The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered by Christopher Bram, Tom Cardamone, Michael Graves, Jameson Currier, Larry Duplechan, Sean Meriwether, Wayne Courtois, Andy Quan, Michael Bronski, Philip Gambone Read Free Book Online

consciousness of her protagonist; and it is the consciousness of her characters that is mostly responsible for startling evocations of setting. . . . She just did not believe in the concept of the tourist.”
    User approaches realism of this sort. Benderson has gone to great lengths in his exploration of the motivations and lack of motivation that befuddle the carnival of denizens in his story. In his recent memoir, The Romanian , Benderson admits he spent a lot time with “midtown Manhattan hustlers, ex-cons, and junkies sponging up their speech and vampirizing their emotions to write about.” These days, he frequently leaves the USA to escape an ever-encroaching gay mentality that he feels eagerly and publicly assimilates itself into a pathetic version of family values, part of the same exclusionary mentality that helped change Times Square into its current scrubbed-up Disneyfied incarnation.
    There is one extended focus on sound in the novel: a reverberant passage that lingers in the mind. When Casio is in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he hears a familiar ringing in his ears that initiates a chain of memories. The sound first entered Casio’s mind years before in prison. While checking for contraband, the guards repeatedly hit metal pipes with rubber mallets. A change in the ringing indicated where things were hidden. As a result of the search, Casio ends up taking the rap for another prisoner. For days in solitary, he hears the ringing internally and imagines it as birds or insects buzzing around him. From then on the ringing is a recurring trigger that sets off a chain of foul memories, a collation of his worst times that threatens to draw him back into darkness.
    The hard edges in this novel lie not in its structure, but in the mental boundaries of the main characters. They are all hemmed in by difficult living situations and the necessity of escaping painful aspects of every day life.
    Benderson’s mode of writing is enhanced by the frequent use of a device: he inserts italicized sections that are the verbalized thoughts of the character into the narrator’s depictions. These thoughts are internal monologues in the voice of that character, given as if they are occurring in real time. For a few seconds, the reader feels he is inside the head of that character. The strength of these sections carries a heightened sense of reality back into the narrator’s non-italicized flow.
    Regardless of Benderson’s success in making a novel that looks from the inside out, the reader is always an outsider looking inside the world of the novel. And in that sense, each reader is a tourist, now even more so, because the novel refers to a Times Square that no longer exists. Though it was written as a fiction, User has become partly a historical document of a world that has vanished or at least has been dispersed into small pockets of activity elsewhere. In this sense, it is kin to Samuel Delany’s frankly stunning documentation of pre-sterilized Times Square, entitled, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue .
    Nearly all of the characters are ruthless as the pain of living presses in on them. They need it to survive the daily onslaught of poverty or drug withdrawal, as well as betrayal from the other desperate ones around them. Yet, Benderson has compassion for each character, he rounds them out with surprising warmth and elicits our sympathy as we delve deeper into their troubled situations. They all have loyalties to others and help each other at times, but these tendencies are easily overridden by the fierce urges of day to day survival. Even the police are portrayed with complexity. Detective Pangero shows compassion for Angelita, the drag performer, by leaving him untouched and unconscious when he arrests Casio, Angelita’s junkie boyfriend and crime partner. Abuela, Casio’s grandmother, who navigates through a sea of religious visions and tries to save her family, is the most compassionate of all, but dies alone