Thank you! I still feel less than great, but today my temp's back to normal.
Congratulations! May it stay that way and the rest of you follow.
And I have never heard of this book, and I thought I was pretty well versed in old queer fiction. 1961!
It seems to have been really under the radar of the field until Cleis Press brought it back into print in 2003, although they only offer the e-book nowadays—it was published originally by a particularly marginal pulp outfit, reprinted once in the '60's under the sleazier and significantly inaccurate title of Rough Trade, according to the Cleis introduction fell totally off the map after that point except for a few dismissive acknowledgements until it was rediscovered in the '90's by the San Francisco Queer History Working Group who recognized it as an invaluable map-on-the-slant to pre-liberation queer San Francisco as well as a wittily subversive mystery in its own right, hitting every beat of your standard-issue noir with a flamboyantly light-in-the-loafers P.I. who arrives at the job by inheritance from his previous career as a chorus boy and like so many queens is actually a pretty tough cookie. The style is chunkily colorful, the wisecracks are funny (a dismayed Francis, confronted his first day on the job with a seemingly endless parade of applicants for his advertised assistant: "My God, Bessie! It looks like the third act of Aïda out there"), it does not feel more misogynist because of its gay male default than some straight hardboiled novels of my experience and perhaps even less [rot13] fvapr abguvat jbefr unccraf gb vgf Punaqyre-fglyr alzcub pyvrag zvkrq hc va gur sevatrf bs gur pevzr guna gung fur yrnirf gbja ng gur raq bs gur pnfr. I wish it were better known. The style Cleis described as "hard-boiled camp" really isn't like anything else I have encountered in queer literature of the time.
So if it's the second oldest, what's the oldest one?
The oldest I have personally encountered is The Heart in Exile (1953) by Adam de Hegedus writing as Rodney Garland, which is on the one hand amazing because in mood and milieu it is rather like a Mary Renault novel [rot13] jurer va gur ynfg puncgre gur cebgntbavfg tbrf shpx vg naq cyhzcf sbe gur evfx bs unccvarff jvgu uvf qribgrq znyr frpergnel vafgrnq bs gur fnsr rzbgvbany-frkhny fgenvgwnpxrg ur'f xrcg uvzfrys va sbe lrnef, and on the other it features a scarifying level of mid-century Freud-o-speak which even the hero's being a psychiatrist before his turn to amateur detection cannot really excuse. But it is determined not to be a tragic gay novel even when it contains tragic gay death and it signals as much by having its characters talk frankly about the trope:
"What I wanted to ask you," Terry said a little abruptly, just when I was anxious to change the subject, "is why all plays and novels dealing with queers have an inevitably tragic end. I mean, there's always murder, suicide, insanity or imprisonment. I mean, that's not so in real life, is it? I don't say all queers are happy, but the vast majority aren't unhappy, anyway, and even if they are they don't go round cutting their throats or killing each other."
"The answer to that is that the only way normal society at present accepts the homosexual in literature is with a compulsory tragic end. To be a homo is a crime, and crime mustn't go unpunished; not in books at least. Besides, I think the author himself, by giving you a tragic end, is trying to engage your sympathy: 'Pity us poor buggers.' Which explains the tear-jerker title, the frequent Biblical quotations, the lugubrious tone, the underlining of the tragic element. Besides, happiness—normal or abnormal—is uninteresting."
Terry smiled; I wondered if he was really listening. He said slowly: "If ever I could write a book on the subject, I'd try to tell the truth. I'd write about the majority for whom it isn't really tragic." He raised a soda-red hand. "I suppose disaster is always there, well . . . a sort of threat, in the background, but the real trouble is that most of them are afraid of love. That's what makes them so miserable. One should never be afraid of it, even if one gets jilted. It's the only thing in life, isn't it? I mean love. That's the message."
And as the hero has demonstrated himself to be one of the people who is afraid of love, it would be really stupid if he didn't get the meta-point. So I recommend it on those grounds, but still warn for the psychobabble.
I hope you enjoy the Old Bridge Inn books. Nobody's going to mistake them for Great Literature, but they're doing things I haven't seen in my (fairly limited) reading of other queer romance books.
Beyond the actually eighteenth-century habits of mind?
They also feel a lot less anachronistic than any other recent historicals I've read--of course the characters have views that look decently progressive to us modern readers, but they mostly seem to arrive at them via the language and thought processes of their own times.
