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

“Ten years ago in these bars,” Michael Grumley wrote in Hard Corps: Studies in Leather and Sadomasochism, “in back rooms far less common than today’s, someone from behind the bar would make a periodic sweep through the dark cluster of bodies with a flashlight. Couples would pull back from one another; bodies would stiffen. It was as if this sweep of the flashlight constituted a guilty fix, a sudden reminder that the business of touching other men’s bodies was something to be ashamed of, after all. In those days darkness was a temporary retreat. Nowadays, there is no longer such a guilt fix operating in these rooms and those who require it must look elsewhere. Perhaps, with no one to punish them for being homosexual, men have taken to punishing each other, but this does not appear to be a majority drive” (ch. 6).

Grumley is writing in 1976 (with the volume to be published in 1977), and he is describing the pre-Stonewall era of the sixties when it was still illegal for bars to serve homosexuals alcohol, when organized crime controlled gay bars throughout New York, and when leather bars were at the very fringe of what was itself marginal. In Grumley’s account, 1966 was a dark period of guilt and oppression, whereas in the 1970s (he confidently asserts), gay life is entirely different: there are no bouncers like lighthouses shooting their beams into the 170 dark shoals to keep the human ships from running aground on the hard rocks, from which they might split open, take on water, and sink into the arms of another man. The seventies is a new era of sexual license, Grumley proclaims—not one filled with guilt and oppression for a small number of renegades, but an era in which an ever-expanding population of gay men band together to enjoy the shadowy mysteries of sexuality. Yes, Grumley admits, there are those who have not yet freed themselves from the restraints of conventional morality, who still wish to punish themselves, but this desire for penance is not “a majority drive.” What “drives” the gay man is the exploration of pleasure, the excitement of being an instrument of power, and the finer delights of attracting that power, of being the lightning rod which brings to one’s own inert iron the hot, illuminating bolt of mastering passion. In Hard Corps, Grumley echoes the basic narrative of the period, the progressive story of sexual liberation of the masses of gay men.

Hard Corps was written in 1976, a pivotal year in gay history. The midpoint between Stonewall and the first announcement of AIDS, it was the year Christopher Street was founded, the first journal dedicated to serious work of gay and lesbian culture. The editor hoped that now that lesbian and gay authors had the opportunity, they would pull their Maurices—their unpublished gay masterpieces—from their drawers, and send them in. But it didn’t happen. A handful of people, including Edmund White, found themselves writing much of the issues. It was also the year that the Pulitzer Prize for drama went to A Chorus Line, whose centerpiece is the confession of a gay man; and the Pulitzer Prize for music went to Ned Rorem, whose diaries gave an unprecedented and unabashed look at gay sex in high society. In short, it was a year of both promise and oppression, in which the liberation of gay lives was more a dream than a reality, a time when the narrative of mass liberation was a myth valued more as an enabling fiction than as a statement of fact.

Although the VQ wasn’t to have its short official life for another four years, it is identified with this moment of gay history; its members are thought of as the group whose works most celebrated this time of sexual license—what Holleran has called “The Age of Promiscuity” and, therefore, the writers who must take the most responsibility for creating an ethos that ended in the AIDS pandemic. For it is true that the Violet Quill created works which were used to further an atmosphere of sexual experimentation, works that seemed to readers to give permission to limitless sexual activity, a hedonism supposedly new to gay men. As White wrote in the mid-seventies, he never questioned the principle that “as much sex as possible with as many men as one could find was a good thing” (FS:317).

Part of the reason the VQ is so branded is that Edmund White coauthored with Charles Silverstein The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, the same year Grumley brought out Hard Corps. (The Joy of Gay Sex has, in fact, a number of connections to the VQ: it is dedicated in part to Chris Cox; for the sequel, The New Joy of Gay Sex, Felice Picano took Edmund White’s place as coauthor; and Charles Silverstein was not only Edmund White’s therapist—before they became coauthors—but also George Whitmore’s.) Twenty years later, it is hard to suggest the importance of The Joy of Gay Sex and its publishing twin The Joy of Lesbian Sex. Modeled on Alex Comfort’s bestseller, The Joy of Sex, they were the most visible and most respected sexual guidebooks for general readers of their day, part of a larger cultural trend that divorced sex from reproduction. The Joy of Gay Sex brought both the topic of homosexuality and explicit accounts of gay sexual activity onto the shelves of bookstores across America, which hitherto had placed homosexuality behind the counter in the cheerless brown paper covers of pornography. According to George Whitmore in an article he wrote for the Washington Post Book World (January 8, 1978), Crown’s original printing of The Joy of Gay Sex was 75,000 copies; together with the Joy of Lesbian Sex, there were prepublication sales of 45,000 copies (E1). These are significant figures for any book.

It’s important to see what The Joy of Gay Sex was up against. Comfort’s Joy of Sex (1972) is almost entirely silent on the issue of homosexuality. He doesn’t include it as an entry, and the word doesn’t appear in the index. The closest he comes to the topic is in an entry on bisexuality contained in the “Problem” section of the book. Comfort is willing to agree that “all people are bisexual—that is to say, they are able to respond sexually to some extent towards people of either sex.” But he’s very quick to assert that homosexuality is different. “Being ‘homosexual’ isn’t a matter of having this kind of response, but usually of having some kind of turn-off toward the opposite sex which makes our same-sex response more evident or predominate” (225). What defines homosexuals, then, is not their sexual response to persons of the same sex but their “turn-off” to the opposite sex, which somehow makes “their” same-sex response different from “ours.” Although Comfort’s attitude is to encourage those interested in same-sex activities to explore such experiences without guilt, he feels he must reassure his heterosexual readers that their same-sex responses aren’t at all the same feelings as those in homosexuals, who suffer from some psychological block. Nor does he stigmatize those heterosexuals who have some “turn-off” about same-sex experiences. “As with other sorts of sex play, if it worries you or you don’t like it, don’t do it. …Straight man-woman sex is the real thing for most people” (225). Clearly, Comfort isn’t worried about a double standard. Straights who don’t like same-sex relations are fine, but gays who don’t like straight sex suffer a problem.

Comfort is the voice of tolerance compared to David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1969), one of the notorious works of popular homophobia. For whereas Comfort is mostly silent about same-sex responses, Reuben is garrulous in his disgust.

Heterosexuality is the only source of “love and gratification.” All other relationships are impossible. The key for Reuben is anatomy. Because “Nature apparently didn’t anticipate homosexuality,” according to Reuben, “the male was not equipped with glands to secrete a sexual lubricant.” The result, he says, is twofold: experienced homosexuals have rectums that lose “muscle tone,” and they become obsessed with food. The obsession with food derives, according to Reuben in one of the more bizarre twists in this thoroughly twisted advice, from the fact that the lubricants gay men prefer are made from vegetable oils, and the obsession manifests itself in stimulating their anuses with vegetables. Reuben is obsessed with three ideas that he associates with homosexuality—sadomasochism, transvestism, and transexuality. He doesn’t distinguish between them. “Homosexuals thrive on danger” and so sooner or later they will “pick up an ‘S and M’ [sic]” (134). The “S and M” is “among the cruelest people who walk this earth” and are the very ones who filled the ranks of “professional torturers and executioners” and joined “Hitler’s Gestapo and SS” (135). “They all have this funny walk” because their clothes either completely hide their genitals or display them for all the world to see, or because many homosexuals want to be women, although the operations will only make them “castrated and mutilated female impersonators” (151). When the hapless questioner asks the all-knowing Dr. Reuben, “How about all the homosexuals who live together happily for years?” the questioner gets squashed:

Everything about The Joy of Gay Sex was designed to shed the stigma of being gay. It was a large-format book—not a coffee table-sized volume but large enough that it wouldn’t disappear on bookshelves either at home or in the store. It had a gleaming white cover with large gold letters—nothing dark or dull—and the design was stylishly tasteful without being trendy. Most important, it was fully illustrated, not just with the anatomical charts one might find in biology textbooks but with black-and-white drawings and large color prints. The artwork was of particular concern. The pictures needed to be explicit without suggesting pornography and to avoid both the classical tradition of perfect proportions, and the Tom-of-Finland model of grotesque, if titillating, exaggeration. The genitals depicted in The Joy of Gay Sex are anatomically correct, indeed somewhat on the smallish side, although not the incidental commas that punctuate the torsos of Greco-Roman statuary. The Joy of Gay Sex shows bodies of various sizes, shapes, and ages. Some are hairy, some are smooth; some are muscular, others saggy; most are white, but a few—the demographically correct percentage—are black. Among the groups conspicuously absent are the obese, the Asian, and the handicapped. Such failings were corrected in The New Joy of Gay Sex, which is ardently PC: not only are Asians and fat men included—although fewer fat men than my unscientific sampling would indicate—but there are Native Americans, Latinos, a man in a wheelchair, and a dwarf. The pictures in The New Joy include a lot more sexual paraphernalia—nipple clamps, leather harnesses, and rubber dildos hang from, cover over, and plunge into the carefully drawn figures. Both the old and new versions of Joy of Gay Sex include color plates—another sign of the books’ lavish production. The ones in the original volume are done in a soft-focus manner, which upset some activists who felt they were too romantic and arty. The ones in The New Joy of Gay Sex have the dark thick colors of Saturday Evening Post covers—a sort of hardcore Norman Rockwell approach whose campiness perhaps was designed to correct the unironic illustrations that came before.

One sign of how important The Joy of Gay Sex was to gay men of the 1970s is that, twenty years after its publication, Larry Kramer is still harping on it. Kramer accuses The Joy of Gay Sex of “bad timing,” and “extolling the virtues of fist fucking on the eve of the plague.” Kramer is wrong on both counts. AIDS was not to be identified for another four years, and so the book was not published “on the eve of the plague.” Moreover, far from extolling “the virtues of fist fucking,” the book’s entry on the topic warns reader repeatedly that fistfucking is “extremely dangerous” and “could be fatal” (JGS:82). To be sure, White and Silverstein concede that, since being fistfucked requires “total relaxation,” the person who is fucked can find “great tranquility” in the act, but this Zen-like tranquility hardly amounts to a recommendation. Indeed, so grim is their account that White and Silverstein fear it might strike some readers as “unnecessarily alarmist and naive.” In fact, despite its title, The Joy of Gay Sex is less a gay Kama Sutra than a guide to the practical problems of being gay, such as coming out at work, or financially protecting your lover. What Kramer’s lapses indicate is just how large The Joy of Gay Sex looms in the imagination of many gay men of the time who remember the book, incorrectly, as a wholly uncritical recipe for sexual license.

In fact, as I look more closely at the book, The Joy of Gay Sex possesses a benign innocence quite in contrast to its reputation. It contains a lengthy entry on the delights of showering with another man—an entry that highlights both hygiene and homoerotics and that has been dropped from the later edition. In a similar vein, although The Joy of Gay Sex has entries on sadomasochism and fetishism, the later edition includes additional entries on leather, phone sex, and spanking. It’s not that the earlier edition wanted to whitewash gay sex to make it more acceptable to mainstream readers—to the contrary, White and Silverstein were absolutely dedicated to giving the best and most truthful information—it was just that gay sex seemed much simpler at the time. A good deal more divides the earlier Joy from the later Joy than the appearance of AIDS, and a full study of the two editions would tell us a lot about the changes that have transpired not only in gay life but in American life as well in the nearly twenty years that separates the volumes. The New Joy is a much darker, more violent, less reassuring work than the earlier one. The pictures in the earlier book contain only two props—mirrors and chairs—but those in the New Joy are filled with commodities: the illustrations as packed with bric-a-brac as a Flemish interior. Gay life—like American life in general—now seems far less homogeneous and far more splintered into niche markets, more narrowly specialized into particular sexual tastes than it did in the seventies. If White thought that, left to his own devices, he would have called the book The Tragedy of Gay Sex, the new addition might well be titled The Agony of Gay Sex, so full are its pictures of whips and clamps, ropes and chains.

