From The Midwest To The Fast Lane

The Golden Boy by James Melson (Harrington Park Press, 212 pp.)

James Melson's autobiography, The Golden Boy, for the most part takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of gay life in the nineteen-seventies, when AIDS and safer sex precautions were unheard of.

The journey begins in Dubuque, Iowa, Melson's hometown, also  known as Sundown Town, "a redneck, rough-shootin' meat packing town on the Mississippi River," where any black man looking for work would be advised by the police to "be gone by sundown."

It is in this setting where Melson made a total transformation: from "a disgusting mass of fat" who everyone laughed at and picked on to a person who because he had gained "a new body, and stardom, all in one year" through swimming and skiing, develops into a "flaming narcissist." It is also the place in which Melson comes out to himself as a homosexual after years of accepting all the negative stereotypes about gay men. When a female classmate on a school bus trip to Canada tries to engage him in sex play under the blanket, he draws back his hand from her unbuttoned jeans. "I believe she knew at that moment that I was queer. No one had ever turned down Cindy's pussy." He discovers that "I wanted a man, at least to have sex with. Although with Cindy I felt a tinge of romance, a gleam of something special, this was just not 'it' for me."

The next two or three chapters (all the chapters start off with an epigram by a famous person that ties the events of each) follows Melson's college days at St. Olaf's in Minnesota and at Northwestern in Chicago.

The Golden Boy doesn't really get interesting until Melson lands in New York and becomes part of the fast-lane crowd. He gives the reader an insider's look at such famous hot spots now demised as Studio 54 and Xenon. While cruising hot bodies, snorting coke, and hobnobbing with the rich and the famous and the wannabes, it is easy to see how and why he became "addicted to the New York night life." But when  he enters the grueling 11-month corporate training program at a large bank, he realizes that his "all-night carousing" has come to an end--for a while, anyway.

Throughout The Golden Boy, Melson exhibits a campy sense of humor ("With his strawberry-blond hair and pale, freckled complexion, he was as convincing as Opie Taylor impersonating Cary Grant.") and a clever way with words ("We would actually own part of a ski resort. The redneck kids would turn green-necked with envy.")

We see before us a Midwestern-hick-turned-cosmopolite who develops a taste for antique folk art objects such as a "nearly four-foot, 1930s birdhouse, an exact replica of a New England church." And when Melson, who we've come to know and like, is diagnosed as having AIDS, we begin to feel the poignancy of the moment. Briefly--and mercifully for the reader--the book deals with the social, economic, and medical ramifications of Melson's Kaposi's sarcoma lesions.

The book ends with Melson heading for California to begin a new life and realizing with a note of sadness that he "would never have it all again."

In the forward Melson states that one of his wishes was for God to allow him to live long enough to finish The Golden Boy. I hope his life is spared too, so he can write more page-turners. It would be a shame for so gifted a literary voice to be silenced so soon.

This review was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (July/August 1992).