The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (5 page)

All things considered, I find it no less than amazing that journeyman screen- and television writer George Baxt should have begun writing a murder mystery novel starring a black gay detective in 1965. No less a publishing giant than Simon and Schuster published the first edition in 1966. There quickly followed a trade paperback edition (1966), the one I most likely read a decade later. As I remember, I read the book ravenously, despite being no big fan of the mystery genre (
A Queer Kind of Death
may well have been the first murder mystery I'd ever read), so great was my joy at finding a novel with a black gay protagonist. Over thirty years and many black gay novels (several of them my own) later, I found my recent re-read of
A Queer Kind of Death
a good deal less joyful.

In brief,
A Queer Kind of Death
concerns the death (apparently by foul play) of Ben Bentley (née Benjamin Bernheim), a handsome twenty-something actor/model/hustler. In the ages-old tradition of the genre, nearly everyone in the immediate orbit of the deceased had some reason to want him dead, among them Seth Piro, failed writer and Ben's ex-roommate (and ex-lover); Seth's estranged wife, Veronica; the wealthy but elderly Jameson Hurst, with whom Ben had also previously shared digs (and presumably a bed); Adam, Hurst's current caretaker/kept boy; a Native American (called Indians in 1966), ex-masseur/call boy; and Hurst's mysterious, reclusive, and oddly powerful sister, Ella. It falls to Detective Pharoah Love (“Negro and homosexual,” to quote
New York Times
reviewer Anthony Boucher —
The New York Times
, June 12, 1966, as quoted on the back cover of the 20th Anniversary Edition of
A Queer Kind of Death
—
) to ferret out Ben Bentley's killer.

The 1986 “20th Anniversary Edition” of
A Queer Kind of Death
, a copy of which I recently bought on the cheap from Amazon, sports one of the most egregiously designed covers ever executed (and I freely admit that a couple of my own book covers qualify as eyesores): a pale purple background from which emerges a drawing of an African-American man's mouth – wide, full lips open to reveal somewhat overlarge upper teeth; in the foreground, a human skeleton wearing a black jacket, pink open-collar shirt, a blue-and-gold-striped neck scarf, and a curly black wig, a long-stemmed red rose between the skull's teeth. Granted, the cover art has nothing really to do with the quality of a book itself, but still – not pretty. The original 1966 paperback and 1969 British paperback versions of
A Queer Kind of Death
are considerably more attractive: the former featuring a close-up of the face of a good-looking, bespectacled black man in the background, with an abstract design of a sprawled male body superimposed. The latter, a skeleton of a hand with a pink carnation between the finger bones.

More importantly (and disappointingly), my revisiting Pharoah Love, Baxt's protagonist, 42 years after his debut, revealed a character who is little more than a funny name and the habit of calling everyone “cat.” In his preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition, Mr. Baxt claims to have based Pharoah (Egyptian monarch deliberately misspelled) Love on “a very hip black man” he'd “occasionally had a drink with at Elaine's famous celebrity hangout” in New York. Apparently, either this black man called people “cat,” or calling people “cat” was Mr. Baxt's idea of something a “very hip black man” might do. In any case, Mr. Baxt has Pharoah Love do this an irritating number of times in the course of 249 small, tiny-type pages: “Seth cat,” “Seth baby cat,” “Adam cat,” “Jameson cat,” “snotty cat” (Love's name for Veronica) – face-to-face and in reference, Pharoah Love calls everybody “cat,” a habit so annoying (at least to me) that he probably could have extracted confessions from suspects using that tactic alone. By the time Seth Piro picks up the habit, calling Love “Pharoah-cat,” I had had more than enough ( according to his 1986 Preface, Baxt's original and preferred title for his first novel was
Dead Cat
;
overkill anyone?).

I found myself wondering if Mr. Baxt's occasional drinking buddy might have been his only black acquaintance as of 1965. At one point in conversation with one of the white characters, Pharoah makes a reference to the Indians having sold Manhattan “to us.” Granting that I was only a kid at the time, it is hard for me to imagine a black man circa 1966 who wouldn't have added something like, “Well, to
y'all
, anyway.” I have no historical documents handy to back up my claim, but I don't believe there were any black folk among the men who walked away with Manhattan for a box of beads. In fact, Pharoah Love seems to be the only black person (hip or square) in the New York City presented by Mr. Baxt. Perhaps realizing he hadn't the first idea of how black New Yorkers might actually speak and behave, he chose to create one “very hip black man” character and leave it at that.

