Friday, April 20, 2012

Friday Open Forum: Inclusion

I've loved the author Patrick Dennis since I was a kid, and first ventured over from the kid's side of the local branch library over to the adult section. My mom was an avid reader, and a woman of good taste besides; she made recommendations of three books that more or less formed the cornerstones of my grown-up literary tastes.

One of them was Dennis's Auntie Mame. Even to a twelve-year-old, it was funny. Dennis built his literary style on a foundation of what I instinctively recognized was high camp—frivolous, artificial, exaggerated, and essentially feminine, despite the fact the author had a penis. (That Dennis had a couple of best-sellers under a female pseudonym really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.)

Dennis was a gay man who attempted—at least at first—to live the straight life. It didn't last. His wife knew about his sexuality; his children learned about it at a very young age, during the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties when his popularity was at its peak. His sexuality infuses all his work, manifesting itself in just about everything he wrote. The titular heroine of Auntie Mame is in essence a big ol' drag queen whose escapades are a rush of sequins, Chanel No. 5, and martini vodka. She's the spiritual mother to Patsy and Eddy in Absolutely Fabulous, and hundreds of other strong-willed, don't-give-a-damn fictional females revered by gay men.

And that's the way most of Dennis's books read—sharp, incisive, pungent, and marked by a thoroughly gay sensibility that increases with every title. It reached an apex in Little Me, in which Dennis and photographer Cris Alexander (who passed away last month, god bless him) essentially assembled a cast of dozens of their gay friends and family (including Alexander's hunky husband, with whom he spent most of a lifetime) to play dress-up and write the fictional celebrity autobiography of a D-list has-been talentless actress. Little Me is a total stitch, and was a best-seller. Surprising, since it's essentially thickly peppered with in-jokes that only its gay audience would recognize.

But as gay-inclusive as Dennis's novels were for their Mad Men era, there's an element of self-loathing that runs through the books as well, tangible and unmistakable. The gay men tend to be effeminate lispers who mince through the pages with limp wrists. They pay too much attention to their looks; they groom too well; they fall in love with straight men and are exposed for the silly fools they are. They live on the periphery of the novels, informing—if not forming—the books' tone, but never amounting to anything much.

I was reminded of this strange, but perhaps understandable, dichotomy when I picked up a copy of Dennis's next-to-last novel, Paradise, this week—the story of twenty strangers in a vacation guest house, on a peninsula in Acapulco that becomes an island after a freak earthquake. I'd loved the book in my adolescence. Loved it. I'd read it over and over again—even more than either of the two Mame books or Genius, which is my favorite Dennis title these days. But I'd not read it since I was twenty, because the copy I owned disappeared while I was in college, and I'd not been able since to find a reasonably-priced replacement.

Someone was offering a low-cost, good-condition first edition on Amazon, though. So I splurged, and settled in to revisit an old favorite. And immediately I was astonished at what a nasty book it was. The characters are mean, and vicious, and seemingly have not a good quality between them to squabble about. The book's lone lesbian is a sexless creature whose only purpose is to spout art-school nonsense and be verbally bitch-slapped by men for her pretentiousness. The gay men are all silly little queens who fall into hysterics over a chipped nail, and who snipe and bitch at each other in ways that aren't just stereotyped, but have been so heavily trod into the ground over the years that they're practically interred. The other characters sneer at them and murmur about 'tatty little faggots' and 'small-town faggotry.' The main gay character attempts suicide after his boyfriend leaves him.

It's depressing, and the book is so cynical and ugly that about a quarter of the way through I found myself thinking, I used to love this book? What the fuck?  It's horrible! Why?!

Well, part of the reason is that the book's about who can and can't prove himself in the face of adversity. After the earthquake that strands the book's characters from the mainland, it's up for the cast of unpleasant characters to fend for their lives. Some rise to the occasion and ennoble themselves. Others don't, and have to face the specters of their own failures. It takes some establishing of a bunch of nasty people before that happens, though.

