Some samples of what’s ahead!
George Stambolian (1938-1992) was one of the major figures in the emergence of modern gay literature—that is, of books by and for gay men about a distinctly gay world, as opposed to books by homosexuals about their sad solitude or twilight demi-monde, or coded books in which all the parts of gay men are played by straight women, usually about as successfully as Cher doing all the parts of West Side Story.
Originally a Proust specialist—as with Leo Bersani, Proust seems to make you gay (or in Deleuze’s case, straight but suspiciously into anal)—Stambolian made a certain contribution to gay studies in his co-edited 1979 anthology, Homosexualities in French Literature, but his real impact came through his involvement with the Christopher Street scene. Around the time Homosexualities came out, he started conducting interviews for the magazine. These were increasingly focused on supposedly emblematic ‘types’ of gays—a hot guy, a rich guy, a black guy (they are, as we will see, all sort of bonkers!)—eventually collected in his 1984 volume Male Fantasies, Gay Realities.
The most important part of his legacy was his series of short story anthologies Men on Men, which started in 1986. Although the title sounds racy, and a lot of the stories are sexual/sexy, and although the volumes sold some tens of thousands of copies each, Stambolian meant them to provide a basis for the future canonization of the new outpouring of gay fiction, which had begun in the 70s and was continuing despite-because of AIDS.
He edited four volumes (one every two years), dying of AIDS himself just before the fourth was to be published (the series continued under David Bergman). Many of the stories in them, of course, are mediocre or even terrible (there’s an awful one by arch-critic David Peck), but Stambolian did critical work in showcasing the best gay writers coming out of diverse regional scenes and styles, from the light farce of Joe Keenan (who would go on to give Frasier its gay sensibility) to the edgelordism of Bruce Benderson and Dennis Cooper, from the relatively conventional realism of the Violet Quill guys (Edmund White, Felice Picano, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and Andrew Holleran all appear, some multiple times) to the ‘New Narrative’ disjunctions of Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Robert Gluck (whose story in volume 4, ‘Everyman’ is genuinely beautiful and moving—and reappears in the recently republished About Ed on NYRB—never let it be said I only hate on them!). They’re not particularly racially/ethnically diverse, although the later volumes throw in a few not-very-good tokens no one has ever heard of since.
Anyway, I’ll talk more in my next post about what I find exciting about the Men on Men project—here I’m going to highlight some of Stambolian’s interviews, starting with one from the March, 1980 issue of Christopher Street, in which he talks with New York gallerist Sam Hardison, whose Robert Samuel Gallery promoted people like Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, as well as Paul Cadmus, Duane Michals, and Tom of Finland (who is somehow in the news again because Jarrett Earnest can’t make up his mind how he feels about the boners the cartoon Nazi leathermen give him. Give it a rest, girl! These takes pirouetting around horny ambivalence were not new in 1979. I guess what is new is that Earnest makes Tom acceptable because he finds that a ‘diverse range of queer people’—that is, not just gay men—have been inspired by his fascist beefcake adolescent boring fantasies. I guess if transmen also want to get raped by the SS on the back of a Harley, then that’s progressive and interesting—the weird stuff gay men like can’t get a pass unless validated by some external source… back in the last paragraphs of Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism,’ it was the consciousness of the closeted lesbian feminist who must decide if we’re acceptable or not; for today’s ‘Fascinating Finland’ [the title under which the NYRB—see, I do hate them after all—essay first appeared to me] it’s the polymorphous queer blob. Either way, no thanks)
But ok, we’re back, as with my last post, to the ‘politics of the male image’:
The images that accompany the article, are mostly dumb (except for the New Yorker style cartoon at the top… Christopher Street aspired to be the ‘gay New Yorker’ and certainly succeeded in imitating its cartoons, even to the point that, like the model, they are always funnier without the captions)—either basic, direct representations of male nudes (sure) or more ‘artsy’ ones that subject the body to weird perspectives or physical distress. So, this by Robert Crowl, or the other by Arthur Tress:
This is sort of literally not-safe-for-work—the erotics of industrial accidents. I don’t find the photos or Hardison’s responses very interesting, but I am taken with Stambolian’s concern to suss out what he takes/wishes to be the coming-together of an incipient gay male visual tradition, and to insist on the need for more ‘romantic’ imagery of male couples, affection, etc, besides the growing catalogue of hot guys in comfort or danger:
In my next post, on Men on Men, you’ll see how these desires shape Stambolian’s attempt to characterize and curate gay literature. But now, more interviews!
There’s a great BronzeAgePervert-esque one with a “Fetishist,” accompanied by photos by Stanley Stellar (who did a lot of work for the magazine back in the day and has been having a moment again lately), including the hot armpit one up top:
why is the S crooked? because he’s just that sick!
Is this a fetish?
Now with steamy auto-theory like this, who needs Jarrett Earnest's whinging (I suppose someday someone will have to write a takedown titled “The Unimportance of Being Jarrett Earnest”), who needs permission from another (“poor is the man who depends, etc,” as Madonna once said)? For that matter, who needs Alamariu to give a political veneer to the civilized longing for barbarian cock? Let the Scythian piss flow!
Stambolian had another interview around the same time (this is 1980-1981, just before things get bleak) with a “Masochist,” although this person is more pitiful (in a BDSM relationship with a guy who has a, in today’s grim language, ‘primary partner’ whom he’s obviously way more into) and the accompanying art is just silly:
It seems like in the 70s and early 80s hot Puerto Rican boys exerted a powerful hold over white New York gays—what happened to them? Was Keith Haring the last goofy-looking white to be addicted to Nuyorican cock? I suppose their neighborhoods got gentrified out of Manhattan, and maybe Puerto Rican families—like Italian-American ones (whose sons were also considered hot in that era)—no longer raise excitingly different, working-class greaseball guys who appear as compellingly rough-but-not-too-rough to whites. But who are the Puerto Ricans of today’s NYC meat market? Gay fiction, in Faggots and Dancer from the Dance, for example, used to put on display the contingent class-and-ethnic fantasies of gay men in a comically exaggerated but not really ashamed way—I don’t know where in literature (rather than porn) one would find this now!
Finally, an interview from the 1984 collection, Male Fantasies, Gay Realities, with a “Romantic,” who is supposedly a “close friend” of Stambolian—a man who is in love with love, and is at work on a novel about gay life on Fire Island inspired by Dancer from the Dance. I asked Andrew Holleran, who asked Felice Picano (they were both friends with Stambolian), who this “close friend” could be… and it’s supposedly Stambolian himself!
After some set-up, Stambolian has his “friend” read a passage of the novel the “friend” is working on, which he says he’s going to send soon to Holleran (who apparently never received such novel)—it all sounds pretty cringe, but, what’s more natural for an academic, or a journalist, or an anthologist and critic, than to nurse a tender wish to write a novel? And what more common gambit for starting a novel than “Not Me Writing a Novel”?