SOCIOLOGIST Anthony Christian Ocampo’s Brown and Gay in LA strikes close to home on so many levels. The author grew up in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood of Los Angeles next door to where I live now. The impetus for this research project began during his graduate student days at UCLA as he was exploring his own sexuality in West Hollywood. While preparing his dissertation (published in 2016 as The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race), Ocampo was also meeting some of the Filipino and Latino gay men who would later become his informants for the current study. He and they recount their nights at the gay clubs of WeHo, as well as the discos catering more specifically to Latinos or Asians. That took me back to my own euphoric times at Circus Disco and Arena—huge Hollywood nightclubs that were demolished in 2016 to make way for luxury condos. Ocampo (now a sociology professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona) formalized the project to focus on second-generation Filipino-American and Latino (primarily Mexican) men who identified as “gay” (or in a few cases “queer”). He defines “second generation” as those born in the U.S. with one or both parents born abroad. Besides those recruited at clubs, about a third of his 63 subjects were recruited from local universities like UCLA. They were between the ages of 18 and 36 when they were interviewed from 2012 to 2016. His sample skews toward men with higher education and middle-class or higher socioeconomic status. Ocampo himself is a gay Filipino, and his dissertation points to his rationale for grouping Filipinos with Latinos (rather than with other Asians). Ocampo analyzes with great empathy the struggles of his informants as gay children of immigrants, often with non-English-speaking families, conservative values, and Roman Catholic mores. Although Filipino-American immigrants tend to have higher educational and professional backgrounds than Latino families, both groups are very family-focused. Like many immigrant families in the U.S., the parents hope their sacrifices and hard work will pay off in their children’s educational attainment, financial advancement, and, of course, grandchildren. This can be a challenge for any second-generation American man or woman. A distinctive challenge for Ocampo’s gay subjects is the deeply entrenched association of gays with effeminacy. Their experience of homophobia regularly takes the form of ridiculing, policing, or outright beatings for unmascuThe Breakaway Generation another FSG author, Susan Sontag. These sudden and vitriolic attacks tested even his greatest champions, people like Giroux and Gordon Lish, the fiction editor of Esquire, and undoubtedly contributed to the declining support he experienced from publishers in the 1970s. What Snyder’s biography makes abundantly clear is that Purdy is a difficult author to love. While he deserves praise for his literary genius and his pioneering of gay themes in literature, his character often gives the reader pause. He believed in the importance of his own writing and felt he was entitled to a glorious career in literature. Everyone who was standing in his way would suffer his public wrath in interviews and published letters. Particularly uncomfortable to read are the episodes in which Purdy attacks the New York literary establishment, which, according to him, was dominated by Jews who only wanted to publish Jewish, black, and female authors. His status as a white Christian male could then be the sole reason he wasn’t more widely read. Snyder somewhat uncomfortably excuses Purdy’s anti-Semitism and misogyny by pointing toward his friendly relationships with Jewish and female authors. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that, even though Purdy’s writings are often heralded as literature that undermines social categories of race, gender, and sexuality, he was quite conscious of these categories in his private life, and all too willingly evoked them in order to demean people he considered to be enemies. Despite these misgivings about his private life, Snyder makes a strong case for Purdy as a visionary American genius. His readings of Purdy’s novels and stories highlight the revolutionary way in which he wrote about social problems, including race, gender, and sexuality inAmerica, particularly in the 1960s. Snyder frequently returns to Purdy’s upbringing in Ohio and interweaves references to his Native American ancestry. He provides important insights into his personal history, showing how his experiences in the Midwest influenced the idiosyncratic vernacular of his novels and the numerous eccentric characters that inhabit his stories. Through his writing, Purdy offers his readers a window on the sexual experiences of an America that remains largely hidden from view. After reading this biography, I couldn’t shake the feeling that ultimately Purdy was indeed ahead of his time, maybe a little too much so. By the time other gay writers such as Edmund White and Larry Kramer received critical acclaim in the 1970s, Purdy had already receded into the background. Even Narrow Rooms, arguably his queer magnum opus, which was published in the same year (1978) as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, couldn’t revive enough interest in his writing to reestablish his reputation as a gay pioneer. Over the years, several attempts have been made to (re)introduce Purdy’s work to the general public, most notably the publication of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdyin 2013. Each time, these attempts have not amounted to very much. It is my sincere wish that the publication of Snyder’s biography will generate some sustained interest in his work, which, even after years of neglect, still manages to excite, shock, and inspire. VERNONROSARIO BROWN AND GAY IN LA The Lives of Immigrant Sons by Anthony Christian Ocampo NYU Press. 207 pages, $28. Vernon Rosario is a child psychiatrist with the Dept. of Mental Health in L.A. and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. January–February 2023 37
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