The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (3 page)

I did not reread Allen’s stories for years, perhaps because I feared they might not be as good as I remembered. Yet it's been a joy to go back to his book for this essay and see Allen the author as well as Allen the friend. He was an amazing writer, even better than I thought at the time. I would love these stories even if I had not known him. They deserve to be read and reread, not only because they capture life in the age of AIDS so well, but because they have a moral weight that transcends their moment in time.

I’d like to discuss a few stories at length to suggest their quality and strength. Allen's work wasn't really about plot, but I should warn you in advance that I'm going to give away a lot.

“The
Times
As It Knows Us” is the best known of Allen's stories, reprinted in anthologies and often cited. It's about a weekend on Fire Island in a house of gay men during the epidemic, an overload of characters we can only slowly distinguish from each other, much as if we were visiting the house ourselves. The story is haunted by the times: both the spirit of the age and the newspaper. The narrator, Clark, keeps a folder of clippings from the
New York Times
, a public history of the epidemic. Clark wants to dig beneath the shallow, two-dimensional accounts of gay men with AIDS propagated by the media and find a fuller, more human reality. That is exactly what the story does. It's like a Chekhov play where nothing major happens, but everything important is revealed. The men bond and bicker, help and hinder. One comes down with a fever; Clark takes care of him with help from housemates. Some people behave well, others badly, but everyone has his reasons. It's a very rich, densely textured story that captures lived lives without glib judgments or false nobility. Needing to give the feverish man a rubdown with vodka, Clark jokes, “Not the imported, get the domestic we use for guests,” without making the reader doubt his genuine fear for his friend.

“The Body and Its Seasons” and “The Body and Its Dangers” are the two linked stories, following a trio of college friends into adulthood. In the first story, a gay student, Gordon, goes to bed with a female friend, Sara, as an experiment. While they lie in bed, we get pieces of his life, chiefly his Catholic upbringing and sex with two different priests, and sex with Sara's friend Marie followed by ideas about innocence and the Fall as illustrated by a play he just performed in,
The Garden
. In the second story, Sara narrates. Seventeen years have passed. She lives with her lover Marie and their daughter Rachel, whose father was Gordon. Sara has had a breast removed for cancer yet is still stricken with the disease. All bodies are in danger, not only the bodies of gay men. Sara spends the story musing to herself, gathering together the pieces of her life: her difficult daughter, her more difficult lover, her dead friend Jake, her absent friend Gordon. (We're never actually told that Gordon is dead, but we can't help assuming so.) Her voice is quiet and mature and clear. She imagines Gordon reappearing, talking to her and touching her scar tissue. “What he cannot make whole again, he will convince me doesn't matter.”

This story narrated by a woman is the most overtly sexual in the book. Allen celebrates sex throughout
The
Body and its Dangers
. Where another writer might condemn the desire that kills his characters, Allen treats sex as a valuable intimacy. Yet the act itself is presented more frankly here than elsewhere. From a woman's point of view, penetration becomes wonderfully matter-of-fact in one of my favorite descriptions of a sex act: “He opened himself with his fingers, and straddled Gordon, sitting back and guiding him in at once. He smiled.”

“Philostorgy, Now Obscure” follows Preston, a gay man recently diagnosed with AIDS, when he returns to Chicago to say goodbye to his friends, in particular the two women he used to live with, Roxy and Lorna., who echo the female friends in the “Body” stories. Lorna is married to Sean, their favorite teacher, and pregnant with her second child. Preston goes to the faculty steam room with Sean and they talk about philosophy, in particular St. Augustine. He contacts an old lover, Jim. They meet for lunch and go to bed together. The story ends with Preston and Roxy talking about her own ex-boyfriend while they wait for Lorna to return.

It's a strange, crowded, slightly elusive story yet very beautiful. Allen's death has given it a weight it didn't have when I first read it. This farewell to friends and lovers was never sentimental or melodramatic, but it is now terribly real. Preston thinks about his dead and remembers desire before we're told:

Which Allen managed to achieve in his single, wonderful book. He can still affect how we think about our lives. His bubble of consciousness survives.

Serpent’s Tail, 1989

Philip Clark

Containing Fragments from and Reworkings of Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990).

Of course, it was several years before I met my own Boy, my very own Boy, that I read
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
. But thank you for that book, Mr. Bartlett. In another of your books,
Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde
, you quote That Man himself:

And is this quite true? This book you wrote, this
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
, this story of Boy and O, the bar where they met, the woman who helped bring them together, the marriage they shared: have I not only read and reread it, given it to others, written about it, quoted from it, but has it also, consciously or not, served as pattern and image for my most important relationship? Has life, as Wilde so famously said, imitated art?

Had I said to my Boy,
I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose!
— would it have been any less true because I was not the first to say it?

I.
In which the Narrator describes Boy for the reader:

“I could tell you that he had white skin, black eyes, and black hair, but you can see that from the photograph. I could tell you that the eyes were so beautiful they could actually make you feel giddy when he suddenly looked up from the floor and straight at you.”

I have described my Boy three times as looking like a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, all black and white: once in a journal, once retelling a story, and now. As Wilde knew, if a line is good enough to use, it is good enough to plagiarize from oneself and use again. Besides, it is appropriate. It is right. My Boy’s eyes were emerald, a cat’s eyes, but in my mind and memory, they are as dark as his bright black hair. They made my stomach tighten with a pleasurable nervousness. I believe I was looking for a Boy whose eyes might make me feel that way.

