Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
by Christopher Bram
Twelve Books. 367 pages, $27.99
FIRST, A CONFESSION: I didn’t know this when asked to review this book, but two of my own books, Gay Fiction Speaks and Hear Us Out, are prominently mentioned. In his acknowledgments, Bram goes so far as to say they are “full of gold.” Nonetheless, I feel that I’ve been able to evaluate Eminent Outlaws objectively, finding much to praise—and some things to criticize, too.
Eminent Outlaws sets out to document the postwar history of American gay male literature in biographical and therefore also generational terms. Although the claim that Bram is the first to tell this story is exaggerated, it is true that nobody to date has written about gay men’s writing from the U.S. exclusively, the more common path being to encompass other literatures written in English as well.
Stephen Adams’ The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction (1980) was an early example of this approach, taking in not only British authors but also lesbian writers who had written about gay men (Mary Renault, Carson McCullers, Iris Murdoch). Gregory Woods’ 1998 volume A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition had a still wider span, taking in literatures in all languages, from all periods, and in all genres. Les Brookes’ Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall (2008) also included British and Irish writers, but only since 1969. Other, more narrowly focused books have overlapped with Eminent Outlaws, notably David Bergman’s The Violet Hour (2004), which documents the work of the Violet Quill group of writers that met in New York City in the late 70’s.
Bram charts his own course, though, and Eminent Outlaws both benefits and occasionally suffers from his independent-mindedness. On one hand, the only critical reception he quotes from is contemporary reviews in newspapers and magazines. His research is thorough and consistently enlightening, however, since it recalls the very different climates in which gay literature was published in America. On the other hand, at times he is given to mentioning in passing that others don’t agree with his views. One longs, then, for chapter-and-verse concerning the divergent opinions. Who disagrees, and why?
He begins with the bold claim that “the gay revolution began as a literary revolution.” Ours is an age in which one can celebrate the proliferation of gay men and women in film, television, drama, music, fashion, politics, sport, and more (though there are limits), so younger readers especially might be surprised to learn just how singular and essential writing was to the ideas of gay liberation and the construction of positive role models. If gay men didn’t hear about worthy role models (and sometimes unworthy ones), they might find them between the covers. Bram proves the point in early chapters on the postwar period with discussions of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood, among others. It’s quite reasonable to feel sorry for the apparently beleaguered and outnumbered heterosexual writer. It almost feels as if Arthur Miller was the only straight playwright around, or that John Updike alone flew the flag for the heterosexual orgasm. Even redoubtable non-gays like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer would become embroiled in the question of gay civil rights.
The author admits in his introduction that Eminent Outlaws cannot help but be selective, and isn’t intended to support any particular gay male literary canon. Fair enough. Yet even in these early chapters, certain omissions point to a determined, even revisionist view of American gay letters. There is, for example, no space to consider William Burroughs—an extraordinary gap, considering the influence of that author upon so many avant-garde writers. The Beats generally get short shrift, though there is a chapter on Allen Ginsberg, focusing on Howl (1956). Bram also neglects Gore Vidal, author of 1948’s The City and the Pillar, among others.
Poetry does not have much of a presence here either. Frank O’Hara and James Merrill appear rather briefly, but the implication is that verse has made a lesser contribution to gay writing since 1945 than has narrative prose. It’s a defensible position—but a position to be defended. A chapter on AIDS-related poems—somewhat infelicitously titled “Dead Poets Society,” given that some of its featured subjects are still with us—introduces Thom Gunn and Mark Doty but moves on to consider Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero (1988). Bram interprets Holleran’s vital and moving accounts of the epidemic—originally written for the magazine Christopher Street—as “prose poems.” You can almost feel the author’s relief at returning to prose, however poetical it may be.
The lack of anything more than a passing reference to Burroughs points to a wider preference toward naturalistic prose and against the indirect, experimental, or allusive. West-Coast figures such as Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, Kevin Killian, Bernard Cooper, and Matthew Stadler are not here, nor are younger experimental novelists such Dale Peck, Scott Heim, or Douglas A. Martin. James Purdy also disappears entirely, as does John Rechy, whose prose style is perhaps not to Bram’s taste but whose contribution to the postwar gay novel—by way of City of Night (1963) and Numbers (1967) especially—surely demands consideration. The irony here is that Bram rightly acclaims brave gay writers as “outlaws.” Yet it is precisely the outlaw æsthetic of the figures I’ve just mentioned that’s overlooked in favor of the more immediately accessible or direct prose of, say, Isherwood, Armistead Maupin, or Stephen McCauley.
Even Edmund White, one of the authors evidently most esteemed by Bram, is given the brush-off in his more fantastical moments. Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) is rejected, its “druggy, baroque style” constituting a “gorgeous closed door.” Caracole (1985) is “a complete dud.” And accessible prose isn’t a guaranteed right of entry, either, since Felice Picano is only mentioned in passing, and Ethan Mordden—a writer with a better sense of storytelling structure than anybody else—not at all. A further shortcoming is the absence of gay memoir (except for White). In different contexts, John Reid’s 1973 novel The Best Little Boy in the World, Arnie Kantrowitz’ Under the Rainbow (1977) and Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) each made an important contribution. No chapter on AIDS and humor should end without discussing John Weir’s unequalled fictional account of the early epidemic, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (1990).
If I’m arguing with Bram, however, it’s because Eminent Outlaws is very much a book worth arguing with. Page after page surprises us with new readings, comparisons, or references. Here is Allen Ginsberg’s father’s response to Howl: “a one-sided, neurotic view of life; it has not enough glad Whitmanian affirmations.” And there’s Bram’s inspired linkage of Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) back to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin stories (1938), which it certainly resembles. Or Larry Kramer, interviewing the “very fat” Vidal, lecturing him on his duty to write about Lincoln’s private life, “to tell this fucking country that its most beloved President was gay.” Or Bram’s brilliant description of Tony Kushner as “a luftmensch, a man of air and ideas, an abstract thinker who does his strongest dramatic work when he uses gay bodies.” He is great too both on the “degayification” of African-American author James Baldwin, as well as on the wistful melancholy of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), which is “about looking for love, living for love, but it’s a love story with no love object, no beloved.”
There’s some danger of idealization. Isherwood certainly was “an exile,” but was he also “a citizen of love without a country”? In California, he never ceased to be totally English, and in a specifically upper-middle-class way. (Bram notes how his American partner Don Bachardy quickly adopted an English accent.) He could be disloyal and curmudgeonly. Armistead Maupin’s wonderful series Tales of the City is rightly praised, and carefully picked apart—but surely few readers would agree that The Night Listener was Maupin’s most “amazing” book. Kushner probably gets the most uncompromisingly positive verdict, for Angels in America, with which Bram engages intimately, describing at length both his intellectual and emotional response to both parts of the play.
In 1970, Tennessee Williams batted away a question about his sexuality with the response, “I don’t want to be involved in some kind of scandal, but I’ve covered the waterfront.” Bram likewise here covers much, if far from all, of the gay literary waterfront. Winningly, too, he is a fan—like the fifteen-year-old English schoolboy he also writes of, who enclosed a photograph of himself in a letter to the 72-year-old Isherwood concerning the latter’s memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976), on the back of which he had written simply: “My tits are on fire!”
Richard Canning’s edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory
