Shawn's comments (member since Oct 10, 2008)

Shawn's comments from the Guilty Pleasures group.

... and of course there are the Ken-and-Ken Gordon Merrick novels, The Lord Won't Mind and An Idol for Otheres---beauty, beauty and more beauty! i should think they wouldn't survive a second reading, but for me they were gifts from the gods back in the 70s/80s.

i understand, but still have a strong reference to that novel. if there ever was a work of fiction that anticipated the AIDS crisis, it was Holleran's Dancer from the Dancer. haunting, lyrical and sad with a sense of foreboding. i read that novel just before the AIDS crisis struck---or before I became conscious of its ravaging nature, back in the mid 1980s---and I've often wondered what Holleran knew, or was he merely prescient. Read one other of his books: Nights of Aruba; can say i remember it, frankly.

i loved Rechy's book. actually, there was an interview with him in the last issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review. I don't remember knowing that the novel was unabashedly autobiographical... and he was quite a terror to agents, book reviewers, etc.

... i liked this book, but loved Leavitt's Family Dancing---his best work, to my mind.

Patricia Neil Warren's The Front Runner (1974), about a love affair between a track star and his coach. The humanizingly beautiful, natural and passionate relationship offered in this tender novel stood as stark contrast to the demonizing of gay people throughout American life. Nell's alternative universe liberated me from the small-minded, poisonous intolerance I experienced in the 1960s/70s Midwest... and inspired my imagination toward other narratives.