Back to Barbary Lane

In the summer of 1985 (near as I can reckon working backwards from publication dates), Dad took us to the Harper & Row book depository on the outskirts of town for their big by-the-box remainder sale. There may yet be a few of these books in my library today--you can readily recognise them by the embossed gold star on the upper right of the front cover--but many if not most were reference works which have long since cycled out to be replaced by more up-to-date editions.

But four of them were quite different, a series of large-format paperback novels from some author I'd never heard of before. I scooped them up because the second of them pictured a frame house with figures silhouetted against the windows, several of them in suggestive positions, and this appealed to the adolescent horndog in me. I didn't realise some of the characters would be gay; I didn't realise at the time that I was gay, so I'm not sure what difference that would've made in any event.

I read them avidly. Mostly dialogue, they were quick reads. They weren't exactly pornographic, but they were far more explicit about sex than anything else I'd read up to that point that hadn't been liberated from my parents' mattress. Speaking of my parents, if they had had any inkling what they were, they never would've let me take the books home. But on that day at the depository we had my father totally outnumbered, the four of us tossing whatever appealed to us into our own boxes and then meeting him at the checkout with faits accomplis.

This all came back from a recent conversation concerning when gay life entred the literary mainstream. (Seems to me that if mass-market editions from a major publishing house known more for children's classics than literary adventurism doesn't qualify as "mainstream" then I literally don't understand what the word is supposed to mean in that context.) Reviewing the publishing dates, it dawned on me that they were not only the first of Armistead Maupin's books I read, they were also the last.

One reason for this was that, when I came out two years later, my best gay friend turned me onto Ethan Mordden, whose more erudite and sophisticated stories held a stronger appeal for me. More importantly, as time went on and I became a more critical consumer of fiction, I became acutely aware of Maupin's limitations. People have faulted his inability to convincingly write diverse voices. (Each chapter tends to be written from the point of view of one of a handful of recurring focus characters.) His view of San Francisco is distressingly narrow. You'd never surmise from his almost exclusively white and well-off milieu what a truly diverse city SF is (or, at least, was at the time).

Then this past week I found myself in a discount bookstore with the recent discussion in my head and a 99¢ copy of Significant others staring back from the shelves. Suspecting (rightly, as it turned out) that I might soon find myself too bleary to focus on the serious literature already in my bag, I grabbed it and set it down on my night table for bedtime reading, polishing it off early this afternoon as I recuperated from a bout of diarrhoea. (As I said, they're quick reads.)

All the shortcomings are still there, of course; if anything, they've only grown more acute with time. Contemporaneous references which seemed so clever at the end of the Reagan era are eye-rollingly dated now. The one non-white character (apart from two mixed-race children frequently referred to as "half-breeds") is an aged Black maid whose only distinguishing trait is her "loyalty" to her rich mistress who irascibly calls her a "nigger". And that's not even the most cringeworthy thing in it.

I will grant him his ability to write crowd-pleasing soap-opera plots. I found myself so anxious to know how things turned out for the protagonists that not only did I have trouble putting it down, but I even skipped ahead several times. (He interweaves plotlines, so the resolution to one may be separated by several chapters of developments in another.) Even so, most of his heart-tugging missed the mark with me. His central romance plot felt like kind of a cheat even as I smiled at seeing it resolved happily.

By another coincidence, I've been tipped to what sounds like a perfect palate-cleanser: Mark Abramson's For my brothers. Same time and place, but through a much less genteel lens.