About Racism, or Just Racist?

The first time I encountered the 1975 film MANDINGO was when it was displayed on video store shelves in the 1980s. Judging from the box cover, I assumed it was a Gone with the Wind-style historical romance, synonymous with boring in my teen-aged mind. I didn’t even bother to pick up the box to read the synopsis on the back, let alone rent it. Yet I did rent Rollover, a 1981 “thriller” that has all the pulse-pounding excitement of a federal reserve chairman’s public address, so clearly I wasn’t making the best choices in my teens.

I realized my error much later, in the mid-2000s, when I read about Mandingo in Bill Landis’ and Michelle Clifford’s book The Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square. What they detailed sounded so tasteless I knew I just had to see it. Luckily, though video rentals were on death’s door, there was a place in my area that had a copy. I watched, mouth agape, horrified/amazed at what I transpired on screen. Mandingo is, quite simply, a trash classic. But this was a guilty pleasure that was guiltier than most. It’s easy for me to defend my liking a problematic movie like Cruising because I’m a member of the minority it unfairly portrays. But a white guy saying he, um, liked (was morbidly fascinated by?) Mandingo? That’s harder to sell.

But like Cruising, Mandingo seems to have been retroactively upgraded from insensitive garbage to culturally significant touchstone (though the former’s upgrade may have only happened in James Franco’s mind). In the 2013-2014 season of American Horror Story: Coven, there’s an episode where the character Queenie (Gabourey Sibide), in an attempt to reprogram a resurrected head of infamous slave serial killer Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), subjects her to an onslaught of TV shows and movies about the Black struggle: Roots, Roots: The Next Generation, The Color Purple and…Mandingo? (BAPS is also included as an ironic choice, making it clear that Mandingo isn’t.)

Wait, Mandingo, the movie Roger Ebert deemed “racist trash,” is being presented as an Important Work? Somehow this was harder to accept than LaLaurie as a bodyless head on a table. At the time I saw that episode, I thought using Mandingo to show horrors of slavery the was akin to using Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS to illustrate the atrocities of the Third Reich.

Sex, Violence and the N-Word

Mandingo isn’t quite as low-brow as Ilsa, but this story about the Falconhurst plantation, owned by father and son slave breeders, Warren and Hammond Maxwell (James Mason and Perry King, respectively), is far from a prestige picture. Warren Maxwell wants three things in life: a cure for his “rheumatiz,” a Mandingo male slave—a “buck,” in the movie’s parlance—and a wife for Hammond. Two of the patriarch’s wishes come true, rather efficiently, in a single road trip Hammond takes with his asshole cousin Charles (Ben Masters), first to a slave auction, to purchase a Mandingo slave, Mede (boxer Ken Norton), then to his cousin Charles’ house for the hasty courtship of Charles’ sister Blanche (Susan George, perhaps the only woman in the antebellum South to have false eyelashes). Handsome though he is, Hammond is shy around some women (“I wouldn’t know what to do, not with no white lady,” he whines to his father), attributed to his self-consciousness about walking with a limp, the result of childhood horse riding accident. Luckily for him he won’t have to work that hard to win Blanche’s hand. She all but greets Hammond at the door in a wedding dress, she’s so eager to get hitched and away from her cash-strapped family and her brother’s boundary issues.

Their marriage is doomed, of course. Hammond blows up when he discovers Blanche isn’t a virgin (“You think I don’t know a virgin when I sleeps with one?”), and he only makes matters worse when, on the return trip to Falconhurst with his new bride and Mede, he picks up another new acquisition, Ellen (Brenda Sykes), as his “bed wench.” Blanche’s disappointment deepens when she discovers that, despite the Maxwell’s wealth, Falconhurst is a shithole. It’s not long before Blanche becomes a bitter, pathetic drunk.

Hammond (Perry King) is self-conscious about his bad leg,
not realizing the women in Mandingo are too focused on
another appendage to notice.

Meanwhile, Hammond, under his father’s tutelage, prepares Mede for a fight in New Orleans, a regimen that includes submersing the slave in near-boiling brine to “toughen his hide,” a scene that also foreshadows for the movie’s grim conclusion. Mede wins his fight, killing his opponent, earning greater respect (but not freedom) from his masters, and resentment from the house slave, Agamemnon (Richard Ward). “Congratulations, Mede,” Agamemnon says upon Mede’s return from New Orleans. “Not every Black man gets the chance to kill another Black man.”

Warren, eager for an heir, then locks Hammond in his wife’s bedroom, ordering the couple to fuck or else (well, words to that effect). For a brief moment, Blanche believes there is hope for their marriage, and chatters at dinner about transforming Falconhurst into the place of elegant parties and elevating the Maxwells’ place in antebellum society. But that hope is fleeting when it’s made clear Hammond has more affection for Ellen than his wife. So, while Hammond is away at a slave auction, Blanche summons for Mede, treating viewers to one more softcore sex scene before the movie’s deadly finale.

Blanche (Susan George) and Mede (Ken Norton) seal their
fates in Mandingo’s final softcore sex scene.

Mandingo’s sequel, Drum, may
have been released by United
Artists, but its production values
are more akin to a Roger
Corman drive-in movie.

The movie is based on Kyle Onstott’s 1957 novel and Jack Kirkland’s 1961 stage adaptation, making Norman Wexler’s screenplay an adaptation of an adaptation, I guess. According to his bio on Wikipedia, Onstott was more interested in writing a bestseller than exposing the horrors of slavery. I’ve read the novel and a few of the Lance Horner-penned sequels—including Drum, which was adapted as Mandingo’s cheaper, tackier sequel in 1976—and they’re pretty much all about abusing slaves and interracial scrompin’ (it’s not called plantation porn for nothing), with dialog that drops the N-word almost as much as it drops consonants. For what it’s worth, the movie is a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, cutting out a lot of the fat from the novel, which was padded with tediously detailed accounts of Hammond shepherding Mede to various fights across the Deep South and Blanche getting drunk with her father-in-law.

But Mandingo’s director, Richard Fleischer, was serious about the movie he was making. “The whole slave story has been lied about, covered up and romanticized so much that I thought it really had to stop,” Fleischer is quoted in a 1976 interview. “The only way to stop was to be as brutal as I could possibly be, to show how these people suffered.”

In all fairness, