The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered Read Free

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    In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege. Rabih Alameddine fully acknowledges this, nabbing the opportunity to offer the world a work of importance. The Perv is inimitable. The Perv is distinctive. The Perv is smashing, relevant, weighty. By fiercely creating his own voice and his own vision, Rabih Alameddine astonishes readers with a very special gift: These stories. I ponder Mr. Alameddine and I often remark, “Fuck! I wish I could be this good.”
    Always a student of others, I have captured a great deal from Mr. Alameddine’s words. He reinforced what I already believed about fiction and art. Be gallant. Be yourself. Create without a filter. Create without fear.
    Sometimes we need fellow radicals to remind us of what we, as writers, have set out to proclaim. He has nudged me and he has almost cradled me. And I am utterly grateful for this book.
     

Allen Barnett: The Body and Its Dangers
     
    St. Martin’s, 1990
    Christopher Bram
     
    This book of six short stories created a nice little stir when it first came out in 1990. It not only won both major gay literary prizes, the Lambda Book Award and the Ferro-Grumley, it received a special citation from PEN's Ernest Hemingway Foundation. It was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. One story, “Philostorgy, Now Obscure,” even appeared in the New Yorker .
    AIDS was a major reason for the attention. Four of the stories deal directly with the epidemic, which casts its shadow over the other two. The plague was still in its first decade and readers — gay readers especially — were looking for fiction that addressed what was devastating their lives. This book did exactly that, not in raw slices of pain but with quiet craft and perfect prose.
    That was the other reason for the attention: it was so beautifully written, the language stylish yet warm, with solid rhythms and well-constructed sentences.
    You let go of people, the living and the dead, and return to your self, your own resources, like a widower, a tourist alone in a foreign country. Your own senses become important and other people's sensibilities a kind of Novo-caine, blocking out your own perceptions, your ability to discriminate, your taste.
     
    But Barnett was not afraid to be funny or smartass. The AIDS quilt is described as “a foldable, dry-cleanable cemetery.” A lesbian mother tells us about her boy-crazy daughter: “My daughter thinks that lesbianism is next to laziness. She thinks this requires no effort.”
    Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels, yet the stories here are rich and full, like concentrated short novels. The digressive episodic construction of each tale recalls Alice Munro at her best. The panels of story don't always come in the pattern we expect, but can suddenly swing left or right, like the movement of a knight on a chessboard. Two stories follow the same set of characters, but the others stand free. Nevertheless, like Munro, the repetitions and variations on certain experiences create the fuzzy outline of an author, like the Invisible Man seen walking in the rain.
    No, I’m sorry, I wanted to write pure literary criticism here, but I am leaving out something important: I knew Allen. I thought I could discuss his work in the impersonal language of high literature, but it doesn't feel right. It feels false even to call him “Barnett.” Allen and I were good friends during the last year of his life. We began by talking about books, our own and other peoples’. When he became sick with AIDS, I visited him in the hospital. Later at his apartment I tried to help him figure out the complicated IV drip and bags of saline solution and the syringes needed to clean out the port in his chest. Allen could no longer write once he was ill. All the experience in his book came from his warm imagination and the illness of friends. When he died in 1991, he left me