Let’s Shut Out the World
by Kevin Bentley
Green Candy Press. 203 pages, $14.95
IN 2002 Kevin Bentley’s Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After was published, complete with an eye-catching cover photo of two young men sharing a casual embrace on a sunlit summer day in the 1970’s. On the inside front cover, the full-sized photo revealed the two to be standing in an enormous Pride Day crowd stretching the length of Castro Street. Like this photo, Wild Animals is focused on the lives of a small circle of men but stands as an exuberant and engaging portrait of an important point of gay history. Reviewing the book in these pages, Andrew Holleran described it as “difficult to put down,” and the praise is deserved: though constructed from diary excerpts, Wild Animals reads like a novel. The book is at once a time capsule, a Bildungsroman, and a compelling portrait of people struggling with love, desire, and identity.
Much the same can be said for Bentley’s follow-up book, Let’s Shut Out the World, a collection of essays, stories, and other short works arranged more-or-less chronologically to come together as a kind of memoir and autobiography. Most of the pieces have appeared in other publications and in anthologies such as the popular His and Flesh and the Word series. By assembling the pieces in this collection, Bentley provides an interesting complement to Wild Animals. While the new book covers similar subject matter, it provides even more insight into Bentley’s formative years.
The first four pieces in the collection focus on Bentley’s boyhood and young adulthood. In “Six Crises of Bullmoose” (which first appeared in Bruce Shenitz’s anthology, The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write about Their Fathers), Bentley offers a vivid portrait of his family and his troubled early years. His father is portrayed in a highly unflattering but memorable light. Though the essay rings with dark humor, it’s ultimately heartbreaking and perhaps all too familiar in its depiction of the homophobia and heartbreak that can mark the coming out process for many gay men. In “Slender,” Bentley recalls the daily terrors of being a school outcast, an ordeal tempered by his first experience of love and sex.
Many of the pieces in Let’s Shut Out the World cover the same years as the diaries of Wild Animals, and one recognizes the raw material of the diaries being given fuller treatment in the short stories and memoirs of this collection. “Deeper Inside the Valley of Kings,” for example, details a series of lustful rendezvous that revolve around the bar Sutter’s Mill and other locales mentioned often in Wild Animals.
Bentley’s status as an HIV-positive, long-term non-progressor informs much of his work (he wrote often for Diseased Pariah News and POZ), and this comes through plainly and plaintively in stories like “Do You Believe I Love You?,” “My Clementina,” and “Widow-Hopper.” His fiction is at once breezy and grave: even when he’s meditating on AIDS and death, Bentley’s prose is punctuated with snappy dialog and funny pop culture references. Describing how he nursed an ailing lover, he writes: “I felt like Karen Black in Airport trying to keep that guy from getting sucked out the hole in the crashing plane.”
One of the most accomplished pieces in the collection is the one that gives the book its title. “Let’s Shut Out the World” follows two parallel love affairs: Bentley and his doomed lover Richard, and the two lesbians, Drew and Marian, whose antique-crammed house Bentley and Richard help Drew with after Marian passes away. As Bentley and his lover sort through Drew and Marian’s old books, mementos, and collectibles, they also follow the history of the women’s fifty-plus year relationship. In so doing, they confront the tenuous nature of human relationships and the reality of their own tragically short time together. Much of Bentley’s writing is taken up with the difficult but ultimately enriching process of reckoning. These are a survivor’s tales. Whether Bentley is working through the memories of his formative years, chronicling the lustful joy of pre-AIDS San Francisco, or memorializing the friends and lovers he’s had to say goodbye to, his voice is humane, engaging, and a pleasure to encounter.
