Safe As Houses!

Our book today is Alex Jeffers’ 1995 gay novel Safe as Houses, here given a very nice reprint by the good folks at Lethe Press, who are smart enough to know a novel worth preserving when they see one and brave enough to reprint a ten-year-old work of fiction in these perilous publishing times. Lethe Press is to be congratulated for the venture, and Safe as Houses can be savored all over again.

It’s a melancholy kind of savoring, as so many gay novels feel compelled to be. This is the love story of Allen and Jeremy, but Allen is dying of AIDS, and the illness – and the sad innovations and adaptations it eventually forces on everybody around Allen – gradually envelopes the book. Jeffers is excellent at portraying this slow process, but still, I can’t help but wish it weren’t a skill so many gay novelists felt compelled to master.

In flashbacks and pages from imaginary journals, Allen paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of his life, and he freely moves his imagination into the interior lives of other people, most especially Jeremy (tall, gentle Jeremy is by far the book’s most fully realized character, even thought it’s poor dying Allen who’s onstage front and center the whole time), whose boyhood experimentations with gay sex (and gay love) are drawn in vivid, honest colors:

Jerry had not questioned the necessity of being homosexual – queer, a fruit, a faggot, a fairy. He resigned himself to it the way he resigned himself to being an artist or freakishly tall and skinny. Relatively certain that Andy was queer too, he thought that they might be in love with each other in a way, a romantic friendship that did not encompass desire. Sex with George [an art class model] – if it had been sex, necking, frottage, mutual masturbation – hadn’t been especially illuminating. He felt no strong urge to repeat the experiment, not with George, not with Andy, but in the dry hot shade of the almond orchard he regarded his friend with a tender, veiled curiosity. “Andy,” he said, “sit still for a while. I want to draw a picture of you.”

The love story of Allen and Jeremy is at the heart of Safe as Houses (yet another deplorable book-title to add to the heap, an already-outdated British idiom that will require its own footnote in another fifty years), and although Jeffers isn’t shy about complicating that love story, he’s fairly scrupulous about throwing only respectable obstacles in its path. There’s family drama (Jeremy’s trouble marriage to the mother of his son Toby, for instance, and Allen’s equally troubled relationships with his own people), there’s job-and-friend drama, there’s the over-arching drama of serious illness, but the standard-issue pan-shallow cattiness that’s so common in contemporary gay fiction is entirely absent, replaced by a developing quite touching depiction of love as it grows older:

If I disengage myself, get up out of bed to pad, naked, across the bedroom and the living room to piss, he [Jeremy] will groan and shift in his sleep; when I return I’ll find him sprawled on his back snoring lightly. I will draw the sheet off him and kneel beside him, this man, this man of thirty-six with his long hair tangled around his head in the white puddle of the pillows, hair that is still mostly back but whose texture has changed over the last few years so that it reflects more light; the neat beard with its thing white stroke, like the stroke of a paintbrush, at the left corner of his mouth, the stubble rising on his cheeks and on the neck; his chest, so broad and deep, so hairy, that beside him I appear an adolescent; his taut, expansive belly. He has thickened since I’ve known him, solidified, become more substantial; underneath the beard his jaw is soft, the hard wee of bone masked by flesh as well as beard; he buys trousers a size larger now. He is a man, fully a man, a man who says hello whenever he notices me as though I were still a surprise to him, says Hello, Allen, with a kind of savor and delight and astonishment, or, sweetly, Hello, boy.

The echo here is a rather oft-used one from the 1991 Robin Williams movie “Hook,” and of course there should be a moratorium on the use of ‘pad’ as a verb, but the passage nonetheless shows Jeffers’ persistent device with Allen: he’s a watcher, a natural observer (this makes the gradual loss of his eyesight to AIDS all the more poignant). Time and again in this wonderful, sad novel, Jeffers will effortlessly take the reader past the flat surfaces of things, into the past contained in every kind of present. At one point late in the book Allen is talking on the phone with Jeremy’s son Toby as he idly fingers an old framed photograph of happier days – and although Allen himself can no longer see the picture clearly, we can:

