Gay Uncle Patrick To The Rescue

Among the "10 Best Books of May" selected by the book reviewers at the Christian Science Monitor Weekly magazine (May 31, 2021 issue) is The Guncle by Steven Rowley (Penguin Random House). The novel, says the magazine, is "about a [gay] sit-com star who becomes the reluctant--and unconventional--caretaker of his niece and nephew," who call him Gay Uncle Patrick or GUP. As a result of him taking them "into his Palm Springs home," states The Hollywood Reporter (June 2, 2021) he "introduc[es] them to his outsize life and unique wisdom and bring[s] about healing for all three."

According to Variety (June 2, 2021), the movie studio Lionsgate has acquired the film rights to The Guncle, with Rowley executive producing as well as writing the screen adaptation.

The book, sure to be a nominee for a Lambda Literary Award next year, sounds like a fun read. I'm eager to get my hands on a copy.

Entering A Gay Bar Alone

Remember when you first went to a gay bar--alone? Do you remember feeling uneasy, uncertain, and just plain scared? The late poet/novelist Melvin Dixon's short story "Boy With Beer," will help you relive that first experience.

The story, first published in a magazine called Pique, relates the experience of a young black gay student as he prepares to enter the gay bar scene, answering the call that inevitably beckons, most, if not all, gay men sooner or later.

In a cinematic style, Dixon presents the young man's life and all those who are or have been a part of it in flashbacks that interfere with his decision to come out of the closet and accept his sexual orientation.

The story is a sympathetic and realistic depiction and should be must-reading for all gay men, especially gay youth, so that they can look at themselves in a positive light and communicate that positivity to others, both gay and straight.

In a telephone conversation, Dixon indicated to me that the bar in "Boy With Beer" was inspired by Andre's, a now-defunct black gay working-class bar in Harlem. (Today, a shopping mall complex that includes the Magic Johnson movie theatre sits on that site.)

Melvin Dixon, who was a professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York and the author of numerous poems and two novels, would have been very pleased to learn that "Boy With Beer" had been read by actor Courtney Vance on the stage of New York's Symphony Space theatre for broadcast on public radio's short story series, Selected Shorts.


NOTE: Parts of this edited version was taken from the 1984 first draft of a proposed introduction to "Boy With Beer," possibly for the black gay and lesbian supplement I guest edited for the New York Native. A sentence in the first paragraph of the draft states that Dixon's short story was being "reprinted for the first time with the permission of its author." The story never appeared in the supplement, instead a poem by Dixon was included in the supplement's poetry centerfold. The poetry centerfold was a first for the Native. They never did another one. This draft (a typescript) was dated April 22, 1984.

A Ringside Coming Out Story

The Final Bell
By M. S. Hunter (Alyson Publications, 191 pp., paperback)

Many men, especially if they're straight, would deny that boxing has a homoerotic appeal to them. But there's little doubt that it does. In M. S. Hunter's novel, The Final Bell, this appeal is mentioned early on. The "intense and intimate contact" of "nearly naked men" causes both spectator and participant to either sublimate or indulge these desires, much as modern dance does.

These same men would also deny the existence of gays in professional boxing. This belief would be instantly eradicated if gay boxers followed the example of Stormy Rhodes, the novel's black protagonist: break the silence.

Rhodes, a welterweight from the tough streets of Harlem, at the start of  The Final Bell is deep in the closet. So deep that not only is he silent about his sexuality, he's also silent about his poetry writing. "I can't have people in my profession knowing I write poetry," he tells Carlos Quesada, a gay Puerto Rican poet and airline ticket office employee, who he meets at a poetry reading and later falls in love with. [ A welterweight boxer weighs approximately 147 pounds.]

Carlos, because he has "a conservative family and a homophobic boss at work," named, interestingly Mr. Helms, is also closeted. But not for long. When Stormy wins the welterweight championship, he announces in the ring his homosexuality and kisses Carlos on national TV, which causes Carlos to wish "he could find a hole in the floor and fall through it."

From that moment on, all hell breaks loose: Stormy's trainer quits, Carlos eventually loses his job, they receive crank phone calls, and a rift develops in the Quesada family. But Stormy is convinced that he and Carlos "can take on the world." Carlos, on the other hand, is not so sure.

In all this chaos, there is a silver lining. Stormy gets his book of poetry published and becomes a hero to the gay community. His status as the first openly gay boxer lands him the grand marshal spot in New York City's Gay Pride March. Then tragedy strikes.

The Final Bell, set in 1997, would have more punch, no pun intended, if the story had been told from either Stormy's or Carlos's point of view and if Hunter weren't afraid to show explicitly two men engaged in sexual intimacy.

