Blackbird (2 page)

Sometimes I’ll see some couple just going at it like there’s no tomorrow, and I feel so lonely and so jealous of them that it throws me into the most awful melancholy, and I could almost cry. And I feel like if I had the atom bomb, I’d just drop it right on these kids laying around sucking face, just so I don’t have to friggin’
see
them.

At other points in the story – which are more moving to me because he is less defensive – Johnnie Ray’s loneliness and yearning are implied, as when he describes his response to “somebody else’s troubles.”

And I’ll want to cry like a baby, or break things. Usually, though, I’ll just go to my room and listen to my stereo, a big old Magnavox mahogany cabinet model that Dad let me keep in my room after he finally broke down and bought a set of components for the living room.

So I went into my room, threw my books on the bed, and put
Court and Spark
on the turntable. I sat on the floor with my back up against the cabinet and let Joni’s voice pour over me like cool honey.

The combination of loneliness and yearning also rules the lives of the people with whom he is friends, all of them misfits in one way or another and, like him, dreaming of escape. I especially like his relationship with his best friend and fellow unacknowledged gay boy, Efrem Zimbalist Johnson. The two quip and banter like a couple of characters from
Stage Door
, and the dialogue is fun at that level, but there is also an undercurrent of affection (verging on unrequited love in Efrem’s case) and solidarity between them.

While I’m here, I want to say a word about Johnnie Ray’s precocious and campy voice in which phrases often sound like they were lifted from the lesser known films of Bette Davis. This mimicry seems to me also to emphasize Johnnie Ray’s loneliness and alienation from his surroundings, since there is almost nothing in this small desert suburb of Los Angeles that mirrors him. Rather it is in the movies that he sees himself, albeit as though through a glass darkly. What I mean is not that Johnnie Ray wants to grow up to be Bette Davis, but that he recognizes in her screen image the kind of courage he has to summon up to survive. Interestingly, it is the courage of women with which he identifies. He is not alone among gay boys in finding women to be better life models than men. The pervasive devaluation that women face based on an almost primal ideology of male supremacy and the strategies they adopt to resist this devaluation are founded on deep self-knowledge and endurance, precisely the qualities that Johnnie Ray, like so many other gay boys, needs to survive his adolescence. It is also not surprising, then, that Johnnie Ray’s identification with women is reflected in the novel’s depiction of his parents. Perhaps the least vividly drawn character in the book is Johnnie Ray’s father and, unlike other characters, one senses a kind of artificiality about him as if the author were struggling against his natural instincts to tell the truth. Conversely, Johnnie Ray’s mother jumps off the page, all ninety-five pounds of her (“soaking wet”) and there’s no mistaking whose child Johnnie Ray is. His mother is a no nonsense woman with a rock-solid sense of herself and the same kind of smart mouth that she deplores in her son. Even though we learn very little of her history and cannot therefore know precisely what hardships she had suffered, we know she is a survivor. It is unfortunate for Johnnie Ray that his mother’s strategy for survival depends upon a fearsomely judgmental brand of Christianity, because it prevents her from recognizing her moral example in his coming out.

The last point I want to make about the title of Larry’s book is, I suppose, what for most readers would be the obvious one – Johnnie Ray is black in a white world. Larry took a beating from some critics, black and white, for what they felt was his insufficient attention to race and racism. As far as I’m concerned, this criticism was profoundly unfair and may be one of the reasons his work has been devalued. There is no mystery about Larry’s attitude toward race; for him, the fact that he is black is less compelling, on every level, than that he is gay. As a writer, what this means is that he primarily a gay writer, not a black one. Yet this does not mean that he is insensitive to race issues – how could he be? The problem seems to be that Larry was unable and unwilling to write books that described a different experience of being black than the one he actually had. In criticizing Larry for not being the black man they wanted him to be, his critics refused to see him as the black man that he is. It’s a lesson in the intolerance of the oppressed.

