Something You Do in the Dark

by Daniel Curzon

Four in Twilight

Cole Ruffner - young, handsome and condemned - a man torn between society's demand for conformity and his real feelings...

Angie Fionda - the girl Cole thought he should marry but could not...

Bud Smallwood - who tempted Cole with the friendship he needed but not the love

and Cole's dying father - who had accepted his son's behavior until the last shocking moment...

Genres: Fiction, Gay

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Born Daniel Russell Brown, Curzon is an American author and playwright.

Curzon has published stories in The Kenyon Review, Descant, Christopher Street, The Oregon Review, Pannus Index, and many other magazines. His stories have been anthologized in Mae West Is Dead (Faber and Faber), Man of My Dreams (Chronicle Books), Aphrodisiac (Coward-McCann), and several other collections.

His play "Godot Arrives" won the 1999 National New Play Contest Award from the Southwest Theatre Association.

Reviews

[Angel Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

In honor of the month, it is June, and Pride Month, I wanted to pull a couple of important classics down from the shelf. When we look at the history of modern gay literature, this is a milestone.

Originally published in 1971, this is an angry, embittered tale with good reason. At the time, many of you youngsters might not recall, but homosexuality (often masked under the legal terms 'lewd behavior' or 'indecent behavior') was still illegal, still prosecuted with a vengeance and still targeted by police departments everywhere in the US. Raids on bath houses, known gay bars and public parks to round up gays and lesbians and lock them up was the norm.

This is one of the first novels to address the issue in a searingly candid, no-holds-barred way. Joyce Carol Oates called it "Engrossing, powerful and disturbing."

And it is. But it is an important work. Difficult to read for the compassionate heart. Necessary to know the history. Vital in today's world to know the history or, as they say, we are doomed to repeat it.

While it is a protest novel, it is also the story of one gay man's fight to survive and stay whole. Survive in a physical sense the threats he encounters and survive in an emotional sense in a society that has branded him a criminal and a deviant.

This is serious stuff, kids. Do not expect fluff. But when I was young, it opened my eyes. It was important then, and I think it remains an important work today.

I'll let Cole, the MC, finish up here for me as he relates his sentencing in his ironic way:

"It was sort of like stealing a loaf of bread - I only got six months for that - but because I protested the basic injustice I was sentenced to two more years. And then something else happened while I was in. And that's how the cookie of life crumbles."

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back during the COVID lockdown I decided to read all the books in Tom Cardamore's 'The Lost Library', which meant, even without the lockdown, buying most of them (I still haven't read them all - some are very expensive to acquire) and this was one of the first. I had great expectations of this book but it failed to live up to them. It is not a novel I would recommend anyone to read except out of interest in campaigning and polemical literature on and about the position of homosexual men in the USA in the 1960's (I deliberately don't use the word 'Gay' because the concept was in its infancy and the novel might be said to be about 'homosexuals' needing to see themselves as gay).

The problem is good intentions don't make good literature. It is a novel with a plot that clunks along with ridiculous coincidences and fallacies. The hero is first railroaded into gaol without access to legal support and then almost immediately after getting out he is arrested but this time the process of is presented as well a oiled machine to squeeze as much cash as possible out defendants like him - white middle class men with something to lose. There isn't even a fig leaf of an attempt to explain the differences between his experiences during his first and second arrest.

What is most glaringly obvious is that though the novel is set in Detroit there is no recognition that the city was already beginning its terminal decline, you had had the terrible riots in 1967, white flight was endemic, the city's population had been declining since its peak in 1950. Of course no one could have predicted quite what a terminal decline it would be or foresee how this major city would turn into a wasteland where the street lights are no longer turned on. But when this novel was published, and even more when it was being written, this was a city in crisis, and not just for middle class white gay men. The corruption, persecution and lack of justice homosexuals experienced was just as, indeed more prevalent, for the cities vast black and minority population. The problem of homosexuals was not outside, it was inextricably linked, to the broader police brutality and judicial corruption.

But the novel's greatest problem is that like all 'message' literature it is worthy and dull. This is no lost classic - what it had to say was important - but it is told with all the nuances of campaigning polemics. The hysterical ending is so over the top it is impossible to take seriously. I am sure at the time it was wonderful to read (I am being vague on purpose in case anyone is going to read the novel) of someone striking back against oppressive injustice, but it is 'agitprop' not reality, worthy, not worthwhile, of the moment, not the ages. It is a curiosity, and deserves a place in gay publishing history, in the USA, but that is all.

I have given it three stars - which is more than it deserves as literature but probably reflects it place in the campaign for gay rights.,