It is not a stretch—in fact, it may
be a cliché—to call Edmund White one of the founding fathers of gay
literature. When I came out of the
closet, one of the first books I was advised to read was A Boy’s Own Story. I’m
willing to bet that half the gay men my age can say the same thing. Reading that novel was, for young men
just emerging from the closet, what Lord of the Flies was for 13-year-old boys, or Little House
on the Prairie for their sisters. In a very crucial way, I found myself
in that book.
Decades later, White remains on the
cutting edge of gay fiction, as he proves with his latest novel, Jack Holmes
and His Friend. The coy title is part of the book’s brilliance—it’s not just
a double entendre; it’s a triple, perhaps even a quadruple entendre. Yes, the eponymous protagonist does
have a friend—but, as Harvey Fierstein once so cleverly wrote, is he “a
friend-friend or a euphemism-friend?”
(Answer: Jack wants him to
be a euphemism, but he’s just a friend.)
And, of course, friend is
in itself also an erstwhile euphemism for penis—as in, “my little friend.” Or, in Jack’s case, not so little.
The novel begins in what, for
wedding-planning homosexuals, constitutes the distant past—the 1960s,
pre-Stonewall—with Jack struggling against his sexual urges in a world that
seems to offer no alternative.
Even his psychotherapists tell him that his sexual behavior is only an
“acting out” of neurosis. These
days, a therapist who said that would be laughed out of practice—or go to work
for Marcus Bachmann.
In such an unwelcoming culture,
it’s no coincidence that Jack’s first object of affection would be an
unattainable straight man named Will.
(One of my favorite things about this book is the way it plays with names—Will
and Jack conjure up images of their respectively straight-acting and fey
counterparts on TV’s Will and Grace,
while Jack’s full name—and endowment—suggest the porn star John Holmes.) Theirs is an odd friendship, which in
due course becomes illustrative of both the similarities and the differences
between the gay and straight demi-mondes.
As Jack becomes more comfortable
with his sexuality, his confidence and social skills grow. Sexual liberation opens him up to
life. In contrast, Will—whose
sexuality is stifled by a cold wife and the expectations of
heteronormativity—finds himself living an increasingly constricted
existence. Until, that is, Jack
sets the wheels in motion for Will’s own sexual awakening—even if, given the
circumstances and Will’s character, it can be only a short-lived
transformation.
What strikes me most about this
book is its lack of a moralistic tone.
It isn’t just because White is writing about the pre-AIDS era; even in
the 70s we had our share of novels condemning the supposed superficiality of
casual sex. But White never judges
Jack for being … well, a slut.
Neither does he judge Will for returning to the fold of monogamy after
his dalliance with promiscuity. In
fact, one of the strengths of the novel is that Will—in all his naivete and
knee-jerk homophobia—is presented as a real person, whose worldview is the
product of his upbringing, and his time.
Will, in fact, is the only character granted a first-person narration,
which suggests something about White’s desire to understand the point of
view—literally—of a straight man.
There’s a fearlessness in this book
that I quite admire. White makes
no apologies for gayness, never succumbing to the politically correct notion
that we’re just like straight people except for what we do in bed. Some of us are. Some of us, like Jack Holmes, are
not. That, coincidentally, is one
of the key themes of my new novel, The Heart’s History: Which
is the greater goal for the gay community’s coming of age—to be accepted into
the fabric of the straight world, or to add a new color to it? Despite the advances of recent
years—indeed, perhaps because of them—the question is more crucial now than
ever.
Labels: Edmund White, gay culture, gay literature, Heart’s History, Jack Holmes, Marcus Bachmann