But the real reason I liked the novel so much, I remembered, is because it contained the first gay sex scene in a novel that I ever encountered. Yes. Typical, no? I encountered better sex scenes in John Rechy's The Sexual Outlaw not very long after. But the gay sex in Paradise was the first. When I ran across the passages this last week, I nodded with a rush of memory and nostalgia, "Ah, yes."

Now, Paradise's sex isn't that explicit. It's not explicit at all, in fact. Basically what happens is that there's a wealthy gay guy (runs a boutique decorated with pink silk, acts in exquisite productions in his community theater, worries about his manicure when he attempts suicide later on), who is sugar daddy to his cheap whore of a boyfriend (former bus boy, muscular, dumb, predatory). While the sugar daddy is showering, the cheap whore comes on to a Mexican room service waiter. He lets his robe slip off him, slowly. His hand traces over his skin, flushed warm from the Acapulcan sun. "Hhhhhot," he says.

The waiter places his hand on the whore's skin. "Si, seƱor," he agrees. "Hhhhhhot."

And that's about it for the sex scene. No, really. The whore then gives the waiter a Hershey Bar as a promise of things to come, and nothing more happens.

But for twelve-year-old me, reading that scene for the first time? I was like, GOD DAMN!

There's also a scene later in the book in which the wealthy faggot (hey, if everyone in the book can call him that, so can I) picks up a pornographic novel that's all the rage among his 'artistic' friends. It's about a romance between a cowboy and an Indian (not a Native American . . . we weren't there yet in 1971) and the glimpses we get from it are all about a thick shaft rising from between copper loins, and the heroes declaring their love for each other. That kind of thing. It's very brief, and now I realize it's obviously a parody of Gordon Merrick novels (Merrick had come out with his first breakout book just the year before Paradise hit the shelves) but still. To a horny twelve-year-old? NICE!

Now, I was actually having sex at twelve, and I don't recall whether that took place before or after my reading of Paradise that same year. It didn't matter. What was not so important to me as a kid, encountering these brief glimpses into gay sex in novels, was not the sex itself (though I do remember masturbating over it, hhhhhot as it was), but the fact that for the very first time in a book, I kind of saw myself included.

I read a lot as a kid. I've been a lifelong reader. I read a lot about kids who stumbled on magic objects, in my youth, or kids who had fantastic adventures when their guardians were absent from the house for weeks and months at a time. I was not one of those kids. When I ventured over to the adult side of the library, I started reading about grown-ups whose only impulses were male-female relationships based on true, 'normal,' heterosexual love. I sensed rather early that I was not one of those, either.

The gay characters in Dennis's novels might have been tatty, and small-minded, and more obsessed with their ascot scarves and manicures that I like today, but boy, in an era in which gay men got very little representation at all, I was ready to take what I could get. Even if it was Uncle Arthur in Bewitched. And that's why I thrilled to those sex scenes, brief and silly as they were. For the very first time ever, I could see some reflection of my own life, my desires, perhaps my future, in the pages of a published book. That meant a lot to me. And hey. Maybe it meant in the future that I, too, could have my own hot Mexican waiter.

Of course, these post-Will and Grace days, we take representation for granted. We have task forces that chide networks when they don't have enough gay characters on their TV shows. We have an abundance of excellent literature aimed at gay and lesbian youth, and all kinds of literature for all kinds of young adults in which non-heterosexual relationships are accepted and common. For someone who grew up with only a few glimpses of 'small-town faggotry' and copper loins as a guidepost, I think the change is remarkable—and welcome.

I'm curious about my readers, though, since I know I have a wide range of ages who check in. Whether on TV, in the movies, or between the pages of a book, what was your first childhood or teen encounter with fictional gay characters, and how did they affect your own vision of yourself? Were you happy to see them? Horrified at the way they were portrayed? When you revisit that material now, how does it make you feel? Let me know how you feel in today's open forum—I'm really interested in your experiences.

