Review by Choice Review
Bram presents an impeccably researched narrative of the changes in post-WW II America up to the present era, changes in part thanks to the efforts of gay writers. Implicit in Bram's substantive work is the need to plot a history of these writers and of gay issues that began to appear in US literature in the middle of the 20th century. The author includes vignettes as well as extensive narratives about the rivalries, sparring matches (rational and irrational), and interactions that were taking place between gay authors during this period. Moving from early writers like Allan Ginsberg to still-living writers like Gore Vidal, Bram not only informs readers about these individuals' lives but also forces them to reexamine (or in some cases examine for the first time) the works of the American gay "canon" that have been influential in helping to define and provide an identity for gay men in the US. A must read for those interested in culture, sexuality, literature, or history, but most important, for anyone who enjoys reading about true "characters" integral to the production of some of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers. T. J. Haskell Northwestern Connecticut Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
WHAT makes a book a gay book, or a writer a gay writer? Walt Whitman, for all his sizzling erotic verses about men, insisted to the end that he was interested only in women. Gore Vidal, who has made no secret of his attraction to men, writes sparingly about gay characters and has asserted that there is no such thing as a homosexual, only homosexual acts. James Baldwin's novels typically repose on bookstores' African-American shelves, rather than their gay and lesbian sections - even "Giovanni's Room," which centers on a relationship between two white men. Christopher Bram, who calls himself a gay novelist (his "Father of Frankenstein" was the basis of the movie "Gods and Monsters"), assumes the task of herding the gay American male writers who emerged after World War II into a coherent history, beginning with the coded innuendo of Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie" in 1944 and peaking with Tony Kushner's luminescent "Angels in America" in 1991. In between, Bram writes, a growing stream of gay-themed novels, plays and poems, some bolder than others, prefigured or hastened sweeping changes in the culture at large. "The gay revolution," he writes, "began as a literary revolution." As the title suggests, "Eminent Outlaws" is mainly a reverie for a time past, seen through a romantic lens. No one would think of a gay writer now as an outlaw, at least until David Sedans starts robbing banks. Even the category of the gay novel or play, once embraced as a liberating break from the closet, now seems more a straitjacket. In a 2005 essay in the Book Review, David Leavitt celebrated the emergence of "post-gay" fiction, in which sexual identity, while important to the characters, neither defines them nor drives the plot. While Allan Gurganus's best-selling "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" features love and embraces between two men, it is not a gay novel in the way that, say, Christopher Isherwood's "Single Man" or Larry Kramer's "Faggots" is. Leavitt and Gurganus make only token appearances in "Eminent Outlaws" with little or no discussion of their work. Ditto for William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, John Rechy, Terrence McNally, Craig Lucas, Paul Monette and Paul Rudnick. Burroughs appears as a "boyish would-be writer" notable mainly for his friendship with Allen Ginsberg; McNally is a love interest of Edward Albee "who later became a playwright himself." James Purdy, Reynolds Price, Dennis Cooper, Augusten Burroughs and E. Lynn Harris do not appear at all; nor does Sedaris. John Cheever appears only in passing and without reference to his bisexuality, which surfaced in Cheever's memoirs. Lesbians are largely absent because, Bram writes, they deserve their own book. Theirs is the love that dare not speak its name, at least not here. Instead, Bram uses a small cast of writers to draw a "large-scale cultural narrative" in which literature played a uniquely transformative role. Starting with the first great thaw - circa 1948, the year of Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and Gore Vidal's "City and the Pillar," both featuring explicitly gay characters - books that openly discussed gay life showed teenagers in the hinterlands that they were not alone and pushed discussions of homosexuality onto national television and into the mainstream press. Gay bookstores like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, which opened in Greenwich Village in 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots, provided safe havens to explore love, lust, politics, art and anatomy - the stuff of urban life, gay or straight. Bram draws this history as a movement from darkness to light, against a "homosexual culture panic" that is mighty but doomed. He does not explore how the immovable object was moved, and at times he appears to be explaining gay culture to visitors from another planet: "For many gay men," he writes, "the first experience of good sex is so electric that it magnetizes the body and soul forever." Well, golly. Bram's framing best suits the first part of his tale, when writers often spoke only in code. The narrators of Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" and Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" - the second published after Time magazine described "Other Voices" as "calculated to make the flesh crawl" - never declare their sexuality, though the clues are there for anyone who knows to look. Williams, in successive drafts of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," made the male lead, Brick, less and less explicitly in love with a lost male friend. "When Brick and Big Daddy throw the word mendacity at each other," Bram writes, "one can't help hearing Williams cast a similar charge of lying against himself." The sparring heterosexual couples in Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" were believed by many at the time to be gay couples in drag. Bram connects the emergence of more declaratively gay literature to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s (though not, curiously, to the broader sexual revolution). After Stonewall, or maybe after the Village People, writers found less need to be coy. If Vidal guided the first half of this history, its center for the second half is Edmund White, whose gay characters do not have to be gay archetypes as well. The two writers, Bram notes in what is presumably meant as lively dish, "are both highly literary and well-read, write excellent prose and are fiercely productive. Both lived for many years in Europe; both are fond of hustlers." Yet even during this literary comingout, much of the work remained gloomy. As Bram smartly observes, Kramer's "Faggots," White's "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" and Andrew Holleran's "Dancer From the Dance," all published in the breakthrough year 1978, each retained the grimness of what Isherwood called "the Tragic Homosexual myth." But the books were successes; the deluge was on. By the end of the 1970s, a cartoon in Christopher Street magazine showed a gay bar in which a man complained, "This used to be a fun place before everyone started writing a gay novel." The end point of all this progress, of course, is the sitcom "Will and Grace," which White said killed gay literature. Without