Had his critics had eyes to see, they would have seen that race is as pervasive in
Blackbird
as music, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication. In the first few pages of the book, Johnnie Ray realizes that his race will prevent him from being cast as Romeo in the school play, even though he is the most talented actor at the school, because “as there’s no black girls in the [drama] department, if I did get cast, I’d undoubtedly have to nuzzle some little flower of white womanhood right there on the stage. I just don’t know if the town’s quite ready for that.” The heaviness of the sarcasm reveals the depth of Johnnie Ray’s experience and understanding of suburban racism. On the very next page, Johnnie Ray notes that “most of the black people live way out on the outskirts of town, either out on the Air Force base or near it. We don’t, and neither does Cherie’s family; but that’s about it.” We don’t know why Johnnie Ray’s parents have chosen to live apart from the town’s black community, but upward mobility and a concomitant identification with whites seems to be part of it (significantly, the only women Johnnie Ray’s mother interacts with in the novel are white) and this explains a great deal about Johnnie Ray’s own racial attitudes. Undoubtedly, Larry could have explored this theme in much greater and more explicit detail, but the fact that he chose not to – because ultimately this was not the story he wanted to tell – does not negate the subtle presence of race and racism that permeates the book.

I want to say a couple of other things about the book that don’t fit neatly into my explication of the title. Larry’s portrait of small town bohemianism in the form of Marshall MacNeill and his friends is precisely and beautifully drawn, like his description of Libby (dressed in a “red paisley muu-muu sort of dress and with no shoes and about thirty-seven bracelets on each arm … dragging a big dirty macramé purse”) and of Marshall’s car Bob Saab (“There was a pile of debris on the seat that included one, maybe two complete changes of clothing, half a ham-on-rye, a copy of
Another Roadside Attraction
… and one mateless rubber-tire-soled sandal somewhat the worse for wear”). Even more than the references to the music of the time, these characters bring back for me the mid-seventies in all their grungy glory, and Larry’s portrait of them and their milieu is, for me, one of the great pleasures of the book. I also want to point out the joyful account of Johnnie Ray’s sexual initiation by Marshall (Chapters 15 and 16, if you want to skip directly to it). As in real life, awkwardness alternates with excitement, uncertainty with single-mindedness, and all of it is rendered in rich sensual and erotic detail that, honestly, could raise the dead. It’s tender and funny and completely credible.

II.

Blackbird
was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1986 by Michael Denneny, a senior editor there who was, more than anyone else in New York publishing, responsible for bringing into print the works of gay male writers in the decade between 1985 and 1995. Many of the writers who were published during that time, by St. Martin’s and other publishers, are dead now, victims of
AIDS
. Most of the work not only of those deceased writers but even writers like Larry, who survived the plague years, is out of print, seldom referred to and, one assumes, forgotten. This is a real loss to American letters and American literary history comparable, I believe, to the decades’ long neglect of the Harlem Renaissance writers that I can only hope doesn’t take as long to be acknowledged and remedied.

In the emerging orthodoxy of gay male writing, writers like Edmund White, Larry Kramer, and Andrew Holleran are considered the “post-Stonewall” generation of gay writers. This designation has always seemed misleading to me, however, because those writers, born in the 1940s, were already young adults when the mass gay movement triggered by Stonewall began to emerge in the early 1970s. Their books, I would argue – at least the books they published in the 1970s – revealed attitudes about homosexuality more consistent with the closeted 1950s. In my view, it is my generation of gay writers, born roughly between the mid-’50s and the mid-’60s, who are more aptly characterized as post-Stonewall writers in that our attitudes regarding homosexuality were shaped in part by the formative years of gay liberation.

The sea-change in consciousness is, as I have already observed, reflected in that passage in
Blackbird
in which Johnnie Ray realizes that his hope for emotional and sexual fulfillment can only be realized with another gay boy. To understand why this is significant, compare the chapters in
Blackbird
that describe Johnnie Ray’s joyful sexual initiation to the passage in Holleran’s 1978
Dancer from the Dance
in which his nominal hero has his first gay sexual experience: performing a blow job on a stranger. Holleran’s character reflects that he has “profaned utterly” his mouth and that his lips “had been soiled beyond redemption.” Don’t misunderstand me – Andrew Holleran is a writer of enormous gifts, but his homosexuals are as filled with loathing for themselves and one another as the characters from the seediest gay pulp novel of the 1950s.