25 comments:

  1. "Typical, no?" I remember as a child being drawn to what I perceived as the (gay) sexual in whatever I was reading (or simply just the gay) even if I didn't have words for it, or knew what I was looking at. I just finished Mary Norton's Are All the Giants Dead? So totally the opposite of Dennis's books but in the midst of this very gentle, very quiet fairy tale, there are two bachelors living together as owners of an inn, Jack-the-Giant-Killer and Jack-of-the-Beanstalk, and it is very obvious what their relationship is like: Jack-the-Giant-Killer is bigger, not emotional (unless he gets upset and gets emotional quicker), AND he kills giants - i.e. he's the man. Jack-of-the-Beanstalk is smaller, quicker with a kind word and caring touch and a nurturer. He grows things, he creates - i.e. he's the woman. (I'm rather sure if Norton thought of it at all, in the 70s, she'd probably have thought of it in those terms.) And I'm sure as a child - preteen - I would've been drawn to this, just as much as I was drawn to Toad and Frog or the Mole and the River Rat in Wind in the Willows. The companionship of men.

    (But to be quite honest the first book I ever had sexual thoughts about a character - and he wasn't gay - was the main character of Piers Anthony's Heaven Cent. The character appeared naked on the cover of the book: you couldn't see anything just the curve of his back into his butt and the very top of his ass crack. Even today my favorite part of the male anatomy.)

    :)

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    1. This is going to sound like your Goodreads comment to me yesterday: I knew Norton for her two Bedknobs and Broomsticks novels and her Borrowers books, both series I loved as a kid. But I'd never heard of the giants ones, and wasn't even aware she'd written anything else.

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  2. Auntie Mame is another one of those items from my childhood that I'm amazed I got from my conservative and homophobic dad, and one of the reasons I'm convinced he wasn't always that way. Like Broadway musicals and Elton John and Madonna, it was my father who introduced me to Mame while my mother said something like, "I'm sure that's great but I don't like it." So strange.

    My early encounters with gay characters were odd to say the least. My first book sex scene was The Gunslinger by Stephan King, which was also the first book by him I read, and the first time I came across the word "cunt" and that was in fifth grade. I quickly busted my way through King's works, and while there wasn't an absence of gay characters, there weren't any positive ones. Not many positive characters at all, honestly. And the first time I read about gay sex in a book, I was eleven the summer after fifth grade and had stumbled on my dad's porn stash. Among his heavy S&M magazines and videos, I found Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy, which I loved for the literary value as well as hot sex. Needless to say, men and women both get fucked in those books, and it is all treated as normal.

    Kind of amazing I don't have a more screwed up idea of sex than I do. But it probably helped that after jerking off to those books I sought out more "normal" sex (less fantastical) and found a book called Boys Like Us at the library that was all about young gay men's sexual awakenings. I also got more and more straight sex from adult books, but at the library I kept reading Boys Like Us over and over. I should find a copy sometime and read it again.

    -Ace

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    1. You're pretty fortunate to be so young that you've had a lot of inclusivity around you, Ace, even if not all of it is uniformly positive. Boys Like Us would've been unheard-of in my teen years.

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    2. I honestly credit Boys Like Us for helping me be in the right space for my first male/male sex a few years later. Otherwise I may have let the moment pass. It also clued me in to things like cruising and whoring as a teen. But mainly it gave me good sexual information and role models, something I wasn't getting from either of my parents. Neither of them really ever talked to me about sex growing up. My dad finally did a few weeks before I left for college...way too late.

      -Ace

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  3. When I was in high school I came across John Rechy's 'Numbers' at the city library and couldn't put it down. It was so sexy and hot to an early teen. I liked it so much that after returning it, I went back and swiped it under my jacket so I could keep it.

    I kept it for a could of local moves and then when I was going to move out of the area, I returned the book to the library in the drive-by drop box.

    I'm sure if I were to read it today, it would be the same as a horny teenager reading it.....lol

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    1. Rechy's books were really explicit and highly informative!

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  4. Well, my earliest encounter with fictional gay characters was when I was about six or seven years old. I used to visit a public library after school, to read some books and see some movies. They had old videotapes of artsy movies and documentaries and a couple of booths with a betamax player and a tv for the people to see the movies without disturbing the reading room. I asked for the tape of The Cabinet of Dr Calligari, put it into the machine and it happened to be mislabeled and contained the 120 days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Passolini (based in the eponimous novel of the Marquis of Sade). I was kind of horrified for the gruesome torture and murder.