The good news about Pharoah Love, in addition to the good news that Mr. Baxt chose to write him at all, is that (unlikely as it seems for the time and place he inhabits) Love is a detective with the New York police force; he's black (he is called “dinge,” “blackamoor” and such by other characters, though never to his face), and he is, by my own working definition, bisexual, and as open about his sexuality as anyone he encounters (straight, bent or undecided) is about theirs. Considering homosexual acts were still illegal in New York in 1966, and the Civil Rights Act was all of two years old, Pharoah Love is one very liberated black queer man. For a black bisexual in a straight white world, he is amazingly comfortable in his own skin. He treats the white people he deals with as his equals (professional, social, and sexual), not his betters. For the 18-year-old black gay boy I was when I first read
A Queer Kind of Death
, Pharoah Love was a welcomed addition to Merrick's Peter and Charlie, and Patricia Nell Warren's Billy and Harland, and an antidote to Mort Crowley's pathetic Bernard.

Post-Stonewall, post-gay liberation movement, post-AIDS, post-Elton, Ellen and Aiken, it is also interesting to witness the attitudes of Mr. Baxt's characters to non-heterosexual leanings and behavior. In the social milieu in which
A Queer Kind of Death
takes place, homosexuality (or, to be more accurate, bisexuality) seems almost to be the norm: while Pharoah Love is outspoken about his desire for Seth Piro (not just as a sexual partner, but as a possible steady date/housemate), he claims he could just as well “care for some chick.” Detective Love is an equal opportunity flirt, turning on the charm not only for Seth, but for bar owner Ida, and a pretty blond “chick” dancing with her date at Ida's joint. Seth is sleeping with men while still legally married to Veronica. Both the hulking Adam and the movie star-handsome Ben have sex with both men and women, for fun and/or profit. Only the women seem to be exclusively heterosexual (and one of them has a Sapphic indiscretion in her past); and of the men, only Ida's bartender (Ward, née Moishe, Gabriel) seems to be unerringly straight, and only the swishy Jameson Hurst is totally homosexual. Certainly, no one in the story is talking about the possibility of same-sex marriage or homosexuals as a voting block – sex and sexuality haven't been politicized yet – but the pervasive attitude seems to be that sex is just sex, whoever's doing what to whom. There is a matter-of-fact sexual fluidity that seems oddly sophisticated and adult as compared with the currently pervasive strict gay/straight dichotomy and “get off the fence” attitude towards bisexuality and those who practice it. Whether this is a true refection of the “homosexual otherworld” with which Mr. Baxt claimed (in his 1986 Preface) to have been familiar, or simply wish fulfillment on the part of the author, I could only conjecture.

While Mr. Baxt exhibits an admirable way with plot (the outcome of Detective Love's investigation took me by surprise 30 years ago, and despite having read the book before, I didn't see it coming this time, either), his characterizations are not nearly as strong. With the exception of Jameson Hurst (effeminate, imperious, lascivious and somehow oddly sympathetic), the denizens of Mr. Baxt's mid-60s New York City are mostly one-note Johnnies – their entire personalities can be reduced to a sentence: Pharoah Love is the black guy who says “cat;” Seth Piro is weak and neurotic, moored to his Viennese psychoanalyst; Veronica is perpetually unpleasant and just as perpetually horny; literary agent Ruthelma is fat, gluttonous, and effusive (indicated by the use of
lots
of
italics
in her dialogue). Even given that murder mysteries as a genre tend to be plot-driven rather than character driven, I could not help wishing the characters were fleshed out a bit more.

As an openly gay fictional sleuth, Pharoah Love is the godfather of Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter, Michael Nava's (gay Latino) Henry Rios, Katherine Forrest's Kate Delafield, and others. But Hansen (beginning in the late 1970s), Nava (in the mid-80s), and Forrest (80s-90s) wrote considerably better mystery novels than
A Queer Kind of Love
. Fortunately, so did George Baxt. He even wrote better Pharoah Love novels, in sequels
Topsy and Evil
(1968) and especially
A Queer Kind of Love
(1994). I don't believe I ever recommended
A Queer Kind of Death
to anyone the first time I read it; and I would only do so today to a mystery novel fanatic (someone who reads the genre indiscriminately), or a student of black gay literature (in spite of Mr. Baxt having been white). To the extent it works at all anymore,
A Queer Kind of Death
works as a period piece, a relic of a very different time, its allusions to short-skirted blonds dancing the frug, the Beatles wanting to hold your hand, and of course, those millions of “cats” giving the book a paisley-print “Austin Powers” campiness forty-plus years after its initial publication.

