The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered Read Free Page A

his computer. I wrote my next three novels on it, including Gods and Monsters . My protagonist, movie director James Whale, served in the trenches during the First World War. I gave Allen's last name to one of Whale's dead comrades. It's strange now, and wonderful, too, to hear Ian McKellan in the movie deliver his extraordinary speech about dead friends and speak of “Barnett on the wire.”
    I did not reread Allen’s stories for years, perhaps because I feared they might not be as good as I remembered. Yet it's been a joy to go back to his book for this essay and see Allen the author as well as Allen the friend. He was an amazing writer, even better than I thought at the time. I would love these stories even if I had not known him. They deserve to be read and reread, not only because they capture life in the age of AIDS so well, but because they have a moral weight that transcends their moment in time.
     
    I’d like to discuss a few stories at length to suggest their quality and strength. Allen's work wasn't really about plot, but I should warn you in advance that I'm going to give away a lot.
    “The Times As It Knows Us” is the best known of Allen's stories, reprinted in anthologies and often cited. It's about a weekend on Fire Island in a house of gay men during the epidemic, an overload of characters we can only slowly distinguish from each other, much as if we were visiting the house ourselves. The story is haunted by the times: both the spirit of the age and the newspaper. The narrator, Clark, keeps a folder of clippings from the New York Times , a public history of the epidemic. Clark wants to dig beneath the shallow, two-dimensional accounts of gay men with AIDS propagated by the media and find a fuller, more human reality. That is exactly what the story does. It's like a Chekhov play where nothing major happens, but everything important is revealed. The men bond and bicker, help and hinder. One comes down with a fever; Clark takes care of him with help from housemates. Some people behave well, others badly, but everyone has his reasons. It's a very rich, densely textured story that captures lived lives without glib judgments or false nobility. Needing to give the feverish man a rubdown with vodka, Clark jokes, “Not the imported, get the domestic we use for guests,” without making the reader doubt his genuine fear for his friend.
    “The Body and Its Seasons” and “The Body and Its Dangers” are the two linked stories, following a trio of college friends into adulthood. In the first story, a gay student, Gordon, goes to bed with a female friend, Sara, as an experiment. While they lie in bed, we get pieces of his life, chiefly his Catholic upbringing and sex with two different priests, and sex with Sara's friend Marie followed by ideas about innocence and the Fall as illustrated by a play he just performed in, The Garden . In the second story, Sara narrates. Seventeen years have passed. She lives with her lover Marie and their daughter Rachel, whose father was Gordon. Sara has had a breast removed for cancer yet is still stricken with the disease. All bodies are in danger, not only the bodies of gay men. Sara spends the story musing to herself, gathering together the pieces of her life: her difficult daughter, her more difficult lover, her dead friend Jake, her absent friend Gordon. (We're never actually told that Gordon is dead, but we can't help assuming so.) Her voice is quiet and mature and clear. She imagines Gordon reappearing, talking to her and touching her scar tissue. “What he cannot make whole again, he will convince me doesn't matter.”
    This story narrated by a woman is the most overtly sexual in the book. Allen celebrates sex throughout The Body and its Dangers . Where another writer might condemn the desire that kills his characters, Allen treats sex as a valuable intimacy. Yet the act itself is presented more frankly here than elsewhere. From a woman's point of view, penetration