Can a novel capture the tensions of recent gay history?

My last outing before the pandemic to a Broadway show, in the fall of 2019, was to see the play by Matthew Lopez Heritage, a seven-hour show which, by its size and scope, courts comparison with Angels in America. It was a polarizing play, one of those cultural events through which the queer men in my life felt either “seen” or distorted, so imposing was the will of the show to diagnose the particular pleasures and pathologies that constitute what we are. could call contemporary gay culture. at least as it exists among the dozen New York men, mostly white, who make up the dramatis personae of the play.

Ultimately Heritage, loosely adapted from EM Forster End Howards, was an exercise in anthropology as well as dramaturgy. At each intermission (six in all), we discussed with the audience its themes: sex, AIDS, friendship, literature, history and trauma (individual and collective, costs and hereditary). The show was by turns thrilling and maddening, with goals so explicitly representative that the conversations in the audience took on an odd meta quality, much like the intergenerational back and forth between the characters in the show. Sitting to my right was a homosexual with observable means who was satisfied, he told me, that my generation would have the chance to vote for a gay president. He had come directly to the theater, he added, from a fundraiser, which he himself had hosted, for the candidate for the Democratic primary at the time, Pete Buttigieg.

I remembered the exchange while reading the first novel Back to the party, by author Zak Salih, who investigates the alleged ideological discord among contemporary gay men with a similar scope. Set shortly after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling affirming the right of same-sex couples to marry and before the massacre the following year of 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub, the book begins at a gay marriage, in which Sebastian, the first of our two narrators, arrives “dressed for a funeral”. There he will come across Oscar, the second narrator and functional foil of Sebastian, for whom marriage equality is a kind of symbolic death, the arc of gay history relentlessly bending towards assimilation. The two are childhood friends, separated by time, distance, and awkward college dates; their fortuitous meeting at the wedding sets in motion the double story of the book. Throughout the work, the point of view alternates between the two, illuminating what Salih sees as a sort of rift between gay men today.

Sebastian is reminiscent of the alleged voter of Buttigieg, a metonymy for the domesticated millennial gay who is not on Grindr (referred to here as “Cruze”) and bristles with the word “queer” even when used by other gay men. At the wedding where he and Oscar meet, he mourns a breakup, “heartbroken and struggling to see this day as the cornerstone of … all the months I have spent soliciting same-sex marriage outside of subway stations. and suburban grocery stores “. He sets his sights on Oscar, who passes the wedding reception scrolling for a quickie with an anonymous sticker called “A”.

Oscar, too, is a pastiche, his loud but hollow politics. He yearns, despite the epidemic, in the heyday of public baths and casual sex, “the grunt of liberation behind louvered doors”, deploring at every turn the siege of gay bars in the neighborhood in the hands of straight men or women. the bane of “Saint Obergefell.” So, inspired by older gay novelist Sean Stokes, a sort of Edmund White figure whose candid portrayals of illicit sex Oscar seek to replicate, he swears in a show of superficial resistance from ” live only by rooster and rooster “.

In an off-putting first scene, angered by the sight of an aerial marriage proposal on Poodle Beach, the gay vacation destination in Rehoboth, Delaware, he turns to a nearby small child and recites a particularly obscene passage from one of these books. “I exploded in his mouth,” he reads to the kid. “He moans in gratitude at my gift.” Later, hoping to disillusion a straight woman with the idea that “we’re just a bunch of harmless queers,” he harasses her in a gay bar. If Oscar’s grievances about cleaning up gay culture are indeed valid – look no further than the NSA headquarters, sporting rainbow colors for pride month – they are often voiced under the form of a bratty provocation.

At the heart of the book is a huge and cumbersome question of what it means to be a gay man today, now that the identifier is neither a death sentence nor the seal of substantial rebellion. But here, as in Heritage, the question becomes its own kind of compulsion. The two works, although very different in their amplitude, have an emotional and historical weight only by association with tragedies not lived by its central characters, namely the AIDS epidemic and, in Back to the party, the Pulse shot. Under such conditions, these events begin to look like plots; they must ennoble, take a step back, as if queer history matters only to the extent that it embroiders the present, tells us how to be and for whom to vote. It is, however, more difficult, and perhaps premature, to tackle a fresher, less easily narrativized story, such as the series of breakthroughs and regressions – the equality of marriages, a homophobic mass shooting, the election of Donald Trump, the emergence of the first gay presidential candidate — that characterizes our present moment.

