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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Fiction of Gay Interest
Plot / Content: Rating: G Short stories by Dennis Cooper, Robert Ferro, John Fox, Robert Gluck, Brad Gooch, Michael Grumley, Richard Hall, Andrew Holleran, Ethan Mordden, Felice Picano, Edmund White and others. Background / Biography: Reviews: A young man sits at a table with a cup of coffee, a notebook and half a donzen pencils; a small diary in one hand, he is writing intently in a notebook. A few feet away there is a bed on which another young man is lying, hands behind his head, eyes closed, more probably resting than asleep. The picture is black and white but has been tinted in pastels - yellow for the flowers by the window, the coffee cup, the writer's shirt, pink for the check of the tablecloth, the short of the man on the bed. The moment is quiet, intimate, yet may suddenly break; you would not be surprised to see the sleeper wake, the writer close his book or either leave. The cover of this collection of recent American gay fiction perfectly captures the dominant mood of the stories within. Romanticism and realism mingle, complementing rather than contradicting each other - the gay man and the straight youth in Brad Gooch's Maine who do not have sex but talk to each other, the construction worker in Ethan Mordden's Hardhats who longs for but cannot find a buddy, the white youth with the black lover in Michael Grumley's Life Drawing who begins to understand that sex has an attraction independent of love. A secondary theme, as one might expect, is AIDS, although most writers who touch on it are more concerned with its aftermath than its effect - Andrew Holleran's Friends at Evening discussing Louis who has died, a Cretan youth in Edmund White's An Oracle helping Ray get over his lover's death. Death also appears in its guise of rounding off a life, as in C F Borgman's A Queer Red Spirit [quote column right] and Wallace Parr's Street Star. George Stambolian's collection nearly balances well-known writers with new, giving proof, if any were necessary, that gay writing in the USA is a a genre that has come into its onwn. (Would that the same could be said [in the UK].) Perhaps because we have come to expect so much of them, it is the established writers who sometimes deliver less than we expect. If Holleran writes about New York again we cannot complain because he does it so well. Robert Ferro's Second Son is as wonderfully written as his Family of Max Desir, but is disappointingly similar to that novel. As for newcomers, Kevin Killian's harrowaing and hearwarming September was for me the most striking, while Wallace Parr and C F Borgman are names that I expect to see again. There are weaknesses, of course; Bruce Boone and Sam d'Allesandro both seem to be writing less for others than themselves, while Dennis Cooper could not get inside his obviously complex characters. If I have any real complaint, however, it is that too many of the stories are essays or memoirs rather than fiction (fine in themselves - but why the misleading category?) and that too many are extracts from novels in progress. These are naturally incomplete and in contrast with the unity of the conventional short story leave the reader unsatisfied and eager for more. Martin Foreman for Gay's The Word Newsletter, January 1987 Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction. Click here for our full list. |
" My name is Brian Malventano. I live out here in Rockaway Beach, Queens. I feel so tight. All muscle. No fat. Hard. In me there is a blue sea center. I am the sky. I thrive on high drive sex. It's in the air. I breathe it. I taste it. Maybe there's something out of kilter in my gland secretions. Maybe it's in the brain. All I know is I love men. I am constantly overcome with lust. I've made all sex be my religion. Orgasm is the highest sacrament." Secondhand booksellers |
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