the willing locals, his heart is won by Nick Flynn, whom he meets in the shower in prison, where Max has been placed while he awaits trial for having sex with an undercover cop. Nick Flynn “was taller, bigger, finer than any one in the [shower] room, in such a way as to seem better fed, on superior food, fresh milk and meat and garden fruit—an American college boy” (62). Whereas Picano finds the ostentatiously muscled Angel vulgar and boring, Max is attracted to the sheer meatiness of the American. He wants none of those skinny Italian men subjected in their childhood to postwar food rationing. Only someone brought up on the pure products of America—a homegrown boy fed on good ol’ American grub—will do.

It’s not that Picano doesn’t register the differences in European and American body types; rather he gives Djanko the task of commenting on how “small and old” Europeans look compared to Americans, who seem like the heroes “in the Greek legends my father told me … the new conquerors of the world” (MWLM:59). Picano isn’t as interested in the supermen of the New World as he longs for the suave cultivation of the European whose serenity comes from having assimilated and mastered the history and achievements of Western Civilization.

Ironically, although Picano was and continues to be devoted to European culture—with White and Holleran, he places the European literary achievement as the model—he lived in Europe relatively briefly; whereas Ferro and Grumley spent a quarter of the year—usually each spring—in Rome until the end of their lives when they were too ill to travel. I suspect that Ferro’s more matter-of-fact attitude to Italy and Italian men comes from his greater familiarity with them and his contempt for minor aristocrats a result of too many dull evenings spent in their company.

Being “free, impatient, and bored”—Picano’s terms for the American’s condition in Europe—could also describe Andrew Holleran’s account of being a soldier stationed in Germany. Like Ferro, he arrives there still a virgin, without even the benefit of the “Princeton rub” (frottage). He, too, floats through life vaguely aware of his sexual yearnings and yet unable to act on them. Like Ferro and Picano, he takes long walks as a way to encounter the very frustrating temptations that the walk was meant to exorcize. Paul, Holleran’s alter ego in Nights in Aruba, is “tired of [his] damp walks to the Königstruhl, the scowl on [his] face when [he] passed someone like the postal clerk whose beauty ravished [him] but whose face [he] could not look at” (72). His friend Vittorio comments, “Funny, isn’t it? It was the army that freed me from a life in which I was trying to be the perfect son. The army, which I thought was depriving me of freedom” (74). And yet freedom is exactly what the heightened sexual world of the army in Europe seems to be foreclosing for Holleran. Paul asks Vittorio, “What do you want to be free of?” When he says, “I just want to be free … Period,” Paul replies, “Well, you’re not … You’re homosexual!” (75). Unlike Picano, Ferro, or Grumley, Holleran believes that being free to be homosexual is to be enslaved by love. “The chief advantage of loving women,” he tells the reader, “was that one could marry and then move onto other concerns (business, politics, science) more worthy of the mind and more likely to give men satisfaction than the endless negotiations people who live for love are condemned to” (72). Europe is part of the education in learning to “live for love.” The liberty of homosexual license is illusory, disguising the gay man’s very loss of freedom. Such an education, rather than fitting one for adult life, in fact disables its students so that they no longer can devote themselves to business, politics, and science even as it forces one into the “public life [of] those without families.” What better place to absorb such un-American lessons than Europe?

It is too simple to say that Paul’s dream of Europe is a leftover from earlier American sentiments, a romantic illusion of a place where the arts, culture, and love are mutually cultivated and refined. Holleran is not willing to embrace the Clam’s cynicism. In “Amsterdam,” the penultimate story in In September, the Light Changes, he rhapsodizes about the Dutch.

Unlike Ferro, Holleran is effusive on the beauty of the Dutch, but it is beauty honed by the need to survive. After a visit to the Rijksmuseum, he discovers that “the people I saw on the canvases (Adam and Eve, Judith, Holofernes, Saint Jerome, Apollo, Mars, Aphrodite; the man with the marmoreal butt in The Massacre of the Innocents) were there the moment I left the museum, walking up and down the rainy streets; the same cream-and-gold complexions, the same well-proportioned limbs” (270). The dream of Europe is cream-and-gold, warm and burnished, and beautifully built. Its history may contain the Massacre of the Innocents, but the very horror is mitigated by “the man with the marmoreal butt,” whose beauty throws everything else into relief.

