Bodice-rippers for Boys
Move over Harlequin Romance. Plus ReadOut shorts on Noel & Cole, surf movies, and queer bumper stickers. By Victor Zorn. ReadOut shorts by Scott Chalupa, Jack Varsi, and Suzie Lynde.
A loud-and-proud man I once dated kept a stack of Harlequin romance books in his bedroom. He liked the escapist reading, he said. Did he, I asked, identify with the heroines in the staunchly hetero novels? Usually he did, he replied, but he said he sometimes switched between hero and heroine from book to book. (Hmmm. Perhaps he was bi -- not that there's anything wrong with that.)
Anyway, I bet my ex-beau would enjoy the line of gay romance novels penned by Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier. Since 2003, the Boston couple has released three books (Razor Burn, Nick of Time, Spare Parts) under their own Romentics imprint. This month, a major publisher, Warner Books, issues the newest Pomfret and Whittier book, Hot Sauce. (The nation won't let gay couples legally marry, but corporate giant Warner apparently forecasts a bull market in gay love.)
Make no mistake: This is escapist reading--not that there's anything wrong with that either, particularly in this season of light-and-breezy page-turners. But beneath the bright, pleasant surface, something genuinely subversive is going on. The authors (who cheerily call themselves "the Scotts" in their communications with readers, including a regular Romentics newsletter) have taken the conventional romance-novel arc--boy meets girl, boy and girl overcome obstacles on the way to True Love and the altar, boy and girl presumably live happily ever after--and inverted it. The main characters are dudes, and they live in a world in which gay love is unremarkable, even if not the norm.
In Hot Sauce, the two young, handsome, wealthy muscle boys (this is after all a romance novel, not social realism) get hitched in not one, but two ceremonies. They live in Massachusetts, which sanctions that kind of thing, at least for now. In publicity materials, Hot Sauce is even billed as "the first same-sex marriage novel." True to form, a huffy group on the religious right has announced a letter-writing assault on Warner Books and its parent, Time Warner, to protest this latest outrage against traditional marriage. If those angry folks would just read one of the Scotts's romances, they would learn how utterly, sweetly ordinary gay love is. Come to think of it, that would spook them even more. In fact, here's a lit-protest idea for June: Buy a copy of Hot Sauce, wrap it up pretty, and mail it to the James Dobson and his Focus on the Family/Love Won Out minions with best wishes for GLBT Pride month.
Victor Zorn makes Pride travel suggestions elsewhere in this issue.
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READOUT SHORTS
Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates Stephen Citron Hal Leonard Corporation (www.halleonard.com) My latest read is not the dilettante's delight crammed with juicy gossip that the title suggests it might be. Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates is a comparative biography of Noel Coward and Cole Porter, with a paralleled chronology of both men's careers and world events, and an appendix analyzing the music and lyrics of selected songs. Though it does discuss both men's homosexuality, it does so without descending into tabloid gossip, and sticks to placing their relationships with both men and women in biographical context to their work and lives. The author, Stephen Citron--himself a composer--has written biographies of other figures in music, as well as a few books on music theory and composition. Neither dumbed down nor academically baroque, the book is fairly accessible to those who have no musical background or education, but does require even the more schooled of vocabulary to pick up a dictionary once in a while. Written with the same attention to detail, insight, and wit that marked both men as masters of music and theater--as well as pop icons of timeless influence-- Noel & Cole is a challenging read that is both educational and entertaining. [Editor's Note: Noel & Cole was published 13 years ago; this is the paperback release.] -- Scott Chalupa
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Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: the First Wave, 1959-1969 Thomas Lisanti McFarland (www.mcfarlandpub.com, 1-800-253-2187) Definitive histories have been written on everything from ancient Rome to the evolution of mankind itself, but no previous book, in my opinion, quite measures up to the cornucopia of sublime information that can be found in Thomas Lisanti's Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: the First Wave, 1959-1969 . Once you get past the shock and perhaps delight of finding blond surf stars Aron Kinkaid and Chris Noel on the cover of a 2005 hardback book (with a forward by Kinkaid, no less), inside you find practically everything you ever wanted to know about 32 of the best (and worst) "fun-in-the-sun teenage epics," including Gidget, Where the Boys Are, Beach Party, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, and also the stars like Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, and the late Sandra Dee, who made them at least partly watchable. Who exactly went to see these movies? Well, teenagers obviously, but since an awful lot of skin, and particularly male skin, was on display in these things, you can be sure that a lot of gay men knew exactly where the boys were on movie screens in the 1960s. Apparently these films contained some elements that were not so obvious four decades ago. In his introduction to Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies , author Lisanti discusses the gay subtext of some of the films: surfer boys feeding each other hot dogs, surfer boys sleeping together instead of sleeping with Deborah Walley, and at least two movies with coverboy Kinkaid in drag! Well, duh! Best bit of trivia: Kinkaid's real name is Norman Neal Williams. After becoming friendly with Armistead Maupin, Kinkaid allowed the writer to use his real name as the name of a character in Tales of the City . The character turned out to be a child molester. -- Jack Varsi
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I Can't Even Drive Straight! Chronicle Books (www.chroniclebooks.com) Do your part to piss off the radical right. Proclaim your rights to civil liberties with these 10 hilarious, tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker postcards: "The Closet Is Now Open," " Do Ask, Do Tell," "Caution: Queers on Board," "Honk If You're a Homo," "If God Didn't Make Homosexuals, There Wouldn't Be Any," "I Fell Pretty, and Witty, and Gay," "Same Sex/ Same Rights," "A Closed Mind Is a Wonderful Thing to Lose," "Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are," and "I Can't Even Drive Straight." Send one to a friend or slap one on your bumper and let everyone know you're proud by choice. -- Suzie Lynde
