The essence of gay
BEST SELLERS
Two new books sum up Manhattan-style, nouveau gai
attitudes o f the post-Stonewall sensibility. Has the
gay movement become the gay market?
Women’s list from A Woman’s Place
Bookstore
B
Buddies, by Ethan Mordden (St. Martin’s
Press, $16.95)
Gay Life: Leisure, Love and Living for
the Contemporary Gay Male, Edited by
Eric E. Rofes (Doubleday, $12.59)
n his first book of short stories, I ’ve a
Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Any
more, Ethan Mordden posed as the
Cocktail Dandy, an eavesdropper and
voyeur in the drawing rooms of gay Man
hattan. In his second book of short stories,
Buddies, Mordden moves to the family
1. River House Stories by Andrea
Carlisle. (Calyx; $7.95)
2. The Search for Intelligent Life in the
Universe by Jane Wagner. (Harper &
Row; $15.95)
3. Star Woman by Lynn Andrews.
(Warner; $16.95)
4. The Singing Creek Where the Willows
Grow by Opal Whitely. (Ticknor &
Fields; $16.95)
5. Blood, Bread & Poetry by Adrienne
Rich. (Norton; $7.95)
Men’s list from Twenty-third
Avenue Books
1. Measure of Madness by Gordon
Merrick. (Warner; $4.95)
2. Men on Men ed. by George
Stambolian. (New American Library;
$9.95)
3. Glory Hole Murders by Tony Fennelly.
(Carroll & Graf; $2.95)
4. Little Dog Laughed by Joseph Hansen.
(Henry Holt; $15.95)
5. Spirit and the Flesh by Walter L.
Williams. (Harper & Row; $21.95)
I
room to become the cranky gay-triarch of
gay brotherhood and wisdom.
Mordden has two themes, the bond
between men, be they gay or straight, and
the attitudes and philosophy that make up
“ gay.”
In the introduction to Buddies, Mord
den writes, “ American gay life, in what I
believe is its most compelling iconoclasm,
has bettered the straight world in combin
ing romance and friendship. One’s lover is
one’s buddy,’’ And one’s buddy, Mordden
makes clear, is one’s brother. Mordden
explores, without drawing conclusions,
his idea that gay friendships are the erotici-
zation of family relations. A lover is a
lover/brother, or a lover/father. Gay men,
by not renouncing their attraction to other
men, can play out the emotional structures
we are bom into, and have a lover who is a
brother, a lover who is a father or son.
What links these men together, or
separates them out, is “ gay.’’ Mordden
uses “ gay” as a term not to indicate mere
sexual orientation, but as the assemblage
of tastes, attitudes, abilities and histories
of the Post-Stonewall sensibility. Queer is
something you’re bom to, “ gay” is some
thing you aspire to, that you acquire after
much learning, and in most cases, after an
apprenticeship served in the drawing
rooms and theatre foyers of Manhattan.
And that is where “ buddies” come in.
Buddies are the keepers of taste and urban
ity and the carriers of the torch of gay
history; the guardians and purveyors of
“ Gay.”
Gay, for Mordden, is the sensibility of
the fellowship. It’s our coteries — our
brotherhood — (not our sexuality) that
make us gay.
It’s an interesting point, and I think he’s
right. Mordden is a writer of facility and
erudition, and much of Buddies is compul
sive reading. Even Mordden’s efforts to
delineate “ gay” as one thing and not
another, or containing one person and not
another, are fine when viewed as camp.
But as serious contentions, they cloy the
intelligence.
Mordden’s narrator is never as frisky or
as fully characterized as when he’s casting
someone out of the Garden of Gay. Yet the
qualities that inform Mordden's
“ gay” are old-fashioned and stereotyped.
containing knowledge of musical comedy,
the opera, Fire Island — in other words,
the High Road to Gay. At one point the
narrator, a sullen, unlikeable character, in
cants a Great Tradition of gay books (Wil
liam Burroughs, Edmund White, John Re-
chy, etc.), with all the fervor of an F.R.
Leavis, and to much the same purpose.
While it seems clear that Mordden
would not concoct such a list without as
serting his more or less immediate inclu
sion on it, what is striking about all of
Mordden’s admonitions are their preoccu
pation with the past. Mordden’s gays,
when they’re good, are straining to belong
to something prior, like high culture, or
last season at the Pines, or a cozy snuggle
with a pre-adolescent brother.
“ Gay” in Mordden’s world is primarily
obsession with nostalgia.
In I ’ve a Feeling, Mordden managed to
reveal what was implicit in the landscape
of gay urbania, in the pageant of gay woo
ing and wininng. In Buddies, however,
stories tend toward position pieces on who
or what is or is not incorrectly gay. Gone
the Sexual Outlaw, come the Cultural
Arbiter.
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* * *
Gay culture is the subject of another
recently released book. Gay Life: Leisure,
Love, and Living for the Contemporary
Gay Male. Editor Eric Rolfes marshals his
42 contributors and presents a volume of
information on how, in the categories of
Health and Image, Home, Love, Culture
and Leisure, and Identity, to be gay. This
primer on all things gay initially seems
interesting — one can compare opinions,
at least, on such subjects as “ Seven
Heroes for Modem Gay Men,” or “ How
to be an Opera Queen.” However, the fun
of this book — and surely much of it can’t
be taken seriously — to those of us old
enough to appreciate it, is circumvented
by the idiocy of a majority of the contribu
tions. Did you know, for instance, that,
“ Most people feel that this area [between
the legs] doesn’t need much attention; oh,
but it does! “ Try to brush your pubic hair
at least once a day” ? Or did you care to
know that one contributor “ to this day
[has] never fully trusted a gay man who
doesn’t love Judy Garland” ?
There is, I suppose, a value in 42 voices
proclaiming that “ Gay is Good.” How
ever, this how-to manual leaves me think
ing, on its evidence, that “ Gay is Facile.”
The slack muscles which drive this volume
make me fearful that we are no longer a
movement, but just another market.
•
Miller Brewing Co., Milw., Wl
Just Out 21 February. 1987