I don’t mean to suggest that the VQ were writing books suitable for children, or living lives of bland domesticity (the only live-in couple of any duration being Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, who were together for nearly twenty years). Chris Cox worked as a part-time hustler and began a project—which like most of his projects was abandoned in its early stages—of compiling a collection of sketches similar in nature to Renaud Camus’ Tricks, in which each short chapter would tell the story of a different john. One of the few of these sketches that still exists is called “Shit,” and it’s about a man named Cliff, “a fucked-up pig” who, since he couldn’t afford to pay Cox full price, ends up “earning his keep” by doing “chores,” presumably vacuuming the apartment, scrubbing the toilet, or washing the dishes. After several sessions, Cliff reveals his ultimate fantasy, and Cox ties him up, lays him in the bathtub, and defecates on his stomach. What disgusts Cox is not the act itself but the smell of his feces, so “from then on, when he wanted it, I shit in his mouth, but made sure he didn’t spill any.” During one of the sessions, Cox takes Polaroids of the man in which his “legs hang over the end of the tub, his mouth wide open full of shit, shit on his chest, smeared around a little.” The story ends with the confession: “I really don’t like this scene. It could bother me after a while.” The conditional tense is important. Cox is not as indifferent as he would like us to think. His acceptance of the vagaries of desire is not as unconditional as he would hope. But his worries are not for the man but for himself; the act “could bother” him because it is not his fantasy, but Cliff’s.

But the sexual explicitness of “Shit,” which remains unpublished, is not typical of the work of the Violet Quill in general. Despite the accusation that their books are obsessed with sex, their works are not particularly sexually explicit. Yet there is a rejection of the attitude of the earlier generation of gay writers whose discretion was both self-protective and snobbish. In The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White records a visit to the home of the “obscure exquisite” Glenway Wescott—the author of several much-praised but generally forgotten novels in the twenties and thirties—who is called Ridgefield in the novel. Ridge-field, a “twittery old man in a tweed jacket with [a] big red, Scotch-nourished nose,” is highly critical of Jean Genet, whom he knew in Paris when Ridgefield was a “scrubbed ephebe [with] skin that looked as though he’d swallowed a light bulb.” “What I object to most,” Ridgefield pontificates, “was not his way of lying systematically or lifting his hostesses’ antique silver demitasse spoons, [but] his way of wallowing in his perversity.” Since, according to Ridgefield, “a writer writes for everyone, for the man, woman and child in the street and, mad as it may seem: They. Don’t. Care what Monsieur Genet daydreams about in his cell.” Moreover, he adds, such explicitness “spoils everything if our … Athenian pleasures are described to the barbarians. I think our world is amusing only so long as it remains a mystery to them” (FS:188–89; italics in original). Such pronouncements are met with a general agreement and warm chuckles, but it is exactly the attitude that the Violet Quill rejects. If heterosexuals are uninterested in the lives—including erotic lives—of gay men, then that is their loss. Gay men have no obligation to write for their limitations. Nor should homosexuality be an esoteric practice, known only by the cognoscenti. Maintaining gay life as a secret religion is merely a pseudo-aristocratic justification for staying in the closet.

Yet as much as the Violet Quill admires Genet, he was not a model for their writing. American culture did not quite have the same access to exquisite prose and raunch that Genet was able to mine. Despite their desire to depict “even the most exotic and depraved corners of human experience”—to use the words of another character in The Farewell Symphony—the members of the Violet Quill were too much the children of the bourgeoisie not to maintain a certain discretion. Take Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, the most famous evocation of the gay circuit of the seventies. One might assume that it would contain sex scene after sex scene, but Holleran treats the characters with a discretion that is almost Victorian. Malone’s first love affair is with Frankie Oliveiri, a man whom he first sees in the subway and then by chance waiting at a VD clinic where they are both patients. By the time Malone is examined—avoiding his usually amused discussion of infections with the doctor, and “thinking that all his fornication till now was a blind thrashing about, that he must be healthy this time, for love itself was at that moment in the waiting room”—Frankie is gone, but Malone finds him waiting outside on the curbstone.

Holleran does not take the opportunity of Frankie and Malone’s first night together to give the reader a steamy account of sexual gymnastics. Instead we get the deliciously ambiguous sentence: “Anything would serve,” which seems about language but could be about sex. Indeed, whatever is served, it takes place somewhere beyond the reader’s knowledge, presumably between their saying hello and moving in together. Although Malone will become famous as a lover throughout New York, what he actually does in bed is kept a secret. The reason is simple enough in artistic terms. Nothing that Malone could be described as doing could live up to the aura that Holleran wishes to weave around him. Moreover, the narrator, one of Malone’s friends, could never give a first-hand account since he never has sex with Malone. But the ultimate reason is Holleran’s own rather Catholic reticence about the mechanics of sex.

It is interesting to note that Allan Gurganus in his novelistic account of the seventies, Plays Well with Others, a work much indebted to Dancer from the Dance (it, too, for example, has central characters who meet in a VD clinic), also holds back from the reader a clear notion of what its hero, Robert, “the greatest beauty of the late 1970s Manhattan nights” does in bed. Robert’s thirty dildos are, if one may use the word, extended to us as an invitation of speculation, but what exactly he has done or thought of doing with them remains a secret to the narrator, his friend Hartley Mims. Although there is much talk about sex in Dancer from the Dance (as well as Plays Well with Others), there are no explicit sex scenes. Although Holleran renders gay life with admirable vividness, he is coyly mum about the actual nature of homosexual acts. This silence suggests that, for Holleran, gay sex is not free from its earlier taboos and that he retains a sense of its indecency, or at least its vulgarity. (I am reminded of Henry James’s similar game in The Ambassadors, in which he holds back the everyday product that has made Mrs. Newsome’s fortune as an object wanting in “dignity, or the least approach to distinction” [49]).

Robert Ferro is a good deal clearer than Holleran, but The Family of Max Desir, his first gay novel, holds off talking about Max’s sex life for nearly its first fifty pages, and then the first sex scene is heterosexual. Louella, a woman who cleans for Max’s mother once a week, rearranges Max’s bed “on the last day of a dragged out flu. Suddenly she pulled down the covers and his pajamas and put his penis in her mouth, then sat on him” (45). The one sentence is all that we get of this experience. Nor is his first gay experience any more graphically rendered. A German picks up Max in a movie theater when Max is touring Europe as a college student. They have coffee together and then retire to a hotel. “The man held him close under the eiderdown. They did not actually have sex beyond frottage” (52). And that is that. What is typical of the period is that frottage is not really considered sex since Ferro relies on the heterosexual notion that sex is penetration. Penetration occurs a few pages later, but just as matter-of-factly as in the earlier scenes. Dancing with a man in Florence, during another European trip, Max finds himself on “a pile of cushions on the floor, in a position of incipient coitus. It was not, [Max] realized, an act one did; it was something that occurred. He lowered himself onto and somehow into the man in the same extended motion, in a way that then and ever after he thought of as miraculously easy and comfortable” (56). Ferro is prissily clinical in describing their fall into the cushions as resulting “in a position of incipient coitus.” But we can recognize that this phrase is meant jokingly by Ferro’s wonderfully subtle comment that the one extended motion that places Max both onto and inside his companion is one that he has found ever since “miraculously easy and comfortable.” The gay reader will know just how miraculous this is. Anal penetration is rarely achieved in “one extended motion,” even by the much-experienced, but never to my knowledge by the unpracticed. Max’s success is truly fabulous, in all its meanings, a comically subtle reminder that The Family of Max Desir is, no matter how autobiographical, ultimately a novel, a fiction, and a work of the imagination. There is another point worth making about this scene. Like the other accounts of sex before it, it takes up a single sentence, and not a particularly long one. The Violet Quill’s work is rarely about sex but about the psychological, political, and cultural forces that inform, construct, and determine the sexual act.

Perhaps a further point needs to be made: the very brevity of these sexual descriptions seems at odds with the matter-of-fact tone Ferro tries to achieve. It seems that if he extended these passages—added more detail to them—he could not have maintained the poise, the equanimity, the nonchalance that he intended. So fragile is his matter-of-factness that it appears capable of being sustained for a sentence at most. The supposed ease the Violet Quill had with sex is, once again, a shallow effect achieved with ellipses and elisions. I think my point will be clearer and more convincing if we compare Holleran and Ferro—indeed all the early works of the Violet Quill—to another book, one that they all knew: Renaud Camus’ Tricks, a work published in France in 1979 and in English translation in 1980, the exact moment of the Violet Quill’s formal meetings.

Tricks appeared with all the fanfare of an important literary occasion. Roland Barthes, one of the famous literary figures of his day, explains that he had agreed to write a preface to the book “because Renaud Camus is a writer, because his text belongs to literature, because he cannot say so himself, and because someone else, therefore, must say so in his place.” Barthes continues in this pugnacious manner in order to silence any question that the work is obscene. The translator of Tricks is Richard Howard, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and one of the most esteemed translators of French. He was a friend to all the members of the Violet Quill (with the exception of Andrew Holleran), giving them counsel, practical assistance (he directed Edmund White’s first novel to the editor who published it), and endorsements. Howard adds a note at the end of Tricks, arguing that the book presents a challenge to American culture and American language, a challenge that his friends in the Violet Quill would have faced in their work. “The French have developed a middle language, “Howard writes, “between the smell of the sewer and the smell of the lamp, which in English is mostly unavailable. We have either the coarse or the very clinical” (251). What both Barthes and Howard wish to explain is that the matter-of-factness of Camus’ sustained accounts of gay sex are an achievement of both literary merit and social importance, and should not be confused with the titillation of pornography even as they elicit in the readers the deepest and most exquisite reading pleasures.

Whereas Ferro’s descriptions of sex last only about one sentence, Renaud Camus elaborates extensively on the sexual mechanics of his tricks. Here is a paragraph from the very first episode of Tricks, in which Camus describes a night with Walthère Dumas:

So now we’re naked, stretched out together, me on top of him, my hands under his buttocks, caressing them and his thighs. We kiss each other, but quite superficially. … My obsession is to lick his buttocks, to thrust my face between them and to stick my tongue as deep in there as I can. He lets me do what I want, but without any special enthusiasm. Yet he offers no resistance. Once more, kissing him I thrust my cock under his balls and gradually raise his legs. … A first attempt to put my cock inside him, with no help that the saliva left there a moment before, gets nowhere. I put on more with my hand, also on my cock. Then I manage to get halfway in, but he winces. I pull back out, and he winces even more. His bent legs against my chest, my forearms under his back, my hands behind his neck, I have my head down against his balls, deep in the forest of hair at his crotch. This seems to excite him, and me as well, so much so that I decide to try to fuck him again. Another attempt succeeds a little better, but judging from his expression, he still seems in pain. I withdraw and stretch out beside him. … He plays with himself. So do I. But since I don’t get much out of that, I put some saliva in my ass this time, straddle him, and stick his cock, which isn’t so big, up my ass. … Leaning forward, I kiss his neck. This position excites me a lot, I come on his belly. He doesn’t seem to want to fuck me any more. I stretch out beside him again. He plays with himself. I have one arm under his back, and with one hand I caress his thighs, his balls. He comes just when one of my fingers is against his asshole. (Tricks, 6–7)

Instead of the “one extended motion” with which Max Desir is able to penetrate his first lover and consummate the act in a single sentence, Camus elaborates on his three attempts, with increased lubrication and adjusted positioning, in a paragraph which even with my multiple elisions is still lengthy. Camus gives each gesture of the sexual performance, as if this were dance notations for a ballet someone else would restage elsewhere. The hydraulics of sex is minutely attended to, as is the state of pain and arousal. What is left out is emotion. A reader may be delighted with the linguistic skill that would render these movements with such lucidity or admire Camus’ narrative technique, but no one would get an erection reading Tricks, and that is exactly its point—to uncouple completely the presentation of sexual behavior from the affect of erotica. The Violet Quill did not follow the extremity of Camus’ agenda—they wanted something more even if it meant rendering less. For despite all the talk in gay liberation of sex for its own sake—a kind of parallel for the turn-of-the-century motto of “art for art’s sake”—the authors of the Violet Quill were never so liberated as they pretended to be, and never so matter-of-fact as they hoped to be. There is always in their work a pull back to the domestic, the romantic, the socially integrated that Camus’ style—his “writerliness,” to use a Barthian term—turns away from with indifference.

