The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered Read Free Page B

becomes wonderfully matter-of-fact in one of my favorite descriptions of a sex act: “He opened himself with his fingers, and straddled Gordon, sitting back and guiding him in at once. He smiled.”
    “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” follows Preston, a gay man recently diagnosed with AIDS, when he returns to Chicago to say goodbye to his friends, in particular the two women he used to live with, Roxy and Lorna., who echo the female friends in the “Body” stories. Lorna is married to Sean, their favorite teacher, and pregnant with her second child. Preston goes to the faculty steam room with Sean and they talk about philosophy, in particular St. Augustine. He contacts an old lover, Jim. They meet for lunch and go to bed together. The story ends with Preston and Roxy talking about her own ex-boyfriend while they wait for Lorna to return.
    It's a strange, crowded, slightly elusive story yet very beautiful. Allen's death has given it a weight it didn't have when I first read it. This farewell to friends and lovers was never sentimental or melodramatic, but it is now terribly real. Preston thinks about his dead and remembers desire before we're told:
    Preston believed that he would survive, not the illness, but death itself. It was one of those things that one believes despite one's self, a tiny bubble of thought that hangs suspended somewhere between the heart and mind, fragile and thin as a Christmas tree ornament yet managing to last decades. He believed in his consciousness, that it would do more than last, but would have impact and consequence, that wherever it went there would be discourse and agitation; decisions would be made and adhered to.
     
    Which Allen managed to achieve in his single, wonderful book. He can still affect how we think about our lives. His bubble of consciousness survives.
     

Neil Bartlett : Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
     
    Serpent’s Tail, 1989
    Philip Clark
     
    Containing Fragments from and Reworkings of Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990).
    [I]ndeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.
    — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Of course, it was several years before I met my own Boy, my very own Boy, that I read Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall . But thank you for that book, Mr. Bartlett. In another of your books, Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde , you quote That Man himself:
    It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. — Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
     
    And is this quite true? This book you wrote, this Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall , this story of Boy and O, the bar where they met, the woman who helped bring them together, the marriage they shared: have I not only read and reread it, given it to others, written about it, quoted from it, but has it also, consciously or not, served as pattern and image for my most important relationship? Has life, as Wilde so famously said, imitated art?
    Had I said to my Boy, I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose! — would it have been any less true because I was not the first to say it?
     
    I. In which the Narrator describes Boy for the reader:
    “I could tell you that he had white skin, black eyes, and black hair, but you can see that from the photograph. I could tell you that the eyes were so beautiful they could actually make you feel giddy when he suddenly looked up from the floor and straight at you.”
    I have described my Boy three times as looking like a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, all black and white: once in a journal, once retelling a story, and now. As Wilde knew, if a line is good enough to use, it is good enough to plagiarize from oneself and use again. Besides, it is appropriate. It is right. My Boy’s eyes were emerald, a cat’s eyes, but in my mind and memory, they are as dark as his bright black hair. They made my stomach