Self-loathing is conspicuously absent from
Blackbird,
and in this sense it is a work representative of our generation of writers. There’s anxiety, loneliness, and rage in the work of these writers, as there is in
Blackbird
, and their characters often undergo tribulations as demeaning and traumatic as the exorcism forced upon Johnnie Ray by his parents. Moreover, as the memoirs of these writers also make clear (the autobiographical essays collected in John Preston’s series of anthologies, for example), these experiences of childhood and adolescence left deep scars and created systems of defense that continued to disfigure and make difficult their adult lives. But there was no lapsing into the kind of obliterating self-hatred that characterized preceding generations of gay men. There was, instead, a recognition that the situation of gay men was not one of moral defectiveness but of social and political oppression to which the proper response was not to change ourselves, but society. Although
Blackbird
is not overtly political – because Larry was telling a story, not delivering a polemic – it is, in fact, radical in its implicit assumption that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Johnnie Ray’s sexuality. It is natural, basic to his being and, of course, should be freely expressed. The implications of that revolutionary position, in the face of centuries of condemnation of homosexuality in the West buttressed by selective readings of religious texts, are still making themselves known. The cohort of writers to which Larry belonged was the first to systematically adopt this position as the moral premise of its writing about homosexuality.

Larry was thirty when he finished
Blackbird
, his second novel. Many of the other gay male writers published in the mid-to-late 1980s were also young, bursting with energy, and filled with the obvious influences of writers they admired (for Larry, Tom Robbins) as they struggled to find their own authentic voices. One would have expected that, between 1986 and now, Larry would have produced another half-dozen novels or more of ever-increasing confidence and craft. Instead, he would publish only two more books,
Tangled Up in Blue
(1989) and
Captain Swing
(1993).

What happened? Elsewhere, Larry has said that he was disheartened because his books were not the commercial successes he had hoped for and, as a natural-born performer, he found the isolation of writing to be temperamentally difficult. I certainly don’t doubt that these were factors that led him to withdraw from writing, but they are not sufficient explanation. Larger forces were at work. New York publishers lost interest in gay writers after it became clear that publishing them would not improve the bottom line – and the haste with which these publishers dumped gay writers is testimony to the deep-seated homophobia of the New York publishing industry. A more basic reason is that
AIDS
happened and many of those gay writers died.

There is a long passage in Larry’s last published novel,
Captain Swing,
in which an older, wiser Johnnie Ray, who has returned to Louisiana to see his dying father, is warned by his aunt, “I don’t believe you’ve seen this kind of sick.” But Johnnie Ray has: “I wanted to tell her about Crockett Miller, my friend … whom
AIDS
had reduced to a sixty-some-odd pound skeleton with skin before finally finishing him off at the age of thirty-two.” He then goes on to name several other friends who died in the epidemic before concluding: “All that beauty and more, all that talent and more, gone gone gone, bye-bye baby and Amen, struck down in the relative youth of late twenties and thirty-something by an elusive, ever mutating viral horror that doesn’t just kill you dead, but kills you
ugly
.” That’s what it was like for all of us before the advent of the wonder drugs and now that, in the gay community, the dying has almost stopped, no one wants to talk about the carnage, much less read about it anymore. We who lived through it are left with survivor’s guilt and unexpressed trauma, like the shell-shocked survivors of the Great War who returned from the trenches with their heads full of horror to a world that had decided to move on. I wonder if one reason Larry stopped writing is that it seemed to him – as it seemed to me – that there was no longer an audience for the things he had to say.

I hold out a hope that Larry will find his voice and give us further adventures in the life of Johnnie Ray, but until then I am grateful to Arsenal Pulp for having the good sense and the good taste to re-issue this little gem of a book.