The cover of the 2000 edition of
A Queer Kind of Death
indicated that the book had at that time been optioned for a major motion picture to star Laurence Fishburne. Nearly a decade later, I see Taye Diggs in the part, or maybe Cuba Gooding Jr. or Rockmund Dunbar; with Jake Gyllenhaal as Seth, and maybe Gwynneth Paltrow as Veronica. Bette Midler could chew scenery and canapés as Ruthelma. And the part of Jameson Hurst fairly
screams
David Bowie. Of course, the screenplay would have to kill most of those “cats.”

Dutton, 1994

Rob Stephenson

I first read Bruce Benderson’s novel
User
a couple of years after its debut in 1995. Stirring, seductive prose sucked me right into this exhaustive portrayal of urban prostitution and drug addiction in early 1990’s Times Square. From the first page, a soiled, silken procession of words rendered me weak-kneed, incapable of pulling out until long after its final avian image had flown.

Reading it again ten years later confirmed my original feelings. This is a remarkable novel.

Benderson’s decadent, viscous language oozes through the novel much like the many liquids held inside it. We encounter a catalog of suggestive fluids: the rich fading potency of sperm underfoot, the staining and sustaining attributes of blood, the grit of old bath water and mud, the disorienting hazes of heroin and booze, the welcome buzz of hot coffee, the jolt of salt water on the tongue, the sour displeasure of diarrhea, spittle, urine, and vomit on the streets, the relentless pounding of the rain.

He offers us the sordid tale of a nineteen-year-old, self-named mulatto hustler and the people in his life. Apollo is a junkie. He dances at the Ecstasy Male Theater and lures men into giving him cash for sex in the private booths behind the stage. After a flubbed attempt to get extra money from his prey, he punches out the doorman of the theater and flees the scene. For the rest of the novel, Apollo is on the run from the police, while hustling just enough cash to cop his bags of dope.

Mrs. Huxton is the eighty-six-year-old Portuguese widow who owns the theater as well as the building that houses it. She lives stories above it. Like a ghost, she haunts the novel, materializing in the background only once to assist the police in their fumbling search for Apollo. Otherwise, she remains a trumped-up authority figure in Apollo’s fantasies about his own importance and his fate. He accepts that she has control over his life. It gives him comfort and hope to believe this, similar to the way many people feel God is a tangible benefactor, remaining close in their thoughts, even though he is locked out of reach in the heavens above them.

The other main characters include Casio, the doorman who ends up in the hospital and back in jail because of Apollo’s punch. Casio’s son, Baby Pop, is only fourteen, a drug-free hustler. He is determined to avenge his father’s sorry condition at Apollo’s hand. Angelita, Casio’s lover and partner in crime, performs and hustles in drag. He’s working towards a sex change operation. Detective Pangero searches for Apollo, enjoying his questionable methods of extracting information from the transvestite hookers he’s attracted to on his beat. Tina, a power-hungry bar owner, runs the main hustler bar. Apollo’s unnamed friend with AIDS gives him shelter and pills. He is the only one with anything like a relationship with Apollo, but it never quite solidifies.

The narrative moves through the minds of many of these characters. Their stories coalesce and break off into personal historical fragments interrupting each other as they zigzag along. Inevitably, they circle back to Apollo’s dire present. He is the unsettling center, often without his own center, as he drifts into ever foggier drug-induced illusions.

If, as Nabokov said, realism is a style (I suggest that it is many styles), then Benderson’s longtime friend, the author Ursule Molinaro, may have given the world a great recipe for actually making it. In his lengthy essay on her writing in
The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
(2002, vol. 22, No. 1) Benderson says that she never used “paint-by-numbers details meant to give a
realistic
feeling of the setting. She chose instead the judicious placement of spare, sensuous details that enhanced the particular consciousness of her protagonist; and it is the consciousness of her characters that is mostly responsible for startling evocations of setting. . . . She just did not believe in the concept of the tourist.”