Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. By Christopher Bram, Twelve, 371 pp.
PERHAPS the key difference between the gay-rights movement and the
campaigns for black and women’s equality was this: before gay people
could band together against discrimination, they first had to know, in
the 20th century’s closeted and fearful middle years, that there were
other gay people to band together with. And the way they discovered that
was through literature—the books that spoke, at first in allusions and
interstitial silences, then more and more directly, of what same-sex
attraction was and could be like.
Given the attention enjoyed by black and women writers and how
commonplace gay storylines now are in fiction, film and television, it
is remarkable that Christopher Bram’s “Eminent Outlaws” is the first
attempt at a more-or-less thorough outline of this literary tradition.
He traces the themes that gay men in particular explored: doomed love
and self-destructive secrecy in the 1940s and 1950s (Gore Vidal’s “The
City and the Pillar” and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room”);
electrifying liberation and testy relationships in the 1960s (Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band”); raucous
sexual freedom and the beginnings of happy normalcy in the 1970s (Larry
Kramer’s “Faggots” and Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City”); the
hammer-blow of AIDS in the 1980s (Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”);
and from the 1990s on, the gradual easing of gay experience into the
mainstream of American life.
The greats are all here—Ginsberg, Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, William S.
Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood,
Edward Albee, Edmund White and throughout the book Mr Vidal (pictured),
who at 86 remains the grand old man (or as Mr Bram has it, “a fairy
godfather”) of American gay letters.
Drawing on biographies and memoirs, Mr Bram, himself a gay novelist
of some note, stitches together a relaxed, gossipy narrative about the
friendships, rivalries, sexcapades and love affairs that gave gay
writers much of their raw material. As the story moves towards his own
time (he is 60), one senses his becoming a little more cautious with the
tittle-tattle. But he still offers plenty of sharp observations on the
complicated relationships of his subjects to the vagaries of gay
politics and to each other. He is a perceptive literary critic, too, and
not shy of praising writers he admires, even as he chides others for
their flaws.
Mr Bram attributes the neglect of this facet of literary history to a
persistent discomfort in the straight world with too much overt
gayness. But his corrective goes a little too far the other way.
Limiting the study to gay, male American writers is fine—books have to
draw their boundaries somewhere—but he then confines them to a gay, male
American cultural bubble. When influences are discussed, they are
usually other writers of the same group, as if the rest of literature
were irrelevant. And he almost never has a good word for his subjects’
forays into non-gay themes.
This seems to be driven by his conviction, stated in the epilogue,
that “a gay man who writes nothing but straight stories works with his
heart only half connected.” There is surely truth in this; as Mr Bram
points out, writers such as Isherwood and Williams who had to disguise
their sexuality in their writing suffered great strain, and their work,
denied the nourishing force of personal experience, suffered too. But he
suggests that even the successes (such as Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf”, a masterful hatchet-job on marriage) are not worth the
trouble, which is questionable, certainly for the new, less traumatised
generation of writers.
Perhaps because of this stance, Mr Bram does not touch on what is surely
a central question for such a book: as being gay becomes ever more
normal, and a territory that straight writers explore unhindered (one of
the best-known gay films of recent years was “Brokeback Mountain”, from
the story by the three-times married Annie Proulx), what will gay
writers write about in future?
Fonte: The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21545984)