What needs to be remembered is the double bind that gay writers of the 1970s faced with representations of sex. On the one hand, to spend too much time on representation of sex performance reinforced the homophobic belief that homosexuals were sex-obsessed people who only acted out of lust, were incapable of love, and whose relationships were unfeeling and bestial, and whose literature was bound to be merely pornographic if released from the restraints that had forced it to become “universal.” On the other hand, failing to represent sex was to reinforce the homophobic belief that such behavior was unspeakable, a source of shame even for the very people who performed such acts, and that the homosexual artist could best serve the public by showing a certain restraint—that he rarely showed—by keeping his dirty linen discretely out of sight. Between this Scylla and Charybdis, gay writers had virtually no chance but to run aground. Nor are the writers given any more room today between the competing discourses of queer theory. Sex scenes only indicate how the gay man of the 1970s—although regarding himself as subversive—was in fact reinforcing those definitions of homosexuality imposed by hegemonic forces; similarly, the absence of sex scenes indicates how the gay authors of the 1970s, although trying to free themselves from the definitions imposed by hegemonic forces, only capitulate to them through self-erasure. The course the Violet Quill adopted in general was to try to assume a matter-of-factness about sex while keeping such talk highly restricted. They evoked a homoeroticized atmosphere while remaining vague about the specifics of erotic behavior.

Yet one more problem faced the Violet Quill in writing about sex—the reading conventions that govern them. When a man and a woman have sex, an author is not at any great pains to describe what they do because readers have what we might call a “default position” for heterosexual relations—male inserter on top, female receptor on the bottom. But with same-sex relations we have no default positions, no conventional ways of reading—except perhaps when one partner is older than another, in which case we assume the older male to be the inserter. (As the example of Max Desir makes clear, this assumption is not based necessarily on actual sexual practices, for it is often the younger male who is the inserter.) In gay literature, then, it is psychologically revealing to know what the characters do in bed as well as what they won’t do or can’t do. And it is not just the physical acts that matter. At the heart of gay experience is the understanding that the same act can have different meanings for the participants. To understand gay life, the Violet Quill recognized it was important to express the phenomenology of sexual experience.

In Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, written during the time of the Violet Quill’s formal meetings, the anonymous narrator speaks of his first love Kevin, a twelve-year-old whom he “cornholes” when the narrator is fifteen. What is significant is that although they take turns entering each other, for Kevin it is only practice for real sex with a woman, something that he will “outgrow”; for the narrator it is “the original theme” echoed repeatedly in “a work that becomes all development” (19). The difference between them is measured by the narrator’s desire to kiss Kevin and his recognition that he shouldn’t—the kiss would label him a sissy and disclose his true romantic feelings. In The Farewell Symphony, White returns to these adolescent sexual experiences. The narrator recalls when he was twelve, convincing his classmate Stuart (who had “the pudding-soft, unexercised body of the teacher’s pet”) to have anal sex with him, a practice they continued all through the summer although there wasn’t “the slightest hint of romance or even friendliness” in their sexual relations. Stuart isn’t unaffected by the experience, of course; his Midwestern unconsciousness transforms their sex into a “dreamlike intensity” of “nearly geological pressure” (FS:260). When they meet four years later at a party given by Stuart’s parents, Stuart still wants to have sex with the narrator, but now Stuart only wants to be the top. Gone is the reciprocity that they had scrupulously followed. Somehow Stuart understands that each had experienced differently the earlier physical relationship—for the narrator it was filled with a desire for sex with another man, while for Stuart it represented only the need for sexual release. Stuart becomes a grandfather and manages the family business; the narrator becomes a gay writer. Gay fiction needed a way to account for the difference in the trajectories of those lives, and to do so it needed to make explicit the way sexual relations were experienced.

Still, the radical equanimity that they showed in works like “Shit” was rarely sustained. The greatest fiction for the Violet Quill was to imagine characters who were free from their uneasiness about sex, who finally achieve a comfort with being gay, a comfort that they not only did not feel but also knew they were incapable of feeling. As Edmund White has written about his work of the 1970s and early 1980s:

Back then I was anything but an objective observer. I was a moralist, if that meant I wanted to suggest new ways of acting through examples and adjectives that were subtly praising or censorious. 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 that struck me as human, decorous, rather than the one irrevocable tragedy of being blasted from the start. I showed my homosexual characters living their lives openly and parallel to those of their heterosexual friends: pure fiction. I pretended the homosexual characters had homes, loves, careers if not exactly the same at least of a similar weight and dignity. 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 this 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 of self-acceptance of my characters but I thought by pretending as if (hadn’t a whole German philosophy been based on the words “as if”?) this utopia already existed I could authenticate my gay readers if not myself. (The Burning Library, 371; see also The Farewell Symphony, 30)

White complicates this problem of assuming an ease with radical ideas of sexuality, a self-acceptance that he doesn’t possess, by giving this same double consciousness to his characters. The nearly identical passage appears in several pieces: for example, it is a statement of the fictional narrator of The Farewell Symphony and is also quoted by White in his address “The Personal Is Political” as a statement of his own problems. What White, in fact, does is build into his narrative of the 1970s this problem—it is an age when many men dressed themselves in clothes of self-acceptance that did not quite fit, and they did so not merely out of blindness to the more conventional attitudes they still harbored within but also to make a more tolerant world possible. Everyone knew he possessed a certain degree of “internalized homophobia” (the very word was coined in the seventies), but only by trying to repress those feelings could one create a culture in which—one hoped—it would fade away like a vestigial organ or like the bourgeoisie under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

From his earliest story, White depicted characters who simultaneously pretended to a sophisticated acceptance even as they retained the most conventional of values. In “Goldfish and Olives,” his first published story—it appeared in New Campus Writing #4 under the name E. Valentine White—we meet characters who will appear and reappear even into his latest book. There is Henry, White’s alter ego in the story—and I wonder, given the story’s elaborate style and psychology, whether also an allusion to Henry James. Henry is an ostensibly heterosexual man with many gay friends, the desire to dance ballet, and a fear of being thought “swish.” Henry is in love with Maria—a name White uses in virtually all his novels for characters modeled on his friend, the painter Marilyn Schaeffer. In “Goldfish and Olives” she appears, as she usually does, as a lesbian artist. The last point in this love triangle is Joan, Maria’s mysterious lover, whom Henry only sees in the last scene. “Goldfish and Olives” is a remarkably sophisticated story for an undergraduate and all the more astonishing for having been written in the early sixties. But its sophistication, like Henry’s sophistication, is the object of scrutiny, and at the center of the story White has Henry reflect on the thinness of his worldliness:

In college, people had regarded Henry as a liberal. He had wanted his fraternity to pledge a Negro, and he had once dated a Chinese girl. Secretly, Henry had prided himself on his broadmindedness. Nevertheless, he had at first had a hard time accepting the truth about Maria and Joan. Over the days, however, he had flirted with the idea of dismissing even this prejudice as “old-fashioned and dangerous.” Certainly Penson [a friend of Henry’s], with his long list of “gay” celebrities from sexologists attesting to the prevalence and normality of homosexuality, placed the whole subject in the category of what Henry had once said about integration—“an issue that cries for acceptance.” Who knows, Henry wondered in his most extravagant vagaries, maybe I’m latently queer. Maybe we all are!” A real man of the world would only laugh at my scruples, Henry reflected. Must I always be a puritanical bumpkin? Marie represents my only way of growing up. Of course she’s queer! If you’re exceptional, you have to be. (126; italics in original)

This is an extraordinary passage not only for the way it combines questions of race and sexuality, and for the way its serpentine sentences capture the psychological nuances of the character, but also for the way it establishes so many themes that will haunt White’s work for the rest of his career: the relationship between lesbians and gay men, the conflicts between conventional morality and radical philosophy, the tensions between bohemian sophistication and rural crudity and between elitism and populism, urbanity and banality. But what is most at issue here is Henry’s desire to be considered more “liberal,” more accepting than he actually feels; and that despite the intellectual and social sophistication with which he is armed, he realizes he is prey to the puritanical bumpkin within. In terms closer to the Cold War ideology that informs “Goldfish and Olives,” Henry worries not so much about the Red Menace that will subvert the culture as he does the white menace that will keep it from justice and freedom.

The Farewell Symphony is White’s most extended meditation on the vicissitudes of posing as a more self-accepting, and therefore as a more radical, gay man than he really is. For what some readers have criticized as White’s obsession with sex is both a consolation for the failures of love and overcompensation for his only partial self-acceptance. Indeed, his relationships with other men fail in part because they are in conflict with both his more radical notions of sexual freedom and his conventional notions of sexual behavior. He thus falls in love with men incapable of either giving him the conventional domestic existence of pseudo-heterosexual marriage or permitting him to have a greater acceptance of himself as a sexual being. He finds himself frustrated both by his failures at sustaining a lover and by the abjection of his unrequited (or at least only partly requited) love affairs.

The earliest work by a member of the Violet Quill to try to reimagine what gay life would be like free from the constraints of social pressure was George Whitmore’s The Confessions of Danny Slocum, which admittedly is a very strange novel. It began as a long two-part magazine article for Christopher Street—reporting on a course of sex therapy to treat “delayed ejaculation.” In point of fact, Whitmore wasn’t just a slow cummer, but rather unable to have an orgasm whenever anyone else was present. Charles Silverstein, Edmund White’s coauthor on The Joy of Gay Sex, directed the treatment, and he appears in the novel as the character Virgil (in White’s A Farewell Symphony, an incarnation of Silverstein appears as Abe). While Whitmore was preparing the article for press, Michael Denneny, the first openly gay editor in trade publishing, asked Whitmore to expand the articles into a book. In the process of developing the material, Whitmore changed it from a piece of nonfiction reporting into a fictional narrative. “What was evolving out of the original material,” Whitmore explains, “was not so much a piece of autobiographical journalism as it was a full-blown novel … not quite the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth in the standard tradition of confessional literature, but, I hope, an honest attempt to portray a slice of life at a particular time and in a particular place, however fictionalized the characters or highly-colored the locales might be” (CDS:215). One could say that the transformation of the work paralleled Whitmore’s psychological transformation, for as he attempted to become the person he imagined, the report became increasingly a tale of the imagination. In reality the treatment was not as successful at the time as Whitmore desired, so the happy ending to The Confessions of Danny Slocum is a fiction that he hoped his own life would and did imitate since at the end of his life he developed the kind of relationship he had always wanted. Danny Slocum is the example par excellence of the Violet Quill’s practice of envisioning a state of psychological health they could achieve at the time only in their imaginations.