And that is actively attractive to me, so thank you for mentioning it. Whitewashing weird but noted.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-07-13 10:10 pm (UTC)Congratulations! May it stay that way and the rest of you follow.
And I have never heard of this book, and I thought I was pretty well versed in old queer fiction. 1961!
It seems to have been really under the radar of the field until Cleis Press brought it back into print in 2003, although they only offer the e-book nowadays—it was published originally by a particularly marginal pulp outfit, reprinted once in the '60's under the sleazier and significantly inaccurate title of Rough Trade, according to the Cleis introduction fell totally off the map after that point except for a few dismissive acknowledgements until it was rediscovered in the '90's by the San Francisco Queer History Working Group who recognized it as an invaluable map-on-the-slant to pre-liberation queer San Francisco as well as a wittily subversive mystery in its own right, hitting every beat of your standard-issue noir with a flamboyantly light-in-the-loafers P.I. who arrives at the job by inheritance from his previous career as a chorus boy and like so many queens is actually a pretty tough cookie. The style is chunkily colorful, the wisecracks are funny (a dismayed Francis, confronted his first day on the job with a seemingly endless parade of applicants for his advertised assistant: "My God, Bessie! It looks like the third act of Aïda out there"), it does not feel more misogynist because of its gay male default than some straight hardboiled novels of my experience and perhaps even less [rot13] fvapr abguvat jbefr unccraf gb vgf Punaqyre-fglyr alzcub pyvrag zvkrq hc va gur sevatrf bs gur pevzr guna gung fur yrnirf gbja ng gur raq bs gur pnfr. I wish it were better known. The style Cleis described as "hard-boiled camp" really isn't like anything else I have encountered in queer literature of the time.
So if it's the second oldest, what's the oldest one?
The oldest I have personally encountered is The Heart in Exile (1953) by Adam de Hegedus writing as Rodney Garland, which is on the one hand amazing because in mood and milieu it is rather like a Mary Renault novel [rot13] jurer va gur ynfg puncgre gur cebgntbavfg tbrf shpx vg naq cyhzcf sbe gur evfx bs unccvarff jvgu uvf qribgrq znyr frpergnel vafgrnq bs gur fnsr rzbgvbany-frkhny fgenvgwnpxrg ur'f xrcg uvzfrys va sbe lrnef, and on the other it features a scarifying level of mid-century Freud-o-speak which even the hero's being a psychiatrist before his turn to amateur detection cannot really excuse. But it is determined not to be a tragic gay novel even when it contains tragic gay death and it signals as much by having its characters talk frankly about the trope:
"What I wanted to ask you," Terry said a little abruptly, just when I was anxious to change the subject, "is why all plays and novels dealing with queers have an inevitably tragic end. I mean, there's always murder, suicide, insanity or imprisonment. I mean, that's not so in real life, is it? I don't say all queers are happy, but the vast majority aren't unhappy, anyway, and even if they are they don't go round cutting their throats or killing each other."
"The answer to that is that the only way normal society at present accepts the homosexual in literature is with a compulsory tragic end. To be a homo is a crime, and crime mustn't go unpunished; not in books at least. Besides, I think the author himself, by giving you a tragic end, is trying to engage your sympathy: 'Pity us poor buggers.' Which explains the tear-jerker title, the frequent Biblical quotations, the lugubrious tone, the underlining of the tragic element. Besides, happiness—normal or abnormal—is uninteresting."
Terry smiled; I wondered if he was really listening. He said slowly: "If ever I could write a book on the subject, I'd try to tell the truth. I'd write about the majority for whom it isn't really tragic." He raised a soda-red hand. "I suppose disaster is always there, well . . . a sort of threat, in the background, but the real trouble is that most of them are afraid of love. That's what makes them so miserable. One should never be afraid of it, even if one gets jilted. It's the only thing in life, isn't it? I mean love. That's the message."
And as the hero has demonstrated himself to be one of the people who is afraid of love, it would be really stupid if he didn't get the meta-point. So I recommend it on those grounds, but still warn for the psychobabble.
I hope you enjoy the Old Bridge Inn books. Nobody's going to mistake them for Great Literature, but they're doing things I haven't seen in my (fairly limited) reading of other queer romance books.
Beyond the actually eighteenth-century habits of mind?
They also feel a lot less anachronistic than any other recent historicals I've read--of course the characters have views that look decently progressive to us modern readers, but they mostly seem to arrive at them via the language and thought processes of their own times.
And that is actively attractive to me, so thank you for mentioning it. Whitewashing weird but noted.