Good, Better, Best: Three Gay Novels

This month, I'd like to recommend three novels, each one better than the next.

Boy Culture by Matthew Rettenmund (St. Martin's Press) is now available in a movie tie-in paperback edition designed to coincide with the movie's recent release. This immensely readable novel is about a hustler, only known throughout the book as "X," whose two roommates are also two potential lovers: Andrew, a romantically confused gay man whom X is sexually attracted to, and Joe, a 17-year-old party boy who is romantically attracted to X. What's a hot hustler to do?

X reveals, in a series of 23 confessions, that he has never let himself fall in love with anyone, although he has enjoyed couplings of every possible variety. A portrait of a love triangle, Boy Culture is a fun, quick read.

In a slightly more literary vein, Shakespeare's Sonnets by Samuel Park (Alyson Publications) is an enjoyable, romantic first novel about a young man, Adam Greenhurst, scion of a wealthy Greenwich millionaire. A student at Harvard University in 1948 — when it was still the all-male bastion of academic America — Adam has all the gifts of waspy entitlement. He's handsome, wealthy and confident. Girls in Boston and Cambridge know that he is a catch, and in fact, Adam is about to get engaged. However, as the story unfolds (in a men's locker room, no less, where a minor sting operation is about to catch student homosexuals), we see that Adam's heart (and desires) are elsewhere.

When Jean Hoffman, a handsome, outspoken student from the drama department who can easily quote lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet, barges into Adam's Renaissance literature course, there is spontaneous combustion. After discussing his exciting literary "find" about Shakespeare's sonnets with Adam, the two decide to explore these famous poems together. Jean, of course, has an ulterior motive. He immediately falls in love with Adam.

Adam, the boy who always does what is right, always anticipating everyone else's expectations, begins to feel that Jean — who is much freer at expressing himself and certainly is not concerned with his responsibility to others — has something to teach him.

At the center of this novel is Oscar Wilde's famous book The Portrait of W.H., where the famous Irish wit speculates that the "W.H." to whom the sonnets are dedicated is a boy actor, Willie Hughes, who, Wilde states, was Shakespeare's lover. Jean sees this as fodder for his own paper for the Renaissance class. Conversely, Adam is writing a paper about the dark lady of the sonnets, who he suggests is an African woman. Two theories, two different papers.

There is one beautiful scene, dramatic — or cinematic — in quality, in which the two college boys read the sonnets to each other one by one: one step forward if it is addressed to a lover, and one step back if it is written to a friend. They end up in each other's arms.

Add to the mix the Renaissance literature teacher, Neil, who is a closeted gay man who is also attracted to Adam. Suddenly the undercurrents of gay life at Harvard University in the late '40s become very interesting.

Park's sweetly written novel moves quickly and has several bursts of lyrical writing. Here is a passage later in the book when Adam begins to figure himself out, realizing he can be his own person: "When he was 7 years old, he had closed his eyes and felt his face the way a blind man would. He had traced his bones, the arch of his nose, felt the hollow of his cheeks, and the circle around his eyes. He wanted to do the same now, but to his soul this time. He wanted to feel his way inside himself, look for the core of his being, the quality of his heart."

Park has created good characters. Adam's fiancée, Clare, is shown to be a rather cold, ambitious girl. Adam's mother, on the other hand, is a needy, beautiful sophisticate (think Sharon Stone or Diane Lane all done up with designer gowns and hair). Adam's worldly father, with a French mistress, is actually quite articulate and tender in his scenes with his son. Shakespeare's Sonnets is a very good book and a solid debut from an accessible, warm-hearted writer.