Virgil’s treatment was a bit unorthodox, although pretty straightforward. He pairs Danny with another gay patient of about the same age, Joe, who has the same problem. Joe is a working-class Italian from Long Island who commutes to the city for therapy because he’s too ashamed of being gay and needing therapy to be treated closer to home. Virgil takes Danny and Joe through a step-by-step desensitization process. First they are to get used to being with one another. Then, they are to learn how to relax touching each other. They are to progress to sexual activity with one another, and finally—if everything goes right—to full sexual functioning. As Danny comes to understand (from no less an authority than his “trusty Joy of Gay Sex”), his problem stems from exercising “such tight control over his feelings as well as his body that he avoids anxiety but may suffer from such displacements of anxiety” (CDS:20). Virgil’s treatment is designed to reduce anxiety and thus eliminate the need for such punitive control.

Novels have been written with all sorts of premises, and somewhere Henry James tells us that every writer must be allowed his donné, but the basic story line to The Confessions of Danny Slocum must be one of the strangest premises any novelist has ever come up with.

And that, of course, is one of the reasons to read it.

One of the challenges for the Violet Quill was to try to create novels that escaped the traditional marriage plot. Andrew Holleran, for example, has Malone run away from his “marriage” to John Schaeffer in Dancer from the Dance. In The Beauty of Men, Lark gives up his vision of domesticity. But The Confessions of Danny Slocum is the most radical solution to this problem of avoiding the marriage plot, because the ultimate sign of their treatment’s success is that after Danny and Joe fall into each other’s arms sexually satisfied, they will say good-bye to one another. One could think of The Confessions of Danny Slocum as a novel about the education of the emotions, a post-Freudian update of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, but in Whitmore’s case there is no reintegration of the wayward hero into society. They aren’t taught to control their passions but to release their emotions from constraint.

But if Danny and Joe’s relationship isn’t a marriage or even a preparation for marriage, what is it? What do we call a relationship that requires the trust, honesty, mutual respect, and physical intimacy of marriage, but isn’t?

The Confessions of Danny Slocum is one of the works of the Violet Quill that tries to present the new kinds of relationships with which gay men were experimenting. What is needed, of course, in gay fiction is the story of fuck buddies—the relationship which, to my knowledge, is unique to American homosexuals. Fuck buddies are more than friends, but they don’t need to be friendly with one another. They are not lovers, yet the relationship is not without its affections. Certain fuck buddies take care of each other in more than sexual needs. They come to rely on each other for all sorts of practical and social assistance. Danny Slocum is not about fuck buddies—Danny and Joe’s relationship is even odder and more complicated than that—but it approaches the narrative of fuck buddies.

In fact, “fuck buddies” is the term that Joe uses early on to describe his relationship with Danny. During one of their sessions when they are massaging each other to get comfortable with each other’s body, Joe questions Danny about the journal he’s keeping. “Well, you can write this down: we’re buddies,” Joe tells Danny.

Repeatedly, Joe and Danny reject the term lovers to describe their relationship. “There is love between us,” Danny explains, “but that love has made us suffer in solitude, for it’s inadequate to bring us together over the barriers of failure, the hopelessness we feel. We try to draw from our porno what the other can’t supply” (CDS:80). And yet when Danny tells Joe he’s been “seeing someone” (a vague category of relationships), they have what Danny regards as a “lovers’ quarrel … he was obsessed with the fact that he didn’t own me” (135). Danny and Joe struggle to imagine a different sort of love relationship, one in which sexual affection is valued, not as a sign of possession but as a gift meant to be passed around. Early on, Danny recognizes, “our love for each other grows weekly more vestigial as we struggle not to fail ourselves and each other in this thing that neither of us quite understands. We are, after all, in this loverlike position only in order to seek out our own lovers freely. If our love achieves its purpose, it will no longer be needed” (82).

The problem of how to classify the relationship is central to the novel. On the one hand, being able to name the relationship will lessen anxiety, provide them with comfort, and help them overcome their sexual dysfunction. On the other hand, classification can be a source of anxiety and self-deprecation. Danny recognizes both the possibilities of developing new classifications for relationships as well as the dangers of such a process:

The “old, rigid Rules” are not merely the conventional rules of heterosexual erotic engagement but the rigid rules emerging in gay culture in the 1970s. Danny’s sexual problems begin when he is left by his lover Max, an actor who has gone to Hollywood to make it big. Max writes Danny about one particularly riotous night at Studio One where he went dancing with the actress Sandy Duncan: “It is the first time I’ve had a chance to blow off steam,” he tells him. “I let out many days of built-up anxiety. I ended up with someone. It was wonderful because it was a stranger. We had pure sex for sex’s sake—no obligations, no talk of business—just escape. The only time in ages I haven’t felt guilt or obligation or pressure. It has been a long time since I had sex without love. I really felt free” (63; italics in original). Here Max articulates one of the tenets of the sexual revolution: the need to free sex not just from procreation but also from romantic feeling—indeed, from any emotion whatsoever. By jettisoning his emotional baggage, Max hopes to rid himself of the guilt and obligation that had weighed him down in the past and to achieve what he calls “pure” sex. Yet the extremes to which he goes to separate sex from his everyday life, rather than distinguishing it from “business,” make sex seem all the more like business: after all, what is business but an exchange performed with virtual strangers, removed from any intimate and tender emotions. In fact, Max’s sex is all business—a consumerist paradise of impersonal transactions, purchased through the exchange of bodily fluids. Such release as Max enjoys is what makes business possible; it’s the all-important safety valve that keeps the entire entrapping capitalist enterprise from exploding under its own pressure. Max is not liberated from guilt; he’s merely on vacation from it—a coffee break of indulgence—an intermission from the world of business, which though full of obligation has just as little human connection as he finds in Studio One. I don’t want to suggest that Whitmore is conservative about sexual behavior, or that he wished to imitate heterosexual structures in homosexual terms. But he does see that Max’s “pure” sex is merely a part of the larger culture of impersonal transactions. There is nothing “pure” about it; rather it participates in the emptiness of the commodification from which it pretends to free its participants.

The Confessions of Danny Slocum ultimately is a book not about Danny’s sexual dysfunction but about a culture whose sexual rules are dysfunctional. Toward the end of the novel, Danny writes a letter to a friend: “I always did feel that my dysfunction was a form of protest, among other things. Against the utter impersonality of the scene … the sexual overload in a place like F[ire] I[sland]. It was as sexually stimulating to me as watching new cars roll off the assembly line in Detroit” (182; italics in original). Human bodies are not liberated in this sexual world, according to Danny, but reinscribed in a Fordian economy of production and consumption; they lose individuality so that they can become interchangeable examples of an improved, hot-selling model. The Confessions of Danny Slocum is a novel about sexual liberation—not sexual liberation as it developed in the clone culture of the seventies, but sexuality liberated from fear and shame, conformity, instrumentality, and interchangeability of gay sexual culture in the seventies.

Yet if, as Danny suggests, the end of their “complete restructuring” of the rules of sexual engagement only leads them “to seek out our own lovers freely,” they haven’t traveled very far in forging new principles that will guide them. For all its awareness of the way sex and sexual relations are structured, The Confessions of Danny Slocum is unable ultimately to imagine alternatives. Danny and Joe see the end of their therapy as a return to the search for bourgeois domesticity, which seemed to be their problem to begin with. The failure may fall with the very nature of psychotherapy, whose aim is not the restructuring of society but rather in helping individuals adjust and adapt to those outmoded rules of society. Yet Virgil’s own domestic situation seems far more radical than the one either Danny or Joe envisions. Virgil’s lover acts as a sex surrogate who tries to help Danny and Joe overcome their sexual inhibitions. In truth, only in his last years did Whitmore develop the kind of lover-like relationship he yearns for in The Confessions of Danny Slocum. But as late as 1985, he writes in his journal: “After so many years in therapy, I still don’t know just exactly why I can’t yet be happy. To at last sort out what comes from outside, what from within. That must be the secret” (July 13, 1985).

Reading the journal he kept in 1984 and 1985 is, indeed, a harrowing experience. Early on he comments: “Reading Denton Welch. There is a theme to all my reading lately. All have been gay and all victims. I will not live my life as an invalid. I have to will myself to act” (November 30, 1984). Clearly, Whitmore must fight off the feelings of being an invalid, and the journal records his fascination with death and suicide. During a business trip to London to research articles, he wonders:

From its very beginning, the novel strives for a comfortable relationship with sex. The opening scene of Danny Slocum is a sex scene whose explicitness lies midway between Ferro’s and Holleran’s reticence and Renaud Camus’ verbosity. Whitmore, however, does not attempt to be matter-of-fact; or rather, he is self-consciously aware of his failure to be matter-of-fact:

He lay in my arms (in all his tautness, his smoothness, his silky slinkiness, lips parted), but all I could think about was his sudden and disconcerting resemblance to—Donny Osmond, on TV. When touched in certain moanable places, he giggled disconcertingly. He had begun disconcertingly to talk baby-talk.

I knelt between his knees, cupped my hands around the flame (why write with such delicacy, Danny?) and breathed on it. It flickered, flared. (His prick was a Roman candle, Danny, and hard in your hot hand.) He bucked and—lordy, these kids—came, and I didn’t spill a drop. (It shot like gobs of hot wax against the back of your throat, Danny.)

He was kneeling over me then—how much later?—and no longer looking like Donny Osmond, was no longer talking at all, or giggling. …

My legs, resting on his thighs, began to cramp, he held my cock in his soft brown hand, tight—like the gearshift on a car.

“Aren’t you going to cum?”

“I’m … too tired, I guess.”

A challenge. He picked up the gauntlet. “I can make you.” Shifted into second.

Oscillations.

My hand fluttered down his face. “Don’t. I’m getting sore.” (The Confessions of Danny Slocum, 2)

In his translator’s note to Tricks, Richard Howard tells us that, whereas the French words for sexual parts are not “immediate metaphors,” “almost every English word at the colloquial level for the sexual parts, male or female, is … extravagantly metaphorical, even—am I stretching it?—poetic.” Howard attributed this metaphoric extravagance to “our Anglo-American uneasiness, in the upper-middle class, about the words for sexual parts,” and he speculates, “Perhaps the jitters are always responsible for metaphorical treatment; perhaps we always use other words when we are afraid” (251–52). The opening of Danny Slocum is ornamented with this euphemistic use of metaphor (“Why write with such delicacy, Danny?”). By delicacy, Danny means speaking of the erect penis as a Roman candle and, later, as a gearshift. The answer—or at least one of the answers—is, as Richard Howard points out, “fear.” In The Confessions of Danny Slocum, Whitmore’s metaphoric language and elaborate rhetorical device of apostrophizing to himself indicate and are symptoms of both his fear of ejaculating and his shame at being unable to ejaculate.