While Toby worked on that conundrum, I picked up the silver frame. Although the photograph was no more than a blur I knew it by heart, Jeremy’s portrait of me on an earlier trip … My back was to the sea and my head turned to the side so that Jeremy had had to tell me he’d snapped the picture. I remembered Jeremy in his leather jacket, a burgundy so deep it was nearly black. His turned-up collar slapped his cheeks in the stiff Pacific wind, raising a flush. He lowered the camera and came over to me. This was California, not Rhode Island, I was young an in that period when infatuation veers giddily into something else: I put my arm around his waist and leaned into his side, smelling the leather smell of his jacket, the musty, physical, sudden smell of his sweat, the salt and kelp smell from the beach below the cliff. I suppose it’s odd that I should first realize how much I loved Jeremy while visiting his ex-wife.

I’m glad to see this paperback of Safe as Houses, glad Lethe Press had the smarts and the courage to reprint it. Needless to say, there’s a long, long list of such reprints of gay fiction that could be made, not only to save imagination-starved young gay men from prowling poorly-lit back shelves in used bookstores (unless of course they have reason to like those back aisles, although I can’t imagine what such a reason would be), but because so many of those older novels deserve to stay in the sun.

A Gay Fiction Trio!

A young acquaintance of mine who's not yet a writer recently made a comment about the book of a young acquaintance of mine who is finally a writer, saying "the book is a successful example of gay fiction" - which naturally got me thinking! What is gay fiction? What constitutes a successful example of the sub-genre? If it's just the presence of lots of men in close homoerotic relationships, we'd have to include everything from Gilgamesh to The Lord of the Rings - so it can't be that alone.

It seems to me all gay fiction has one thing in common: consciously or unconsciously, it mirrors some aspect of what it's like to be gay at the time it's written. The challenges, the fears, the pleasures, most often and most effectively the neuroses ... all these things are reflected, distorted, blithely discarded, exaggerated in an attempt to give gay readers someplace to go with the part of the reading desire that wants to identify with some image of themselves.

(That desire - to find a place in a book that comfortably resembles a place inside you - actually animates a great deal of fiction, of course; the genres that cater only to that can rightly be called escapist and gently barred from the highest ranks of literature, since those ranks are reserved for books that attempt - again, successfully or not - to sow discomfort in the reader. The best reading is, after all, telepathy - with all the disruption and self-annihilation that implies)

So it must be admitted - even by those of us who like the sub-genre - that most gay fiction is purely escapist these days: boy meets boy, boys get it on, boys rest for a few minutes, boys get it on again, straight boy tormentors get either tormented or boy-seduced, boys get it on some more, etc. The amazing thing about this deplorable state of affairs, the thing that no scoffers should allow themselves to forget, is what a triumph it is for gay fiction to have reached the point where it can be mindless fun. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to find a book like Dorm Porn or Cowboy Lovin' (or Beantown Boys) in a mall bookstore; fifty years ago it would have been a crime. Today, a gay boy lucky enough not to live in a bigoted (i.e. rural) area can walk into such a bookstore, hand over the money he earned turning tricks, and buy - over the counter, as it were - a wide selection of books that present him, at long last, with pure gay escapism. Many Bothans died to bring us to such a point - it's not a thing to be lightly dismissed, however silly the actual content is.

The journey to that point - where both escapist titillation and deeper, more thoughtful reflections are possible in the light of day - is a 20th century thing. The twenty-three centuries before that were far too thick with religious prohibitions and social stigmata for any Western writer to risk an open reflection of gay desires or problems. You have to go back to fourth century Athens to find men openly loving men and suffering no bigotry for it (and jumping forward to the 20th century, you could find that same lack of neuroses in the magnificent novels of Mary Renault, which got away with it by being set in that time The Last of the Wine may very well be the most idyllic portrayal of gay love ever written); after that, it's the rack and the stake and psychology and 're-education camps' ... until Stonewall, Tales of the City, and Brokeback Mountain. Until now.


