Miscellaneous Holleriana

gaylitter

A number of archival pearls that I thought could be strung into the narrative of my book are, as the manuscript draft approaches at least a rough preliminary completion, still rolling loose. Among my favorite un-place-ables are some lines from Andrew Holleran’s letters to Robert Ferro, George Stambolian, and Ethan Mordden. I’ve shared excerpts of his correspondence (held at Yale, and in Stambolian’s case, also at the New York Public Library) before, but there’s still so much! As far as I know the only portions of it to have been published are a few of the letters to and from Ferro in the Violet Quill Reader; I hope someday the best of Holleran’s thousands of hilarious and touching letters, like the best of the many unpublished essays for Christopher Street, New York Native, and the Gay & Lesbian Review get the anthologization they and we deserve. In the meantime, some hits:

1979—

Holleran consoles Robert Ferro, who was thinking of taking a job tending bar or catering to make ends meet, that he had had to do the same himself and could give some references. He teased, “when I saw your brochure next to Sally Struther’s on One Hundred Neediest Novelists, I knew I had to give in. Please tell me if you’re not getting enough rice.”

“As to Felice [Picano]’s talent—a new paragraph… (though I find him very amiable, and fun to be with). You know of course the Henry James story ‘The Tree of Knowledge’ (I think), in which the family conspires, the friends conspire, everyone conspires to pretend that the sculptor/husband/father/friend has talent, when he does not. Well.”

1981—

The breakdown of the Violet Quill could be summarized as “When Queens Collide.” He asks Ferro to keep him informed of the latest “pyrotechnics of this season in the literary cesspools of gay New York.”

Holleran trying to write a new novel in 1981, but sensed he was on the wrong track: “This book, even as I dutifully type it up, I feel almost certain is not it—one knows when one is getting something out and when one is just dropping small, tightly formed turds…”

1982—

Ferro had complained about the bad editing at the Native. Holleran responds: “There is something tawdry about it all when it could be very classy. I think it should be very New York/intellectual/classy… but then remember, if they seem like juvenile and mediocre queens, so were we at that age, I suspect.”

NPR had on the radio two nights before a program with Larry Kramer on AIDS: “It was simply too much—accurate, well done, like a rock being picked up, creepy crawlies underneath… What a portrait of gay life! Promiscuity=disease risk is simply the thesis, and quite right, alas. I’m never coming back. Until they find the cure. Then they played background disco music… and I changed my mind.”

1984—

“I was not offended by [David] LEAVITT ON THE COVER [of Christopher Street], THE COVER LOOKED GOOD THE MAG SHOULD introduce new writers (WE’RE not that whatever we are)… where were we at 23 dear?”

Holleran has just learned—he’s astonished what a “naïve nit” he’s been—that [editor] Tom Steele has been writing the letters to the editor at CS, “The whole magazine comes out of his refrigerator!”

1985—

“As for an ideal reader: I don’t think of one, really. Or rather an odd combination of a youth I’ve never seen in a library in Kansas, and a queen from Fire Island who is very witty and critical. If you can please both you’ve done it right.”

“The negro as subject of comedy is of course taboo and we have lost some yuks—but an African Bishop Tutu!!!!!”

Asked by George Stambolian to recommend other possible contributors for Men on Men: “how could I? This is showbiz” then recommends “Armistead Maupin, Dennis Cooper, George Whitmore, Richard Umans and Ethan Mordden.”

“Ironically, I fell into the trap with NIGHTS IN BOOM BOOM [Nights in Aruba] a book I don’t think I pulled off because of mistaking autobiography for fiction… One must make up.”

1986—

Larry Kramer is still complaining to anyone who will listen (in this case, Richard Howard) about how badly Stambolian treated him, and now also complaining that Ed White was irresponsible in writing a story that features unprotected sex: “It’s like he’s viewing all lit in terms of Soviet socialism or something… these vendettas, this animus, well is what wrote the play [The Normal Heart].”

Israel a “ghastly garrison state”

1987—

Holleran invited by undergraduate student at Oberlin, Jordan Balter, head of the school’s gay student association, to come give a talk on gay literature. Ferro had been invited shortly before. “I think of it all as the monks who kept literature alive in the Dark Ages—maybe this lecture program is the last vestige of… gaylitter.” “Well not quite” he continued, Adam Mars-Jones and Ed White are working on a new anthology, and both their contributions are (he had read the galleys) “quite good.”

[Balter, apparently, organized a series of I think annual conferences on gay literature at Oberlin in the late 80s, with Holleran, Ferro, and Picano giving speeches—Ferro’s talk, “Gay Literature Today,” is in the Violet Quill Reader linked to at the top of this post. This would have been quite a pioneering thing to do, as gay literature was only just coming together as a category and was already in danger of collapse. Something worth recording! But I haven’t found Holleran and Picano’s talk, or any other information on the Oberlin events; neither could the Oberlin college archivist. And I can’t ask Balter, who passed in 2014 at the age of 47.]