Book Reviews: One Gay Man's "True Stories," Plus Books About a "Secret" and "Entering Oblivion"

Novelist Felice Picano is a walking, talking, breathing encyclopedia of gay history. His experiences cross the spectrum of gay culture and his past memoirs are a window into the life and times of such celebrated names as Tennessee Williams and Bette Midler.

True Stories, Portraits of My Past is yet another glimpse into the eventful and fascinating life Mr. Picano has led. This is not his first memoir and indeed AfterElton.com gave his last memoir Art and Sex in Greenwich Village a glowing review.

If you don’t know who Picano is, don’t feel bad. Among my failings is a rather large gap in my knowledge of gay history and this book provided me a wonderful opportunity to fill in that missing knowledge a little.

Picano started Seahorse Press in 1977, which essentially pushed gay literature out of the shadows, giving it a legitimacy it had never before had. Later, he teamed up with Terry Helbing and Larry Mitchell to form Gay Press New York which went on to publish Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein.

To say Picano has had a profound effect on gay pop culture would be an epic understatement.

His latest memoir is not a linear tale of a certain period of Picano's life. It is instead a series of essays or anecdotes about the extraordinary people whom he has known. Picano himself puts it best when he describes it like this:

"I suppose this might be called an autobiography in the negative: showing me by showing those I related to, over the years."

True Stories reads like the transcript of a chat one might have with Picano if you were lucky enough to sit with him over coffee. He speaks of people with such casual familiarity that it feels like you should just know who they are. Sometimes that is difficult to follow at times, but it also serves to make the reader feel included in Picano's world.

If I have a fault, it's that sometimes the prose is a little thick, with sentences that run on far longer than expected. At times, it seems there is so much information Picano has to convey that he can hardly squeeze it all in without stopping to take a breath (or to add some periods!).

This is a memoir marked by tragedy and loss, and as such it reflects the deep heartache of a man who has lost many people he loved. It’s a chilling reminder of the way HIV and AIDS once laid waste to some of our best and brightest talents.

When Picano talks about how embittered he became towards life after witnessing so much death, I (who have lost a number of people I care about) found myself nodding along. This quote beautifully encompasses the nihilism one develops after encountering so much death.

“I’d lived with constant death for so long and so closely, that I’d really grown sick of living.”

Ironically, it was a man named James, himself dying of AIDS, who helped to show Picano to see the beauty in life again. After meeting him at a writer's conference, James asks Felice to be his friend--someone he can talk to and hang out with. In spite of--or possibly even because of--his situation, James views the world with wonder and hope. He is hungry to experience as much as he can in the time he has left.

Portraits From My Past makes no effort to rewrite history or make the author sound better in hindsight than he really was. He talks honestly about his shortcomings and doesn't gloss over the negative parts of those he is writing about. Everyone is shown to be simply what we all ultimately are — flawed human beings.

More than anything, though, this is a triumphant story of a man who lived his life to the fullest.

The Secret of Talmor Manor by Mathew Lang is a wonderful tale combining the modern world with the magical. This is Australian-born Lang’s first book and the author's bio on his website gives a glimpse of the quirky sense of humor that we see all throughout his book. I particularly like his wryly expressed hope that one day he will be released from his straight jacket.

After receiving a mysterious package, our protagonist Jake begins to have very odd dreams. In them, he finds himself in a strange place called Talmor Manor — an old mansion inhabited by some very congenial ghosts.

At first, and quite naturally, Jake dismisses the dreams as nothing more than the quirks of his very imaginative brain. He is a writer, after all, as well as a creative writing professor. To him it makes sense that the dreams are just his way of making sense of all the ideas he has and comes into contact with while teaching.

However, when the dreams grow more vivid, soon he can’t deny that something very peculiar is going on. Aided by his friend Logan, a charming (and bisexual!) young man who has been his friend since boyhood, he begins to try unraveling the mystery.

Lang has an attention to detail that I have not seen in many years. His eloquent depictions of the characters’ surroundings make it easy to imagine being there creating a richness to his world that is rare to find.

Unfortunately, while his descriptions are exquisite, he doesn’t do as well with moving his plot along. There are many places where he tells the reader to be afraid rather than letting the scene convey a feeling of terror.

The Secret of Talmor Manor also has certain plot elements that make me, personally, wince. Logan is into "New Age" philosophy and mysticism and this is how some of the magical plot elements are explained for the reader. Personally, I've just seen this done too many times and it sort feels like a cop-out to me.

There is also the problem of Jake being a writer himself. I always get an uncomfortable sense of self-insertion — the writer putting themselves in the story — when I see this particular plot device. I don’t know if that was what Lang was doing, but I'm personally biased against characters in books being writers themselves.

Nonetheless, for a first effort, I thought this book was really quite good.  It was slow in places and there were moments that I felt the narrative stumble, but liked the way the mystery unfolded, and more importantly, I really enjoyed the characters. If you like mysteries with a little bit of the supernatural mixed in, you will want to check this out.

C.M. Harris brings us Enter Oblivion, a story about a moody boxer from Brooklyn who finds himself in London in the mid 80’s. Harris, who studied writing at the Art Institute of Chicago, says she was fascinated with London while growing up in America’s Midwest and that was part of the impetus for the setting of this book.

Enter Oblivion begins with Vince, a moody boxer, entering a London dance club. It's immediately apparent that Vince is in a bad temper, but why he's in such a foul mood isn't made clear. Since his friends don’t seem to even notice, we're left to assume this just his normal behavior.

Perhaps it has something to do with Vince's idea that the men in the club are eying him. something for which he does not care. This isn't ever explained, and after several pages of his pissy little attitude, I'm tired of it and ready for an explanation.

Unfortunately, when we are given an explanation, it takes the character in a direction I just can’t condone.

“How many of these fruitcakes can go ten rounds with a WBA middleweight hopeful?”

Lovely. The possible attention from gay men actually disgusts him. Vince's constant state of belligerence leads him into multiple brawls with a local band of skin heads and no amount of pleading from his friends can convince him to back down.

The only really positive influence on Vince is O’Blivion, a massive man with red hair who has a fondness for skin-tight rubber suits. His size alone is enough to earn Vincent’s respect and attention.

Slowly, the angry young man is brought into O’Blivion’s world of music and 80’s theatricality, and while Vincent doesn’t seem to change, so much as he learns to be a tiny bit more tolerant of those “fruitcake” people.

His use of the term fruitcake and the gratuitous, hypermasculine way he perceives himself smack of things like internalized homophobia and effemphobia. While this sort of character doesn't interest me, I have to say that at least he was written consistently and I found him to be all too believable.

Unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this book. Anti-heroes are a tricky business. They can be done well — say, V from V for Vendetta. Or they can be done badly like, say, Thomas Covenant from his eponymous chronicles. But if there isn't something more, something under the bitterness and violence, that makes them at least somewhat relatable, then I simply can't enjoy reading about them. And I never really found that in Vince.