Holleran holds on to his “dream of Europe” because he needs it to counterbalance the unreality of America, particularly the insubstantiality of gay life. For Holleran, American life in general—which is light, shallow, forever on the move, content with the ersatz and the half-baked, ignorant of what little history it has and contemptuous of anything that would interrupt its unceasing consumerism—gains whatever substance and stability it has from family life and its wholesome domesticity. Gay life, which lacks the anchorage of the domestic, is especially prone to shallow trendiness unless directed toward art and beauty, especially European art—weighty, serious, complex, and substantial. The bohemian culture of New York, in its rejection of bourgeois values, especially prizes the artistic dedication of European writers, painters, composers, and performers. Holleran’s dream of Europe is inextricably bound to his vision of bohemian gay culture. He goes to Europe to find what he needs for New York.

Ironically, it is Edmund White—the member of the Violet Quill who lived the longest in Europe—who in the end entertains the least romantic notions about it. His disillusionment is directly proportional to the romantic dreams with which he first invested the Continent. In The Farewell Symphony, White speaks of how he thought of Europe as not only a consolation for his effeminacy but a sanctuary. “I … had been an unhappy sissy boy who’d found consolation in books. … I’d confounded the arts with European refinement, which in turn I assumed must guarantee a smiling moral tolerance” (FS:136). White attempts to put his finger on why Europe was so attractive to the gay artists of his generation. According to White, “the dream of Europe” ameliorated the pain of being called a sissy by offering the balm of refinement; it assuaged the loneliness of being “artistic” by placing one in the company of a tradition that stretched to antiquity; but, most of all, it relieved the guilt of being homosexual by extending a “smiling moral tolerance” to such behaviors. But like the Clam, White soon learns “the dream of Europe is just that—a dream” (NIA:67).

How he comes to be disabused of his European fantasies is one of the themes of The Farewell Symphony. Yet this is not to say that White ever completely loses a sense for the beauty and poetry of Europe. Writing about the character Joshua, based on his friend David Kalstone, White describes Venice at the end of The Farewell Symphony in a manner that clearly shows both his love for Europe and his refusal to be taken in by it: “Venice was both stone and water, permanence and transience, the fluid element shaping but never wholly dissolving the solid, and this very ambiguity had always vouchsafed that no matter how much Joshua submitted to time’s corrosives he would endure” (393). But, of course, Joshua in the novel, like David Kalstone in real life, dies of AIDS, the disease that can turn even the most solid body into the liquidity of memory. White’s Ruskinian meditation on the Stones of Venice are undercut by its understanding of mortality.

Such cruelty is the opposite of refinement; it represents the same bourgeois snobbishness he would have found in his father’s circle in Cincinnati. Indeed, rather than showing worldly awareness, the French suffer from a “dream of Americans” no less distorted, naive, and self-satisfying than the American “dream of Europe.” Invited to a party where “everyone was standing around sipping bad brandy,” White comes to understand that “the French, apparently, liked their Americans big, butch and dumb. … Now I saw I’d have had better luck if I’d shaved my head and worn fatigues to dinner” (FS:6). There is little place in the Parisian imagination, according to White, for a sophisticated, thoughtful, and cultured American; having failed to be a marine, White is thus dismissed as an inferior version of Jerry Lewis.

Nor did White find in Europe the dream of a society of intellectual refinement he so hoped to encounter. Indeed, White seems impatient with the old Jamesian dualism of American innocence versus Continental knowledge. The narrator of The Farewell Symphony, who pals around with Michel Foucault, finds little in Europe to rival the intellectual and artistic life he left behind in the States when he was in the company of such people as Joshua (David Kalstone), Eddie (James Merrill), or Max (Richard Howard). He finds France “a bit dim and dreary” although he continues to live there (FS:381). In fact, he becomes impatient with the Europeans’ illusion of their own superiority.

