The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered by Christopher Bram, Tom Cardamone, Michael Graves, Jameson Currier, Larry Duplechan, Sean Meriwether, Wayne Courtois, Andy Quan, Michael Bronski, Philip Gambone Page A
Authors: Christopher Bram, Tom Cardamone, Michael Graves, Jameson Currier, Larry Duplechan, Sean Meriwether, Wayne Courtois, Andy Quan, Michael Bronski, Philip Gambone
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beyond the thicket of rugosa and a scrawny strip of beach. Writing was sacred, Robert reminded me. Writers were priests, and a calling was not to be ignored. He explained that he’d found my story good, and that this meant I should stop monkeying around in magazines — I was senior editor of Interview at the time — and start taking myself more seriously as a writer.
My little story was printed in Advocate Men and eventually made its way into The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories . And I wrote other stories. But it would be years before I completed my first novel, Dreadnought , and even then it was Robert’s spirit that helped me get through the ordeal of writing it — much as Chase in The Blue Star takes his time becoming the vessel he was meant to be, and does so after a tap on the shoulder by fate, in the form of Niccolo, whose chief talent is taking one’s self seriously.
Yet not too seriously. The Blue Star also expresses what might be called a respect for fun as a supernal quality — fun when it’s combined with pleasure and joy instead of substituting for them, as often happens in American life. This side of Robert was often on display during weekends at the beach house, when gossip had to be shared and games played. It was customary, for example, for Robert and Michael to welcome me and my boyfriend, Barry, for a weekend with a little note they’d secreted away beforehand in a certain rabbit-shaped box in the room of the house that I preferred, the Suite Orientale, so-called because it boasted a pair of extravagantly exotic, red-black-and-gold lamps in the form of Chinese courtiers. Upon departing at the end of a weekend, Barry and I would leave a note for our hosts. One weekend, I had planned ahead. The note we left was the first clue in an elaborate treasure hunt that led to further clues — ten of them, I think, in the form of parts of a map, which I had hidden throughout the house all weekend, right under Robert’s nose. The last of the parts led directly to the treasure: a miniature casket brimming with fake gemstones I had collected from shops in New York’s button-and-bauble district, off Seventh Avenue. I had placed the casket in the powder room — the one with the Blue Star murals.
The reason I speak so much of the beach house is that both it and Robert’s writing reflect a deeper quality that was essential to him as a man and an artist. Robert always said that the key to life was rearranging the furniture. Consider that statement’s practically Victorian resonance — imperial in its ambition to remake Nature in accordance with our needs, our beliefs, even our esthetics. Indeed, in his personal life Robert did as much decorating, landscaping, and commissioning of suits as his characters do, and this all reflects an urgent faith Robert had in an individual’s pure agency.
In the years since Robert’s death, I’ve re-read his novels frequently, just to stay in tune with his wavelength. I also direct the annual literary prize that bears his and Michael’s name, the Ferro-Grumley, which I co-founded a year after they died. I guess you could say that the prize itself is a kind of conspiracy, devised in Robert’s name to draw attention to the kinds of truthful, luminous writing he aimed for in his books and sought in those of others, books that continue to sit upon our shelves, as seductively incandescent as a blue star.
John Gilgun: Music I Never Dreamed Of
Amethyst Press, 1989
Wayne Courtois
Thirteen Short Essays
1. What I Meant to Do, I Think
I meant to write a conventional critical essay on John Gilgun’s novel Music I Never Dreamed Of. But who was I kidding? I’m not a literary critic. Perhaps instead I can write a series of impressionistic pieces that will magically coalesce in the mind of the reader into some of kind of magnificent whole . . .
Or something like that.
2. Days of Our Inner Lives
In the title essay of her collection The Din in the Head, Cynthia
My little story was printed in Advocate Men and eventually made its way into The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories . And I wrote other stories. But it would be years before I completed my first novel, Dreadnought , and even then it was Robert’s spirit that helped me get through the ordeal of writing it — much as Chase in The Blue Star takes his time becoming the vessel he was meant to be, and does so after a tap on the shoulder by fate, in the form of Niccolo, whose chief talent is taking one’s self seriously.
Yet not too seriously. The Blue Star also expresses what might be called a respect for fun as a supernal quality — fun when it’s combined with pleasure and joy instead of substituting for them, as often happens in American life. This side of Robert was often on display during weekends at the beach house, when gossip had to be shared and games played. It was customary, for example, for Robert and Michael to welcome me and my boyfriend, Barry, for a weekend with a little note they’d secreted away beforehand in a certain rabbit-shaped box in the room of the house that I preferred, the Suite Orientale, so-called because it boasted a pair of extravagantly exotic, red-black-and-gold lamps in the form of Chinese courtiers. Upon departing at the end of a weekend, Barry and I would leave a note for our hosts. One weekend, I had planned ahead. The note we left was the first clue in an elaborate treasure hunt that led to further clues — ten of them, I think, in the form of parts of a map, which I had hidden throughout the house all weekend, right under Robert’s nose. The last of the parts led directly to the treasure: a miniature casket brimming with fake gemstones I had collected from shops in New York’s button-and-bauble district, off Seventh Avenue. I had placed the casket in the powder room — the one with the Blue Star murals.
The reason I speak so much of the beach house is that both it and Robert’s writing reflect a deeper quality that was essential to him as a man and an artist. Robert always said that the key to life was rearranging the furniture. Consider that statement’s practically Victorian resonance — imperial in its ambition to remake Nature in accordance with our needs, our beliefs, even our esthetics. Indeed, in his personal life Robert did as much decorating, landscaping, and commissioning of suits as his characters do, and this all reflects an urgent faith Robert had in an individual’s pure agency.
In the years since Robert’s death, I’ve re-read his novels frequently, just to stay in tune with his wavelength. I also direct the annual literary prize that bears his and Michael’s name, the Ferro-Grumley, which I co-founded a year after they died. I guess you could say that the prize itself is a kind of conspiracy, devised in Robert’s name to draw attention to the kinds of truthful, luminous writing he aimed for in his books and sought in those of others, books that continue to sit upon our shelves, as seductively incandescent as a blue star.
John Gilgun: Music I Never Dreamed Of
Amethyst Press, 1989
Wayne Courtois
Thirteen Short Essays
1. What I Meant to Do, I Think
I meant to write a conventional critical essay on John Gilgun’s novel Music I Never Dreamed Of. But who was I kidding? I’m not a literary critic. Perhaps instead I can write a series of impressionistic pieces that will magically coalesce in the mind of the reader into some of kind of magnificent whole . . .
Or something like that.
2. Days of Our Inner Lives
In the title essay of her collection The Din in the Head, Cynthia
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