The very metaphors Whitmore uses suggest his fear and shame. While Danny’s trick’s penis is a Roman candle, a source of light and explosive energy, Danny’s own penis is a gearshift, an implement for controlling an energy that is directed elsewhere, a mechanical instrument that is manipulated but not enjoyed. A gearshift—unlike a Roman candle—is an instrument of control; and as a late cummer, Danny needs to exercise control to mitigate his anxiety. And what is the late cummer so anxious about? According to Danny, it is “the prospect of intimacy … cumming becomes the final sign of accepting that intimacy” (22). Fear of intimacy, the need to maintain control, all these turn the sex act into a series of metaphors that in their instrumentality and mechanicalness distance and displace the act and his shameful failure to perform it.

The Confessions of Danny Slocum is very much “a slice of life at a particular time and in a particular place”—an expression of both the excitement of the possibility of new ways of structuring relationships and the expression of the fear, guilt, and shame that still lingered around sex (CDS:215). Consequently, Whitmore very consciously locates the novel in late-seventies culture. Danny Slocum makes references to the real-life fire at the Everard Baths (an event that also appears at the conclusion of Dancer from the Dance), the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, the introduction of the hepatitis B vaccine (long before those studies became central in understanding the development of AIDS), and the publication of Gay American History, the first important collection of documents covering the entire history of same-sex relations in North America. There are even a number of references to members of the Violet Quill. Danny’s novelist friend seems to be a combination of Edmund White and Felice Picano (with a dash of Richard Howard, for good measure). Danny alludes to Dancer from the Dance: “I’m reading this new novel in which a character says that men with small cocks are the lepers of the gay world.” And The Joy of Gay Sex is the bible Danny consults whenever he has questions about sexual performance. The Confessions of Danny Slocum captures, as so many books of the Violet Quill do, the peculiar quality of a certain segment of New York gay culture in the 1970s, one that oscillated from very high art to down and dirty sex, or as Edmund White put it in an interview, it was a time when a certain group of gay men were “serious and arty and interested in high culture, but also interested in having lots of sex in trucks and stuff” (Lemon:124). The Confessions of Danny Slocum refers to Vivaldi and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon on the same page (165), yokes Ronald Firbank and Wilhelm Reich (48), and moves from Bleak House to Moby-Dick to skincare entrepreneur Georgette Klinger in the blink of a Mabellined eye (32).

Whitmore sees the events in Danny Slocum as particularly American. Danny accuses a friend of laughing at his decision to enter sex therapy. His friend campily rejoins, “But, darling, I’m not laughing. It’s just that I can’t imagine any other nationality going about it in quite the same way. Self-reliance, how-to, know-how, all that” (9). Danny’s friend is amused by how gay life is affected by the American ethos of “self-reliance,” which reduces all of life to a set of attainable techniques. Whitmore is also laughing at himself, for he was a student of American transcendentalism, which put such importance on “self-reliance.” Whitmore refers to Thoreau and nineteenth-century feminist Margaret Fuller in Danny Slocum, and he wrote a long essay on Thoreau.

But it is also a novel based in its intellectual moment. The first version of Danny Slocum appeared in Christopher Street in 1979, the year after Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality appeared in English. And in the spirit of the times, Whitmore comes to see the ways that sexuality is socially constructed. Because he can’t ejaculate, Danny is forced to consider the question of what constitutes sex. A feminist friend of his points out that the importance men give to the orgasm is a patriarchal value. “You don’t call it real sex unless you can come every time, do you? It’s just so typically male,” she tells him in disgust (16). Later, when Joe does have an orgasm in the presence of another person, he doesn’t consider it “real” sex because he achieved the orgasm by masturbating. Sex becomes a category very much in dispute, but it is interesting that Danny never seriously considers whether there would be some benefit to reshaping sexual relations that removes it from orgasms, ejaculations, or even erections.

Although George Whitmore’s Confessions of Danny Slocum is the most formally innovative of the early novels of the Violet Quill, it is not alone in questioning the nature of sexual categories, the centrality of the marriage model, or the power of internalized homophobia. These are the subjects of Felice Picano’s The Lure, the first of his explicitly gay novels, published exactly a decade after the Stonewall Riots. A psychological thriller like his first three novels, The Lure takes the issue of psychological control into what for Picano is a new direction. Noel Cummings, the hero of The Lure, is an NYU sociology professor who is recruited by Whisper, a hush-hush police unit established to fight drug traffickers. Cummings is enlisted to infiltrate a gay-owned and operated company that runs a chain of discos and bars throughout the country, but whose president, Eric Redfern, is suspected of being not only a drug kingpin but an unusually brutal serial killer. Cummings believes he is recruited because he is straight, honest, and the killer’s exact type, but he is actually recruited because he is gullible, romantic, and wracked by the guilt and fear of homoerotic desires. For Whisper, as we eventually learn, is not so much a law enforcement unit as an arm of ultra-right fanatics dedicated to destroying the nascent gay liberation movement by assassinating its leaders and using other gay men as their assassins. Like The Manchurian Candidate, The Lure shows that, through the exploitation of their psychological vulnerabilities, people can be programmed to act out orders they are not conscious of possessing. Indeed, the novel shows how we are all more or less programmed to act in the ways society dictates.

The Lure contains several concepts that books of the seventies are not usually thought to express. First, Picano is at pains to show how gay culture is in the process of being constructed. Second, he dramatizes how sexual identity is a product of society, a phenomenon that grows out of the need to classify desire. In short, The Lure is closer to some of the basic tenets of queer theory than one might expect of so early a work.

Making his hero a sociologist was a smart move on Picano’s part; it justifies, for example, a great deal of the exposition. Picano can explain gay slang under the guise of Cummings’s need to learn gay argot (there is a long entry defining the term fag hag). He can treat the reader to a grand tour of gay institutions—backroom bars, bathhouses, Fire Island, glitzy discos, and dark, urinous leather clubs—as part of Cummings’s education. In fact, The Lure provides the straight reader with a crash course in gay life. The explanation for Picano’s programmatic narrative—he’s far more schematic than Holleran, who covers much the same ground in Dancer from the Dance—is that Picano is working in a popular genre that appeals to a wider, if less sophisticated, readership. Yet Picano is always making fun of Cummings’s scholarly motives, slyly alluding to that old chestnut of gay folklore that has students or teachers explaining their presence at a gay bar by insisting that they’re only doing “research.” Finally, the fact that Cummings is a sociologist provides Picano with a way of showing that gay culture is virtually a product of sociology itself. Cummings has agreed to work for Whisper because it will give him the opportunity to write the book that he needs to earn tenure in his department. Thus the novel’s entry into gay life is through the lens of the categories set up by academic sociology.

One of the more interesting aspects of Picano’s sociological portrait of queer New York is that he places it in a historical context. The Lure, although published in 1979, pushes events back to 1976 so that the action can take place in the time when gay entrepreneurs began challenging the Mafia’s control of gay bars and bathhouses by creating cleaner, better designed, gay-friendly establishments that more successfully catered to the demands of gay customers. By presenting gay culture not as a fixed unchanging culture, but as one rapidly evolving, Picano suggests that social forces both from within and without construct gay society.

If Picano is careful to represent gay society as constructed, he is even clearer in showing that the label gay is a highly variable term imposed to contain the fluidity of desire. For example, Cummings is first presented as a paragon of heterosexuality, a man who seems naturally to fulfill the rules of masculinity. But soon enough we discover not only the usual adolescent episode of same-sex experimentation but a college hazing incident, quietly handled by school authorities, in which he raped a freshman pledge in one of those boywas-I-drunk blackouts. The definition of heterosexuality is further compromised as Cummings is forced to have sex with other men to maintain his cover as a Whisper operative. His repeated sexual acts with men are overlooked because they are performed to avoid suspicion. Yet The Lure is not about a closet case who finally comes out. Cummings’s erotic drives are never reoriented exclusively to men. Throughout the novel, women genuinely arouse him sexually, and he is not the only character in the novel who is aroused by women; Buddy Vega, a fellow Whisper operative, is happily married, and his wife assists Cummings in revealing Whisper’s nefarious plot to destroy the gay liberation movement. Cummings is portrayed as falling in love with both Alana, a wealthy supermodel, and her companion Eric Redfern. And although Redfern is clearly more attracted to men, The Lure repeatedly refuses to force Redfern’s bond with Alana into any of the available pigeonholes. Picano carefully keeps it enigmatic, unclassifiable. At a key moment in the novel Cummings wanders the beaches of Fire Island and notes how often he is propositioned for “a variety of sexual activities, some of which he’d never even classified as sexual” (270). Such a statement reinforces the idea dramatized in the action of the novel that not only is the division of sexuality into homo- and heterosexual an arbitrary structure dictated by forces that profit through repression, but that the very category of what is “classified as sexual” is equally a construction. Indeed, one gets the sense that ultra-right fanatics wish to destroy the gay culture not simply because it valorizes same-sex relations but, more important, because it defies the very mechanism of that sexual classification. Although by the end of The Lure, Cummings identifies himself as a gay man, we should not interpret that identification as synonymous with being exclusively homosexual but, rather, as a person who resists the very imperative to classify sexual orientation—in short, as much closer to the way some people today use the word queer.

Nor is The Lure the only book in which Picano challenges the imposition of classification onto the fluidity of desire. Ambidextrous, his “memoir in the form of a novel” (a subtitle that plays with the very arbitrariness of classification), also asserts the freedom of childhood sexuality before it is socially contained. In Late in the Season, a man who has for sometime identified himself as exclusively homosexual surprises himself by becoming sexually and romantically involved with a woman. Although the hero of Late in the Season ultimately returns to his male lover, he does so with an awareness that sexual labels do an injustice not only to the motility of erotic attraction but to the range of one’s own experience. As noted earlier, the working title of Late in the Season was A Summer’s Lease, and in the allusion to Shakespeare’s sonnets, Picano underscores the need for desire to be allowed more room to shape itself, just as Shakespeare seems to be untroubled whether the object of his love is male or female.

On the surface, Edmund White looks like the opposite of Picano. Picano’s characters discover a bisexuality they had not consciously been looking for, whereas White’s characters strive to achieve a bisexuality that they cannot realize or sustain. The nameless narrator of his trilogy of autobiographical novels tries repeatedly to work up lust for women. The attempts are mostly failures, in part because they derive not from his own desire but from his wish to please his mother or father or psychoanalyst. Despite his desire to “get well,” his sexual orientation remains decidedly frozen. In Caracole, in which all the characters are heterosexual, the orientation is equally fixed, the men and women seemingly unable to act on, or even imagine, same-sex desire. For White, sexual orientation comes as a kind of immovable feast, an imprinting as grotesque and unshakeable as the gosling’s attachment to the first large moving object it sees after emerging from its shell. Although a friend of Foucault and an early American admirer of his work, White seems mainly to be an unapologetic essentialist.

Yet the narrator of his autobiographical trilogy does manage to have sex with a woman—the lesbian painter Maria. They have sex almost in a trance, swept up, as he says, “like lovers in a tempest that rage around us, and, yes, for us” (BRE:112). Yet after two days, he casts “hungry looks at … boys and yearn[s] to escape Maria.” His inability to sustain his sexual desire for Maria alone troubles him. He cannot resolve his love for her with his unaltered (and seemingly unalterable) lust for males because he can find no category under which to place his feeling. Bisexual is a rubric that presumes sexual attraction to women. But the narrator is not sexually attracted to women in general; he lusts for men. Yet his love for Maria is not without a sexual component. How does one organize a life around such feelings? The narrator cannot say that his failure to imagine such a life results from “the conventionality of [his] social imagination.” He tells the reader: “I didn’t have the insider’s advantage of refashioning public forms to suit private needs. Yet I did have an ecstatic apprehension of her, of what she meant to me” (113). The “heterosexual” man can find a way to slip in sex with other males because he is the “insider,” the person who controls the social system. But the homosexual cannot find room for women, or even a woman, because then he’d only be a closet case trying to win acceptance. Picano and White share the same beliefs that categories are harmful not only because they stigmatize same-sex relations but also because, for those who feel that they have little or no power within the social system, they channel erotic desire into constricting modes.