Salih’s book tries to do this by reading sometimes less like a novel than like a dialectic between Sebastien and Oscar, between assimilationists and liberators. If there is a happy medium on this continuum, it is suggested almost exclusively by the novel’s supporting characters, two of whom exist as symbols, who help expose the tyranny of the convictions of the two narrators. For Sebastian, a high school art history teacher, there is his pupil Arthur, in whom he sees not only the possibility of a proud adolescence, of which he has been deprived, but also the virginal and fresh face. of Caravaggio’s boy. The musicians. Although Salih writes well about art, Sebastian’s frequent allusions to different paintings expose his psychology, a fundamental inability to treat the people in his life as anything other than extensions of a thwarted desire. In “The Musicians” he sees “Arthur Ayer, rendered in oil, looking at me over the shoulders of a young man tuning a lute”. When he bluntly finds out that Arthur is on Cruze, certainly not a crime for a horny high school student, his projections are complicated. “No, I don’t think so,” he said when he learned that the “A” Oscar was flirting with on the app was indeed his student. “He’s not the type.

This moralistic perspective on casual sex, the idea that only a certain “type” of homosexual could seek it out, has already surfaced earlier in the novel. In New York for an academic conference, “inspired by the anonymity of the city”, Sebastian downloads Cruze “just to see what the other half was like.” But if the historical differences between radicals and incrementalists were often real conflicts of race, class and political ideology, it is only a question here of sexual habits, of a clash between the suits and the sluts. Where the book nods to the existence of other queer people on this continuum – to people of color or trans people, to those who live in countries less welcoming to non-normative sex – it does. in the extreme, a sort of superficial verification of its narrators. privilege which feels less motivated by the imperatives of the story and the character than by those of the representation. Sebastian, whose mother is said to be of Arab descent, watches “a [TV news] report on radical Islamic terror ”, focusing on images of state-sanctioned executions. “The free-falling body framed by sandstone columns, the rush to prospect,” he says. Here, what could have been an opportunity for the book to widen its openness is rather avoided. “What,” Sebastian asks simply, “Would Arthur think of such a thing?” ”

Where Sebastian focuses on Arthur, Oscar turns to aging novelist Sean Stokes, whose books function as a portal to an era of sexual debauchery. Oscar spends much of the novel praising him, despite being very promiscuous himself, having bet his gay good faith on his libido. The past, for him, is something elated, “a time when you could have the impression of living in rebellion”, he says, when being homosexual wanted to “get away with a murder. “. If Salih intends to reprimand the naivety of his characters, the novel too rarely calls into question the clear dichotomy from which it draws its dramatic tension.

IIt takes two tragedies to complicate the dogma of either narrator, although at this point the pair can feel like the personification of a debate. The debate itself is worth debating, pivoting on the question of what is lost when a once marginal community is emancipated by the heteronormative and provocative institution of marriage. In The New York Book Review, in 2014, Edmund White asked if “homosexuals risk covering themselves,” disinfecting those qualities that have historically distinguished us, “in order to obtain permission to marry.” If it was worth it, White said, “I can’t decide,” which seems like the truest answer possible. In Back to the party, older novelist Sean Stokes decides late in the book to marry, telling Oscar, who feels betrayed by the gesture, that getting married “seems, puzzled, like the strangest thing left to me. make”. Although incidental, Stokes is the novel’s most interesting character precisely because he plays against the type, confronting the futility of a perfect alignment of his identity, behavior, and politics.

The presence of such inconsistencies in everyone except our two narrators betrays the fundamental question of the book and, more importantly, reveals that this is some kind of red herring, resting on the hypothesis of types and tribes which may indeed permeate applications like Cruze but are ultimately reductive, at least in fiction. All art, to some extent, manipulates history for its own purposes. The characters in Heritage do it literally, bringing in EM Forster who often comes across as some kind of bright spirit to help them tell their life story. But in both Lopez’s play and Salih’s book, the queer story is unfolded as an affectation, wanting the viewer to feel represented – as some might, by a gay president – or just that he is. feels.