Even as recently as 1970, most gay fiction found it unimaginable that gay relationships could be legal and open - but there was one famous trailblazer who at least imagined they could be happy. Gordon Merrick's exuberantly written, erotically charged novels would look like anomalies no matter when they happened, but coming as they did at the very beginning of the so-called sexual revolution and claiming all the freedoms of that revolution for homosexuality, they often seem nothing short of revelatory. In 1970 Merrick published The Lord Won't Mind, the first of his books to feature his perfect gay couple, Peter and Charlie. The boys first meet in this book, at the leafy, accepting home of an eccentric (Merrick code for 'loves the gays') aunt, and they've no sooner shaken hands than they're up in their bedrooms, stripping off each other's clothes and pounding away. Merrick's endless descriptions of sex are hugely entertaining for their unflagging enthusiasm, but the real appeal of the books - especially in 1970 - was in their free, healthy attitude toward it all, perfectly captured by Peter and Charle's first post-coital conversation:

"Haven't you ever done anything like this before?" he [Charlie] asked. Peter rolled his head on the pillow in negation, his eyes still closed. "My God, I can't believe it. With your looks, I should've thought everybody would be falling all over themselves after you."

Peter opened his eyes. Tears were in them, and a reluctant, ambiguous plea. "Have you done it before?" he asked.

"Well, sure. Hundreds of times."

"How did you know I was - Did you know it was going to happen with us?"

"I didn't know. I thought it might. I hoped it would."

"I guess I did too, from the minute I saw you, but I tried not to think about it. You're going to have to show me. I don't know how to act. You're going to have to teach me everything."

"That won't be any great hardship," Charlie said with a chuckle. "Just do anything you feel like."

To put it mildly, the world of Charlie and Peter was an utterly unattainable dream for most gay men in the 1970, and to be fair to Merrick, things don't stay quite so perfect for our heroes in later chapters and later books. The specter of bigotry isn't entirely absent from Merrick's books, but confronting that spirit directly, dissecting it, simply isn't on his agenda as a writer. He's more concerned with giving his readers great heaping helpings of wish-fulfillment, sunny days and infinite orgasms with hardly a social restriction in sight.


What a different world presents itself only eight years later, in Andrew Holleran's rightly venerated gay fiction classic Dancer From the Dance! This is surely the greatest novel about unfulfilled gay yearning ever written, with Malone, its beautiful, doomed central character standing in for every key frustration of the age. Holleran's book is a quintessential New York novel, and all through its pages, we get glimpses - glimpses of the kind New York endlessly provides, then and now: handsome businessmen on their way to work, whole lives repressed beneath their cookie-cutter features, swaying pretty boys staggering happily home at dawn from a night gyrating away at dance parties in the city's secret corners, perhaps that one young guy with the evocative face, sitting on a park bench as you crane your neck to see him through the window of your crowded passing bus. Holleran takes us inside the hollow, tortured life of one of those glimpsed young men, Malone, as he at first tries desperately to be 'normal' (i.e. straight) and then abandons himself to the downward whirl of the city's sexual underside. Needless to say, Malone himself is full of yearnings - always for something simpler than he is:

"Isn't it beautiful?" Malone would exclaim as we drove past the girl doing handstands on the lawn, a young woman walking a flock of children down a dappled sidewalk. "Why don't we take a house here next summer instead?" But he knew we wouldn't, and he knew he wouldn't, for even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasure-seekers, so bent on pleasure they were driving right through Happiness, it seemed, a quieter brand of existence that flourished under these green elms. We kept driving right through all that dappled domesticity, like prisoners, indeed, being moved from jail to jail imprisoned in our own sophistication. The truth was the town reminded Malone of his days at boarding school in Vermont; the sight of a football arcing across a green wall of woods made him sigh with a passionate regret. He always looked like a student who has just come in off the playing fields, eyes glowing from an afternoon of soccer. He always looked like that, even in the depths of a subway station, on the dingiest street in Manhattan.

There's plenty of light in Dancer from the Dance but no warmth; this is nostalgia without sentiment, the careful, loving remembrance of unpleasant things. In writing the great pre-AIDS gay novel, Holleran was forever memorializing a setting in which empty carnality was the only substitute available for all that dappled domesticity the narrator affects to scorn.

