The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (7 page)

And throughout the years of their relationship Timothy has been mostly monogamous with Jasper; his infidelity, though, is rather calculated. Fearing that he may have become infected with the virus because of Jasper, Timothy decides on a liaison with another man so that if he does become ill, he will not have to hold Jasper accountable. “It is only of my case I can say that everything that has come to me has come because I loved without demands.”

Love without demands, Timothy believes, has killed more than a million men in a decade. Coe is careful about not making this issue a moral statement, though the lush, romantic sweep he imbues
Such Times
with proves that Timothy is a man who only wants to love just one man. Jasper believes that “monogamy is antithetical to the homosexual life.” He refuses to attach an emotional need to sex; he is a man who appreciates it for its particular pleasures. But Coe is also careful about showing how Jasper, in his own fashion, cares for Timothy, from the table and bookcases he builds for Timothy at the onset of their affair, to the special sugar, easily dissolvable in cold liquid, he buys once Timothy becomes ill.

What buoys
Such Times
above its haughty
locales, pretentious characters, and its simple and melodramatic plot, is Coe’s playful but concise use of language, which is the same technique which lifted Coe’s first short novel,
I Look Divine,
into the literary stratosphere. Timothy narrates the
Such Times
, like Nicholas’s brother in
I Look Divine
, in a clever, deadpan tone. Evasiveness and repetition are Coe’s primary techniques, but the sentences are crisp, spare, and full of shrewd, elegant observation. In
I Look Divine
, clothes become “frocks,” photographs are “shots,”
joie de vivre
is retitled as
suave de vivre
. In
Such Times
, dessert is always “pudding,” sex is “toss and catch,” improvisation becomes first improvision and later improvositable, a well made daiquiri is “perf,” an affair is a
frisson
, a particularly handsome man is continually referred to as “The Hot One.” Timothy forbids Jasper calling him “Tim” because he hates “being called a monosyllable.” In fact, Timothy, as a young man, attempts to woo Jasper with words. “I had a richer vocabulary than I have now,” he remembers. “It was a time of life when I did not run out of words. I’m always running out of words now, and things have become harder to describe. I can’t pin them down as I used to. There wasn’t an adjective I wouldn’t use, misuse, abuse. I also spoke with my hands. Years later, Jasper told me he had been startled that night by the way I spoke. He told me he hadn’t before heard anyone speak quite as I did, and he told me that he had thought for a while that I might be the smartest person he’d met in his life. This made me wonder more than a bit about his life, but it was, of course, nice to hear. He took it back, naturally, once he got to know me.”

As in
I Look Divine
, Coe uses a lyrical, elliptical construction in
Such Times
; subjects are examined as if through a prism, revealing a succession of delicate and fine-tuned details. “There is something just to proximity, to having known a man’s body by touch, to loving the forces behind it, the voice that comes out of him, the words he selects, and then, too, something to having been away awhile — a week, a day, an hour, time in which you were removed, briefly free of him, even — and to coming back into a room and finding him still there, unchanged, the same as he was when you left him. There is something to this, to finding that you cannot possibly fill in what the man was in your absence, cannot imagine him as having been anything at all, even just alive, lying motionless without you, and something about this is bound to overcome you.”

Such Times
pulsates with the confusions and heartbreaks of attempting to understand the different types of gay men and their relationships — from the well-built to the unattractive to the uninhibited and disposable to those hopeful and unrequited — and chart them in an era when every blemish was a suspect of something else and the medical mystery of AIDS was spiraling into hysteria. Anyone who has found himself as the third party in a triangular relationship — and that is not altogether uncommon in the modern gay milieu — will certainly empathize with the pleasures and pains Timothy finds in his love for Jasper. And anyone who witnessed the changes of gay life during the first decades of the AIDS epidemic — the individual and collective pain and dislocation and strength and heroism — will find
Such Times
a must read; and any reader with a taste for gay history and sociology and the way things were will also find the novel worthwhile today. Coe covers a multitude of subjects before and during the onslaught of the epidemic, from riffing about fisting to musing about taking the HIV test. He perceptively charts many of the physical and psychological changes the plague brought to the gay community. “The appearance of the people with the virus, how they look physically, is more widely documented than what they feel under their skin, inside themselves,” Timothy observes.

In fact, Coe spends as much energy pondering science and medicine and health as he does on sex and gay men and relationships. There are scenes of lumbar tests, tales of hospitals overcharging patients, and explanations of the thymus gland. In lesser hands, this sort of diversion could potentially bog down a contemporary novel, but throughout Coe is able to maintain Timothy’s cleverness, particularly on a section about retroviruses. In attempting to explain nucleotides to Jasper, for instance, Timothy conjures up a metaphor of precious stones. “My virus may begin with an emerald, and then go: diamond, diamond, sapphire, ruby, emerald, emerald, ruby. Your virus may begin with a sapphire, and if read from end to end, which they can do now in a laboratory, it might go something like this: sapphire, diamond, diamond, sapphire, ruby, emerald, diamond, ruby, ruby.”

Even ill and recuperating, Timothy refuses to shed his sophis-tication or his appetite for a good life, enjoying the meals Jasper cooks for him: “a rare rack of baby lamb, not yet a month old, a wonderfully thick veal chop sautéed with chanterelles, a two-pound lobster, which he took out of the shell for me and served with fresh tarragon mayonnaise, tiny soft-shell crabs crisp with garlic and capers.”

