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 Page A

with no one to take care of her.
    Intelligence alone never saves people from dire circumstances. Apollo readily absorbs information from everything around him and recycles it to make himself appear more attractive to a variety of men who return for his services, but only temporarily. Baby Pop has a knack for math and creates elaborate internal scenarios adapted from the popular novels he reads. But both are unable to imagine a usable framework for changing their situations.
    Angelita does willfully overcome addiction to get his operation and moves out of the neighborhood. During the course of the novel, she is the only true survivor.
    No matter how much Benderson seeks to reveal to us the otherness of this world, it isn’t difficult to understand Apollo’s need to share his pain in unusual ways with his johns and the other junkies. He blames the stomping he gives his only friend on the withdrawal from drugs. He’s trapped in vicious circles that must be attended to at the sacrifice of others. In this novel, redemption comes only momentarily, if it comes at all: and then, more as a hint of whimsy than a destined eventual outcome.
    Apollo’s unnamed friend is an almost middle-aged educated man trying to stay alive in a pre-AIDS cocktail world. He takes strong prescription drugs to prolong his life, but it is a losing battle. Their jerky relationship continues because Apollo trusts him more than his other contacts. Apollo can only admit he needs help when he’s desperate. Full acknowledgement of his helplessness would destroy him. His friend helps him because he has nothing to lose. He is already lost and he thinks for a time that some involvement in Apollo’s world has more meaning than the literary life he’s left behind on full shelves that line the walls of his apartment.
    Benderson contrasts the abuse by the cops that Apollo receives for his drug use with his friend’s unpleasant dependence on legal medication. Apollo gives in to the numbing effect dope; and his friend desperately clings to life by taking sanctioned poison.
    After Apollo’s valiant effort to kick and work a real job as a doorman for Tina, the pressures drive him back to dope. It’s nearly impossible to stay clean when he’s surrounded by the same environment that fed his habit in the first place. His comeback high gives him a surge of confidence as he puts the make on two blonde out-of-towners. They succumb easily to his macho display and take him back in their hotel room. He takes every advantage of them by strutting, rutting, and degrading them as bitches. He stuns them for hours with super human endurance and his dope stick: the blood engorged penis that stays erect for hours at the end of a high. He completely humiliates them after the sexual frenzy by demanding sixty dollars, which they do reluctantly pay him.
    This act is Apollo’s pathetic revenge on the girly tourist gays who are seeping into the neighborhood, hanging out in new trendy clubs in greater numbers. Few of them are looking for a hustler. In fact, they fear him or ignore him. He has become the alien who no longer belongs, a clown to be laughed at by the passersby. Eventually, his inability to deal with this change inflates the wishful fantasies in his mind, pushing out the last remnants of rationality.
    Benderson shows us that everyone is a user and is used as well. To be used is not always to be abused. At times, it benefits the used more than the user. Sometimes, both parties benefit, sometimes neither. There is the temptation to wonder who benefited more in the making of this novel, Benderson or those who were used as the basis of its characters.
    No matter how we might pretend otherwise, even a cushy life can be viewed as day to day survival through the use of others and their use of us. The question is not whether this is so, but how is this so. Ironically, as entertainment-seeking tourists approaching Benderson’s passionately drawn world of lowlifes, freaks, and