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 B

criminals, our rapt stares may transform this novel’s exquisite portrait into an elegant and filthy mirror, inside which any one of us will catch a few glimpses of his own reflection.
     
    Addendum:
    It was in late March of 2007, shortly after finishing this review that I went to a celebration for the Romanian writer Ruda Popa at the Russian restaurant Samovar in Manhattan. The friend I was to meet there didn’t make it. Upstairs in the salon, I took a seat at the white U-shape made of long tables pushed together. I could not avoid noticing the garish makeup of the 60-or-so-year-old woman who sat next to me. Adroit with a worn down pencil, she calculated her way through several puzzles in a small Sudoku book. Her cloying perfume mingled mercilessly in my head with the mind-altering shot glasses of vodka I downed as they were offered to me on silver trays. As soon as the guest of honor finished talking, she sighed and pushed her chair back away from the table. I recognized Bruce Benderson sitting on the other side of her. I had heard him read years before during one of the many readings hosted by C. Bard Cole in the East Village. This time I introduced myself and we spent the next several hours together talking about all manner of things including his desire not to be labeled gay and the sad fact that his new novel, Pacific Agony would probably not be published in English. Benderson’s caustic yet cavalier wit did not disappoint.

Christopher Coe: Such Times
     
    Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993
    Jameson Currier
     
    Christopher Coe’s critically acclaimed first novel, I Look Divine , published by Ticknor & Fields in 1987, was the witty and luminous portrait of a rich, gifted, über narcissistic gay man who believed he was exceptional from the moment of his birth. Jet-setting across the affluent and au courant landscapes of Rome, Madrid, Mexico, and Manhattan, I Look Divine re-counted the tragedy of Nicholas, the divinely sophisticated “affected creature” of the title, and his swift downfall when he realizes that aging has erased both his youth and beauty. As narrated by his older brother in a cleverly succinct manner, Nicholas’s life was marvelous and stylish right up to its end.
    That same sort of elegant and eloquent stylishness reappears in Coe’s second novel, Such Times , published by Harcourt in 1993 and reprinted by Penguin in 1994, but the journey on which the author propels his characters this time is not merely through the process of growing older but of navigating the bleak and haunting realities of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. This time Coe slowly strips his archly observant gay narrator, Timothy Springer, of his wealth, health, and good looks, and, in the process, infuses this novel with a humanity that was often absent from I Look Divine ; Such Times becomes, then, a sort of riches-to-rags tale, a Job-like tumble from the demands an unexpected life-altering circumstance can produce — in this case, an AIDS diagnosis. As in I Look Divine , Coe tells this tragic tale of a vain and self-involved man’s breakdown from a grand, clever, witty and distinctly gay point of view.
    The narrative structure of Such Times finds Timothy and Dominic, friends for twenty-plus years, catching up with one another over risotto frutti di mare in a trendy Los Angeles restaurant after viewing Dominic’s taped appearance on a television quiz show. Dominick and Timothy share many traits with the brothers of I Look Divine . Dominick, like Nicholas, “has always made up laws for life.” He knows a true daiquiri cocktail requires a few drops of maraschino liqueur, adores his set of Baccarat tumblers, and can recall verbatim Elizabeth Taylor’s Academy Award acceptance speech for Butterfield 8 . Timothy, overly articulate and “desperate to be glamorous,” shops for a baby spoon for himself at Tiffany’s and desires to be “irresistible to every man who looked like anything.” Together they drink Gavi dei Gavi la