GLR November-December 2022

things. Who did read Merrick’s books? Not his agent, Merrick eventually realized, or even his editor at Avon Books. But thou sands of fans did. Sales figures are sprin kled throughout Joseph M. Ortiz’ new

nalism, novels, and plays. And you could argue it really began in the theater. That’s because Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic ’s film and theater critic, published an essay in The New York Times in 1966 titled “Homosexual Drama and Its

GORDON MERRICK AND THE GREAT GAY AMERICAN NOVEL by Joseph M. Ortiz Lexington Books. 359 pages, $120.

biography, Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel . One refers to over a million books sold. They did well in France and England. French critics considered Merrick a “serious” novelist. It helped that Merrick was fluent in French (one reason the OSS hired him), and so did the fact that he was critical of his own country’s shortcomings. His early books, which Ortiz calls “protest” novels, were about the cruelty of both sides in World War II, American racism, and class preju dice. The new ones were about sex, however, because Mer rick felt it was important that people know what gay men did in the sack. Merrick took pains to get his sex scenes just right, as Ortiz discovered after going through Merrick’s papers in the Princeton library. This, of course, opened Merrick up to the charge of writing soft-core porn. Gore Vidal claimed that he’d been blackballed by the critics after publishing The City and the Pillar because of its subject matter. Whether or not that’s true, this is sort of what happened to Merrick after The Lord Won’t Mind . Until then, the theme of homosexuality in his novels had been a minor one, his lead characters always straight, but with The Lord Won’t Mind the struggle of a gay man to find happiness became the main sub ject. Writing about his own life liberated Merrick, as it would so

Disguises” in which he asked why homosexual playwrights pretended their characters were heterosexual. He was pre sumably thinking of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , a 1962 play that led some to wonder if the bickering couples were not really four men, and whether a character like Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was not a man in drag. Albee always resisted this in terpretation, and so did Williams. But a writer named Mart Crowley accepted Kauffmann’s challenge when he wrote a play about a bunch of “fairies” struggling with internalized homophobia at a birthday party on the Upper East Side of New York. Gordon Merrick didn’t like the play. Years later, de fending his own novels in an interview with Michael’s Thing magazine, he denounced what he saw as gay writers’ tendency to confirm anti-gay prejudice by “descending to the lower depths, which are terribly distorted as in The Boys in the Band . The play was successful because of its presentation of the stereotype and the public accepts it.” Of course, the last forlorn lines include the host’s lament: “If we could just learn to not hate ourselves so very much,” and surely that was the driving theme of The Lord Won’t Mind as well. But there was a crucial difference: Merrick’s novel, unlike Crowley’s play, had a happy ending. The idea of giving his gay charac

many writers in the following decade. Four years after ignoring The Lord Won’t Mind , the Times reviewer praised Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner as “the most moving, monumental love story ever written about gay life.” It was only the first in an efflorescence of gay novels in the late 1970s. The main thrust of Ortiz’ book is to answer the question: Why did Merrick’s novels get so little respect from critics? The answer is to be found in the meticulous research he’s done. There is not, for anyone interested in the literary aspect of gay liberation, a page or paragraph without interest in this gracefully written study. “The purpose of this book,” Ortiz writes, “is not to argue that Gordon’s novels are master pieces that have been unjustly banned from the upper echelon of gay literature.” Nor is it, strictly speaking, a biography of Gordon Merrick. It’s the story of a book; but because it’s this book, it is about gay liberation. It reminds us that the lat ter was not just Stonewall and Pride parades; it was a cultural battle, con ducted via movies, TV shows, jour

ters a hopeful future was something Merrick had dreamed of since read ing E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice , the book Forster chose not to publish during his lifetime (which Merrick read in manuscript). At its end, the two lovers are about to leave England to find a happy life together, far from the society that proscribed their love (exactly, you might say, what Mer rick did in his own life). Crowley’s play was criticized by many for painting too dark a picture of gay men, while others felt it was bril liantly honest—a debate that goes on to this day. And it’s tempting to see The Lord Won’t Mind , which ap peared two years later, as a reply to Crowley’s work. But Merrick’s novel was no more inspired by Crowley’s play than it was by Stonewall, Ortiz points out. Merrick had begun writ ing it in 1967, before both events, and he was already showing it to publishers in 1968, when he was liv ing on the Greek Islands. And yet, Stonewall, Crowley’s play, and Mer rick’s novel were responses to the same forces that were moving Amer

Cover of the 1970 edition.

The G & LR

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