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Book Review: Out of the Shadows
Mar. 28th, 2022 08:57 pmThe first time I found Walt Odets's Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives, I didn't buy it, and then it stuck in my head to such an extent that I had to walk back to the bookstore two days later to get it.
There's a lot going on in this book, including quite a few chapters about the impact of AIDS on the gay community and gay men's lives, both during the crisis stage and the current "what epidemic? Pay no attention to the HIV infection rates behind the curtain!" stage. Why yes, this does have uncomfortable resonance with the Covid future we are all going to share. Huzzah.
However, the reason I bought the book, and the part I liked best, are the life stories Odets shares of various gay men of various ages. I was particularly fascinated by the contrast between Odets's own story and that of one of his lovers, Matthias, both of whom came of age in the US in the 1960s.
Odets came from an unusually accepting family: he relates a story about his father walking in on Odets fooling around with a friend at the age of twelve, and his father said, "Oops, didn't know you were busy," and walked right back out. But he came to the decision (and he presents it that way: this was a decision he made) that he was gay only in his late twenties, after a number of girlfriends, when he decided that he just had a stronger emotional/sexual attachment to men, and particular to Matthias, his best friend from college.
(Odets suggests that there's a latent self-hatred in the "born this way" formulation - as if the only possible acceptable excuse for gay behavior is having no choice in the matter.)
Matthias knew he was gay from the age of six. He grew up in a trailer in Alaska with an abusive father, a hyper-masculine (but secretly gay) older brother, and an emotionally checked-out mother. Classmates bullied him mercilessly at school, but his kindly English teacher encouraged his talent, and Matthias ran away at age sixteen and got a scholarship to college, where he met Odets. While Odets was still figuring out his sexuality they spent a weekend cuddling naked at a hotel in Provincetown, and at the end of the weekend the proprietor made them a cake wishing them "Happy lifes!" And then Matthias grew up to be an award-winning Broadway playwright.
Now, what struck me is that if I used ANY of this in a book, I'm pretty sure readers would ding it as unrealistic. The cake incident and Odets's family are both far too happy (as we all know, gay life in Ye Olden Days was an endless gray slog), whereas Matthias's early life would be rejected as misery porn.
I think that often when people criticize something in fiction as "unrealistic," what they mean at bottom is that they don't want to read about it - that they are rejecting it as a part of their reality. Reality, especially historical reality, is bigger and messier and both better and far worse than we conceive it to be.
And also, when people ask whether we really NEED more stories of a particular type (viz: "Do we really NEED more coming out stories?"), what they often mean is that they, personally, are tired of this particular story. They have read five hundred coming out stories and they want something else, please. Which is fine! Cast off your chains! Read other stories! But this rarely has any bearing on what anyone else NEEDS. As Odets points out, large swathes of the United States are still basically unaccepting. There will still be a need for stories that deal with that for a long, long time to come.
There's a lot going on in this book, including quite a few chapters about the impact of AIDS on the gay community and gay men's lives, both during the crisis stage and the current "what epidemic? Pay no attention to the HIV infection rates behind the curtain!" stage. Why yes, this does have uncomfortable resonance with the Covid future we are all going to share. Huzzah.
However, the reason I bought the book, and the part I liked best, are the life stories Odets shares of various gay men of various ages. I was particularly fascinated by the contrast between Odets's own story and that of one of his lovers, Matthias, both of whom came of age in the US in the 1960s.
Odets came from an unusually accepting family: he relates a story about his father walking in on Odets fooling around with a friend at the age of twelve, and his father said, "Oops, didn't know you were busy," and walked right back out. But he came to the decision (and he presents it that way: this was a decision he made) that he was gay only in his late twenties, after a number of girlfriends, when he decided that he just had a stronger emotional/sexual attachment to men, and particular to Matthias, his best friend from college.
(Odets suggests that there's a latent self-hatred in the "born this way" formulation - as if the only possible acceptable excuse for gay behavior is having no choice in the matter.)
Matthias knew he was gay from the age of six. He grew up in a trailer in Alaska with an abusive father, a hyper-masculine (but secretly gay) older brother, and an emotionally checked-out mother. Classmates bullied him mercilessly at school, but his kindly English teacher encouraged his talent, and Matthias ran away at age sixteen and got a scholarship to college, where he met Odets. While Odets was still figuring out his sexuality they spent a weekend cuddling naked at a hotel in Provincetown, and at the end of the weekend the proprietor made them a cake wishing them "Happy lifes!" And then Matthias grew up to be an award-winning Broadway playwright.
Now, what struck me is that if I used ANY of this in a book, I'm pretty sure readers would ding it as unrealistic. The cake incident and Odets's family are both far too happy (as we all know, gay life in Ye Olden Days was an endless gray slog), whereas Matthias's early life would be rejected as misery porn.
I think that often when people criticize something in fiction as "unrealistic," what they mean at bottom is that they don't want to read about it - that they are rejecting it as a part of their reality. Reality, especially historical reality, is bigger and messier and both better and far worse than we conceive it to be.
And also, when people ask whether we really NEED more stories of a particular type (viz: "Do we really NEED more coming out stories?"), what they often mean is that they, personally, are tired of this particular story. They have read five hundred coming out stories and they want something else, please. Which is fine! Cast off your chains! Read other stories! But this rarely has any bearing on what anyone else NEEDS. As Odets points out, large swathes of the United States are still basically unaccepting. There will still be a need for stories that deal with that for a long, long time to come.