Hunter reveals his tin ear for African-American speech when he has Stormy say things like, "And this must be your brother Regilio what you tol' me about." He should read John Edgar Wideman.

Another flaw in the novel is Stormy's naivete, despite his "sophistication" about poetry. Wouldn't it occur to such a public figure that if he outs himself that he would be idolized in a symbol-starved gay community? And it's strange that Carlos isn't angry or standoffish for a time after being outed by his lover without his consent.

The Final Bell's best scenes, however, take place inside the ring, where Hunter's blow-by-blow descriptions are tension-filled.

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (March/April 1995).

"Streetboy Dreams": An Unusual Love Story

Streetboy Dreams is Kevin Esser's first novel, published by the New York-based Sea Horse Press, and is the story of an oftentimes stormy and frustrating love relationship involving Peter Versani, a young schoolteacher and a 14-year-old streetboy named Gito Lopez whom Peter meets one night in a neighborhood bar while the boy is selling candy from a cardboard box. It is the beginning of a relationship that results in Gito, an orphan, moving into Peter's apartment and Peter discovering, and accepting, his attraction to adolescent boys.

The author, a 30-year-old elementary school music teacher, has completed another autobiographical novel Mad to Be Saved, which "deal[s] with my life between the ages of 14 and 22."

Esser has had 30 short stories published. Among them a trilogy set in Morocco: "Renaissance Boy" (his favorite of the three) published in Panthology Three; "Memory of Khalid," NAMBLA BULLETIN; and "Tangerine Daze," which was also" in a NAMBLA publication ."

The Joliet, Illinois native, who calls himself a nomad, has lived in Boston, London, Paris, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Mexico. He now lives in a small town in Illinois, " a little factory town of 40,000 people. It's just a typical middle western city but I've been here so often, off and on for so long, it's pretty much home. I use it as a home base."

There is, according to Esser, no gay life to speak of in his small town which doesn't bother him one little bit. "There's people here," he said, " and that's all I'm interested in. Gay bars, gay cinemas, gay this, gay that, I've never been involved in that anyway. I try to stay in the shadows [he laughed] as much as possible."

The youngest of two children (he has a brother), Esser, half Italian and half German, grew up as an Italian. (His immediate family had no involvement with the German side of the family.) Esser's Italian background probably explains why he made Peter, a principal character in Streetboy, a member of that ethnic group.

Esser is six feet tall, weighs 180 pounds, has brown hair and eyes, wears a beard and glasses. The glasses, he claimed, causes people to think he looks professorial.

Esser spoke with me via phone from his home in Illinois.

Charles Michael Smith: How much of Streetboy is autobiographical?
Kevin Esser: It's almost completely autobiographical. I jumbled around a few events in order to make it more dramatically pleasing. The relationships, the settings, the characters were all real.

CMS: What inspired you to write the book?
KE: Well, mainly because I had never read a book on the subject that had pleased me before. So I decided to write one of my own. I was tired of books that either dwelled on nothing but the negative aspects of affairs like that via the self-pity and the despair involved or mostly things that Pan, a magazine from Amsterdam, had come out with. Stories that were just fantasy and unrealistic. They publish an anthology once a year called Panthology. They're stories that have to have a happy ending. Always it's just man meets boy, the boy falls in love with the man, and they live happily ever after. I wanted to write something a little more realistic, dealing with the situation as it would have really happened. Something a little more well-written. There seemed to be a dearth of talented writers in the field. I wanted to see if I could turn out a little better product.

CMS: How long did it take you to write Streetboy?
KE: About three months. it was the first novel I had written so I was more or less teaching myself how to write the thing as I went along. It took a lot of rewritings. The second novel went much, much faster. Of course, I wasn't using [in Streetboy] the style that I was most comfortable with either. I deliberately used a very, sort of, orthodox, traditional writing style.
Since it was my first novel, I didn't want to try anything experimental which is usually the way I write. I wanted to write an unusual love story that wouldn't turn off any readers because of stylistic excesses or whatever. The second novel is written in a much more, sort of, lyrical, experimental style. I thought I could get away with it at that point. I already knew my editor and had some connections. The way it turned out I was right about that. [With] Streetboy, I wanted to play very safe. In the second novel, the style is part of the story because the main character is slightly crazy at the time so the style is slightly lunatic also. It's told in the first person so there's a much stronger feeling of the character's voice involved in the story. 

CMS: Were you afraid you might get a great deal of criticism from people who are not sympathetic to this type of love affair?
KE: That doesn't bother me. However people react to it is their problem, not mine.

