“My Brother, My Lover” (1985) is a loss of innocence tale with strong echoes of “The Wizard of Oz.” Two brothers, nearly twins, fall in love physically in the “Barrus/pair o’us” pattern but instead of Paris, the magic city is San Francisco. “Kansas” is a little community called “Pioneer” in the High Sierras not far from Tahoe. The town is on my road atlas and might be where Barrus’ paternal grandparents ranched. Barrus has a sister rather than a brother, to the dismay of journalists who don’t know about fiction, but he has doppelgangers.
Instead of a cyclone lifting Dorothy’s house away from the Kansas farm, it is a lightning strike that incinerates house and grandparents. I hope this is invented and not true. The brothers begin a new house, but the older brother leaves. Soon the first person narrator goes looking for him. As the boys have grown up, they have always known that San Francisco was where “sex” was so that’s where they both go.
The following episodes could be worked into equivalence with the Tin Man (heartless sadist), the Cowardly Lion (Miss Mary Vicious is not the same as Prairie Mary who hadn’t been invented yet), and the Scarecrow (the rich guy) but that would be trying too hard. The real elements I’d bet on are the yellow house and the long, long rides on the bus as the narrator searches and scans, slowly beginning to flirt. Historically “leather” has been invented as the definer of “manly” power-gay, but there is no mention of AIDS. The equivalent of Toto (and Navajo) is an Irish setter pup.
There is a strong “take-down” of the porn movie industry that rings true. I think I glimpsed Jack Fritscher and his partner. Mostly things move right along, going downhill, until it seems briefly as though all is lost in Manhattan at the Mineshaft and then at St. Patrick’s Cathedral where the elusive brother is getting married to a high society belle (female) and the narrator realizes that he has been on a hopeless search, destroying himself. Miss Mary Vicious (née Glinda, the good witch) hands him the ruby slippers and he goes home. It turns out well, though some people may not be happy with that ending, preferring to be fashionably cynical.
“Anywhere, Anywhere” (1969) is an earlier novel and only gently sexual. “My Brother, My Lover” (1985) has more squirmy-spermy sequences to please those who are reading for porn.
What I was seeing as I read was quite different, a tension between the natural man of nature (the Barrus men’s hunting/fishing/ranching in the wilderness) and the arts man, possibly a denizen of the world admired by a mother who may have subscribed to those magazines, like the Saturday Review of Literature, about the major writers, expressing admiration of them. Culture in those days was defined and guarded by the graduates of fancy universities that could only be entered through certain gates, mostly money and status. But there are always parallel worlds and the one forming in San Francisco in those days was both rich and open in quite different ways. So in went the real Barrus, by this time the father of a small but tough daughter. He was actually working for the United Nations and hobnobbing with photographers. Then, soon, editing and writing for Drummer, MACH, Genesis, Advocate, Hustler and Mineshaft.
“My Brother, My Lover” is not an Armisted Maupin story, full of charm and friendship, though this book describes roughly the same time and place. My female boss in Portland (where the openly gay mayor has just stumbled in a major scandal over his same-sex adventures) in the Nineties loaned me the full set of Maupin’s tales, evidently under the impression that I was gay -- which I am not. I think she would have liked it better if I were. Just as some people would like this story better if it were written by a “real” homosexual instead of someone who married a woman. As it was, being mistaken for gay raised a lot of questions in my mind that have expanded as our culture staggers along with some of the same wondering, ever more complicated by research.
When Barrus married and left San Francisco, he went to Indian country under a death cloud of friends wiped out by AIDS. The experience shows up in “Genocide” (1988) where the dystopia is very much like the one in Spielberg’s “Artificial Intelligence” and the theme of brothers continues. (AIDS was first recognized and defined in the early Eighties, between the two Barrus books. He married and left San Francisco in 1989.) “Selective Service” and “To Indigo Dust” were written in the next couple of years. I haven’t read them. The first “Nasdijj” book, drawing on the reservation experience, came out in 2000.
A writer must spin from his or her inner world of memories and lessons a virtual world with enough detail and narrative drive to carry a reader along. “My Brother, My Lover” does this, though some people will be reading only to get off on the steamy parts, which is always the case with a book that talks about sex. This is not a long book, but it is an earnest one. The tension between a somehow innocent young man in the midst of corruption and the older protective one who tries to advise and save him is the key to Barrus’ double-men, sometimes real brothers and others just kindred spirits or lovers.
Barrus always describes one male as older, stronger, more skillful, without ever letting the more child-like one trigger a semblance of pedophilia. Some of this material has to come out of his own relationship with his abusive father, but more of it seems to come out of a salvific friendship with a peer, a schoolmate, which he has also written about. This is the trustworthy key relationship in a world of hurt.
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