NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/soc/motss/48094

Text File | 1992-11-17 | 3.3 KB | 72 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Steven Levine)
Subject: The het woman in gay male fiction
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: Have you met this woman?
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Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 17 Nov 92 15:40:27 CST

I just read _O Beautiful_, a new novel by Jesse Green.  I suspected
from the acknowledgements page, which included a note of
gratitude to Meg Wolitzer (among others), that the book would be
of a certain genre -- someday someone will do a thesis on the
incestuous relationships among young New York City authors with
gay characters based solely on the circle-jerk of their acknowlegements pages.

I was not surprised, therefore, to find the book burdened with
the gay-male-angst, NY City-life, problematic-family-relationship
plot elements I have come to associate with David Leavitt.  Fortunately,
however, Mr. Green (who graduated Yale a year or so before Mr. Leavitt),
seems to have taken a tip or two from Joe Ryan and remembered
that even the most self-questioning, tragically-alientated ivy-educated
gay man still manages to have a bit of clever banter now and then, and
that however trenchant one's observations about the shallowness of
life may be, a bit of narrative thrust can do wonders for a novel.
So actually I liked the book, and read it quickly, and found a resonance
or two with my own experiences.

But that's not what I wanted to post about.

What concerns me is the strange trend in gay male fiction
that every young gay angst-ridden man has a fabulous straight
female best friend who takes care of him and fixes him up and
cooks soup when he's sick and understands fashion almost as much
as he does.  Sometimes this woman is overweight, and she always
knows a lot about art.  This woman was in the Nathan Aldyne
detective stories, the Joe Ryan farces, she was there full force
in the recent movie "The Living End."  I think this is the
woman who roomed with the main character in Stephen Macauley's
_The Object of My Affection_.  And she appears again
in _O Beautiful_, picking up the pieces of the main character's
life when he goes too far.  She also appeared in some of David
Leavitt's short stores; I don't recall whether she was in any
of his novels.

[I don't think Michael Tolliver's Mary Ann was this woman,
but I may be wrong.]

Who *is* this woman?  Do any of us know her?  Is there something
missing in my life because I don't have a straight woman
best friend who runs an art gallery and wears drop-dead clothes
when she accompanies me to glittering cocktail parties?

Well, actually, I do have a straight female best friend
who sometimes plays the emotionally supportive role that
the women in these novels do -- but she is a suburban
homemaker and she and her husband are intimate friends
with my parents, which somehow doesn't fit in with the
character that keeps appearing in gay fiction.  And besides,
the emotional support is more of a mutual thing than it
appears to be with the fictional characters.  So I don't
know.

What gives?  Am I the only one who seems concerned
about this recurring character, who crosses genres
and generations and publishing houses?

-Steven Levine
 [e-mail]