Shift forward nearly forty years, and what do you find in bookstores? A new series from Running Press called "M/M Romance" - historical romance novels set in a wide variety of time periods (but not, so far, fourth century Athens) featuring love between men ... almost Running Press' commentary on the lack of societal challenges facing such love in contemporary American settings (if this is indeed their rationale, they need to spend more time in Anytown, U.S.A., where there's still plenty of challenge in two men openly loving each other). It would have been perversely pointless to publish such books in 1970, or 1950 - why take a cultural impossibility and compound it? But now, when every high school has a GLBT "alliance" and half the states in the country favor legalizing gay marriage, there's a certain element of dramatic excitement derived from setting stories in ages where homosexuality was almost invariably punished with death.


These "M/M Romances" (an unfortunate series title, not only because it looks weird but also because no male/male passion in the history of the world has ever burned as hot as male/M&M's passion, and what's the point of reminding your readers of that fact, except to make them hungry?) are strongly written and fairly well researched. The one set during the English Civil War has some howlers, but "False Colors," set during the so-called "Georgian Age of Sail" in 1762, has been more soundly fact-checked. It's the story of prim, straitlaced John Cavendish, commander of the HMS Meteor, who begins to have passionate feelings for his Lieutenant "Alfie" Donwell and fights those feelings for convincingly-portrayed cultural reasons. The book's author, Alex Beecroft, lets his nautical metaphors rather sweep him away during some of the stormier interpersonal scenes, but on the whole the characters ring true, especially over-rationalizing Cavendish, who encounters Alfie after the latter has been imprisoned and almost lets his desires overcome his discretion:

Jealousy provided a thousand bitter words. You didn't give me a chance! You were gone before I had time to think. You knocked down the foundations of my world and then disappeared! What did you expect of me? And more base than that - a petty cry of pain of which he was ashamed, but could not silence: Do you know how much I've given up for you? Swallowing, he pushed them back down into the darkness, concerned instead for the man before him. Alfie's every gesture spoke of endurance, empty of joy. He stood patient in the limpid light, quiet, placid as a horse well broken to the bit. Words died on John's tongue, inadequate.

There was no prudence in the way he worked his fingers into Alfie's fists. When they opened, obediently, he lifted them, one after the other, to kiss the palms. Pure folly, a risk to name and fame and life itself, but oh, it felt so right. He hauled down the false colors under which he had been sailing all his life, and exchanged them for true.

As you can see, we've skipped right over Andrew Holleran and circled back to the over-the-top lush confessionals of Gordon Merrick. Only False Colors isn't painting an idyllic picture of what can't happen in the present day (where, in the modern British navy, Cavendish and Alfie could probably have a shipboard wedding) - it's taking us back two hundred years so its story of gay love can feel illicit and dangerous again. It's hard to know whether or not to call that progress, but one thing is noteworthy: when Running Press first distributed these books, they were coded for the normal, sprawling Romance section of retail bookstore chains. Weeks later - no doubt after vocal commentary from customers and bookstore staff - several of those stores moved the books into the expected ghetto for such fare, the dimly-lit recesses of the Gay & Lesbian Section ... but for a while there, the respectable soccer-moms of Columbus and Grosse Point were seeing sultry Commander Cavendish right alongside their ravished heiresses. And that is a kind of progress.

Such Times

Our book today is Such Times by Christopher Coe, and those nine words toll more sheer sadness than some whole books do. Because Such Times is one of the most winsome and powerful novels ever written about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and its author died of that epidemic while he was still only forty-one.

Such Times is one of the greatest AIDS novels ever written, and it is so very self consciously, since its author experienced the worst of that time and intentionally wove it into the story of a long-term love between two men.

Readers today will have little awareness of how bad it was, back when they were infants crawling on their parents' carpets. Right there in the heart of the modern age, this disease erupted - not in Somalia or South Queensland but in Manhattan, stalking and killing not the poor and wretched but the young and the pretty, every last one of whom was within cab-distance of Cedar Sinai medical center.

The problem, of course, was that this particular virus was new in the human population, and young viruses thrive on being new. They can cut a swath denied their older, more seasoned brethren, and they can do so for one simple reason - they've yet to learn the first rule of viruses: don't kill your host too quickly. If you do, you get the cellular satisfaction of a large body count, but you get called a scourge and sometimes you get the resources of whole governments turned to your destruction.

