Johnny Ray Rousseau's Mostly White World

Blackbird by Larry Duplechan (St. Martin's Press, 182 pp.)

While reading Blackbird, Larry Duplechan's second romantic gay comic novel, the term "crossover" kept springing to mind. It's obvious that Duplechan sees no value in writing about a totally or predominantly black milieu.

As in Eight Days a Week, the main character is Johnny Ray Rousseau, who is black and gay. However, this time we see him five years earlier when he was an 18-year-old high school student in a small Southern California town. We learn from the outset that "most of the black people live way out on the outskirts of town" (how convenient for Duplechan's storytelling purposes) and that at school "most of the black kids keep pretty much to themselves and the white kids to themselves."

Johnny Ray and Cherie Baker, a black girl who is in love with him, are the exceptions. All of their  cronies, male and female, are white. And these cronies are a mixed bag. Johnny Ray's closest friend, Efrem Zimbalist Johnson, a latent homosexual, seems to delight in sneering at those he feels are his intellectual inferiors, especially the pretty boys. Another friend, Carolann Compton, has a split personality that changes at will.

Sad to say, the most interesting parts of the novel are its sex scenes: the heterosexual one, involving Cherie which introduces him to sex, without diminishing his gay feelings and the homosexual one with a young filmmaker named Marshall Two-Hawks McNeill, which, for Johnny Ray, is the most satisfying of the two liaisons.

Johnny Ray sees himself as a "boy nympho" (the correct word is satyr). Throughout Blackbird, he is constantly at war with his libido, worried that he might, as he puts it, "throw a rod" (have an erection) at inopportune moments. And when those moments occur, "I recite the Twenty-third Psalm to myself, very quickly." This obsession leads Johnny Ray to admit, with a bit of self-derision, that "I get an awful lot of hard-ons, and a pretty good percentage of them seem to end up in my right hand. In other words, I jerk off quite a lot which bothers me sometimes, like maybe I do it too much."

If Larry Duplechan were a much more careful writer, a lot of the inconsistencies that appear in Blackbird would have been greatly reduced, particularly the more obvious bits of information, some of it carryovers from the first book. For example, whatever happened to David, his younger brother, who because he was better-looking, played a significant role in how Johnny Ray viewed himself physically?: "I truly came to abhor my flat nose and (to me) overlarge lips,...." It seems that Johnny Ray has become an only child.

Elsewhere in Blackbird, Johnny Ray, in the first-person narrative, reveals that his father looks like Harry Belafonte, and that he has always had "sort of a crush on my dad. I mean, he's so strong and so very handsome." In another part of the book, he states that one particular guy didn't appeal to him because "he wasn't my type, which is blonde." I would have thought that his dad would be the prototype for Johnny Ray's attractions. After all, Belafonte is no blond. Interestingly, the father is completely absent from Eight Days a Week. Where was he?

And how, in a town with "a certain amount of racism," is it possible for his family to "go to the basically white Baptist church" while "[m]ost of the others go to the black church across town"? Johnny Ray explains it away by saying "we'd just as soon go to church in the neighborhood we live in." If only life were that simple, Johnny Ray.

Blackbird falls into that genre of gay literature known as the "coming-out novel," and carries with it the cliches found therein: the straight girl who tries to "cure" him, the parents who become distraught upon learning of his true nature,
et cetera. I think there is some merit to what writer Philip Lopate has said in the New York Times Book Review (October 5, 1986) about this genre: "...the coming out to one's parents scene is becoming an overworked convention in contemporary fiction."

It would be refreshing, for a change, if Duplechan stopped trying to be an assimilationist, and took pride in being of African descent. "I do not see," says Nigerian writer and 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Wole Soyinka, "how any writer, any artist in fact, can fail to be identified with his sources, with the origin of his inspiration." (The New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1985).

This article was originally published in The New York Student, a City University of New York publication (Summer 1987).