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    1. ...but titillated at the sodomy? I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know what's in it!

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    2. I saw that movie a few years ago. The plot is basically a group of Italian fascists kidnap, rape, torture, feed feces to, and ultimately kill a group of kids. The sex is purposefully not sexy. And the actors were nasty. Even by Passolini standards.

      -Ace

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  5. Lots of great comments from everyone here. I am going to be reading some new books soon. Unlike many here, my first fictional gay characters were in a movie, not a film. I remember being about 11 or 12 when the movie MAKING LOVE first showed on television. It starred Harry Hamlin as a gay man who starts an affair with a married man (wife played by Kate Jackson). My parents were horrified that something like this could be on television, but they watched it nonetheless, while I sat on the stairs (I was supposed to be in bed) watching it out of their sight. I remember thinking that I was like the men in that movie, but I was not going to carry any of the shame about wanting to be with other men. Something in my young mind solidified that day, and I chose to be proud of my sexual desires instead of ashamed of them. I have stood by that choice to this day, and am very happy I did.

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    1. I remember that movie, because the uniform response to it after was 'poor Kate Jackson!', as if her husband had died of the worst kind of cancer or something. Did your parents ever find out you'd watched it behind their backs?

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    2. No -- they never did. I also remember finding my mothers playgirl magazine. I think I spent more time in the bathroom with that than she did. You have me reminiscing about all sorts of pre and early adolescent encounters now Rob!

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  6. I have read about half the Dennis books--but not "Paradise." But I found him as an author after I was out. I think what I read in my teens for gay characters were the plays of Tennessee Williams. Not a great choice for positive role models---but at least we were there.

    But I also had my Dad's erotic novels which were stashed under the front seat of his car. It was an ever evolving group of pulp porn books--straight in the 1960's to bi and finally gay in the 1970's. I couldn't stop reading one--no idea of a title now--but the cover was a Tom of Finland rip-off. I can distinctly remember the combined thrill of disgust and some sort of "light bulb" moment as a biker pissed up the ass of the young protagonist. And he LIKED it...

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    1. I don't think porn really counts as inclusion in mainstream media, but it's always good to have around, FP!

      I like this quote in Paradise about the book's central plot, spoken by a TV producer: "Placed in the hands of Tennessee Williams we'd have a fag and a nympho fighting for three acts over which one gets to wear Momma's old hoopskirt!"

      Dennis's self-loathing, again. (And yet, kind of accurate.)

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  7. There was an episode of Batman when the cliff hanger had Robin tied up ass up being swallowed by a giant clam. I know, not officially a gay character, but the submissive nature of the position made me want to be Robin. I couldn't define why that scene gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach at the time. I can now. The first overtly gay characters I encountered were in Myra Breckinridge and Flaws in the Glass. I borrowed both of those books from the school library a LOT and would always blush when I checked them out. Looking back, the librarian must have found my closeted behaviour hilarious.

    Cheers

    Jamie

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    1. I knew a lot of people who'd cite Myra Breckinridge as an early touchstone, Jamie. I've never read it or seen the movie, though!

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  8. Of all the books I could stumble on in the used bookstore, I would just happen to pick up Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. It's a lucky thing I didn't off myself. I ran into a couple of other gay titles, and even discovered Nathan Aldyne's mystery series in my local Safeway, but it wasn't until I stumbled on to Gordon Merrick can I say I found any of them to be particularly erotic inducing.

    Now, as for Mr. Dennis (who later became quite a successful butler under his own name) in addition to Auntie Mame and Genius, one of his titles I enjoyed most was Westward Ho! It's a true(ish) story of a sophisticated NYC couple who move to New Mexico to run a dude ranch. It's written as by Barbara Hooten as told to Patrick Dennis.

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    1. You mean Guestward Ho!, Buddy. It's a good light read.