One of the central projects of the Violet Quill was to fight “the conventionality of [the] social imagination” and imagine forms of relationships that better mirror the realities of gay life or could better serve gay men. But the very nature of such deeply ingrained cultural practices makes them extremely difficult to evade. The narrator of The Farewell Symphony aspires to a sophistication that precludes such bourgeois and heterosexist institutions as marriage. Celebrating the silence that was an essential part of public or semipublic cruising on the docks at the Trucks—the area on West Street beneath the elevated West Side Highway (now torn down) where trucks were parked in row after row—he writes:

The vow of silence had eliminated the last link with the old, established world of man and woman, the one in which sexuality was used as a bright bait, as reward or recompense, in a game that otherwise concerned suitable pairings, the suitability determined by money, age, religion, race. Gay couples might still observe the familiar conventions, but for that very reason gay men looked down on marriage itself as retrograde. Perhaps that’s why gay couples were usually relegated to Brooklyn Heights (if they were dully domestic) or the Upper East Side (if they were stylish) or West (if bookish)—anywhere out of sight of these bold, laughing Villagers with their mustaches, ringing voices, their clothes contrived as erotic advertisement, their warm, seasoned faces, just a bit lined and vulpine from so many nights on the hunt, their scent-free bodies molded, more and more, by black leather since the sadistic was the only look that went well with extreme pallor. (The Farewell Symphony, 178)

His contempt for gay couples is heightened by the style and bookishness of his own sentences, which argue his superiority to those couples that would try to justify such retrograde behavior by recourse to the very qualities that keep them apart. Yet within pages, the narrator will turn to Sean, one of the men he is most profoundly attached to, and propose with a variation on that time-honored question, “Would you marry me?” The narrator wants to assure us that “there was no suggestion that I wanted him to be my ‘husband’” and that he still rejects the “bourgeois institution of marriage,” and yet he wishes to solemnize “a relationship that went beyond … mere passion and that was more permanent than the vagaries of desire” (FS:182).

Nor is this his only proposal. He also proposes to Kevin, a figure that grew out of White’s relationship with the actor and writer Keith McDermott. There is in both these proposals an anticipation of humiliation; indeed, the proposal themselves derive from his sense of humiliation, as if masochism alone could justify so fierce a desire. For Kevin he feels “what an ugly man feels toward a beautiful woman,” a desire not of possession but of transubstantiation—to use White’s religious term, his customary discourse when describing his erotic passions—that through such a union with the beautiful, the ugly can be transformed and become its equal. In The Farewell Symphony he discusses the contradictions in his attitude toward coupledom:

White’s view of marriage goes beyond the bourgeois pieties of the romantic age, back before the Enlightenment, to a metaphysical view of love, the subject of study of his friend, the scholar and critic David Kalstone. White’s way of avoiding the humiliation of falling prey to the domestic banality of marriage is to elevate love into some version of Courtly Love with its Neoplatonic Christian metaphysics, a love that demands failure and pain as its keenest evidence of sincerity. In this view, even Kevin’s attempts to disgust the narrator by telling him about his hemorrhoid (“I don’t see what all the fuss is about, I just poke it back in with my finger and then get fucked with nothing but really big dicks”) becomes an excuse for veneration, as one would venerate a chip of a saint’s hipbone or the wounds of Christ. Like Genet, White is an atheist who, nevertheless, is devoted to the sacred if scummy beloved. Yet unlike Genet, this position is never stabilized for White as it is for Genet because White lacks the cultural background against which such inversions are possible. The most Catholic element of Genet is his very French anticlericalism, whereas White can only rely on a rather diluted country club Episcopalianism as a foil, and it is not enough to hold these terms in place.

In Whitmore’s Danny Slocum and in Picano’s The Lure, the authors tried to imagine relationships that defied the conventional structure of heterosexual marriages. In Picano’s The Lure, even the legally married men try to make room for expression of their needs for same-sex relations, relationships recognized by their wives. Yet the triumphant ending of The Lure, it’s insistent “We’ve won,” as Noel Cummings and Eric Redfern foil the plans of Whisper, sound a bit strained. As Picano knew all too well, making a culture is not an enterprise that has easy winners and losers.

What is striking is the near unanimity among the members of the Violet Quill in their desire to go beyond the structure of conventional marriage. It is all the more striking given the importance that gay and lesbian marriage has had in the political climate of the 1990s in which so much energy has been channeled to legalizing same-sex marriages. Indeed it seems that it has been “the conventionality of [the] social imagination” which can claim victory.

Not that the Violet Quill didn’t understand or appreciate from the very beginning the draw of conventional family life; to the contrary, no one is more sappily sentimental about it than Andrew Holleran. In Nights in Aruba, the narrator (who has a summer job as an encyclopedia salesman) gives this homage to the lower-middle-class suburban family:

Holleran’s characters cling to the right to remain single even as they bemoan the loneliness of their unattached states. As I have mentioned, even though Malone agrees to be married to the good-looking and sufficiently wealthy young John Schaeffer, he bolts at the last minute, in part because he does not love Schaeffer but also because he doesn’t truly want to be “married” to anyone. Malone’s sense of wholeness, of connection, doesn’t come from attachment to one person; it comes from being linked to an entire community. Malone’s relationship with Frankie—his first love affair—ends when Frankie finds that Malone has been having sex with others. Frankie, who has left his wife and children to live with Malone, takes with him the idea of marital fidelity, and that notion of sexual exclusivity ends what had been a perfectly happy relationship. Whatever sense sexual exclusivity may make within heterosexual relations, the VQ saw it as a formula for disaster in homosexual ones. Malone needs to be able to express himself sexually with other men. If there is a central figure in Malone’s life, it is Sutherland, with whom he never has sex. Love, as Sutherland defines it (in a parody of real-life psychologist and syndicated newspaper columnist Dr. Rose Franzblau), is “the mutual support of two mature people involved in separate quests for self-realization” (DFTD:144). Stress falls on the word separate. Malone can never realize himself tied to anyone—his hope is in following his own separate quest.

In The Beauty of Men, published nearly twenty years after Dancer from the Dance, Holleran is still writing about the search for a lover and still weaving around the American home a sort of sacred mythology. In The Beauty of Men, Lark, who is obsessed with Becker, gets into the habit of driving past his home late at night. Lark feels “an enormous sense of relief” when he first gets sight of what is a quite ordinary Floridian house:

Such domesticity thrills Lark (as it thrills Holleran), who nevertheless remains outside, passing secretively in his car, certain that he will never enter this charmed circle; and yet the very tackiness of this landscape with its miniature windmill, birdbath, and mirrored ball—everything but pink flamingos—suggests that its charms, however momentarily strong, are impossible for Lark to sustain. The personal safety net is not to be found in coupledom but in the intersecting ties of a wider group of friends. It is significant that Lark’s obsession with Becker occurs while Lark takes care of his invalid widowed mother. Marriage has not kept her from dying alone. What Lark needs to come to accept is the reality that there is no way out of the separateness that is everybody’s life and—not just accept it—embrace his independence.

White returns to the theoretical position of gay liberation that rejected heterosexual models for gay men. Whereas straight people worked under the assumption that they should form monogamous, lifelong unions (even if few did), gay men did not have to operate under such Victorian notions:

In many ways in his fiction, White’s alter egos, even while wishing to “marry” one man or another, evolve relationships that are entirely outside the conventional norm. In The Farewell Symphony the narrator never has a monogamous relationship with any of the men with whom he lives and—like Malone—the man he loves most, Joshua, is one with whom he never has sex. In The Married Man the situation is even more complex. Although Austin lives with Julien, a Frenchman, he has not broken relations with Peter, an American, whom Austin supports in his old apartment in New York (Peter doesn’t care for Paris). Peter and Julien don’t like one another—Austin’s attempts to create what might be a ménage à trois is disastrous—in part because they understand that they do not have a complete hold on Austin and that they must exist in some undefined relationship, neither kept man nor neglected spouse. White did not only write about such relations; he lived them. Peter and Julien are drawn extensively from John Purcell and Hubert Sorin. And during the period that he maintained ties to both Purcell and Sorin, White enjoyed sex with other men as well.

White’s desire to avoid heterosexual models extends to his view of parenting. His nephew, Keith Fleming, has written a remarkable account of the year or so in the mid-seventies in which White became his guardian, a period covered in The Farewell Symphony. Fleming, called in the novel Gabriel, comes to stay with White directly from the “psych ward” where he had been committed. On first looking at his nephew, White concludes that the boy needs treatment not for mental illness but for a devastating case of acne. “No wonder he lurks in the basement and only emerges at night,” the narrator reasons. “He doesn’t want anyone to see him” (267). He sends him, then, not to a psychiatrist but to a dermatologist. When he learns that Gabriel/Fleming is pining away for a girl whom he had met in the hospital—Ana in the novel, Laura in real life—White arranges not just for the young woman to come and live in New York, where he provides schooling for her, but for them to live in an apartment by themselves. “I felt that my wards must understand we were all in this together,” he writes in The Farewell Symphony. “They delved into trouble because they’d defied their parents and other authorities. But they couldn’t rebel against me.” His plan is to give them nothing to rebel against. “You can go to school or not. … You can sleep all day, get drunk, do whatever you like.” No matter what they chose, he would give them a weekly allowance of half his earnings, and he shows them his checkbook so that they can see he isn’t lying (313). This unorthodox approach had its success. Both made reasonable progress in their development, and although White has lost contact with Ana/Laura, Fleming has developed into a fine writer. But the success or failure of White’s strategy is secondary to the effort of his trying to rethink the structure of personal relationships, to locate in the very structure of the conventional family—which denies to young people an integral place in the family and subordinates them economically, sexually, and socially—the causes of its undoing. Only by the most radical restructuring along egalitarian lines does White think that sanity can be restored to domestic life.

The AIDS epidemic reaffirmed—not weakened—the Violet Quill’s belief that intimate relations couldn’t be modeled on the conventional family, for as many of them discovered, families could not necessarily be trusted to provide the care people needed. They saw repeatedly how many gay men relied on a large network of friends and social services—not their families—to provide their needs. In The Farewell Symphony, White tells how Joshua is cared for, not by his family nor even very well by his lover, but by Ned and Philip—modeled on John Purcell and J. D. McClatchy, respectively. He also records how Tom in the last months of his life throws out his devoted lover because the lover has not been sexually monogamous and thereby, in a mistaken allegiance to normative heterosexual conventions, turns his final days into a period of resentment and loneliness.

It is Felice Picano who has written the most about the success of redefined relations to meet the stress of AIDS. Picano’s focus on this subject is drawn from his own life, for he not only saw his own family’s rejection of his brother who died of AIDS, but he saw how his lover, Bob Lowe, tried to encourage Picano to go on without him. In his novel Onyx and his story “The Geology of Southern California at Black’s Beach,” men with AIDS encourage their partners to find new lovers. Picano knows that the structure of long-term relationships can be strengthened when the pressures of caregiving are widely spread, and that those both grieving and dying need various outlets for their feelings and more—not fewer—people to love. If gay marriages are modeled on conventional straight marriages, then gay people will be in a dire position should another health crisis arise, for there will not be the widespread community to step in nor the multiple sites of relief. The gay world will be as imploded into little households as is the straight community for whom good fences make good neighbors. If, as the African proverb says, “it takes a village to raise a child,” then it also takes a community to care for the dying. The fluid, interlocking relationships that were built in the gay community helped it contend with a health crisis unparalleled in America.

