FIFTY YEARS AGO, Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind hit the bookstore shelves. The novel, Merrick’s fifth, set forth the romantic relationship between Charlie Mills, a dashing Ivy-educated actor, and Peter Martin, a sensitive beauty destined for West Point. Although it was published in hardcover with an innocuous cover, the novel was boldly advertised in The New York Times as “the first homosexual novel with a happy ending.”
The novel was an immediate bestseller, quickly breaking into the Times top ten list, where it remained for a stunning sixteen weeks. It was translated into several languages, including Japanese, and was regularly listed in gay book catalogues alongside works by Mary Renault and Gore Vidal. Merrick capitalized on the novel’s success by writing two sequels, One for the Gods and Forth into Light. All three novels were periodically reissued, mostly in paperback editions, and Merrick’s publishers received a steady stream of fan mail throughout the 1970s and ’80s.
But despite its popularity, The Lord Won’t Mind is rarely included in histories and anthologies of gay fiction. When it is mentioned, it’s often treated as a guilty pleasure or as an embarrassment. Historians typically classify the novel as a throwback to trashy gay romance pulps or as an unfortunate product of post-Stonewall liberation. Literary criticism has been brutal. The book reviewer for the Times minced no words when he wrote that the novel “may set homosexuality back at least twenty years.”
Critics get two things wrong about The Lord Won’t Mind. First, Merrick was not influenced by Stonewall. He started writing the novel in the mid-’60s, and his agent was already shopping the manuscript to publishers in 1968. If anything, Merrick was looking backward, not forward, when he wrote the novel. His literary models were Gertrude Stein and E. M. Forster, whose semi-autobiographical works had touched on gay themes. In fact Merrick had been friends with Forster for many years. He later claimed that he had read the manuscript copy of Maurice and had tried to persuade Forster to publish it in his lifetime.
The second misunderstanding of Merrick’s gay fiction is more interesting. Many consider the novels to be unrealistic fantasy or soapy melodrama. Gay literary historian Roger Austen called it “pleasant escape fiction for the Gay and Gray set.” To be sure, Merrick’s characters can be gushing, and his sex scenes are nothing short of sensational. However, many scenes in these novels that initially seem melodramatic or “escapist” are actually autobiographical. My own research on Merrick over the last twenty years has revealed that all of his novels include episodes that are based on events in his own life, beginning with his time as a Princeton undergraduate in the 1930s.
Certainly Merrick’s life provided plenty of material for literary treatment. He had rubbed elbows with future luminaries at Princeton, acting alongside Mel Ferrer in university theater productions and briefly being classmates with John F. Kennedy. Merrick caught the acting bug in college and dropped out in his senior year to pursue an acting career on Broadway. His striking good looks and sonorous voice made him a formidable talent, and he won a supporting role in Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner. His fifteen minutes of theatrical fame opened the door to New York’s fabulous gay social circles. When he wasn’t acting, he was going to parties and mingling with the likes of writer Glenway Wescott, Broadway actor William Roerick, publisher Monroe Wheeler, and artist Paul Cadmus.
Merrick also experienced the darker side of Broadway. In a compelling episode in The Lord Won’t Mind, he fictionalizes his relationship with Moss Hart, the influential gay playwright and director. The novel’s version of Hart is a Harvey Weinstein-like predator who uses his power to pressure Charlie (a stand-in for Merrick) into sex. Right before he demands sex from Charlie, the exploitative director says: “I’m afraid you’ll have to learn right from the start what a sordid business the theater is.”
Merrick eventually left the theater and started writing for the New York Post. He might have stayed a journalist, but World War II came and changed everything. Merrick enlisted in the army and was soon recruited by the OSS (now the CIA). If the OSS knew about Merrick’s homosexuality, they clearly didn’t care. They recognized the usefulness of his good looks, his acting ability, and above all his impeccable French. The OSS assigned Merrick to a counter-espionage mission in the French Riviera, which he later used as the basis for his first novel, The Strumpet Wind (1947). This “straight” novel garnered positive reviews and established Merrick as a promising postwar novelist.
After the war, Merrick spent the rest of his life as an expatriate, moving first to France, then to Greece, and finally to Sri Lanka. Wherever he was, he quickly found other expatriate writers and artists, becoming friends with Clive James and Arthur C. Clarke, and socializing with celebrities like Ian McKellen and Jacqueline Onassis. Merrick spent nearly all of his adult life in a same-sex long-term relationship—first with Bob Richardson, to whom he dedicated his first novel, and then with Charles Hulse, a garrulous Southern beauty who would one day write an autobiographical novel of his own. Merrick and Hulse were together for 33 years, up until Merrick’s death in 1988.
Perhaps the most striking fact about Merrick is that he lived relatively openly as a gay man for most of his life. His family and friends treated him and Bob (and later him and Charles) as a couple, and he seems never to have hidden his relationships from his publishers or editors. Of course, Merrick’s openness was made easier by his economic status and his decision to live abroad. But it was also enabled by his remarkable ability to adapt to his surroundings and fit in with any social circle. (One can see why the OSS made him a spy.) This adaptability sometimes comes across as a deeply held conservatism—an inclination not to “rock the boat.” In one interview he gave late in his life, Merrick claimed not to understand the demonstrativeness of the gay liberation movement.
Merrick’s representation of gay love likewise did not seek to upend society. In his gay novels, Charlie and Peter essentially form a marriage-like union, setting up house, raising children, and growing old together. For many readers in the 70s and ’80s (like myself) such a vision was transformative. For others it was saccharine and heteronormative. To put it another way, The Lord Won’t Mind is a gay novel, not a queer one.
Ironically, Merrick’s vision of gay life is more in line with the LGBT movement of today than that of 1970. Gay marriage, gays in the military, even “guncles”—these are all things that Merrick experienced and wrote about. Only a few weeks ago, the Lifetime channel made headlines by ending a Christmas romance movie with a kiss between two married men. Gay journalists almost universally responded with praise. Daily Beast writer Tim Teeman wrote that Lifetime’s sappy gay finale could “shake up these snowy, typically heterosexual worlds of love.” The Lord Won’t Mind might have set back homosexuality twenty years, but it was also fifty years ahead of its time.
Joseph M. Ortiz teaches at the University of Texas, El Paso. He is writing a biography of Gordon Merrick.
