GLR May-June 2024

tle, to undo my boots, to remove my stockings, and to lie there bare-legged in the grass, to feel the earth and grass against my skin, the hem of my gown on my knees, my foot against hers.” After they kiss at the Fife Fair of Curiosities (bearded women, dwarves, fortune tellers, a cat circus) there is a spine-tingling, blood-curdling incident when they spot a frightening beast that may or may not have been real. Something “big. Black. Deep.” The creature appears again at crucial moments of mounting sexual tension—when they remove their corsets to expose naked skin to air and experience an exotic sense of freedom, when they skinny dip in a lake. It is a “thing [that] had the proportions of a human. But it was larger. Wider. The skin was dark, and it had hair on its back and legs. The arms were long, as with an ape, but it was not an ape. The head was big, coarse, it had human fea tures, but not in the right proportions. It had small eyes and a small nose, but the mouth was huge.” Indeed, it’s starting to look a lot like the end result of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment. Tales of witches, monsters, and mythic characters domi nate both narrative sections. The novel opens in Cologny dur Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, is an award-winning book critic in the Los Angeles area. S OMETIMES our pre-Stonewall history can feel downright prehis toric. Few of us lived through Sen ator McCarthy’s red-baiting and the “lavender scare,” when LGBT people were purged from jobs in the federal gov ernment. Some of us do, however, remem ber times when our bars and clubs were routinely subjected to police raids, which continued into the late 1970s. Patrons could be roughed up by rogue cops, arrested, fingerprinted, and photographed like criminals. Worse, their names, ages, addresses, and places of employment were pub lished in newspaper accounts of the raids, causing them to lose their jobs, their family ties, their homes, and sometimes their very lives. Such raids were commonplace in American cities in the 1960s, including in New York, where things came to a head at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. Edward Cahill’s novel Disorderly Men begins with just such a police raid on the fictional Caesar’s bar in New York’s Green wich Village in the early 1960s. In the midst of the raid, we meet the sundry patrons whose lives Cahill portrays in the novel. Roger Moorhouse is a 39-year-old closeted gay man, an ex fighter pilot who served in the Pacific during World War II. He is now a bank vice president, married, with a wife and two young kids, and he commutes into the city every morning from a northern suburb. He is arrested along with Andy, a young blond whom he was hoping to take back to his hotel room for the night. Julian Prince, a young associate professor of literature Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most re cently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. May–June 2024

ing the “witching hour” of three a.m., when “sheet lightning persists” and the weather whiplash of death pollutes the Geneva atmosphere. When it flashes back to Dundee, family story nights resurrect folktales of a being with “the head of a man, the body of a fish” or the myth of The Draulameth, a sea monster that understands humans, dragging them to the edge of the sea where they go willingly until “the deeper you go, the more firmly the sea embraces you. Your head goes under. ... Breathing no longer means anything. You think you are happy. Then it appears, its tongue licks your temples, and your heart flips inside your chest. The beats last hours. And with every beat of your heart, a piece of you disappears—until you no longer exist.” These grotesque images feed Mary’s fertile mind. A dome of doom haunts Mary every night with residual memories of her dead daughter. It permeates her waking life and insinuates itself into her imagination, ultimately reaching into the realm of her writing about “the most frightening thing in existence. Longing, loss, grief.” Eekhout’s Mary Shelley and the Birth of Frankenstein may send you back to read the original Frankenstein . Her deft de construction of the story and her own imaginative reconstruc tion are spellbinding and unique, like the original book.

The Many Ways to Wreck a Life

at a NYC college, is there with abstract artist Gus, his new boyfriend. Danny Duffy is a 23-year-old manager of a produce store who lives at his mother’s home and is rou tinely tormented by his older brother Quinn, who suspects that Danny is gay. All of them are caught up in the midnight po lice raid, which disrupts their lives in dif

H ANK T ROUT

DISORDERLY MEN by Edward Cahill Fordham Univ. Press. 342 pages, $28.95

ferent profound ways. These men and others are all thrown into a police wagon and hauled off to NYC’s sixth precinct, but they experience dif ferent degrees of humiliation and ruin in the aftermath of the raid. Typical for the time, the men who appear to be more “re spectable,” more affluent, are treated rather gingerly: the po lice interview them and then set them free. Thus, Roger and Julian get off with a stern talking-to but no arrest and no crim inal record. (The real reason for their being let go becomes clearer and more sinister soon afterward.) Danny isn’t so lucky. He has just been thrown out of his mother’s house by Quinn (who thinks Danny’s purple necktie confirms his gayness). During the raid, he is beaten severely with billy clubs and kicked around by a tall blond “Nazi” cop; he is arrested, fin gerprinted, photographed, and charged with frequenting a “dis orderly house.” He pleads guilty and is let go, but is still publicly outed in a newspaper report of the raid. Gus, the artist, seems to be the unluckiest: he pleads not guilty and is sent to Riker’s Island to await trial. The primary reaction of all the characters swept up in the raid is fear of what comes next. Mostly they fear losing their jobs and reputations. They have reason to be afraid: the after math of the raid includes a suicide, a clumsy attempt at extor

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