What seemed to the Violet Quill to be the greatest challenge to conventional notions of sex and love was the rise of leather fetishism and sadomasochistic practices. Within the group, sadomasochism gets abbreviated in a variety of ways. Michael Grumley uses “S/M,” George Whitmore “S-M,” Edmund White “S and M” or “S & M.” When quoting the writers, I will use their preferred spelling; otherwise, I will use S/M since the slash mark seems particularly appropriate in this context. Of course, S/M was not limited to homosexuals—in his book Hard Corps Michael Grumley gives equal time to heterosexuals engaged in S/M—nor are leather and S/M necessarily bound (shall we say) together. But in the perception of the general public and in the minds of many gay men, S/M concerned gay men most especially, and the line between leather sex and S/M symbolically merged.

“It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Sociology to ascertain that interest in S-M is on the rise,” George Whitmore tartly notes; “just a walk down any ghetto street late Friday night” will give you all the confirmation you might need (“New Frontiers”:45). Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term sadomasochism in 1890, and clearly in the nineteenth century there were private clubs dedicated to spanking, whipping, and forms of bondage; but according to Gert Hekma, sadomasochism didn’t produce a significant movement or subculture until after World War II (762). The immediate post-Stonewall atmosphere saw the publication of the Phil Andros books and Dirk Vanden’s All trilogy. George Whitmore writes about the popularity of John Preston’s Mr. Benson, serialized in the mid-seventies in Drummer. Grumley argues that most “newcomers, fascinated by the vague spectacle before them, read The Story of O, Juliette, The Leatherman’s Handbook and The Real Thing,” suggesting the literary nature of sadomasochism (Hard Corps:ch. 2). Of course, Tom of Finland had been publishing his pictures of leather-clad motorcyclists, soldiers, and policemen since the mid-fifties.

But by the late seventies, a significant change had taken place in the New York bar scene. Traditional leather bars such as the Eagle’s Nest and the Ramrod had spawned a new kind of bar—the Toilet and the Mineshaft. In The Farewell Symphony, White gives quite a lengthy description of the Mineshaft, as if he were helping future urban anthropologists to make sense of practices that might be shrouded in history and lost to analysis.

The entrance to the club was at the top of a long flight of stairs. There a guy seated on a stool kept out the undesirables—men wearing cologne or silk shirts or sports jackets—and let in guys who smelled of nothing but leather, sweat and beer. Once inside, the customer could check all his clothes at the door. … The hat-check boy also handed out paper cups full of Crisco.

In the first room men drank at a long bar and played pool.

In the second room the customers were plunged instantly into near-total darkness. … One wall was perforated with saucer-sized holes at waist height—glory holes. Guys would stick their cocks through these holes and get sucked off by unseen mouths on the other side. Some stood there silently at attention; others writhed and clawed the wood. …

As in Hell, the punishments became more severe the lower one descended. Upstairs men were being fisted in slings; downstairs they were naked in a tub being pissed on. As though Hell were a sideshow, most of the men were shuffling from the bearded lady to the snake charmer. One whip-wielding man kept driving his lover back into a corner, which represented the kennel; everyone rushed to see this noisy dressage. Elsewhere a man was being wrapped in sheets of transparent plastic—only a slender pipe came out of his mouth to allow him breath. This image of mummification frightened me so much I couldn’t look at it. (329)

Among the strangest elements of this passage is what White regards as the lowest rung in the Mineshaft’s Hell. He is quite willing to witness fisting, whipping, and “golden showers,” but he turns away from the spectacle of a man being Saran-wrapped. Ironically, what makes this act seem so perverse is its very absence of overt violence. For whereas the other events involve contact between master and slave—a contact that involves intimacy with the most abject parts of the other’s body—the mummification is an antiseptic performance, silent, unfeeling, and completely passive. If the person were chained or bound in ropes, the masochist could at least have the opportunity to resist or struggle out of them. But the point of binding someone in “sheets of transparent plastic” is to exhibit complete submission and to underscore the performance of subservience. It is as if White were watching only the last scene of The Taming of the Shrew and had to imagine the psychic violence that preceded and was necessary to produce such unquestioning docility. White finds unwatchable not the desire for mastery—which is a desire he is quite willing to acknowledge as his own—but the attainment of inertness, a renunciation of everything but the ability to breathe, a condition made manifest through the layers of transparent plastic, a condition from which he turns away in both recognition and psychic self-protection.

S/M practices, although only a small part of gay activity, caught the public’s imagination in the late seventies, and the Violet Quill tried several stylistic strategies to address the phenomenon. Michael Grumley tried a solemn and ponderous approach in Hard Corps, George Whitmore is light-heartedly satirical, and White is matter-of-fact in The Joy of Gay Sex, apologetic but hip in his essays and anxiously lyrical in his novels. (It is significant that White was a friend and colleague of Robert Mapplethorpe, who produced some of the more famous photographs of S/M culture, in a variety of styles.) These writers were compelled to write about S/M not merely because they were to a greater or lesser extent personally involved in it, but also it seemed important to them as writers. As chroniclers of gay life, they felt that S/M was an important way to understanding the social, sexual, and psychological energies gay liberation had let loose, and as writers they were predictably drawn to the most extreme and dramatic forms that liberation could take. They also saw that gay S/M brought something new to sexuality. Fisting, for example, appears to be an invention of the mid-twentieth century, unknown in the nineteenth century where there are no known reports of it in either the extensive medical/legal files—Krafft-Ebing dedicated himself to uncovering the entire range of sexual practices and notes no examples—or in the very extensive pornographic literature where there were far more brutal fantasies. What the VQ saw was that something unprecedented was happening in front of them.

The two most popular explanations for the rise of S/M among gay men have enough truth in them that they are worth repeating, but none of the Violet Quill thought they actually explained the phenomenon. The most common explanation was that S/M expresses internalized homophobia. Michael Grumley speaks of the “stern and simple morality” of twentieth-century America in which “the authority-institution figure punishes the renegade.” “In a nation where organized religion has gone out fashion,” he continues, “the themes of the early morality have moved directly from the pulpit to the bedroom.” Yet as White points out, there are some evident problems with this explanation. If S/M actually represented a desire to punish oneself for being a homosexual, why wasn’t S/M activity more common among highly closeted gay men than with the flagrant leathermen who parade so ostentatiously in Chelsea? Why would it have waited for gay liberation to make its mark instead of being popular in the highly repressive 1950s? And finally, why would it appear most commonly among the middle and upper class, where sexual repression is weaker, than in the lower classes where sexual deviation is more vehemently stigmatized and sex roles more clearly prescribed? As White cogently argues, “If S and M were really a way of identifying with the straight oppressor, we would expect the typical leather man to be older rather than younger, closety rather than overt, conformist rather than blatant” (BL:60).

The other explanation is that gay men, having freed themselves from the stigma of being sissies, took up S/M practices as a form of overcompensation in which they could project a hypermasculine identity. “Former fairies,” George Whitmore notes, “have transformed themselves virtually overnight into macho construction workers or swaggering bikers. They do not mince their way through the sexual battlefields that are our dockstrips and warehouse districts; they stride forth, not looking left, not looking right, guided purely by a laser-like sense of direction, to the nearest cellar-with-a-sling in the neighborhood” (“New Frontiers”:45). The humor of Whitmore’s description is buttressed by his counterintuitive allusion to Stephen Sondheim’s torch song “Losing My Mind” (from Follies), in which a love-distraught character obsessed by her beloved feigns quotidian normality in the face of paralyzing indecision (“not going left/not going right”). The fairy may have left the musical, but the musical has not left the fairy. Yet despite this hypermasculine appearance, leatherman often were keenly and unself-consciously involved in the arts.

Even as White disparages these two explanations for S/M, he uses them. In The Farewell Symphony, Leonard exemplifies both the overcompensating and self-hating theories on the origin of gay sadomasochism. The narrator meets Leonard in the midst of Leonard’s three-year-long transformation from “timid, skinny kid to a loud, smiling, lordly man.” He becomes in the process a man “with a massive chest too hard to sleep on, shoulders as wide as a Jaguar’s fenders, a back so bulked with muscle that his spine had become a deep indentation and a butt you could have balanced a martini on” (FS:324). Leonard’s transformation is a direct response to his trailer-trash childhood in Florida, an upbringing in which his father, crippled in a car accident, starved and abused Leonard, constantly calling him “a fuckin’ nerd, the kind of creep I used to beat up in high school.” Still, Leonard is not just all gym body; he becomes the type of leatherman who, on his return from a motorcycle rally, cried when his lover played “Kinderszenen or sang in his quavering, pale voice Schubert’s Erlkönig” (329). But when Leonard develops AIDS and sheds “the massive body” he has worked so hard to achieve, he becomes once more “the skinny blond kid … the despised creep he’d [been] as a boy when he’d been tormented by his alcoholic, bedridden father.” As the ebbing of a tide often reveals the ruins that lay beneath the waters, so, too, the ebbing of his hypermasculine body reveals that Leonard “hated himself” (381). Beneath his obsession with leather is a homophobia barely concealed, and beneath the superhero physique is the 98-pound weakling.

Yet even if there is an element of truth behind these simple theories for the rise in S/M practices, still these facile explanations do not approach the complex reality that surrounded the Violet Quill, and it was this fuller picture of gay life—not the schematic picture of sociology or political argument—that they wished to paint. Even in White’s portrait of Leonard, internalized homophobia is not Leonard’s only or even major motivation. If he had been so afraid of appearing to be a sissy, why does Leonard develop his interests in high art? If so afraid to appear feminine, why is he so proud of his ability to shed tears? Why does he look for someone who can top his top, by making him the submissive one? More is going on than is met with in pop psychology.

While admitting its dangers, the Violet Quill tended to give to S/M a rather positive spin. George Whitmore’s satirical piece “New Frontiers of S-M,” which appeared in Christopher Street, suggests that the violence associated with sadomasochism is overblown. In a mock interview with “Bart,” the current “president of the Dungeon Club’s New York chapter and past-Grand Master of the Northeast division of the Biker’s Brigade” (titles meant to suggest that S/M was just a queer variation of the Masons), Whitmore learns of practices too horrible to put into print, practices demanded by the master that the slave can hardly imagine possible, practices we soon discover are no less than … learning to quit smoking! Whitmore goes on to reveal even more horrible torments: masters “in a certain Midwestern city where Slaves are compelled to take up spot-welding and computer sciences.” “These activities,” Whitmore admits in mock horror, “will be viewed by many readers as nauseating and heinous to the last degree,” but, he suggests, they are not the most terrible punishments meted out in “the last frontiers of S-M.” He’s heard of masters exercising their “secret, unbidden desire to take up potholder weaving … or the even more exotic but nevertheless currently fashionable S-M practice of vegetable home-canning” (48). Whitmore clearly believes that all the publicity surrounding S/M and the titillating stories of abuse are ridiculous and that the dark mysteries of S/M clubs are, in actuality, about as dangerous as the secret ceremonies in a Moose Lodge.