organized repression, or without a virus more deadly than any cultural enemy, there may still be new books by gay writers, but no unifying story line, no outlaws. Little of this is news. By compressing literary history to a coherent movement, Bram concentrates mainly on the obvious, and by ignoring outliers he is left with a canon too thin to fill a summer vacation. The books are triumphs first, literature second. THAT'S one way to tell the story, and it's not an unreasonable one. But it leaves the implication that gay writers mattered because of their enemies more than their verse or prose. After "Angels in America," which was as magnificent as the plague was disastrous, the story has nowhere to go; even Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize for "The Hours" doesn't strike a blow for freedom because there's no one to strike it against. To Bram, it's just a gloss to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," which doesn't move him because "I had unlocked 'Mrs. Dalloway' for myself and did not need a substitute." Gay writers and their work are much messier than the story told here, and more interesting for it. "Eminent Outlaws" deserves a prominent place in the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. But alas, the store closed in 2009 - once vitally necessary, now made obsolete by its own success. Starting around 1948, books that openly discussed gay life showed many readers that they were not alone. John Leland, a reporter at The Times, is the author of "Hip: The History" and "Why Kerouac Matters."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 26, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Highly regarded novelist Bram's needed, spirited survey of post-WWII gay literature in America begins with this compelling line, The gay revolution began as a literary revolution. In his view, many prominent gay novelists, playwrights, and poets as their novels, plays, and poems rose in critical and public acceptance from outlaw to pioneer status led the way for a social change that swept the country, by which gay life in general gained in increasing acceptance. The image the reader gathers from this learned but never stuffy analysis, brimming with Bram's own well-considered and entertaining opinions, is a door of a darkened room slowly opening to admit the light from without. We begin our visitation to seminal writers with the first wave following the end of WWII, which included such figures, now thought of as luminaries, as Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsburg, and James Baldwin. Just as recovery from illness is not a perfect trajectory upward, the reaction to gay lit wavered, even in increasingly tolerant times, certainly hitting a speed bump during the AIDS crisis. Bram notes an irony in the present day: even as the economy has resulted in a shrinking publishing industry, vast strides in gay acceptance have been made. For all literature collections striving for inclusion and relevance.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This select series of profiles and literary analyses by the author of Gods and Monsters (turned into an Oscar-winning film) explores with brio the gay temper in American literature, from 1948 to 2000. Segmenting his book into five parts, by decade, Bram concentrates on the giants among them: Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, and, above all Edmund White (the "central figure" for his generation, as Vidal had been for an earlier one). We're treated to their successes as well as to the juicy rivalries that sometimes marked their careers. Bram doesn't indulge in canon formation. In fact, he only mentions Henry James, Willa Cather (one of the few women of this book on a male tradition), Hart Crane, and Thornton Wilder in passing. Rather, Bram succeeds in integrating the politics and culture of homosexuality from the postwar period through McCarthyism and Stonewall to the decimating specter of AIDS and a healthy new liberation. Storytelling, Bram says, was central to the gay revolution. "And why not?... what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?" Unified by the keen observations of a novelist working in the tradition that re-energized American letters, Bram successfully informs and entertains. Agent: Edward Hibbert. (Feb. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This book is a history, literary critique, and collective biography in one. Novelist Bram (Gods and Monsters), himself an essential gay writer, discusses gay men (no women here, with no explanation) from Gore Vidal in the early postwar years up through the 1990s and close to the present. His main thesis, that "good art can lay the groundwork for social change," is demonstrated and contextualized in dozens of examples of how literature can be not just a reflection of the times but also a catalyst for change; for example, Mart Crowley's 1968 play (made into a 1970 movie), The Boys in the Band, is shown to have produced conflicting reactions that spurred the debate of what gay culture should look like. -VERDICT The men Bram focuses on, from James Baldwin to David Leavitt, are beautifully drawn, and Bram has a knowing critical eye for the strengths and weaknesses of their works. Bram's own prose is wonderfully immediate and readable, combining biography, gossip, literary criticism, and social history. Highly recommended for all literary historians and for those interested in American or LGBT studies or the rise of gay literature. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/11.]-David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Exiles in America, 2006, etc.) charts the emergence of gay writers, decade by decade, from the mostly-closeted 1940s to the whole-house present. The author, gay himself, does not say much about his own career here--just a couple of modest asides--but he does pay homage to those he considers the godfathers of gay writing, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and the "fairy godfather," Gore Vidal, to whom Bram returns continually throughout. The author also slams those critics who could not see the literary merit of stories with gay characters and behavior--principally Stanley Kauffmann, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Midge Decter, though Bram points out that writers from Norman Mailer to Andrew Sullivan have at times had "issues." Bram follows the careers of the godfathers, but he also looks at other important novelists, poets and playwrights, including Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Frank O'Hara, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Mark Doty, David Leavitt, Michael Cunningham and many others. Often he pauses for plot summary, analysis and judgment. The author also points out writers he believes have not received sufficient attention, among them Paul Russell, Mark Merlis and Henry Rios. Bram pauses occasionally to rehearse key events in gay cultural history--the Howl obscenity trial, the Stonewall riots, the televised 1968 clash between William F. Buckley Jr., and Vidal, Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade, the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis in the '80s and beyond. Bram also flashes some attitude here and there, and not just toward the enemies of gay writers. He sometimes chides Vidal, shines a harsh light on Capote and calls Edmund White's novel Caracole "a complete dud." An educative mixture of analysis, celebration, description, disappointment, disdain and, finally, love.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