Unless you mostly target the right groups, which is the main reason why we can still, in 2008, talk about the scourge of AIDS. If the corn-fed populace of the American Midwest thought of AIDS as their epidemic, rather than a plague them homersexuals, well then money and research would have been forthcoming, especially in the reign of Ronald Reagan. Instead, scandalously, the American government in the '80s reacted in the same dilatory fashion toward a catastrophe engulfing gays as it did the American government two decades later toward a catastrophe engulfing the blacks of New Orleans.

Coe's a smart enough author to make generous use of his tragic backdrop but not to let it override his story. There's dark humor here, and a perfect ear for dialogue, and some beautifully wrought vignettes of life in a different era. But necessarily the main mood of the book is grief, and it's always perfectly invoked:

There may have been a day this year when I thought of him as dead right off, the first time he came to mind. Most days I think of him as though he is alive. It can happen anywhere. Walking on a street, reading a magazine, I will see a listing for a concert, a review of a movie, a new place to go for dinner, and will think: Jasper and I should hear that, see that, go there. My mind then works out of habit to remember what date we made, when Jasper said we would see each other next. When this happens, it only takes a second, maybe not even as long as that; it is quick, not a time you can measure by a watch, but most of my life is contained in that time.

AIDS in America has become a 'manageable' disease in the 21st century, which has the unlooked-for side effect of throwing the initial onslaught of the epidemic into a weird kind of alternate-history, prompting the few survivors to look around themselves bewildered and ask, did it all really happen? The roll-call of their lost friends will assure them it did, but the literature of the disease has no such apparent consolations. It exists always in a state of culpable improbability - full-blown plague years, unfolding in the heart of the most medically sophisticated society in the history of the world. The literature indicts, and it does so by its very absences - here are writers who will never produce derivative autumnal works, or confound expectations, or rise above them. They're silent now, and Christopher Coe with them, except for the books we already have. Such Times is one of the best of those books, and we here at Stevereads sadly but earnestly recommend it.

A Secret Edge

Our book today is Robin Reardon's “A Secret Edge,” a slim and surprisingly sensual gay coming-of-age novel centering around the personal awakening of high school track star Jason Peele.

When the book opens, Jason is the picture of an ordinary high school student - hanging out at the mall, doing his homework, going on awkward double dates. But he has growing doubts about how normal he is, and the addition of handsome young Raj to his track team fans those doubts into agonies. Raj is gay and far more assertive than Jason, and one of the book’s strong points is how quickly it cuts to the chase (as Raj tells Jason, “we have to [be fast]. We won’t get much time, and we won’t get any encouragement”). Not only are all the book’s various coaches, parents, and extended families soon dealing with the relationship that springs up between Jason and Raj, but our two protagonists waste no time in, er, fraternizing.

Reardon’s prose is clean and light and almost always convincing as Jason’s first person narration (almost: for instance, it’s extremely unlikely any 2007 teenager would refer to something as “the sixty-four thousand dollar question”). And sprinkled throughout the book, usually connected with the physical, sensual aspects of two teenagers falling in love, there are little bursts that very nearly qualify as prose poetry, like when Jason thinks, “I could listen to him talk all day. His voice sings, and he makes consonants sound like something he’s trying to taste with just the tip of his tongue.”

The overall shape of the book’s plot will be familiar to anybody who’s ever read in this particular sub-genre. Some family members are instantly supportive, others take a benign amount of adjusting. Minor misunderstandings (in this case, oddly and interestingly, involving a pocket knife and the teachings of Gandhi) threaten to part our young lovers. Each boy suffers a beating by homophobic thugs. The book’s final scene is both unabashedly melodramatic and undeniably satisfying. Sequels are easily imaginable and would be welcomed here at Stevereads.

