The Columbia History of the American Novel

them outside both 'straight' culture and the stories it told about men. In this way, they sought to articulate what could be seen as a transformation in male sexual ethics and activities by transforming the very structure of the stories they told about the sexual subculture with which they enthusiastically (if critically) identified.

While I gratefully consumed such books, thankful for the glimpse they gave me onto a world I was still too young and too timid to claim for my own, I was also disturbed by implications they had for how sexuality takes shape in contemporary American society. It -549- seemed to me then and it certainly seems to me now that these late 1970s depictions of gay male sexuality were implicated in the (re)production of a certain kind of male sexuality that was predicated upon the objectification of (male) bodies as the sources of both aesthetic and erotic pleasure. Now don't get me wrong: with the right body a little objectification can go a long way toward pleasing the senses, as well as the soul. Moreover, in the political and historical moment in which they appeared, such texts certainly interrupted the totalizing force of the dominant narratives that sought to emplot sexual behavior within the dynamics of (heterosexual) love and marriage. But what seemed/seems hard for me to comprehend (maybe because I grew up reading too many nineteenth-century novels and watching too many 1940s movies) was how the dynamics of this new expression of male desire created either texts or contexts within which one could explore the ways overdetermined objectifications of (male) bodies engendered different kinds of male subjects, whether 'gay' or 'straight.'

Even as beautiful and erotic a text as Renaud Camus's Tricks (1981) provides an excellent example of this dilemma. In the '25 encounters' that Camus narrates in the course of his text we are regaled with the compelling details of sexual adventure as they border on the banality of everyday life. In the italicized commentary that follows the account of each encounter, the narrator reframes the poignancy of sexual passion within the moment of retelling the adventure, so that these retrospective reflections come to foreground the erotics of narration as well as the narratives of the erotic. Indeed, it is precisely this 'erotic' dynamic between the telling and the tale that the text would seem to ask us to consider: within the course of the book, the book's own writing becomes part of the narrative and even part of the narrator's sexual experiences, so that the distinction between the stories of sexual activities and 'the sexual itself' loses its definition. And perhaps this is the book's 'trick.' In the twenty-five episodes that structure the text, the same elements of cruising, seduction, sucking, penetration, coming, exhaustion, and relief are reiterated, in almost exactly the same order, over and over again. What makes them appear as different moments seems to depend not upon the sexual acts or actors but upon the effects of narration itself: the details that give the stories their 'character,' the nuances that pro-550- duce the frisson of singularity. Yet belying this particularity is the iterability and substitutability of the 'tricks' themselves. While it is this lack of distinction that the book seems to celebrate as if in righteous — and joyful — defiance of the traditional novelistic emplotments that 'properly' situate sexuality within the narratives of romance and marriage, the recognition of the necessary intercourse between sexuality and narration fails to produce the sense that such an imaginary relation might enable us to reimagine 'the sexual' or 'the male' per se. Instead, Tricks offers a limited (if fairly exhilarating) repertoire of sexual acts as the telling shape that such stories take, thereby eliding the question of how such shapings create the understanding that who gay men 'are' derives from what they 'do' with and to each other — and just as important, what they say about 'it' afterwards.

