setting the record gay

It must seem petulant, obsessive, small-minded and boring to be worried—amid all of the terrible things happening right now—about the minutiae of generation-ago gay literature. Or, ok, it is petulant, obsessive, small-minded—but I’m not bored yet! Whether this is just a distraction from our real, enormous problems or whether, somehow, getting a few little things right about yesterday’s culture might help us at least not go crazy, that’s where my mind is, gathering fragments like Disney’s Ariel in her treasure cave or Benjamin diving for pearls.

Anyway, in a recent interview in the Yale Review, Robert Gluck (who I wrote about at great, ambivalent length, in an essay Tablet didn’t want to publish), speaking with Samuel Ernest (who is finishing a dissertation on Tim Dlugos, and was helpful to me as I was writing my own recent essay on the Anglo-/Catholic poet), discusses the great critic, anthologist, scholar, and promoter of gay literature, George Stambolian (whom I’ve written several posts about on here).

The exchange goes:

SE You dedicate the first section of About Ed, “Everyman,” to George Stambolian—a writer, an editor, and a professor of French. His work appeared regularly in gay publications like Christopher Street and the New York Native. I know he published a story of yours in his first anthology, Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction. Who was he to you? Why dedicate “Everyman” to him?

RG George Stambolian was both exotic and immediately recognizable to me. He was a New York A-gay, handsome, cultivated, stylish, with a fabulous beach house in Amagansett. He was Armenian. Perhaps Jews and Armenians share some affect—because of the genocides? He was like one of my great aunts—fretful, loving, aggressive, a bit of a noodge. And he was the first editor who published my writing and the writing of my little West Coast New Narrative group in a book from a trade press. The trade presses were indifferent to us, which is to say the gay mainstream, where the ideal novel was written with a Violet Quill. Our influences were more continental—more French. George was a French scholar, as you say. I think that’s why he was not put off by our experiments.

He was dying in 1991 as he finished editing Men on Men 4: Best New Gay Fiction, and I am such a painfully slow writer that I transgressed his increasingly urgent deadlines. I was working on the long story “Everyman,” which eventually became the first section of About Ed. George would call me up and say, “Bob, I’m dying, give me the story now.” I’m afraid I caused him some distress. He was gone by the time the book went to press, so I dedicated “Everyman” to him, part thank-you, part apology.

Gluck here is presenting things as if in the 80s there had been, on the one hand, the world of commercial publishing, which supported the Violet Quill, the New York-based writers associated with Christopher Street scene (Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, etc.) and on the other hand, a little group of experimental writers on the West Coast who looked to Europe, and were saved from being ignored by the gay mainstream and trade presses (I always have to giggle about trade in this context) only by Stambolian, who was sophisticated and almost-Jewish enough to appreciate them. Commerce, mainstream gays, and goyish America against the California-Continental-Jew/ish avant-garde.

But this is almost the opposite of how it was!

Stambolian did include Gluck’s story (which is genuinely lovely!) “Everyman” in the fourth issue of the Men on Men anthology series (1992). More importantly, he included Gluck’s (less brilliant) “Sex Story” in the pioneering first issue of the series (1986), which had an epochal role in defining a canon of contemporary gay male American writers participating in a distinct “gay literature.” With Men on Men, Stambolian brought together his own circle of Christopher Street-adjacent New York writers and former Violet Quill members with writers from the West Coast, such as Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Sam D’Allesandro (whom I love) and Robert Gluck, to make the case that there was a new American subcultural canon in formation, alongside, for example, African-American, Jewish American, and other minority literatures.

The Eastern and Western literary sets had some stylistic differences, which a few of the West Coast writers, particularly Cooper and Gluck, often framed as broader ethical and political differences that pitted them against the supposedly mainstream, assimilationist, boringly realist fiction of the New Yorkers. The charge was always unfair for a number of reasons.

For example, Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, members of the Violet Quill, wrote absolutely bonkers, mystical fiction with scenes of voodoo, Masonic conspiracies, and oneiric eroticism—along with non-fiction (!) about their search for Atlantis. Many of Ed White’s early novels, such as Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Caracole, are weird, Firbankian exercises in indirection and faggy humor. And Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, as my friend Domenic Desocio and I recently discussed, is not a conventional, realistic narrative but a strange, often hazy reverie and story-within-story. As for the West Coasters being more French and Continental than the Easterners, Holleran’s work is deeply informed by Proust (part of the basis for his close friendship with Stambolian, a Proust scholar by training), and White wrote a door-stopping biography of Genet.

More crucially, the Violet Quill guys made possible the national (and for Cooper, international) careers of the West Coasters—Picano published Cooper and Gluck’s early work on his little New York presses in the late 70s and early 80s, while White blurbed and promoted them. According to Picano’s unreliable memoirs, Art and Sex in Greenwich Village, he had to walk miles in the snow during a taxicab strike to hand-deliver review copies of Jack the Modernist, Gluck’s (good!) experimental gay novel when he published in 1985. The snow part is giving Ginger Minj can’t stop lying compilations, but he did publish the novel! That same year, it was Picano who brought Gluck to Stambolian’s attention, urging him to include Gluck in Men on Men, and to pay attention to the Bay Area ‘New Narrative’ scene that Gluck was part of.

Picano may have been a liar and one of the very worst gay writers (pick up Like People in History), but he was a smart publisher and promoter. If anyone deserves credit for bringing the West Coast gay authors into dialogue with the Easterners, and thus to a central place in the gay male literary canon, it’s Picano. It’s no diminishment to Stambolian, a brilliant man and a central figure in the formation of gay literature, to say that it wasn’t his francophilic scholarliness but rather Picano’s pushy marketing that got that particular ball rolling.

He and the Violet Quill more generally deserve more respect—or at least more honesty—than Gluck and his admirers give them. Gluck wouldn’t be where he is today, republished by NYRB Classics and be lying to the Paris Review, without the trailblazing gay liars who went before him!

I can’t resist the temptation to complain—or to persist in imagining, without being really sure why, that getting these details about our literary and cultural history right would be good for today’s gays. Maybe, for instance, in making a little less plausible silly dichotomies that pit a commercialized mainstream against the plucky experimenters, or in making that “mainstream” seem less familiar, more odd and various and daring, more generative and still sustaining, than ungrateful beneficiaries give it credit for…