While acknowledging that much of S/M is theater, no more genuinely violent than the World Wrestling Federation, Michael Grumley still wishes to invest it with a mythic and sacramental aura. He repeatedly returns to a mystic sense of cosmic and psychic balance that is to be achieved through S/M. Hard Corps begins by invoking the Dugum Dani, a tribe in Papua New Guinea, who “regularly enacts rituals of sacrifice in order to maintain their sense of balance with the deistic forces of good and evil” (ch. 1). Toward the end of the book, Grumley ruminates:

One of Grumley’s other ways to take the sting, so to speak, out of S/M and present it as healthy is to find examples in nature. Repeatedly, he calls on animal behavior to show that humans are not the only creatures who engage in sexual behavior that is violent and nonreproductive, yet necessary for the stability of the species. We’re told about certain bighorn sheep in the Rockies in which the female, who is in heat only three days a year, allows herself to be mounted “only when she has been defeated in combat by a stronger ram.” During the rest of the year, “the high-ranking male spends considerable time mounting … subordinate males, who offer him a neat focus for combining aggressive and sexual behavior.” For Grumley there’s no contradiction between nature red in tooth and claw and the music of the spheres—both are examples of cosmic equilibrium, a way to balance the yin and yang of the universe.

As a patient in fairly traditional analysis for years, White suggests a typically Freudian explanation of S/M behavior. For White, S/M is a form of repetition compulsion, in which one re-creates “earlier traumatic experience down to the last painful detail.” For Freud, patients reconstruct such events in order “to master disturbing reality by stage-managing it” so that the individual “rather than being a passive observer” can manipulate these threatening memories (BL:62–63). The masochist stages his torture to gain control over it and thereby master his suffering. But White doesn’t posit that all masochists have suffered serious childhood trauma, as Freud does. White enacts, as does Grumley, a change of direction that has become increasingly common in the theoretical literature that has developed in the last twenty or so years around the topic of sadomasochism. Instead of viewing the violence of society as a manifestation of private trauma (the rise of Fascism as an expression of Hitler’s own troubled childhood, for instance), White argues that the masochist’s desire for pain is a way of dealing with the violence, injustice, and inequalities of society:

The repetition compulsion seems an elegant model for sadomasochism, in which both partners, functioning under the benign dispensation of make-believe, re-enact not their own private troubles but rather society’s nightmarish preoccupations with power, with might. No acute person can fail to respond to the gross economic exploitation, the subtle oppression, the alienation and inauthenticity of modern life. …

This miserable reality, fueled by greed, fear and intimidation, is so real we cannot bear to look at it; as Simone Weil puts it, “Unless protected by an armor of lies, man cannot endure might without suffering a blow in the depth of his soul.” Most Americans today dismiss social problems as “dull” or drop a tired curtsy towards such issues in the form of a quip or rueful joke. …

These hidden maneuvers after money and status are revealed in sadomasochism. Whereas ordinary social interactions are characterized by the joke, humor has always been inimical to sadism, just as light is to vampires. This humor that defuses outrage (no matter how justified) and dampens indignation (no matter how righteous) is just another name for surrender. Sado-masochism rejects the laugh that paralyzes social consciousness. Within the charged space surrounding the master and slave, true deeds are performed. One man does submit to another. One man does humiliate another. (The Burning Library, 63)

What White admires about S/M is what we have always admired about tragedy: it is fiction that dares tell a truth we do not permit ourselves to recognize directly. A society that places competition as the centerpiece of its economic system creates a condition in which one person is encouraged to force another into submission, where winners are expected to advertise their triumph over losers. S/M stages these social battles and strips away the window dressing that society throws over the pain inflicted on the population. Yet S/M stages this reality so the participants can feel—as they do not in real life—that they have some control over the matter. If there is something ameliorative about S/M, according to White, it is the way it allows us simultaneously to recognize our victimization and to feel that we have control over it. Grumley maintains a similar position. America’s very success is the reason it is becoming “America the Masochistic” since, having spanked the world, we “now expect the world to spank us back.” “The masochist,” Grumley theorizes, “having reached a level of considerable professional authority or prestige, by subjecting himself to punishment of the physical sort, rights the balance of his success.”

In a recent conversation with Edmund White, he said that he thought that Pat Califia, the editor of The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, has presented what he regards as the most compelling explanation of the attractions of masochism. In the S/M scenario, according to White, the masochist’s most glaring defects become the focus of the sadist’s attention and are, thereby, redeemed as valuable. For White, the master wants you because you are fat or femmy or awkward; you become desirable because of your deficiencies, which are no longer deficiencies but assets to be valued. Such an analysis highlights the role attention plays in creating value and the way this need for attention underlies the entire theatricalization of S/M practices. In S/M, dominance and submission are not merely performed, they are performed for someone. As Freud argued in “A Child is Being Beaten” (1919), the audience is an essential part of the fantasy.

Children can never get enough attention, and children who will become gay are often particularly starved for attention because they fail to perform the sorts of actions that will win their father’s approval. At least in White’s childhood as narrated in his trilogy of autobiographical novels, this is the case. His father, a distant man in general, becomes particularly distant to his awkward, chubby, effeminate son. At the end of the first chapter of A Boy’s Own Story, the narrator explains, “I might not be the son [my father] thought he wanted, but I was what he deserved—someone patient, appreciative … as isolated by my loneliness as he was by his misanthropy” (33). For White, his father’s anger was better than his indifference, for at least anger is a form of attention. His story “Skinned Alive” is about the thin line between the alert unconcern of sadism and the true inattention of those callously indifferent. The narrator, who like White is a middle-aged, HIV-positive American writer living in Paris, is in love with Jean-Loup, a provincial Frenchman who desires social elevation and is therefore always looking for a rich debutante to marry or a rich gay man. Jean-Loup and the narrator have intense but infrequent sex. The narrator then meets Paul, a giant blond American expatriate who is studying at the Sorbonne, working as a doorman at a chic Parisian club, and living with Thierry, a well-to-do sadistic businessman who, Paul fears, is losing interest in him. Both Paul and the narrator are tormented by the inattention of their boyfriends, and such inattention is all the more painful to them because of their hypervigilance. Paul, especially, seems poles apart from Thierry. With his photographic memory, which allows him to remember not only long passages of Ronsard, Racine, and Sir Phillip Sidney but also gives him his work as a “physiognomist” at the club as “the person who recognizes the regulars and the celebrities” so he can decide “who comes in, who stays out, who pays, who doesn’t,” Paul has based his very existence on his ability to remain acutely—even painfully—aware of everything around him. With “ten thousand faces stored in [his] memory,” he is the extreme example of a man on whom “nothing is lost” (SA:69). Yet in turning toward each other, Paul and the narrator find not the happiness they seek, but more of the pain they desire. On their last night on a trip to the desert—a trip that recalls the Moroccan journey White took with Hubert Sorin on which Sorin finally succumbed to the effects of AIDS—Paul promises to love, protect, and spend his life with the narrator, and then “pounded [him] in the face with his wrists, shouting … in a stuttering, broken explosion of French and English” (86). In short, they get what they had both always wanted but could never sustain—direct physical contact and unbroken attention. For what both have erected is an extreme either/or: they can have either the sustained pain of the indifferent lover, or the brief but intense violence of the entirely engaged lover. For, as the narrator realizes, what he wants most is for “Paul, with all his tenderness and quizzical, hesitating intelligence, his delicacy to hit me. To be hurt by an enraged bull on steroids doesn’t excite me. What I want is to belong to this grave, divided, philosophical man” (85). There is no love without ambivalence, and in that ambivalence is the painful inattention that is for them the sign of genuine affection.

From this perspective we can see another way that S/M is the product of the political-cultural condition. In a world dominated more and more by the simulated—which insulates us from discomfort, uneasiness, and insecurity—the painful, the dangerous, and the anxious become, increasingly, tokens of the true and genuine. In a world increasingly dominated by the virtual, the twinge of cruelty assures one that the experience is real and that the Other is truly present and engaged. What gay culture repeatedly critiques in the bourgeois marriage is its lack of intensity, its falsely comforting conventionality. The heterosexual couple doesn’t have to worry about real feelings since it has bought into the entire bill of family life with its premeasured emotional packaging. What S/M brings to gay (and straight?) relations is the feeling of the untested rawness of human engagement—where trust and commitment are constantly in need of reassessment so that the boundaries between pain and cruelty, tenderness and love need constant and intense attention.

The need to cut through to the genuine is particularly urgent in the face of AIDS, even as the need to deny the horror increased. “Skinned Alive” is very much a story about the need of pain that would direct a person back into the world to counterbalance the pain that is drawing one away from the world. In a passage that echoes the conclusion of White’s story “An Oracle,” the narrator turns to Paul after telling him about missing his best friend who is dead (presumably from AIDS): “It’s sacrilegious to say it, especially for an atheist, but I feel God sent you not to replace my friend, since he’s irreplaceable, but …” (SA:84). The ellipses are not meant for us to fill in but, rather, to indicate the narrator’s inability to understand his own feelings. Clearly, Paul turns the narrator back to the world of the present and engages him painfully with the world of the living, rather than allowing him to sink into a dulled longing for what is irretrievably lost. The pain that S/M brings to White is the opposite of suicidal; it is the chief way he can achieve the proper “sacramental” attitude toward living (73).

Of all the authors of the Violet Quill, the one who on the surface seems least interested in S/M is Andrew Holleran. From Dancer from the Dance on, his milieu is not the leather but the dance bar. His dress code is flannel and denim, not rawhide. Yet in his recent stories, the pain of humiliation is what brings character after character out of the limbo of their AIDS paralysis and back into contact with each other. In “Petunias,” Morgan, a recovering alcoholic who has lost his business in New Orleans because of his failure to pay taxes, returns to Fire Island to get his old job back as manager of a restaurant. He falls in love with Ryan, a young waiter, who leads him on. The community knows that Ryan is feigning interest just to keep his job, so when Ryan finally dumps Morgan, Morgan feels not only loss but also humiliation. He weeps so loudly that he wakes the neighbors, then runs to save from the ravages of an unexpected northeaster a barrel of petunias that he and Ryan had nursed all summer outside the restaurant. Yet in the morning, with the skies clear, “he put his shoulders back. He felt alive” (ISLC:127). In “The Married Man,” Luke has given up his “amatory career” because of age and AIDS and believes his best friend Pietro has also become a celibate; but when he learns that Pietro has been seeing a married man for a decade, Luke decides that he will also have sex with the married man and hunts him down at the university where he teaches. When Luke offers to give the professor a blow job, the teacher hesitates, for he has “a small requirement in these matters”—that his partners be well-hung. He squeezes Luke’s crotch and when he finds “nothing there but shriveled, unused, terrified flesh,” he excuses himself. “Some other time,” he tells Luke. Luke leaves “so ashamed his face stung, and his eyes watered,” but instead of returning to his semifrozen state, “he felt alive again … like a baby who’s just been slapped into life by the doctor’s hand” (187).

The free-wheeling sexual world of the 1970s, with which the VQ is associated, crystallized at the end of that decade and into the early 1980s in a proliferation of S/M venues. It is almost as if the New York gay world was preparing itself for the pain and loss it would meet in the AIDS epidemic. Bars like the Toilet or the Mineshaft closed with the advent of AIDS and quickly ended the vogue of S/M practices in the public arena. Some of the more superficial elements of the leather scene directed its energy into “bear clubs” (burly hairy guys), others to bodybuilding; but what White and Holleran record is the need to shock the system out of the defensive protective coating in which it had wrapped itself. The process requires not only the ability to tolerate pain but to take some pleasure in it. As the younger generation turned to X-tasy to cushion their alienation, the survivors of the VQ found release in particular forms of agony to cut through to a genuine engagement with life.