The French loved to discuss American “puritanism,” by which they meant a phobia about pleasure, a hatred of the body and a fanatical prudishness. I became hot under the collar explaining that the actual Puritans had been the best thing that ever happened to America, responsible for abolitionism, prison reform and universal, free, compulsory education, and that America’s religious life, unfortunately, was dominated not by the somber, fatalistic, intellectual Puritans but by born-again nitwits who joined their small-minded bigotry to a convulsive but mercifully shortlived revivalism. (The Farewell Symphony, 380)

It is not surprising that Edmund White should find himself defending the “somber, fatalistic, intellectual Puritans” because in so many ways he himself is somber, fatalistic, and intellectual, and, of course, these are also the qualities that the French particularly admire, and which their most recent pantheon of thinkers—Foucault and Derrida—embody. Americans are no less knowledgeable than Europeans, no less enlightened, or rather, postenlightened. In The Flaneur, his book on Paris, White excoriates his former home for its racism, anti-Semitism, and its covert homophobia. The French possess the same narrow-mindedness as benighted Americans—they merely hide it better.

Finally, White does not see Europe as a place for sexual license for—unlike Holleran, Picano, or Ferro—he didn’t go there to lose his virginity. He had lost it long before, albeit in a foreign country—Mexico, when he vacationed there as an adolescent in the company of his father. Rather, Europe is the place marked for White by sexual reserve and prudence (TF:380). After all, White was an early and frequent banqueter at the feast of the sexual revolution, the coauthor of The Joy of Gay Sex, that groundbreaking manual in the art of love. Repeatedly in The Farewell Symphony, he points out that the European, rather than possessing more sexual knowledge, merely performs in a different, more hygienic, and gentle way than Americans. Guglielmo, a baronino from Florence and a would-be expert of William Blake, “took a shower first and sprinkled talcum powder on his feet then he mounted me as he smiled a beatific smile of Fra Angelico gentleness, a million miles away from the I’m-going-to-fuck-you-until-I-take-out-your-tonsils New York attitude I’d been conditioned to find exciting” (FS:84). The difference is not knowledge but conditioning, not sophistication but construction. Sexual excitement is a Pavlovian response, a culturally conditioned reflex; ejaculation no more than the penial drool in response to some internalized erotic bell.

If White doesn’t regard the Europeans as sexually freer than Americans, he also doesn’t see Europe as a place to escape the attentions of his family, as it had been for other members of the Violet Quill. In The Farewell Symphony, White writes: “My first psychiatrist, Dr. O’Reilly, had said that the unconscious does not distinguish between leaving and being left, and that the child who goes on a trip from home feels abandoned by his parents; by that reasoning I felt rejected by the States. I was in a pout that America had let me go so easily” (381). White felt not so much freed from America as abandoned by it. He was cast out by those who had never wanted him. By living in Europe, he was acting out a theme that had haunted his novels: the barely tolerated son who is dispossessed. The prince in Forgetting Elena is allowed to live in the country that has undergone a revolution only if he forgets entirely any claims to rule it; and in Caracole the entire society has been removed from power by a foreign invading force. There is little difference between being a stranger in one’s own country and being a resident alien in someone else’s. Indeed, the latter may seem to grant one more freedom because it disguises more easily one’s alienation from it.

The value of living in Europe for White was that it heightened his awareness of the ways all social practices shape or construct one’s sense of the world, especially what is considered normal or natural, issues of even greater importance to the gay writer than to the straight one. “Living internationally as an expatriate invariably promotes a double vision,” White writes in one of his many essayistic asides in The Farewell Symphony, “a queasy sense of the arbitrariness of all conventions, and makes one wince at the vulgarity of one’s compatriots and mock the humorless provinciality of one’s hosts” (98). The perception of the vulgarity and provinciality of both the country from which he came and the one in which he resides is the product of the expatriate’s double vision. Such a double vision conveys a particularly useful power upon the novelist who would exercise the kind of defamiliarization that Russian formalists say is essential to literary discourse. An expatriate like White finds in the habits and manners of all people something strange, arbitrary, worthy of perception. More than a decade of living in Europe taught White that any attempt at generalizing a national character is based on racism.

Even before White took up residence in Europe for any extended period, his work invited the outsider’s defamiliarized vision. In Forgetting Elena the defamiliarization is made possible by the protagonist’s amnesia. The manners of those around him seem strange because he has forgotten how things are done. But it is in Caracole, his fantasy novel and his first major work after settling in Europe, that the defamiliarization becomes less mechanical and more integrated into the crazy quilt of the story. Caracole, although started in the States, is a novel only an expatriate could have finished.