He was not unlike the 19-year-old Boy who enters The Bar in that book.

II.
In which the Narrator
explains The Bar’s ritual of naming:

“One thing Boy never said, the line . . . he would never have used, was
don’t call me Boy
. He loved to be called Boy. He smiled whenever the name was used. He loved it that we had christened him and he knew that he was special to us.”

Long after it had started, we argued playfully about who had first begun our custom. He thought he had, but I knew that couldn’t be true. This ritual was in place well before the day I had him read
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
, and I knew I must have initiated it. We never used our Christian names. We each called the other “Boy.”

And if this sounds too precious to you, if it makes you want to stop reading, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you think that this sounds like an affectation, that no two people you would want to spend time with would act this way. Well I have to say that much of the impact of this story depends upon your realizing that this felt entirely natural to us. That “Boy” also meant
I love you
and
I am near
and
we are safe with each other
.

And that when he stopped calling me “Boy,” I knew it was over.

III.
In which the Narrator explains a detail of The Bar’s decorations, as designed by Madame, the proprietress:

“And whatever else the décor was . . . the one thing that was always the same and that Madame never got rid of was the ceiling. The design of the ceiling of The Bar was very wonderful. She’d had it inlaid with a hundred, several hundred small white fairy-lights, and it gave the effect of a real fantastic night sky, especially on a good night. I always loved that. The bulbs weren’t just scattered, but were arranged in the correct pattern — so that if you looked up you could see (if you knew which star was which), up there amongst all the dragons, bulls, and poisonous scuttlers of the Heavens, right in the centre you could see the constellation which I always thought of as our special one, a solitary man walking with his faithful dog, the high summer constellation of Orion, the Hunter, stretched and striding above us. But I never knew what all the other stars meant, just that one constellation.”

It is easy to identify The Hunter, spread-eagled on the night’s black bed of sky. He is a man making his own path, always moving toward some unknowable goal. But for a dog, he is alone. This does not stop his progress. I imagine him, the protector, looking down on the heads of The Bar’s patrons.

We had no Bar to turn to. We had no single space in which to be together, and so we turned outdoors, made every place our proving ground. Early on, we saw that nature welcomed us. We could not cross the college campus we first called home without encounters. An evening stroll near fraternity row led to a thick-flanked raccoon waddling across our path, eyeing us with complacent tolerance before drifting into the dusky woods. On the bridge between the cafeteria and the library, we were treated to the spectacle of five deer crashing about the undergrowth. They settled and browsed the leaves while we watched with quiet pleasure. And while neither of us knew the sky’s shining map, every night we found Orion launched above our heads, watching over us, a blessing.

IV.
In which a patron of The Bar has been attacked
:

“This time there was no knife, they just got him on the floor and it was just a fist which had come down on the man’s face again and again. And it happened just two streets away from The Bar. He came into the bar with blood everywhere . . . He wasn’t as badly hurt as he looked, actually, but it was enough to make us all think at least twice.

People say to me that I must be keeping a list of all the attacks I hear about. They say it’s morbid, they say what are you trying to prove anyway. They say why do you have to talk about that just now. They say to me, how many of them do there have to be before you think you’ve got enough on your list. They say when are you going to stop it, and I say, when am I going to stop it, when am I —

Not long after we began dating, one of our favorite professors screened the movie version of
Bent
, Martin Sherman’s play about the claiming of gay identity, set amid the brutality of the Holocaust. Having read and been stunned at the play’s power in high school, I knew what to expect of the movie. But when I walked into the darkened classroom, I was too distracted to think much about the film. I knew we would be together that evening, and in the sweet daze of one newly in love, my thoughts were always at least half with him.

But after the opening cycle of scenes, the tightening net, the knowledge that there will be no hiding, no passport, no border, no cloak of night, and after the inevitable arrests, the main character, Max, finds himself in the cattle car with his friend. When the Nazis choose his friend to mock, to abuse, when they bash their clubs against this man’s ribs with the sickening thud of metal to flesh, Max stands still, knowing that to react will only invite his own destruction, paralyzed by self-protection. And I — I who do not cry at movies, who know the line between what is real and what is on the screen, who affects, like any proper boy, not to feel — I am thinking of him, thinking of his being touched for so slight a reason as petty hatred, and I cannot stop the tears no matter how I try to hold them in.

Together, we had yet to hear more than a few words tossed from cars as we made our way through the town’s grid of gently curving streets. But did he notice that I held him extra-long in our welcoming embrace that night? That stepping back I examined his face, half-expecting swollen lips, a cut or bruise below those emerald eyes?

V.
When Boy reappears in The Bar with O, with whom he has spent six days
:

“In the week of their absence, we had decided that their lovemaking would be extraordinary, legendary. Since so many of us had made love to either O or to Boy, we felt that by comparing notes, we knew a great deal about how they behaved when making love, and so when we saw them reappear so obviously as lovers we were pleased to see that our predictions had been correct. We had assumed that their affair would in some way be a violent one, because O was known to be violent, and because Boy made you feel strange when he gave himself away to you, a strangeness, and a feeling that you always wanted more, that often came out as violence. And now here to prove our thesis was Boy, silent, stunned, extraordinarily tired, ravaged by intimacy, shattered by sex, dazed with sex.”