City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [88]
Usually I felt some connection with another gay man. Not necessarily a vital link, but a real one, such as one might feel with another American in Berlin, say, neither more nor less. With Burroughs, however, there was no conspiratorial wink and his sexuality seemed like something that might take place only once every hundred years, like the midnight blooming of a century plant. What amazed me was that so many young straight guys revered Ginsberg and Burroughs despite their homosexuality. I guess for those young guys Ginsberg was primarily a hippie guru and Buddhist chanter and wild poet freak, and Burroughs was a reactivated drugged-out zombie, both cool in their ways. Legendary. I knew a young straight guy who put out for Ginsberg and bragged about it. When I asked him how he could do that, he said, “Man, he was Allen Ginsberg, man…”
William Burroughs eventually went off to live near Grauerholz in Lawrence, Kansas, where he dabbled in art by shooting at cans full of paint that spattered blank canvases. These were the “shotgun” paintings—just thirty-six canvases among the fifteen hundred he eventually did.
The Joy of Gay Sex had come out and was something of a success, selling all over the country as a mainstream book in ordinary bookstores with a minimum of fuss. Since Mitchell Beazley had contracted the book and Charles Silverstein and I were hired guns, our contract was a good deal less favorable than it would have been had we originated the project. No matter. People thought I was making money and I didn’t disabuse them. I discovered that making money is what publishing really cares about and that once again I was bankable.
I was able to sell to Michael Denneny, the first and foremost openly gay editor, a new novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples. Michael, who had a strong Rhode Island accent and who’d studied under Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago, had a deeply curious and skeptical mind, with equal emphasis on both adjectives. He wanted to know about everything (an invaluable characteristic for an editor), but was quick to contest anything that struck him as dubious or factitious. He refused to rush in an industry that demanded speed, and this leisureliness would eventually be his downfall. That, and that he embraced and launched gay fiction in a way no one else before him and few after him dared to do. When gay lit didn’t make big bucks, he was fired. But in the meantime Michael had a run of many years in the offices of St. Martin’s Press. In that time he was able at least partially to fulfill his dream of putting gay content into all the genres—gay romantic novels, gay cowboy novels, gay gangster books, etc. He would bring out just a few thousand copies of any title and let it sink or swim on its own. There was a moment, before the market became saturated, when an ordinary straight first literary novel could be expected to sell five thousand copies—and a gay literary title would sell seven thousand. For a long while gay readers had a greater hunger for books than did the ten-times-larger straight public for heterosexual literature.
In the seventies some fifty gay bookstores opened all across the country. This was the era before the big chains such as Barnes & Noble. Suddenly, in the bars in every small town lots of small, free gay publications were being handed out that would reprint syndicated book reviews. It was all pretty tacky, but it was undeniably grassroots. Some publications, such as Christopher Street and later the James White Review and the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, gave a dignified and intelligent forum to gay art and thought.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples was once again a book that I’d written for myself alone. Not that I didn’t have a reader in mind, but that reader was much like myself—as demanding, as romantic, as besotted with poetic language. Buried into the book were many bits of poetry written out as prose. Jimmy Merrill was the only reader who ever detected on