      I never found the Merricks all that erotic either, when I finally got up the nerve to read them. They are dated in the worst possible way, too.

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    2. You're right, it was Guestward Ho. It even led to an eventually TV series during the early 60s.

      As to the Merrick books, the dated plot lines didn't entirely cover up the teenage woodies they triggered, but since the lacked any chapter breaks (which gave it an almost breathless pacing like On The Road as written by an over dramatic and jaded drag queen) and always had to end semi-tragically, they weren't titles I revisited after reading. Well, except for the truly dirty bits, which coincidentally were the sections to which the book would naturally fall open after a time.

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  9. Growing up in a very liberal city I thought for a long time discrimination against homosexuality is ... fictional. I read about it, but especially where I lived, and the circles my parents frequented, homosexuality was so normal that it was somewhat a shock to read James Baldwin's Another country or the articles about the infamous Oscar Wilde Trial.

    I might be wrong, but I actually found especially "straight" writers like Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler very homoerotic.

    Of course I liked Maurice but also books with gay characters in the closet–Lost Illusions by Balzac, Dostojevky's Demons (I don't know the English title), The Brothers Lionheart by Lindgren, Lord of the Rings, Dune–I am a slasher, so 99% of real men and fictional male characters are gay in my eyes. No, wait, make that 99,9%. Or just 100% ... ;))

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  10. I grew up in a small, repressed, community, and the library was pretty prudish. While I may have encountered gay characters in fiction, the first time I ever noticed one was on the TV. I was 14 when Billy Crystal appeard on "Soap." The character had its ups and downs, as far as role-models to, but opened my eyes to my own feelings.

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  11. I am a Dennis devotee as well and have all of his works. You have to view him in the context of the era; definitely depressing but the brilliance and wit definitely emerged through the repression

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  12. Did ya hear about the infant born w/ BOTH sex organs!?!?!?
    A Brain and a Penis,
    That's you Buddy!
    -and that is why it would give me the greatest pleasure to send you my copy of
    "First Lady" by Patrick Dennis,
    it's formatted just as "Little Me"
    same gang of friends,
    dressing up and taking photos.
    Featuring a "Home-wrecking Vixen" named Gladys Goldfoil,
    a young Mrs Gladys Kravitz as the first daughter,
    Peggy Cass,
    Dody Goodman,
    gratuitous male nudity ! (check out 13 yr old "Bubber")
    The Butterfield Brothers!
    A saucy tale of Sex Greed Bootlegging and Politics
    Annnnnnnnd Hell Yeah! as a 12yr old I Jacked my Dick to these pics, that and JAMES WEST!
    Please contact me at theDNAexchange@gmail.com
    and I will send this "Post Haste"
    PERVERSATILE
    "Books are awfully decorative, don't you think?" -g.upson

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  13. Well, I was 14 in 1992 when I saw an ad in Spin magazine that made me realize I was gay (yeah, I know... of all the places!). The weird thing is that I don't remember encountering many gay characters before that (at least nothing that stood out in my mind). After that, I sought out different titles and there were a lot to choose from with Alyson Books publishing all sorts of stuff. And I had adopted a gay couple as my Godfathers (one of which is a writer) and they directed me to things that they read growing up like Patricia Neil Warren's "The Frontrunner". In college in the late 90s, I took a couple of courses on pre- and post-Stonewall queer lit (I was pretty surprised finding myself jerking off to lesbian porn as a result). So I think I'm saying that I built up a support structure where gay characters weren't completely foreign. Still had a bit of a duel life in high school, but nothing too bad. Most of my gay buds from first coming out are either dead, drugged out or behind bars. I'd like to think that I'm of the 25% of the rest that are relatively unremarkable. But what I think is interesting is, after watching an indie movie called "the new twenty" and chatting with people younger than me and seeing how the gay bars are evolving, gay people are more integrated but are almost castrated. People have openly gay friends, but they don't really want to know about who they're fucking. Well, that was a bit of a rant, but thought I'd toss in my perspective as a 90s kid since you asked. Cheers!

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