Queer Affirmations

...Its hero, too, is a good-looking nonentity of distinctly WASP complexion, in this case a young American businessman, so awfully decent, you know, but somewhat at loose ends after separating from his wife in Rome...

...His first novel, Totempole (Dutton, 411 pp., $5.95) is the most audacious affirmation of the homosexual experience by an American writer I have seen, and its success is the more remarkable since nearly all the materials of this novel are not only familiar but fashionable: the preoccupation with childhood and adolescence, the horrific account of middle-class Jewish family life in America, and the homosexual theme itself...

...In the original version of this novel, the hero murdered his old high school lover in a rage of disappointment, frustration, and despair...

...Still, the atmosphere of guilt and moral drift that pervades The City and the Pillar, even in its Revised form, marks it as the work of another period...

...In the portrayal of Sun Bo, the Korean doctor, he very nearly succumbs to the kind of fantasy characterization of the ideal sexual partner that is the bane of homosexual fiction: Outside the familiar web of bourgeois sexual relations, Friedman's hard-headed realism softens...

...To gauge the distance we have traveled from the bad old days, when such novels were thought to be "daring" and an author was more or less obliged to do his hero in, morally if not physically, as the price of luxuriating in his sexual waywardness, one need only compare Windham's book with Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar Revised (Dutton, 249 pp., $4.95...

...His bogeyman father, though well-off, is terribly tight with the cash, and Marcello is therefore chronically short of pocket money to smarten his wardrobe and entertain his girl friend, whom he would like eventually to marry...

...But times have changed...

...Nothing seems to interest the reading public quite so much these days as anal intercourse, and Vidal, always the obliging literary jobber, has touched up his outmoded tale with exactly the stroke needed to excite new interest...

...The latter, written in the late '40s when its author was 21 and now reissued in somewhat altered form, was typical of—it may even have launched, for all I know— all those homosexual novels, which, disguised as "problem" literature, provided the public with a glamorous, though circumspect, tour d'horizon of the queer halfworld while at the same time satisfying a conventional puritan code by concluding on a note of violence, despair, or plain nastiness...

...A vast philistine public, its sensibilities effectively raped by the shock troops of the Grove Press, is bound to take a certain satisfaction in a literature designed to reassure us that queers are, after all, firm supporters of home and hearth...

...Yet Totempole remains a powerful novel, and will be far more disturbing, I think, than the sexual tours of the lower depths to which we have lately been treated just because it reveals so vividly the existence of those depths in the heart of the middle class itself...

...Friedman has the old-fashioned novelist's eye — and ear — for character, speech, and setting...

...For what we have in this tenuous little fable is pederasty without tears—a homosexual romance, replete with clean linen and sunlit views of Rome, that raises no painful questions, acquits its principals of all but the tcnderest motives, absolves them of all guilt, and restores them, morally intact, to the banalities of bourgeois respectability...

...Nor is this painstaking attention to the vicissitudes of sexual growth won at the expense of the social milieux in which it takes place—mainly the smothering family life of the Wolfes in New York, the New England camps where Stephen spends his boyhood summers, and life in college and the Army—and which so much determine the course of its outcome...

...Disposed to this feminine role, yet suffering the anguish which is its inevitable accompaniment in a moral atmosphere that can account for it only as a form of disease, Stephen Wolfe is at first the victim—and only at the end of this book the beneficiary—of a sexual odyssey whose goal is the loving, coital embrace of the father...

...But the very familiarity of these materials turns out, in Friedman's case, to be the first measure of his audacity...

...Reading books of this sort, in which an unappeasable sexual parti pris dissolves every other human factor into the most myopic erotic fancy, can be a very depressing experience...

...Taking his protagonist, Stephen Wolfe, from infancy to his experience as a soldier in the Korean War, Friedman dwells tenaciously on the morphology of his sexual identity, skimping nothing painful—and nothing pleasurable either...

...Sanford Friedman is, I think, a writer of this kind...

...True, the attitude of Marcello, the boy, is not an entirely disinterested one...

...The Freudian "family romance" is thus given a highly unorthodox twist...

...Thus, a novel like Donald Windham's Two People (Coward-McCann, 252 pp., $4.95) may err on the side of discretion and good taste—a public grown used to gamier fare is not likely to settle for something quite so tame—but it nonetheless points a direction that others are sure to follow...