CMS: How long have you been involved in man/boy relationships?
KE: Since I was about 14 I've been sexually active. As soon as I became an adult then I became the adult in the situation instead of the boy.

CMS: At 14 were you involved with older men?
KE: Well, no, actually not. Just with other boys at that point.

CMS: When did you decide that you were attracted to boys?
KE: It was never a conscious decision, just a matter of allowing myself to become involved with whoever I chose to at the time and allowing relationships to develop. In a lot of cases, it's just a matter of not cutting a relationship off because situations develop like that all the time which you can really fall into very easily. I don't go out looking for them very often really. I put myself into situations, just leave myself open to things, see what happens. I don't want to get too specific either.

CMS: When your boy lover grows up, does the relationship continue in some way?
KE: Actually every situation I've been involved in either the boy or I have moved away while the relationship is still going on or immediately after. I've always led a very nomadic lifestyle. There's never been a situation where the boy has grown up and I've still been around. I never met any kids that I knew after they have grown up.

CMS: Is it possible for you and the boy to continue having sex well into his adulthood?
KE: Hmmm, no. Probably the sexual aspect of the relationship would end. We could just remain friends. I certainly wouldn't, as I've seen it described in a lot of literature, just use the boy sexually and then cast him aside. That wouldn't happen. We'd certainly remain good friends. All the relationships have been based on a lot of friendship and genuine affection, not just some sort of hustler affair.
Adult males don't excite me sexually so there'd really be no more chance of that than if I had a sexual affair with a woman.

CMS: Wouldn't you say that your attraction to boys may be due to a desire to stay youthful? Or did it come about because of your lack of confidence in dealing with adults sexually and socially?
KE: I never bothered to explore it really very deeply. It's just what I find beautiful. It's my aesthetic perception of the world. I find the ideal of physical beauty in adolescent boys. That's what I find most attractive.

CMS: It seems to me that the availability of boys is much easier in Mexico, for example, than it would be in the United States.
KE: It is much easier in other countries. The cultures are much different in the United States, England, and a couple of other places. There're really exceptions to the rule as far as attitudes towards sex are concerned. Even in countries like Morocco where the religion very strictly forbids homosexuality, there's sort of a double-edged sword. There's a very long and deep-rooted tradition of man/boy love in the culture itself underlying the religious attitudes which isn't true in this country at all.
In Morocco, a man/boy relationship would be preferable to a man and a girl. The girls are kept very closely guarded. The boys are allowed to run totally free. So it would be the reverse in countries like that. A man having an affair with a young girl would be much more objectionable than fooling around with one of the boys.

CMS: In ancient Greece, man/boy love was quite prevalent and accepted.
KE: That's all through the Mediterranean, even now.

CMS: Would you prefer to live overseas?
KE: I would prefer to be able to visit there as often as I'd like. I don't think I'd want to live there as much as I like one aspect of the culture. I am a product of this society. I still like hot showers and Big Macs and color TV.


This article was originally published in the New York Native in a slightly different form in 1984.

Of Prima Donnas And Bisexual Men

Not a Day Goes By by E. Lynn Harris (Doubleday, 288 pp.)


Not a Day Goes By, whose chapters are mercifully short, tells the story of the ill-fated love affair of Basil Henderson, an ex-football star-turned-sports agent and Yancey Braxton, an extremely ambitious prima donna stage actress. Both characters, products of dysfunctional families, are planning to get married. But Basil has a lingering question: "[C]an a diva and a dude like me ever settle down?"

In the prologue Basil calls Yancey to inform her that their wedding is off for good. (This part of the story appears too early to create suspense.) Then it backtracks to the day of their love-at-first sight meeting at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center. From there subsequent events and revelations (one in particular--Basil's bisexuality--could hurt his chance of being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame) work to doom their marriage plans.

Although the macho, slightly homophobic Basil and the manipulative, self-centered Yancey are described in the dust jacket copy as "two very unforgettable characters," that label rightly belongs to Yancey's cold-blooded, man-grabbing femme fatale mother, Ava, herself an actress. Currently married to a wealthy computer whiz she met on a flight to Hawaii, Ava is ever on the prowl (she already snared the package delivery man) and will stop at nothing to get what, and who, she wants. And that includes acquiring a son-in-law so that Yancey can fleece him of his hard-earned wealth and then divorce him. If Harris had written, a noir novel, a la James M. Cain, Ava would be a standout. I wanted to hear more from her, and less from Basil and Yancey.

Harris's alternate use of first- and third-person narration is annoying and distracting. Basil's scenes are told in his voice, while Yancey's are told in the third person. It's as though Harris was not confident enough to write from a woman's point of view.