The only disturbing thing about the novel is that it needs to be written at all. And yet it does: storylines very similar to this one unfold daily in small towns and big cities across the world, usually containing far less hope and far less honesty than is found in “A Secret Edge.” No matter where you’re reading this, somewhere nearby there’s a young man similar to Jason Peele who cannot make any of the decisions he eventually does - who would lose (or believes he would lose) his family, his friends, and maybe his life if he tried. Despite the proliferation of gay acceptance in American popular culture (an actor on a hit TV show uses a gay slur about a fellow cast member, and not only is that cast member’s career not ruined by it, but the actor is fired for saying it - it’s by such baby-steps that tolerance takes root), we still live in a time when a gay coming-of-age novel that didn't feature a beating would seem unrealistic.

“A Secret Edge” doesn’t join us on our soapbox, of course. It’s busy telling its sweet, intimate story of a good kid falling in love for the first time, and it does so effectively. Here’s hoping the real-life equivalents of that kid find it and draw some measure of courage from it.

Tale of Two Summers

It's like I was telling my esteemed colleague Ty the other day - teen novels are often sharper than adult novels, because teen novels are pitched to the most unforgiving audience in the known world: teenagers who actually read. They can sense stupid artifice and plot boondoggling a mile away, and they can't stand, utterly can't stand, being talked down to.

Writers who respect that can end up writing really, really good books - books that are so lancingly smart and sharp and wry that they bear only an insulting comparison to most contemporary fiction aimed at adults.

Adults (present company excepted, of course) have learned to settle for less, or rather for MORE - more redundant dialogue, more extraneous padding, more ridiculous plotting. Some of this is peer pressure - nobody wants to STAY the creepy-smart outcast after high school. And maybe part of it is traditional, since society tends to say 'adult' novels will be hefty three-deckers with loads of subplots.

Which isn't to say there isn't tremendous enjoyment to be taken from such immensities. My friend Beepy is currently crawling her way through Middlemarch (when she's not playing pornographic video games or drunkenly phoning people late at night, that is) and loving every sentence of it.

No, my main point here is that any smart, self-respecting teen reader would be bored shitless by A.S.Byatt.

Of course, such an audience comes with its own dangers. Namely, if you suck, they'll heap scorn on you and walk away. You're not really given the luxury of screwing up. They want the goods.

I read a teen novel last night (I think I'll read a few in a row, to cleanse my palate after Bully Boy) called A Tale of Two Summers by Brian Sloan. It's about two best friends, Hal (who's gay) and Chuck (who's straight), who spend their first summer apart when they're fifteen. Chuck goes to theater camp (the straight one's into musical theater, get it?), while Hal stays at home and goes to driving school. They decide to chronicle their 'tale of two summers' in a blog.

Yes, this is the world's first blog-novel.

Both of them have romantic adventures - Hal with a dreamy French pothead, Chuck with a girl from theater camp - and absolutely no detail is left out. The book virtually drips with spooge, and I'm not sure what the aforementioned sharp, smart teen would make of that. The author clearly means his sexual frankness as a good thing, a way of being upfront with his readers. But one can be forgiven for doubting whether ANY teenage boy, gay or straight, would put half of this stuff in a blog that could be read by anybody.

Actually, that's the main hurdle in teen fiction: believability. There's nothing more cringe-inducing than a 20-something writer ineptly mimicking the patois of teenagers (ulp). Better by far to avoid patois altogether, but many authors - Sloan included - just can't seem to resist giving it a try.

So Sloan's book is full of OMGs and LOLs and OC references, and most of them are cringe-inducing. His two teen bloggers sound like two fifty-year-old Broadway theater-queens. I'd bet Sloan thinks he can get away with that because one of his characters is gay and the other is, well, a theater queen. But it fails more often than it succeeds.

Their two summers feel inconsequential and contrived (never moreso than when, in need of some tension at the book's climax, the author hauls in TORNADOES. Geez). This is made worse by the steady allusions made to a New Year's party the year before where Hal came out to (and tried to make out with) Chuck - I wish the author had chosen to dump the blog-format and simply write that story.

I can't stand it when I think the author has chosen to tell the wrong story about his characters. Seems to be happening a lot in this blog....

There's some moving stuff, even so. An argument scene between our two main characters half-way through the book is very well done, and the writing is never anything less than peppy. But I couldn't recommend anybody buy this thing in hardcover, and it alone certainly didn't cleanse my palate.

Maybe tonight. I'll keep you posted.