The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (10 page)

Reluctantly, his high-strung and fussy mother allows him to bring along his beloved dog, Fred, a lick-happy dachshund. But she resents his presence — the way he barks when Davy leaves, the way he pees on the floor when he gets excited, the way he playfully gnaws on her bathrobe. She refers to him as “a little bastard” and, addressing Davy, adds that “there’s something wrong with you animal-lovers.” She also finds living with her son difficult, and copes by going heavy on the evening cocktails, something she unsuccessfully hides from Davy — he’s no fool. Davy’s father, meanwhile, lives in the city with his new wife, and though both of them seem very supportive and kind, Davy sees them only on occasional weekends. Really, in Davy’s new life, Fred is his only friend.

His mother enrolls him in a private Episcopal school, even though Davy notices a lot of public schools nearby. On his first day, as he’s introduced to his classmates, Davy says, “I smile as though I’m friendly, and about everyone smiles back except the kid in the seat in front of me, who doesn’t even turn around to see what I look like.” That kid is Douglas Altschuler, the sullen class jock. Things start out frosty between the two, but soon they inch their way toward friendship — and maybe something more. “There’s one thing about this guy; he’s not modest,” Davy says of Altschuler after they become friendly. “The second thing is that he says exactly what’s on his mind. I never met anyone like Altschuler before.” To Davy, Altschuler is a breath of fresh air, anything but a phony. He’s also good looking, a fact Davy remarks on a few times in the novel.

Throughout, as Donovan develops their friendship, you can sense a tension between the boys — the moments of vulnerability sprinkled with bravado, the kindness followed by petty arguments, misunderstandings, pouting, then reconciliation. This well-crafted tension — subtle but insistent — finally reaches a head. One day after school, Altschuler accompanies Davy home. Davy’s mother is still at work. They take Fred for his walk, then return to the apartment, where they chase Fred around the furniture until they both collapse on the floor, laughing. What follows is their first encounter:

The two boys pull apart, feeling awkward and confused. In the end, they simply laugh their actions off. Still, Davy ends the chapter by directly responding to what has just happened: “I mean a couple of guys like Altschuler and me don’t have to worry about being queer or anything like that. Hell, no.”

Typically, Altschuler avoids Davy at school the next day, but the two can’t avoid each other forever, and soon they are back on track. Before too long, Altschuler ends up sleeping over one night. Donovan skips over what happens that night, but in Davy’s reflections the day after, it is clear that “goofy business” has occurred again between the two — kissing, for sure, and perhaps more. Davy’s ambivalence and confusion about what has happened are spot on: “There’s nothing wrong with Altschuler and me, is there? . . . It’s not dirty, or anything like that. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

Things carry on between them, until Davy’s mother catches the boys asleep and embracing each other on the floor. Later, she grills Davy about what is going on between the two: “Nothing . . . unnatural . . . happened this afternoon with you and Douglas, did it?” Soon, Davy’s father is called over, and he is a surprisingly level-headed voice to counter the hysterics of Davy’s mother. But Davy is in denial and swears to his father, “I’m not queer or anything, if that’s what you think.”

While Davy is having his heart to heart with his father, his mother takes Fred out for a walk. The tragedy that ensues — Fred gets loose and is struck and killed by a car — has been used by contemporary critics to dismiss Donovan’s novel as an example of a kind of self-hating gay novel, where tragedy is meted out as punishment for gay activity. But this dismissal is wrong-headed and simplistic. Sure, Davy blames himself for Fred’s death; more specifically, he blames what happened between him and Altschuler: “Nothing would have happened to Fred if I hadn’t been messing around with Altschuler. My fault. Mine!” But Davy is reacting the way many young gay kids might have acted at the time — indeed, the way some kids might
still
react. He is guilty, afraid, and confused. I remember being homophobic when I was a teenager, which I can see now was a reaction to the feelings I secretly had for other boys. Like Davy, I was afraid of it, didn’t want it — it couldn’t possibly be true about
me
. Indeed, I wasn’t ready to accept the fact that I was gay until I was twenty. Davy, at thirteen, is still in search of himself. While it is clear to the contemporary reader that Davy is likely gay, the narrator can’t yet truly see that about himself. The territory is still too strange, fraught with uncertainty.

As the novel draws to a close, Altschuler and Davy are walking together, talking about all that has happened between them. Altschuler says, “What happened to Fred had nothing to do with us.” “Maybe it did,” Davy replies. Altschuler, showing that he, at least, is more comfortable with his budding sexuality, says, “Go ahead and feel guilty about it if you want to. I don’t.”

In the end, Davy is still confused by his feelings. But the two friends agree to respect each other. Whether that respect will lead to deeper feelings isn’t clear. But it is clear that Davy, though conflicted, has crossed a threshold into maturity. He’s prepared to face whatever the future holds. Sure, some readers might prefer to see Davy and Altschuler rolling around passionately, affirming their love. But such an ending would ring false — this is a novel about growing up, not coming out.