Also, the sex scenes always involve Basil and Yancey. But if Basil is a bisexual, there should be a scene or two showing him with a man rather than having him reminisce about an old flame who "could deep-throat the jimmie like a fire-eating circus performer." Does Harris believe that too much detail about two men in bed would turn off female readers?

Overall, Not a Day Goes By is formulaic and is the literary equivalent of junk food. There is very little in it that is thought-provoking. And it certainly isn't stylistically innovative or challenging to the status quo.

This article was originally published in the New York Blade (August 11, 2000) and reprinted in the Washington Blade (September 1, 2000).

A Black Gay Man's Personal Odyssey

The End of Innocence: A Journey Into the Life by Alaric Wendell Blair (South Bend, Indiana: Mirage Publishing Co., 249 pp, paperback)

While aboard a Greyhound bus enroute to his native city of Chicago, Fitzgerald Washington, the "scholarly, articulate, and light-skinned" black gay protagonist in Alaric Wendell Blair's debut novel The End of Innocence: A Journey Into the Life, pulls out a copy of his favorite book Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. "This would be my sixth time reading the book since I got it," he declares.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about The End of Innocence. One reading is enough for me.

Unlike Baldwin's classic novel which seriously deals with sexual identity and the ramifications of love, Blair's novel has a nineties TV sit-com approach to these subjects, with punchlines, catty remarks, and pop culture references (e.g. Joan Collins, Patti Labelle, Oprah, et cetera) to boot.

I'm disappointed that Blair, "an educator, journalist, and activist in the Indiana community where he resides" (according to the back jacket copy) hasn't produced a novel worthy of his background--something that is complex and intellectually stimulating, a la Baldwin or Toni Morrison.

The End of Innocence  is one of these tiresome coming-out novels. Following Fitzgerald from a summer camp "for bored ghetto children" to high school to predominantly white Harmon College to his enlistment in the navy, it reads more like an autobiography or memoir than it does a work of fiction.

As far as young Fitzgerald is concerned, despite his sassy snap diva demeanor, he is very insecure and naive (particularly about gay life). I found it hard to believe that a young gay man living in the 1980s, in Chicago, would not know about the rainbow flag and the pink triangle. (A black lesbian student at the college educates him about the symbols.) If the story had been set in the 1940s or 1950s, and the main character was from the sticks, it would be more believable. but at a time when gay life is visible on TV, in the movies, on national magazine covers, I don't think so. I don't even think straight people are that uniformed about American gay culture.

Also, all or most of the gay male characters (black and white), Fitzgerald included, are depicted as very effeminate, or as Fitzgerald would put it, act "more than a woman," saying things like "[y]ou young girls tickle me." Even in the mid-80s black gay men were caught up in what Michelangelo Signorile, the gay writer, would call the cult of masculinity and would frown at and avoid socializing with effeminate men. Fitzgerald conversely suffers very little negativity as a result of his admittedly "flamboyant behavior" in an increasingly macho gay environment.

Moreover, aside from his naivete ("I wonder if Rockwell or Kevin is gay. Mel could be, but I don't think so because he's fat"), his attitude about what is "real sex" have a Clintonian ring. For example, early in the book, after a sexual encounter (his first ever) with Denise, a promiscuous neighbor two years his senior, he still thinks of himself as "still a virgin because I hadn't achieved an orgasm with her." A later gay tryst doesn't rate as real sex either because it involved oral, not anal, sex.

The most interesting, and most promising, part of The End of Innocence are the last seven chapters. In these chapters, Fitzgerald joins the navy, goes through the naval equivalent of boot camp, and gets kicked out for being gay just as his naval career is beginning. Here is a missed opportunity. Blair could have expanded this section into a book-length indictment against the mistreatment of gay men in the military. It certainly is a topical and controversial issue that Blair could have used to give voice to those very rarely heard from in the media--black gay men in uniform.

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (March 1999).

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).

An Escort In Tangiers

Hello Darling, Are You Working? by Rupert Everett (William Morrow & Co., paperback, 240 pp.)

If you're an aficionado of  high camp, which I'm not, then film actor Rupert Everett's comic first novel, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, will probably be a welcome addition to your library. For me, the humor, British in this case, elicited not one laugh. It just went right past me.

