City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [85]
David had met her through a Venetian pal, Peter Feibleman, who would leave messages for her at the hotel in the name of “Rabbi Hellman.” Now David struck up the acquaintance again through one of her closest friends, Richard Poirier, who at about this same time was persuaded to invite me to lunch. He was then living just off lower Fifth Avenue, near Howard Moss. (Eventually he had to move because the house next door, at 18 West Eleventh Street, where James Merrill had been born, was accidentally blown up by a Weatherman woman while she was constructing a bomb.) At the start of the lunch, Poirier was cordial enough but soon began to tongue-lash me for the duration of the meal, furious because I’d said I thought there was such a thing as gay fiction, even gay poetry—worse, a gay sensibility!—and that at the very least works by gay people could be read in a special light, to illuminate them. Richard was enraged that I would even propose to isolate gay writers from the literary mainstream. He had a rough, gravelly voice, a strong, virile face, and one eye that wandered, and he relentlessly pursued his thought without ever smiling. I felt as unprovided with arguments as I had when I’d told Maitland Edey about feminism.
Frankly, I couldn’t see what the big deal was with the idea of “gay literature.” I said, “Well, there’s no reason the same text can’t be read from several different perspectives. It’s just that for us gay writers now, it’s fun to—”
“Gay writers!” Richard thundered. “I’ve never heard of anything so absurd. It’s obscene!”
I wanted to concede the whole dispute just to end it, but I knew that David would be ashamed of me if I gave in too quickly. I knew how much he admired Richard’s “fierceness,” his “bearish strength.” In their world Richard was “famous” for his intransigence. Of course I didn’t have their training, having studied Chinese at Michigan and not humanities and English at Harvard. Nor had I ever taught literature. I’d only written a few unpopular book reviews, out of step with the critical opinion of the times.
I couldn’t help noticing, at least to myself, that all these writers I was meeting who were gay—Ashbery, Howard Moss, David Kalstone, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Poirier—might be open about their sexuality in their private lives, but no one in the general public knew about it. Richard Howard and James Merrill were the only ones who were out in their poetry as well as in their lives.
“But things do change,” I said confusedly. “There are always new movements in fiction, aren’t there? The word novelty is contained in the word novel. Why not have a gay school of fiction? Is there any harm in that? At least it’s exciting and new.”
“Exciting! But it’s a betrayal of every humane idea of literature. Have you never heard of universalism?”
Now, all these years later, when “gay literature” has come and gone as a commercial fad and a serious movement, I can see his point. It’s true that as a movement it did isolate us—to our advantage initially, though ultimately to our disadvantage. At first it drew the attention of critics and editors to our writing, but in the end (after our books didn’t sell) it served to quarantine us into a small, confined space. Before the category of “gay writing” was invented, books with gay content (Vidal’s City and the Pillar, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Isherwood’s A Single Man) were widely reviewed and often became bestsellers. After a label was applied to them they were dismissed as being of special interest only to gay people. They could only preach to the converted. The truth, however, was that gay literature was every bit as interesting and varied as straight literature.
Something similar happened to gay people themselves.