The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (9 page)

As the story unfolds through the voices of Jesse, his fellow dancer and brief love interest Ruella, and the disturbed youth Lonny, we learn more about Metro, his relationship with Jesse and what led to his brutal murder. What first attracted a black dancer from Hartford, Connecticut to a white farm boy from Lafayette, Louisiana? At a campus demonstration to memorialize Malcolm X’s death, Jesse describes his first sight of Metro:

Suddenly the demonstration seems unimportant to Jesse compared to the emotions given wing by the force of his attraction. It’s a mutual hunger that brings them together, yet what is the basis of this need? Dixon did not aim for definitive answers to this question; the subject is too complex for cut-and-dried explanations. When I first reread
Vanishing Rooms
, I was struck by how much I’d idealized or forgotten regarding Jesse and Metro’s relationship. The ugly moments between them, including a disturbing sexual flashback, startled more than the first time. Was their bond doomed to be severed even before Metro’s murder? When Metro joins Jesse in New York after a trip back home, something has changed but we never find out what, though one suspects it has something to do with Metro’s parents, Jesse’s race, and an erotic childhood memory recalled by Metro involving a black maid’s son.

While pursuing their respective dreams, Jesse and Metro have different schedules and see different aspects of the city. Jesse’s world involves dance studios, part-time work for a choreographer, the ceaseless awareness of prejudice. Metro’s job as a night shift journalist constantly exposes him to the poverty, crime and corruption in the city, and when it takes its toll on him he begins abusing drugs and pursuing anonymous sex in the streets, trying unsuccessfully to make Jesse understand the guilt, rage and disappointment that he feels.

Dixon does not make his characters one-dimensional or stereo-typical. Therefore Metro is not some unsympathetic racist using Jesse for his pleasure and Jesse is not entirely blameless in the downward spiral the relationship takes. In the novel’s first line, we learn, “Metro wasn’t his real name, but I called him that.” His real name is Jon-Michael Barthe but to Jesse he is Metro for “the fast, slippery train we were on,” for having traveled underground, to places where Jesse wanted to go. Metro, increasingly frustrated with life in New York City, questions Jesse’s refusal to call him by his true name. Does he believe that by calling him Metro his lover is denying his identity, not truly seeing him for who he is? In his worsening emotional state, does Metro come to associate Jesse’s blackness with the criminals that he fears, with everything he comes to hate about the city?

Vanishing Rooms
makes it clear that other factors work against the success of Jesse and Metro’s relationship, not only the issue of race. The uglier side of urban life, with its teeming masses, homelessness, crowded subways, rampant crime and racism also play a significant part in affecting the novel’s characters.

Having lived in New York City since I was12, one of the thrills in reading Dixon’s book was recognizing the streets and locales his characters inhabit, being able to relate to the city’s vibe and to its potential for countless wonders and terrors. I’ve known the restlessness that drives Jesse to ride the subways at night, the deadly allure of the train tracks when one is desperate. I’ve also known the hunger that ultimately leads Jesse to the Paradise Baths, the setting for some of the novel’s more hypnotic passages.

The Paradise is the amusement park of sex clubs, a seven-story building with rooms catering to all kinds of fetishes, from scout camp showers and barred cells to army barracks and a completely mirrored room where images of coupling men are repeated as if “extended into infinity.” Jesse goes because Metro had been there once and he feels that somehow he’ll be close to him this way. He’s also there to test something in himself. Metro, as anxious as he’d been regarding the city’s dangers and miseries, fell under the spell of anonymous sex, embracing its thrills and perils; yet bewildered by Jesse’s refusal or inability to understand him, he escaped further into that world. By stepping into the Paradise Baths, Jesse is not only seeking to understand his dead lover but also to see how far he can go himself.

Like a twisted version of Dante’s
Inferno
, Jesse’s guide through the seven levels of the bathhouse is a tall and overweight black man, “old as sin,” who calls himself Clementine. As they make their way up and visit the various rooms, Jesse flashes back to his times with Metro in college, where they first met, and to the months in New York following Metro’s return from Louisiana. The narrative takes on a feverish urgency as Jesse explores both the Paradise and his memories. Men emerge like ghosts out of steam rooms, sniff open lockers while masturbating to boyhood memories, fill the many rooms with the smell and heat of their bodies, the sound of their moans and sobs. And Clementine changes throughout the scenes; appearing as a friendly, sharp-tongued wise man at first, he takes on a somewhat sinister aura when he seems to know things about the nature of Jesse and Metro’s relationship, insisting that Jesse had been Metro’s “nigger” and chiding him for being a “snow queen” (a derogatory term for a black man attracted to white men). It’s when Jesse finds the room of his ideal fantasies that his grief over Metro’s death and Clementine’s increasingly aggressive words and actions send him over the edge.

In
Vanishing Rooms
, Melvin Dixon chronicled the failure of an interracial couple to triumph over the specters of racism and homophobia. One finishes the novel unsure of what Jesse’s (or the author’s) stance is on the subject. Does his dating Rodney, a black dancer, at the end of the book signify a rejection of biracial desire? When he flees the Paradise Jesse declares, “I wasn’t Metro’s nigger, or Clementine’s. I was my own beautiful black son of a bitch.” Despite it all, Jesse uses his passion for dance and the wonderful and terrible times with Metro to transcend the pain of his experiences.

