GLR November-December 2022

ican culture forward, at least in its willingness to admit that ho mosexuals were human beings. What’s so well done by Ortiz is his re-creation of the whole milieu in which all this happened. He may have set out simply to tell the story of a book that meant a lot to him as a young man—afraid that purchasing it would reveal his sexuality to the cashier. But his book ends up being a fascinating history of the arguments over just how gay people were to be portrayed. A S I WRITE, the media are running stories about the delicacy of getting the word out about monkeypox without stigmatizing its major target group, gay men. People are even nervous about the term “monkeypox,” since it seems to turn victims into out-of control primates screwing each other. But what gay men do in the sack has always made society nervous. Until the ’60s, gay fiction writing, save for a few isolated novels ( Finistère , City of Night ), had been confined to mass market paperbacks li able to face prosecution under the laws against sending any thing obscene through the mail. Homosexual novels were either commercial pornography or literature; and when the latter, they had to have a tragic ending. In the original ending of The City and The Pillar , the hero murders the man he loves. (Vidal later revised the ending, changing the murder to a rape.) Merrick’s two men end up committed to one another. Yet The Lord Won’t Mind irritated many gay critics. It was too romantic, too escapist, too glamorous, too much like soft-core porn. After Merrick began writing about gay men and gay sex, he was no longer considered a “serious” writer. He simply sold a lot of books. Was it prudery? There are, of course, the sex scenes. In his interview with Michael’s Thing , Merrick said: “it was impor tant that straight people know exactly what gay men did . Oth erwise, straight people would fill in the gaps with their own distorted, horrifying, stereotypical fantasies.” Others felt dif ferently. At a party in London, Edward Albee “lost his temper and screamed at Gordon: ‘Merrick, how dare you write all that crap! You have an eight-inch cock and I have an eight-inch cock but we don’t have to write about it, do we?’” Afterwards, Mer rick professed to have been confused by Albee’s reaction to his novels. “I didn’t know what it was about,” he said. “It was as if I were giving away trade secrets.” But Noël Coward was of the same mind as Albee. “My dear boy, that isn’t done,” he sup posedly told Gordon. “We don’t talk about it .” What was it ? The mechanics of gay sex. At the time, gay intellectuals seemed to be divided into two camps: those who urged us to put sex back into homosexuality, and those eager to show that we were not defined solely by what we did in bed. Merrick’s agent exemplified the split when one of his Avon paperbacks was to be serialized, and she chose to send it to Blueboy rather than to the more literary Christopher Street . The latter accepted ads for Merrick’s novels but did not review them. Or is what bothered the critics the fact that Merrick’s char acters seemed to have nothing to do with gay politics? Merrick, you could argue, had solved the problem of being homosexual in the U.S. by leaving the country. In France, he claimed, no body made a fuss about whom you slept with (if you were a for

eigner, perhaps; but if you were French, I suspect it was another matter, as is clear in the recent books by Édouard Louis). In Merrick’s own country, homosexuals were often lumped to gether with Communists. In his astute chapter on the “gay canon”—the surveys of gay literature—Ortiz points out that Merrick was criticized for not dealing with Stonewall and AIDS. Merrick, whose novels were quite autobiographical, wrote as if Stonewall and AIDS had never happened. But they hadn’t, to Merrick, because he was living abroad. Back in the U.S. for a book tour, Merrick criti cized Larry Kramer in an interview for comparing the plague to the Holocaust. (Kramer, when Ortiz tried to get him to talk about Merrick, told Ortiz he had no interest in Gordon Mer rick’s novels.) Merrick’s version of gay liberation was living with his lover in Hydra and in Sri Lanka. When asked by Bernard Geis to come out for the publicity campaign for his novel, Merrick declined. “The only thing I won’t accept is an in vasion of privacy,” he told Geis. “The book doesn’t prove any thing about me, any more than Crime and Punishment proves that Dostoevsky murdered old ladies.” The irony in all this—the eternal rivalry between art and best-sellers, between gay literature and what Isherwood called “fagtrash”—is that the trilogy begun by The Lord Won’t Mind is basically the story of two men, Charley and Peter, who maintain a relationship over a long span of time. They deal with classic gay issues: shame, internalized homophobia, the moral disap proval of family and society, and the temptation to hide in the closet. And Merrick, true to Maurice , gives his men a happy ending. It ends with the children they’ve fathered coming down the stairs in all their glory. In other words, it ends with some thing very like the current state of gay liberation: marriage and children. However, in Merrick’s case, it wasn’t a house in the suburbs of St. Louis; it was a place close to a beach on the In dian Ocean. Merrick chose to live outside the country that he “hated” (he told a French interviewer), no doubt because he didn’t see why he should wait for his fellow Americans to catch up with his own view of things. This view was a curious amalgam of the confidence of an entitled American—his lover Charles Hulse’s younger brother, after visiting the pair in Hydra, thought Mer rick a “pompous prick”—and the fear that his homosexuality would make him vulnerable to a society “where he would be doomed to hostility or derision or the half-world of exclusive homosexuality,” in the words of one of his characters. In other words, he was not attracted to the gay ghetto; he simply wanted to love men. Even the first pages of The Lord Won’t Mind betray this cu rious mixture of a desire to be free with an earlier, more con ventional, even snobbish age, this odd blending of Edwardian manners and modern sexual frankness. You find it in the open ing pages of The Lord Won’t Mind , where a man’s “penis” is re ferred to as his “sex”—as in: “He crouched down, and Peter’s sex leaped and quivered before him, the head as taut and smooth as ripe fruit.” After both men have had an orgasm and Charley is getting up to wash himself, he notices what Merrick refers to as “blood and other matter” on his skin. “Other matter” pre sumably means feces. That’s why, whatever else people want to call Merrick’s work, they can’t call it pornography, because we all know that in pornography there’s never any shit.

November–December 2022

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