While such an elision might seem to subsume the representations of a 'gay' male gender easily within the representations of gay male sexuality, the prominence with which the relations among sexual acts, sexual identities, and sexual narratives appeared in the gay male novels written during the early 1980s suggests that it took a fair amount of literary work to keep this 'imaginary' constellation together. In the first few years of the decade, a spate of gay men's 'coming-of-age' stories appeared, inaugurating the development of what we might call a 'gay' Bildungsroman. Ranging from Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story (1982), to Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir (1983), to John Fox's The Boys on the Rock (1984), to David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), to Larry Duplechan's Blackbird (1987), these novels constitute an emergent narrative genre whose definition is itself predicated on a narratively produced gender. That is, they are all novels that depict a central character's development through or against the structure of a story we colloquially call 'coming out.' Since the late 1960s, 'coming out' has served as a rubric for the processes of self- affirmation and self-definition through which men and women begin to denominate themselves as 'gay men' and 'lesbians' in their relations with themselves, their families, friends, loved ones, and communitiesprocesses that have been central to the creation of both gay and lesbian identities and gay and lesbian collectivities. But more than just processes of emergence and identification, 'coming out' is also a way -551- of telling a life story. Indeed, to some extent the 'coming out story' becomes the basis for the production of an identity to which the narrating individual lays claim precisely by pronouncing this story to be his or her own. Schematically, the coming out tale is often described as depicting a passage from the darkness, ignorance, and repression of the non-self-affirming 'closet' to the colorful, illuminated, self-affirming freedom of gay/lesbian 'identity.' A recent Keith Haring graphic designed to advertise National Coming Out Day makes the implications of this movement clear: in the center of the drawing is a large black rectangle (which symbolically doubles as both the closet and the grave) from which a typically dynamic Haring figure emerges into the boldly colored, vividly alive world of queer identity. Sort of like what happens to Dorothy when she lands in Oz and suddenly the movie goes into Technicolor. The significance of this imaginary movement from darkness into color, however, is not simply one of 'enlightenment' or 'liberation,' for the most profound force of the coming out story is not prospective but retrospective. That is, the effective dynamic of the narrative structure gives shape not just to the landscape into which the figure steps but more prominently to the black box from which the figure has emerged, now retroactively defined both as having a (safe) regular shape and as being (safely) confined to the past.

To a large extent, gay coming-of-age novels necessarily partake of such a retrospective perspective: these narratives attempt to give meaning and form to a variety of experiences both sexual and nonsexual that prior to the moments of gender redefinition often seem disparate, unconnected, and confusing, but which after the fact of coming out — either explicitly or implicitly — seem to have been leading inevitably up to such a conclusion all along. The preternaturally aware narrator of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story provides perhaps the most explicit example of this imbrication between identity and narrative when he attempts to describe his decision to enter psychoanalysis:

Just as years before, when I was seven, I had presented myself to a minister and had sought his understanding, in the same way now I was turning to a psychoanalyst for help. I wanted to overcome this thing I was becoming and was in danger soon of being, the homosexual, as though that designation were the mold in which the water was freezing, the first crystals forming a -552- fragile membrane. The confusion and fear and pain that beset me — initiated by my experience with the hustler, intensified by Mr. Pouchet's gentle silence and made eerie by my fascination with the 'Age of Bronze' — had translated me into a code no one could read, I least of all, a code perhaps designed to defeat even the best cryptographer….

I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual. For I was possessed with a yearning for the company of men, for their look, touch, and smell, and nothing transfixed me more than the sight of a man shaving and dressing, sumptuous rites. It was men, not women, who struck me as foreign and desirable and I disguised myself as a child or a man or whatever was necessary in order to enter their hushed, hieratic company, my disguise so perfect I never stopped to question my identity. Nor did I want to study the face beneath my mask, lest it turn out to have the pursed lips, the dead pallor and shaped eyebrows by which one can always recognize the Homosexual.

As this slippage between the 'now' of the first paragraph and the 'now' of the second paragraph suggests, the narrator here is awkwardly positioned in time. Simultaneously evoking the boy who seeks psychoanalytic 'understanding' and the adult man who comprehends that 'what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual,' the narrative 'I' holds both the 'boy's' prospective yearning and the 'man's' retrospective awareness in tension. This divided articulation constitutes the character's 'identity' neither as disguised man-child who fears being frozen into the death mask of 'the Homosexual,' nor as the mature consciousness of the man who has moved beyond pathology to selfaffirmation, but rather as the discrepancy between these two positions that is reconciled only through the implied transformation of the character's coming out. Although this transitional moment is not 'in' the novel itself (appearing as a narrative event only in the sequel