What to Curl Up With (Part Two)
More desert island books…!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
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