Expatriatism heightens the alienated double vision of the homosexual; in fact, expatriatism just made things fuzzy, whereas homosexuality always allowed the true binocular experience that brought the world into clear, cold, if somewhat distanced, focus. For, according to White, the homosexual “would always be disenfranchised by every party, a pariah even among outcasts” (FS:99). He was not at risk of adopting the comforting illusions of being natural, normal, or at home that allowed most people to sail through life unaware of the world around them. When a friend joins an Italian political party whose constituents consisted of a coalition of “prostitutes, gays, anarchists, ecologists, and other ‘marginals,’” White laughs, “since compromising with such a band of thieves seemed far less desirable to me than total isolation, our natural state and a splendid one” (99). Conventional political action might blur the hard edge of gay perception, which is one of the advantages that the homosexual has. When a heterosexual female friend suffers “paralyzing depressions” because she has been rejected by her husband, White is impatient with her grief.

Many readers have found in Holleran and White a self-hatred that they wished them to be rid of. Being gay after all shouldn’t be “a variety of shame” or a “perversion.” Readers wonder why they cling to such outworn ideas and reject the twelve-step programs that have brought comfort to so many. But if they cling to such feelings, it is because these wounds bring clarity of vision—an icy, bitter sharpness of perception that is lost in the analgesic fog of therapy. In any case, White replaces the dualism of American Innocence and European Knowledge with the dualism of Heterosexual Ignorance and Homosexual Alienated Self-awareness.

There is perhaps still one more reason the dream of Europe has not lasted for Edmund White, and that is because it has been experienced (for the most part) during the nightmare of AIDS. To be sure, Europe functioned as a way to escape AIDS (as I will discuss at some length in a later chapter). Suffice it to say here that in his story “Palace Days,” the main characters, Ned and Mark, move to Paris because “they hoped the party would go on in Europe as it had before in the States.” And “indeed the party was still in full swing” in Paris, at least for a while (DP:137–38). Yet the interval Europe gives them from AIDS is brief. Soon enough their friends across Europe are dying, and if in France the authorities “were calm and rational in their response to the epidemic, the Germans, like the English, were being driven to hysteria by their press. In France one could forget the disease for whole days at a stretch, but in reactionary Bavaria, for instance, the Minister of Health had proposed quarantining even healthy carriers” (156). As the pandemic continues, Ned and Mark try to forge even more tightly their relationship, as so many gay men were doing on both sides of the Atlantic. But they discover that finding their way as a couple is not helped by being isolated from a gay community, which they feel does not exist in Paris where “French people kept referring contemptuously to the ‘ghetto’” (140). Europe could not be home for Mark and Ned; as Mark realizes in the story’s concluding sentence, “Ned was the only home he had” (167). In the final analysis, home is not a place but a person. The gay community is located not on some plot of land but in the intermeshed lives of other gay men.

Nevertheless, White (with his partner Hubert Sorin) tries to construct out of Paris a place where they can be gay men momentarily free from mortality and stigmatization. They construct a benign fantasy. I cannot imagine White writing a book called My New York; indeed, the New York section is one of the weakest portions of States of Desire. One reason he would never write such a book is that White knows all too well that New York is too complex, too varied, to be possessed by any one person, to be subject to a single perspective. In Paris, of course, he had the outsider’s pride in establishing his stake in the city. He convinced himself, if only for the moment, that he could claim a community as his own. But that claim, that stake, is an enabling fiction driven by the urgencies of personal grief and social despair. He can make claim to Our Paris because the plural is passing even as it is uttered.

It is hard to say whether Europe holds the same sway for the gay writers who have emerged after the Violet Quill. To be sure, David Leavitt lived in Italy for a while, as does Paul Gervais. Richard Zimler, a novelist too little known in this country, makes his home in Portugal. But these are rare cases. Europe as a place of freedom, a place to discover oneself as an artist, as a homosexual, as a man of the world—this current of American literature seems to have dried up with the Violet Quill. With the AIDS pandemic, gay Americans could no longer count themselves as Innocents traveling to a world of Knowledge. Daisy Millers no longer ruin their reputations in the shadows of the Coliseum. Now it is the Europeans who steer clear of Americans, and the Europeans who feel that Americans will bring their tainted lives to foreign shores.