Hello Darling, Are You Working?  takes place mostly in Paris. The protagonist is Rhys Waveral, an out-of-work British actor who once starred in an American soap opera. When Rhys, who goes by a number of names (Dorita, Wavy, et al.), depending on his mood and/or situation, loses all of his money in the 1987 stock market crash, he finds he has no other alternative to paying his enormous hotel suite bill but to turn to prostitution. Enter Mrs. Rikki Lancaster, a rich American widow "dressed to the hilt,...in her hallmark turban and cape and liberally splattered with chunky jewellery" and her sidekick, Miss Elida Schumann. Mrs. Lancaster over lunch offers to pay Rhys $100,000 to escort her to a costume party in Tangiers, Morocco--$50,000 upfront, the rest after they have done "the deed" (have sex) following the festivities. Rhys reluctantly agrees to the assignment or, in this case, assignation.

At the party in Tangiers, hosted by a flaming queen from the American Deep South, Ashby Montgomery de la Zouche, an interior decorator, Rhys dresses up as a fruit plate, a costume that takes him "almost as long to get out of" as it does "to get into...."

The other bizarre characters include: Peach Delight, a gorgeous transvestite who speaks in pidgin English ("You Rhys father? I Peach. I friend of Rhys."), Maurice Goodbuns, an aging actor who Rhys encounters on the streets of Tangiers disguised as a beggar, and Dim (the Brigidier) Waveral, Rhys's blustering father, who constantly berates (with glee) Rhys.

Divided into three acts like a stage play, Hello Darling, Are You Working? is liberally and wonderfully illustrated by Frances Crichton Stuart. The pictures are like the black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings found in a children's storybook. At the beginning of each chapter there is a headnote that summarizes the action therein.

Although Rhys is supposed to be a gay man, there is very little in the book to suggest this, which is another reason I found Hello Darling, Are You Working? of no significance to me as a reader or to gay literature in general. There are so much hijinks going on that the reader becomes exhausted and loses the thread of the story. The question arises: What is the point of it all?

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (November/December 1992).

Seeking Guidance From The Blue Lady

The Blue Lady's Hands by John Champagne (Meadowland Books/Lyle Stuart, Inc., 156 pp.)

The nameless protagonist in John Champagne's first novel, The Blue Lady's Hands is described in the dust jacket copy as being "vulnerable, funny but above all resilient." Vulnerable? Most definitely. Resilient? Well, perhaps. Funny? No way. If this guy represents the New Gay Man of the late '80s and '90s, we're in deep trouble. He is an absolute wimp, with a capital W. Throughout this novel, which reads more like a confessional, he is whining and handwringing, all because of his need to find a "man who could love me."

This search for love brings him to Andrea, a psychotherapist, who tries to help him overcome childhood experiences that have made him feel that his "love is bad." One of these experiences is seeing his mother sent away to a hospital for electro-shock treatments when she suffers a nervous breakdown. He believes he is to blame because he loved her too much. Andrea explains to him that "when something happens that doesn't make sense, that can't be made 'right' with a kiss or a hug, then we tell ourselves a story. We make up a reason, find some reason for why things happen the way they do. That way, the world will still make sense. ...So you decided that it had to be your fault. In that way, you could still have some control over the situation."

The other person who is helping the protagonist to know "what it means to love someone" is the Blue Lady, a character he admits does not exist, except in his imagination. He describes her as wearing "robes as blue as a clear sea on a sunny day" and as having a "face...so bright, so radiant, it hurts my eyes to look at her." From time to time her hands start "poking around inside of me" causing "terrible pains in my chest." This is her way of reminding him whenever he begins to "love someone who can't possibly love me back the way I'd like to be loved" that "love is so very hard to bear" at times.

Later, near the end of the book, after he's found a new (possibly permanent) lover named Daniel, he asks himself: "Could I possibly have made up the whole story of the Blue Lady? I don't know. ...But I believe in the Blue Lady,"

The guy is all mixed-up. Let's face it, after endlessly wading through his self-pity and insecurities ("Am I attractive? I wonder if I really want to be with anyone."), you begin not to care if he ever gets himself together.

The Blue Lady's Hands is so fragmented (there are no chapters; events are presented as vignettes separated by white space) that the story is a bit confusing at times. Even the significance of the Blue Lady's presence is equally unclear. And to make matters worse, the poetry that the protagonist writes as "conversations with myself," add nothing to the story and are, in fact, intrusive.

I don't have anything against nonlinear novels, as long as they are coherently written. This one, sad to say, is not. The dust jacket copywriter must have been talking about another novel when he or she wrote that The Blue Lady's Hands is a "triumph of storytelling."

Note: This article was originally written for the Lambda Rising Book Report (later renamed the Lambda Book Report) in 1988. The manuscript was later returned to me because they received it past the deadline. The real reason, I think, was that my review of The Blue Lady's Hands was considered too harsh.