Metro’s murder interrupts a relationship initially built on a promise of love and comradeship. Victims of America’s racist history, Jesse and Metro are brought together by a hunger to know the other, a deep need to connect regardless of sex, race and upbringing.
Vanishing Rooms
creates a dialogue still needed in our so-called progressive times, where people still oppress or kill others because of their skin color or for whom they choose to love. Years after my first reading, I continue to admire Melvin Dixon’s courage in tackling such troubling subject matter with haunting grace and moving immediacy.

Dixon died of AIDS-related complications in 1992 at age 42 (one year after the publication of
Vanishing Rooms
, the same year Dixon’s partner Richard Allen Horovitz passed away; the novel is dedicated to him). As with James Baldwin’s death, Dixon’s absence leaves an empty space for other brave writers to fill and undertake the still divisive topics brought to light by Dixon and his literary ancestors. That
Vanishing Rooms
was brought back into print seems to indicate not only that its significance to gay and African American literature has been recognized but also that “Jesses” and “Metros” of the present and future will still have this novel as part of their literary heritage, perhaps helping them move beyond the traps of racism and homophobia to a place where they can see each other in unfiltered light.

In his college senior year, Jesse performs a spooky solo to “Strange Fruit” at the spring dance concert. The next day someone asks him for the meaning of the dance.

Harper & Row, 1969

Martin Wilson

Published in 1969 — the year of the Stonewall Riots
—
John Donovan’s
I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.
was the first Young Adult novel to deal with homosexuality. Ushered into print by the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom (she has been called the Maxwell Perkins of children’s literature), the novel is an honest, sensitive, funny, sharply written, and very moving coming-of-age novel narrated by a 13-year-old boy who is, most likely, gay.

I was well past my own adolescence when I first read about Donovan’s book. I had recently finished graduate school, in fact, and was about to attempt my own first novel. One Sunday, while I was reading
The New York Times Book Review
, I came across a review of a book called
Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom
. In the course of the piece, the reviewer mentioned Donovan’s book as one of Nordstrom’s ground-breaking achievements. Indeed, Nordstrom, in a letter to Donovan that is included in the book, writes, “the whole experience of publishing your book has been a most rewarding one for me.” It is clear she was aware of the risks in publishing such a book, but she persevered: “We’re going to meet a lot of resistance to this book and we will be eager to fight that resistance as intelligently and gracefully as possible.” I was astonished: There had actually
been
a book for teenagers with a gay character way back in 1969? Why hadn’t I heard of this book, with its catchy but oddly long title?

I had spent my own young adult years (in the 1980s) reading writ-ers like Beverly Cleary, Madeleine L’Engle, E. B. White, Louise Fitzhugh, and Lois Duncan, not to mention those Choose Your Own Adventure books and Richie Rich comics. Of course, back then I hadn’t known I was gay, though I realized that I was attracted to other boys and their bodies. But I couldn’t connect those feelings with “being gay,” which was so foreign, scary, and invisible, especially in my home state of Alabama. If I’d discovered Donovan’s book at the time, would I have figured out what these urges meant? Would I have seen that there are other “normal” boys out there with such feelings? That’s hard to say. More likely I would have freaked out a little, the same way I did when I started reading
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. All those paragraphs about male beauty just made me nervous, for now-obvious reasons.

As a writer just starting out, I was curious about this all-but-forgotten Young Adult novel. I had actually considered writing a novel for a YA audience — it made sense, I thought, because many of my characters were tormented, angst-ridden teenagers. But at the time I wasn’t sure if, as a gay writer, there was much of a place for me, or for my characters, in the genre. But here was this author, John Donovan, who had found such a place, before I was even born.

I
had
to track down a copy of
I’ll Get There
.
It Better Be Worth the Trip.
I checked first on Amazon.com to see if it was in print, but it wasn’t. Then I searched for it among the shelves at the local used bookstore, where I’d found countless out-of-print treasures in the past. But
I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip
was nowhere to be found — neither in the “adult” section nor on the children’s shelves. It wasn’t even at the local library. I finally tracked it down through an online used book dealer. I ordered my copy, a hardcover, for about eight dollars.

It arrived a few days later. The copy I had purchased was what you call a library-bound edition — a glossy hardcover without a jacket, made for wear and tear. The dust jacket copy was glued inside the front of the book, as was a little pouch for the library card that was stamped with DISCARDED in black ink. Someone had taken a blue marker and tried to cover another stamp that said this book was PROVIDED BY THE ALABAMA PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICE. So, I thought, this book came from Alabama, just like I did.

The cover art was modeled clearly (and cleverly) after a yellow piece of lined writing paper, the kind you might use in elementary school. The novel’s title was printed incompletely in a loopy font (starting with I’LL GET THERE. IT BETT. . .), from top row to bottom row, all the way down the page, where it culminated, finally, in the complete title (including the period) in pink letters, followed by “a novel by John Donovan” in aqua-blue lettering.

I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip
is narrated by thirteen-year-old Davy Ross, who from the very first page has an appealing sardonic voice, one that suggests both toughness and vulnerability. Davy has lived with his grandmother — not with his divorced parents — since he was five. But as the novel opens, his grandmother has just died, and now Davy must move to New York City to live with his mother. “There aren’t many adults I have anything to
say
to,” Davy tells us, “and now there is one less, with Grandmother dead.”