The Columbia History of the American Novel

Here Rich suggests that the condition of 'invisibility' must be understood as at once a collective and a personal one. As such it has devolved in 'our' American culture onto the many individuals and groups whose presence is perceived and represented primarily as an absence — an absence of those particular qualities that are asserted as necessary, normal, or natural for all human beings. Yet, as the challenges posed by the Civil Rights, Women's, and Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movements, among others, have taught us, such normative descriptions are in fact contingent and conventional, fabricated by some human beings in order to legitimate the valuing of particular forms of experience and expression over others. It is in the slippage -545- between the desire to fix certain qualities as eternal, unalterable, or pregiven (by God, by Law, by Custom) and the complex movements that mark out our everyday lives that many of us seem to 'disappear.'

Living through the profound pain of such an absent presence as a sexually confused adolescent, my disappearance seemed almost complete to me. Not only in the suburbanizing small-town culture in which I was reared but also in my regular circuits of the public library's shelves, where I found few texts that would act as my mirror. The two to which I was repeatedly drawn, Dr. Rubin's (homophobic) pop-psychology best-seller Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask) and Kinsey's soberly scientific Sexual Behavior in the Human Male did provide some comfort inasmuch as they informed me that there existed other males like me — though a statistical minority to be sure — who had had fantasies about, or perhaps had even engaged in, sexual acts with other men. Yet, while these texts provoked something like a flash of selfrecognition, they were hardly untarnished mirrors since they failed to provide me with any of the stories for which I longed: stories that would have helped me give shape to the confusing jumble of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and sensations that characterized my life. So, instead, I read novels — or more accurately, devoured them — in the vain hope of fitting my feelings into their plots. From the time I was nine until I was in my mid-twenties, there was rarely a moment when I was not in the middle of some novel or another. And as soon as one was completed there was always another waiting to be begun. Today when I reflect on this period in my life, I am astounded by the range and compulsiveness of my reading. I indiscriminately wended my way through most of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert, Stendhal, Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Isaac Asimov, among many, many others, and except for a few books by Ursula LeGuin and Rex Stout, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a passionate episode with Willa Cather, all of the hundreds of thousands of pages I turned seemed inevitably to return me to the same basic plot: boy meets girl, boy wants girl (albeit with frustrating complications), boy gets — or alternatively, but rarely, does not get — girl. Now in saying this I am not trying to claim that there is only one -546- story that Anglo-American and European literatures tell over and over. Rather I'd simply like to recognize that, whether or not that basic plot initiates the unfolding/enfolding action of the text, the dynamics of gender difference very frequently provide the 'knot' that the novel's denouement unravels, thereby explicitly or implicitly organizing the novelistic narrative as a temporal resolution of a structural opposition between 'male' and 'female.' A limited and limiting structure in any event and especially so for those of us whose knot is not tied in this way.

It wasn't until I got to college that I began to find both the books and the people who could begin to help me unravel the feelings that had knotted themselves in my intestines and not in my stories. (I mean this quite literally, since from the age of thirteen on I had been plagued by a serious inflammatory bowel disease that kept me moving between toilets and hospitals in an unconscious attempt to give material form to the emotional pain that flowed through me. Thus, what Adrienne Rich calls the 'psychic disequilibrium' of being unmirrored took on for me the somatic force of an earthquake zone where the movements of unseen tectonic plates repeatedly shook me to the edge between life and death. Now, admittedly, I'm what some might call a drama queen, so I tend to take things to their extremes and perhaps this case is no different from many others in my life, but I'm including this anecdote here in order to help you understand why the effects engendered by certain books affect me as they do.) The first 'gay' book I remember reading was James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), which I discovered when I was about eighteen. In reflecting back on this seminal reading experience, I am struck by what I remember distinctly about it: it wasn't the mirroring of the desire for another man that was so moving for me, nor the possibility of giving aesthetic form to my sexual desires, but rather it was the searing emotional pain that pervaded the book's imaginary world that deeply touched my sense of self. The claustrophobia induced by Giovanni's eponymous room metonymically evoked for me the cramped subcultural space in which circuits of male desire were routed around the male/female divide, circling back onto and into men who desire each other. In Baldwin's text, this space of male same-sex eroticism marks out the edge of imprisonment where pleasure and pain elide into an experience from which there is no escape. -547-

Baldwin's narrator crystallizes this dilemma when he describes his first visit to Giovanni's room: 'He locked the door behind us, and then for a moment, in the gloom, we simply stared at each otherwith dismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan.' The ambiguity of the narrator's sound — the moan of pleasure, the moan of pain — articulates the tension that the narrative resolves only in the book's final pages when Giovanni has exchanged his room for a prison cell and the narrator, anticipating Giovanni's execution, looks into the mirror in his own room in order to 'see' Giovanni's last moments. In this final instance of mirroring the two men become one (at least for the narrator) in the face of pain and death:

It's getting late.

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under the sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries towards revelation.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife. The journey to the grave is always, already, half over. Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.

Then the door is before him.

The door to Giovanni's prison cell, like the door to his room, proves to be an impossible threshold between life and death, between pleasure and pain. Here in the liminal zone between worlds, here where bodies melt into death and thereby find the 'key to…salvation,' the two men separate to meet as one. The contradiction of a 'troubling' sex that seeks its own seems in Baldwin's text necessarily 'always, already' caught between the knife and the grave, a mirror space from which the novel arises (the book opens with the narrator contemplating his reflection) and yet never quite escapes. Needless to say, by giving such exquisite shape to something I could recognize as akin to my own pain, this book both thrilled and depressed me. Yet -548- while Baldwin's book helped me to imagine the complex dynamics of male desire for men in a world that both condemns and mutilates it, the novel did not help me to 'construct' a new sense of gender that affirmed the possibility — if not the desirability — of the life and love I hoped to feel.

After Giovanni's Room, this bifurcated experience of delight and despair recurred frequently as I dived into the 'gay' novels that were available to me. I was fortunate in this regard since the late 1970s, unlike any other earlier historical period, witnessed the appearance in the United States of many popular and sometimes mass-market paperbacks that sought explicitly to depict the lives and loves of (predominantly white, largely middle-class) gay American men. Books that quickly became cult classics like Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Larry Kramer's Faggots (1978) devoted themselves to chronicling the developments in the urban gay male subcultures that thrived on 'the coasts' throughout the seventies. Assuming the sexual ethos of a post-Stonewall 'liberation,' such books self- consciously set out to mirror the subcultures from which they emerged. Thus, they situated themselves within the complex networks of human relationships organized by a developing sexual community in which human contacts were often mediated by physical experiences whose longevity or intensity could not be defined or depicted solely in terms of the traditional emplotments provided by novelistic conventions. Instead, these novels fragmented their narrative developments between characters who moved in parallel directions so that the texts themselves often became pastiches of anecdotes, vignettes of sexual conquest or defeat. To some extent, then, these novels took as their protagonists a community, or at least an urban network, whose collective sexual practices seemed to position