Michael Grumley (1942-1988) is today one of the less-famous members of the Violet Quill, the group (whose existence was always more meme-y or mythic than real) of New York area writers that included his partner Robert Ferro, Andrew Holleran and Edmund White—and that promoters of gay literature in the 80s and 90s, like David Bergman and George Stambolian, could frame as one of the distinct (and for Bergman, the best) elements of emerging literary tradition of distinctly gay writing.
Some gay writers defined themselves against qualities attributed to the VQ, reinforcing the notion that it was/is, in fact, a thing. David Leavitt, born two decades later than most of the VQ guys (who were, generally speaking, Grumley’s contemporaries) and coming on the scene in the 80s as something of a child prodigy (albeit a prematurely bald one), slammed them for their irresponsible representations of sex and failure to provide positive images of gay couples. Leavitt’s own work in that era was characterized infamously and not inaccurately as “dickless lit” by Dennis Cooper, who, like fellow West Coaster Robert Gluck also shit on the VQ for creating, he said, boring, stale, conventional novels about coming out to your family. Well, then as always, gay can’t win for losing—and almost don’t need straights to hold us down.
Holleran and White, in part because they didn’t die three or four decades ago, have seen their reputations surpass those controversies, and even their worst novels (Nights in Aruba, Nocturnes for the King of Naples) are getting republished with idiotic and sycophantic prefaces by Girth Greensmell. But there are some interesting weirdos left in the bin—not least Grumley, who today is known perhaps best, if at all, as one of the names in the Ferro Grumley awards, which lately honor LGBT writers for their contributions to the pile of tedious woke queer garbage.
Grumley and Ferro were neither woke (they did have sex with a lot of black guys, but whether this counts as progressive or problematic is something I never seem to remember) nor writers of realist, domestic fictions—their work, although informed by their time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, is bonkers.
Today I’m just writing about Grumley, but we’ll have to start with their first, coauthored book, Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search (1970). It’s a “real and psychic journey,” y’all. The fact that it’s about the young couple’s totally serious search for Atlantis—with none of James Merrill’s initial ‘Oh haha not me talking to ghosts on the Ouija board’ evasions—isn’t even the weird part. They start the search in the first place, supposedly, because of an Italian psychic and drugs (the magic of Italy, as in actual magic, would be a theme of Ferro’s later work as well). Just a taste from the preface and the first chapter…
So it’s already insane and the girls aren’t even on the boat yet. And of course if you’re into one such sort of nonsense, you’re likely into another, so four years later, here’s Grumley’s first solo effort:
Frankly Grumley looks a little like a missing link himself here, albeit a cerebral one. And he’s not just running after bigfeet—he’s giving Man’s Search for Meaning, getting Kabbalistic, and gardening with the gods:
The writing is uneven and sometimes cliched or pedantic—but the opening bit on King Kong, frankly, was hot (what to do with the uh racial implications of him writing so throbbingly about blondes wanting/not-wanting to be savaged by brutish apemen I leave to the scholars of literature! Although Bergman, I should note, has a smart chapter on race in the VQ’s work, meaning as we often do by race, black guys—as I’ve said before though there’s also a lot to say about Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and WASPs in this stuff).
Grumley’s illustrations don’t do it so much for me:
In 1977, Grumley published a two-book turn away from fringe science into a kind of longform ethnograph-ish journalism, first looking at (straight and gay) leather sex people, in a book that is now super expensive, but which you can see at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/hardcorpsstudies0000mich
The text is pretty absurd, reaching for a sort of learned tone and curious erudition:
The photos (not Grumley’s) are oddly wholesome (by my standards):
Mapplethorpe it ain’t.
But the art and the prose are both better in his 1977 book on straight and gay oddballs, After Midnight, a series of vignettes about people who work the nightshift. First, some drawings:
And then a nice gay couple—a butch factory worker and a sensitive artist:
It’s not scintillating prose—or content—but it’s clear and sweet and unhysterical, which for gay writing in the late 70s is saying a lot.
You know how this ends. Grumley died of AIDS, as did Ferro, who oversaw the posthumous publication of Grumley’s novella Life Drawing, which, sort of, among other things, does a Mark Twain homoerotic fantasia with a teenage white boy taking off downriver for New Orleans (among other places) with his black boyfriend James—and having a lot of sex with other guys too, as in this lovely adulterous idyll:
Possibly this comes off boring rather than sexy in a gentle dreamlike way, but I like that someone can do erotic writing in this mode, rather than in the show-off-y theatrics of lyrical fragmentation that Gluck uses in Jack the Modernist or the slasher transgression of Cooper (or lately, to shit on Greenwell again, the supposedly poetic voice of the narrator stuck in his own head and intellectualizing about the blowjob he’s giving)—although the novella itself, like the short story excerpted from the work-in-progress that appeared in Stambolian’s Men on Men, never, for me anyway, takes off.
I haven’t read Grumley’s column in New York Native in the 80s—something, hopefully, to look forward to—but beyond the sense of a life cut short, like hundreds of thousands of others of gay men’s lives in those years, of potential unfulfilled, I want to point out how Grumley, whatever the Iowa-ness of his style, was at once charmingly nuts in his personal interests (lost civilizations, cryptids, D.H. Lawrence) and capable of writing in a disarmingly easy way about relationships and sex. In both modes the prose is, whatever its early faults, direct and engaging (especially when it’s not going for Intellectual Range) in a way that, sure, by Cooper and Gluck’s lights isn’t avant-garde, experimental, etc., but that gay writers—so many of whom, including I myself, decided, maybe without reflecting on it, in favor of a glinting pretentiousness—have I think still something to learn from.
Ok well to end, here’s first Ed White in a tribute to Grumley (going on and on for some horny reason about what a manly man he was), and then George Stambolian having a relatively more normal one on Grumley and Ferro (the subject of a forthcoming post here, once I’ve read the rest of his stuff!):
Leave it to Ed White to get a hard-on in his eulogy! Here’s Stambolian, with some unsurprising details about Grumley’s spirituality (which ran between the Buddha and the BBC) and some really wrenching memories about his and Ferro’s care for each other to the end: