Those Sexy, Scary ’70s
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            In the novel, Jason Follett is the youngest son in the well-heeled and respected Follett family—Dad is a VP at Motorola—who live just outside of Chicago, “where being a Republican was almost a religious affiliation.” He has just finished two years of study at the Vanderbilt Divinity School and has decided not to enter the ministry but to seek a career in public service instead. A friend gets him a job as a director of Head Start for two counties in eastern, rural West Virginia, and so off he drives to Pearsall’s Flats.

            Jason isn’t just running from his family; he’s running from himself. He recognizes his homosexual urges but fears what they could do to his life. It was the ’70s, and despite progress in major hubs like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, LGBT people were very much at risk of discrimination, ostracism, and even violence. Jason hopes that moving to a quiet rural environment, where he can be alone and work on his poetry, will diminish his temptations and keep him safe from the draw of living a gay life. “I thought of myself as a straight guy. Normal,” he lies to himself.

            Nearly as soon as he starts to settle in the rural community, he begins meeting one gay man after another, men in varying degrees of “outness.” The older man who owns the lodge where Jason lives is gay (his wife, who hates sex, knows this and approves) and often has weekend parties of six to twelve men at the lodge; Jason has sex with two of them. This kind of thing goes on for a while, until at last he meets a young man at yet another party with whom he connects not just sexually but on many levels. Eric is a young, athletic biracial man (Korean mother, African-American father) who loves Jason deeply. But after months of a truly great, mutually rewarding relationship, Jason, resolving to be “normal,” leaves Eric and takes up with a woman named Debra, who gets him to move to Nashville with her. A year later, around the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 (and possibly inspired by it), and having been dumped by Debra, he resolves to go back to Eric in Cumberland and give gay life a try.

            There is much to praise in Spang’s book. For instance, his characters are almost all finely drawn, especially Jason. And the journal entries that Jason writes, reflecting his inner turmoil, are quite good. “I came here to live off the grid,” he muses. “I thought that maybe, to shed my dystonic feelings and quell the rumblings of desire, a far away place would give me a reprieve …  but for me getting away from my fears has turned out to be the opposite of what I intended. I find myself immersed in gay life.” Jason has a lot of faults, but lack of self-awareness is not one of them.

            There are also problems with this book, starting with its plausibility. I lived in West Virginia for the first 27 years of my life. If there is any part of the state that can be considered sophisticated or urbane, it’s Morgantown, the home of WVU. In all those years, and despite six years spent in the English and Drama Departments from 1970 to 1977, I met only two other gay men. For me, that makes Jason’s being “immersed in gay life” quite a stretch. I suppose it’s possible, but I never found this life.

            Also problematic, for me at least: I understand Jason’s confusion about his sexuality, but his never-ending “sampling”—try a woman this week, a man the next, and back again—gets repetitive and even boring. And I think if Jason had used the word “normal” to mean “not gay” one more time, I would have thrown the book into the recycling bin! Add to that, River Crossed is riddled with the kinds of errors that a competent editor or proofreader should have caught. A very small sampling: “He all clinked our glasses”; “would do just what as it was designed to do”; “of how I given it”; “types of men who might such as soon”; “to the to discover”; “did, indeed, connected us”; “but she tickets already”; “I tried to justified”; and so on. Such mistakes are distracting and tend to take the reader out of the narrative.

            All that said, if you can overlook these shortcomings, and if you’re a fan of coming-out stories, there is enough to enjoy in River Crossed to make it worth your while. _______________________________________________________

Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most recently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.