...He may not be much of a novelist — readers who come to Vidal's fiction expecting the wit and intelligence of his critical and polemical writings are in for a disappointment — but he is certainly a keen judge of fluctuations in public taste...

...Not that we are meant to regard Marcello as being in any way cynical...

...Whether one likes it or not, however, the time is certainly ripe...

...The hero of Vidal's novel is a good-looking nonentity who, haunted by an idyllic sexual experience of his adolescence, travels the more comfortable purlieus of the queer circuit—Hollywood, the New York literary world, etc.—only to end, brutalized and self-deceived by romantic fantasy, in violating his old high school buddy, now married and rather thick-headed and insensitive but still a handsome man...

...Whatever advance in social enlightenment their publication may represent, they only remind us that the cost of such enlightenment is often a corruption of public taste...

...He picks up a beautiful Roman schoolboy of 17 on the Spanish Steps, makes him his lover, enjoys an affectionate and untroubled liaison, and then, his commitment to marriage mysteriously redeemed, returns to his wife and kids on Riverside Drive...

...Gloomy thoughts about the slippery relation of tolerance to esthetic vulgarity tax one's liberal sentiments — or would, anyway, if a real writer didn't appear now and again to take imaginative possession of the problem and redeem it in the name of authentic art...

...Stephen Wolfe finds this ideal sexual surrogate in the person of a Korean prisoner-of-war, a saintly physician, himself the loving father of a young son, whose erotic ministrations liberate Stephen from all the guilt, fear, and self-hatred with which a life-denying civilization has afflicted him...

...Receiving the good doctor's loving phallus in a lyric scene of anal intercourse, at one at last with the lost father of his youth, Stephen affirms his feminine nature, celebrating a consummation he had formerly despised...

...Traditionally American writers have excelled in dealing with guilty secrets...

...This last bit was surely a very shrewd change...

...Sanford Friedman is more persuasive in depicting guilt than affirmation, however...

...He explores a recognizable terrain, and leaves it deeply illumined...

...It is union with the father's powerful phallus, not the maternal womb, for which the son yearns...

...A period of queer affirmation is upon us...

...The imagination of affirmation has been sparse and, Whitman notwithstanding, usually a bore...

...And it is these gifts, brought to bear (albeit single-mindedly) on the sexual theme, which ultimately transform his Freudian "case" into a compelling fictional portrait...

...In placing his theme in the bosom, as it were, of American life, he has eschewed the temptation to turn it into a form of exotica where credible motives and common experience needn't act as a brake against wish-fulfilling fantasy...

...But the literary question, as distinct from the social question raised by this change in attitude, is not so easily disposed of...

...As one expatriate connoisseur of the Roman streets confides to our hero: " promiscuous encounters are to Italian boys what ice cream sodas at the corner drugstore are to their American counterparts"—a fair sample, I think, of Windham's characteristic profundity...

...It is only that, according to Windham, boys will be boys—which is to say, Roman schoolboys from the comfortable middle class will not be averse to putting out now and then for the clean-cut American visitor in return for a thousand-lire note and some discreet gifts...

...Nowhere in recent fiction have the erotic sensations of childhood, boyhood, and youth been more scrupulously portrayed: This is no New Yorker-style evocation of lost innocence, with its genteel and predictable epiphanies, but a hard-headed account of what the burden of sexual appetite actually feels like, from childhood onward, in an environment that remains blind to its implications...

...Dominating this portrait is Stephen Wolfe's relation to his father, a vulgarian and an hysteric who emerges as the first and most enduring sexual object in his son's life...

...One may be more than surfeited with the sado-masochist school of homosexual brutalism, itself a product of guilt shaking loose of its own disguises, and yet still regard the prospect of a homosexual literature written to the strains of hearts and flowers with something less than joy...

...In the revised version, the hero overpowers his lost love, and rapes him anally—the venerable "fate worse than death" brought up to date perhaps...

...This change undoubtedly reflects a more enlightened, or at least a more tolerant, view not only of homosexuality but of sexuality itself, and for that, I suppose, one can only be grateful...

...Nothing like it ever obtrudes upon the halcyon glow of Two People...

...His fictional method is more explicitly Freudian than we are accustomed to finding in serious novels nowadays: that is, Freudian in its structure as well as in its theme...