But it is Timothy’s attempt at uncovering and understanding the mysteries of science and medicine that provide him with a reason to live. Jasper, however, allows himself to succumb to the virus without even a fight. When Timothy finds a drug that might counter Jasper’s AZT anemia, Jasper refuses to take it because it has not been approved by the FDA. In literary merit, this is the true test of character — showing how a person reacts to conflict or change. And in showing the contrast by which Timothy and Jasper react to their diagnoses, Coe demonstrates how AIDS forced a whole generation of men into directions they might never have taken, and the positive and negative forces of each individual spirit.

Timothy refuses to see either himself or Jasper as victims, unwilling to yield to the randomness of fate or to the misery of lost romance. What he does is find a redemptive power from his memory, and, as he unfolds his story, his voice elevates
Such Times
into a transcendent classic that deserves to be discovered and re-discovered.

I first read Coe’s
I Look Divine
in 1988 after a recommendation from a writing workshop. A few years later, in 1993, I was asked to review
Such Times
for
The Washington Blade
, a weekly gay newspaper. It was my second paid assignment as a literary critic. (James McCourt’s novel,
Time Remaining
, was the first.) I knew nothing of the personal facts or the life history of Christopher Coe, nor did I attempt to discover them, although I knew through editors and publicists at the time that Coe was ill and struggling with AIDS. Coe was also sketchy about revealing facts about himself. In a 1993 interview that ran alongside my review in the
Blade
, when editor Trey Graham asked Coe about the autobiographical inspiration of
Such Times
, the author responded, “Quite a bit of it is autobiographical, but I don’t get into that — you’ll forgive me. I resent those questions because people are trying to peg you in one category or another. If I say it’s all made up, it’s all fiction, then they’ll say, ‘Well, what does it matter then?’ And if I said it’s all autobiographical, it’s all from the truth, then they’ll ask, ‘Then where’s the art?’ So you can’t win.”

Eventually, Coe and I shared an editor at Viking Penguin, Edward Iwanicki, a man who championed many gay male writers writing about AIDS, including David B. Feinberg and Richard Hall. Christopher Coe died shortly before the paperback publication of
Such Times
, on September 6, 1994, at his home in Manhattan. He was 41 years old.

In re-reading
Such Times
14 years later for this anthology of lost gay fiction, I found Timothy’s line, from which the novel derives its title, particularly poignant. “I really do find it hard to believe that there used to be such times,” Timothy says in 1992, referring to the uninhibited past of glory holes and bathhouses and sex with other men inside the empty trucks on the streets of the meatpacking district in the West Village. Ironically, the same can be now said of 1992 and those first horrific years of the epidemic, when every HIV-positive diagnosis was a potential death knell. Who knew then that such times would change again? Who knew this could happen? Who knew such
extraordinary
times would turn into history?

Putnam, 1971

Jesse Monteagudo

The years after the Stonewall Riots (1969-73) were the lesbian and gay community’s “heroic age,” a period of great achievements in gay politics, society, religion, culture and thought. But when it came to creative literature by or about gay men, the “heroic age” left much to be desired. This was a period when fact was more exciting than fiction. As the later Roger Austen wrote in
Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel In America
(1977), “One of the most obvious results of the politicization of gayness has been the publication of scores of nonfiction books which have quite dramatically overshadowed the output of traditional gay fiction. . . . As closet doors have been flung open, men who had had neither the time nor the talent to write novels have not hesitated to dash off personal reminiscences, and altogether the movement has produced very little fiction but an avalanche of con-fessions, interviews, essays, diaries, and polemics.” What novel could compete with the true-life adventures of Arthur Bell, Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols, Wallace Hamilton, Merle Miller, John Murphy, the Rev. Troy Perry or “John Reid” (Andrew Tobias)? Outside of pornographic fiction — and “non-gay,” gay novels by the likes of James Purdy and Gore Vidal — gay fiction in the years between 1969 and 1973 could only produce Joseph Hansen’s first two Dave Brandstetter mysteries (
Fadeout
and
Death Claims
), Gordon Merrick’s first two Charlie and Peter romances (
The Lord Won’t Mind
and
One for the Gods
), Merle Miller’s autobiographical novel
What Happened
, Frank Hilaire’s prison yarn
Thanatos
and Leo Skir’s quaint
Boychick
— and Daniel Curzon’s first novel,
Something You Do in the Dark
.

I am a non-fiction kind of guy, so I did not read
Something You Do in the Dark
when I went through my own coming out process in 1972-73. Rather, I came out fine by reading some of the aforementioned true-life memoirs, as well as “gay 101” books like Peter Fisher’s Gay Book Award-winning
The Gay Mystique
. I first read about Dan Curzon and his book in early 1977, thanks to an Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop catalog. I immediately ordered a copy of the Lancer paperback, read it with mounting excitement, and became a fan for life of Dan Curzon. Cole Ruffner, Curzon’s gay anti-hero, was a man whom I could relate to, though thankfully I did not suffer any of the trials or tribulations that Cole Ruffner went through within the pages of this book. When I began to write a book review column (“The Book Nook”) for Miami’s newly-published, gay community news-paper
The Weekly News
(Nov. 1977), one of the first articles that I wrote was a review of
Dark
and of Curzon’s second novel,
The Misadventures of Tim McPick
(1975). The following year I had the opportunity to meet Curzon when he spoke at a Florida Gay and Lesbian Conference in Tallahassee. I still have with me my autographed copy of
Something You Do in the Dark
, dedicated by the author “To Jesse, a nice guy, nice to meet you. With people like you, good gay literature can’t lose. Dan Curzon may 29/78” Since then I have kept in touch with Dan Curzon, most recently by e-mail, and have been fortunate to read and enjoyed all of his subsequent novels, short stories, memoirs and satires, though sadly none of his equally-acclaimed plays.