Since
I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.
was published, many YA novels about gay youths have entered the marketplace — books by David Levithan, Nancy Garden, Alex Sanchez, and Jacqueline Woodson, to name just a few. In fact, the gay YA novel is now pretty commonplace. Sure, the quality of the titles varies, but even the fluffiest of these books are worthwhile, because now, finally, gay and lesbian young people can find mirror images of themselves in literature. I’ve read a number of these books, but so far none have affected me the way that
I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.
did. It’s a subtle and honest story told by an appealing and confused young man. Again, remember that this novel was published in 1969, just as gays were becoming more visible in this country, standing up for their rights, refusing to be invisible. Donovan’s book, in that light, is remarkable and daring. But now, with gays more visible in “mainstream culture” than ever before, it is even more remarkable that this eloquent novel still rings true as a portrait of a young gay man, inching toward adulthood, searching for his place in the world. I like to think that Davy got there — and that it was worth the trip.

Dutton, 1985

Stephen Greco

I’ve just reread
The Blue Star
, Robert Ferro’s third novel —or his second-to-last, to use a method of ordering that felt inescapable in the year when the novel came out, 1985. It was a time when all the young gay authors I knew were thinking that their next books might well be their last. Robert certainly thought that; he told so me many times, when working on
Second Son
, a thoughtful and surprisingly entertaining AIDS novel that appeared in 1988, the year Robert died of the disease just six weeks after his partner of many years, the novelist Michael Grumley, died of it, too. For Robert, I think,
Second Son
had to be about AIDS. He was constantly sick by then, and the prospect of his death was too momentous to leave unexplored.
The Blue Star
, on the other hand, seems about life and the forces that drive it, unhaunted by “a death out of order,” which is how Robert referred to AIDS fatalities.

According to the slightly yellowed flap of my copy’s dust jacket,
The Blue Star
begins with “two heroes, reflective Peter and Byronic Chase, indulging their youthful appetites in Florence.” By day, the boys feast on
la dolce vita
in conspicuously well-tailored clothing — this is the early 1960s — and by night, after hours, they cruise along the Arno and find love and violence. Then they are invited to tea by a worldly, lecherous old aristocrat, Count Niccolo Virgiliano.

From that tea, over the next 20 years, everything follows: Peter’s loss and rediscovery of his first love, Lorenzo, who grows from a stunning teenager into a beautiful man; Chase’s marriage to Olympia, Niccolo’s princess niece, for the express purpose of joining bloodlines and fortunes; and the voyage of several of these characters up the Nile on a yacht named La Stella Azzurra — The Blue Star— in a climactic chapter that happens to elucidate a similar though shadowier voyage that Robert described years before in his first novel,
The Others
.

As the passage above suggests, time was second only to family as an important theme in Robert’s work. (He inscribed my copy of
The Blue Star
“through the years …”) Not far into the story a temporal shift occurs that I remember finding jarring at the time, partly because the author’s voice, already authoritative, ascends into infallibility: “To tell the story it is necessary to jump back a hundred years, to New York City in 1857, to an ancestor of Chase Walker — his great-great-great-grandfather Orvil Starkweather, and to begin with a brief history of Central Park, and something of the Masons.”

It is at this point that
The Blue Star
blooms into a tale of a family conspiracy spanning centuries — generations!— as Orvil leads the building of a secret Masonic temple beneath Central Park. Secrets, conspiracies, and cabals are at the core in
The Blue Star
, as they were for Robert at the core of human existence. In fact, the depiction of hidden powers and arcane knowledge — to be revealed only to those worthy of seeing how such stuff spins into history (i.e., readers and other initiates) — is what makes
The Blue Star
so distinctly a gay novel, gayness for Robert being a kind of revealed knowledge. Yet like
The Others
and Robert’s second novel,
The Family of Max Desir
,
The Blue Star
is more than a gay novel. It appeared just at the moment when one could feel so-called gay literature stepping beyond genre, into the mainstream — an arrival merited by authors as masterful as Robert and his Violet Quill colleagues, who didn’t merely write about gay life, but drew on the gay imagination to write about “life as a whole.” Transcend convention.

The Blue Star
, in particular, shows the gay imagination catalyzing the observation and description of things both common and mysterious, like sex and love, which affords the reader a fresh appreciation of the breathless thrill of existence. “Euphoria” is how Robert’s friend, the poet and translator Richard Howard, described this quality, in his blurb for the book:

“The contents of happiness.” Isn’t that a felicitous phrase? It applies not only to Robert’s approach to literature but to his understanding of life and the exacting way he pursued life’s nicest possibilities. The blurb was printed on the rear cover of the novel’s original hardback edition, which depicts an azure sea at dusk, as seen from a terrace, through an elegant stone archway. On the front over, through another archway, is more sea and a stylish white yacht, along with title and author. If I am not mistaken, Robert worked closely with the artist on that jacket illustration. He might also have sweet-talked Richard Howard for the blurb and worked closely with Dutton, the book’s publisher, to polish the jacket copy. Some might have thought Robert a control freak, but he was really a perfectionist, attentive to the smallest detail, like the placement of an amethyst-glass vase on a windowsill in the beach house in Sea Girt, New Jersey, that Robert and Michael often shared with friends on weekends. That house — another story, I’m afraid — had been his mother’s, and its maintenance as an idyllic escape for himself and loved ones was one of Robert’s greatest pleasures and perhaps one of his greatest achievements. The walls of the downstairs powder room were specially muraled with stone arches and a tranquil blue sea, just like the book cover.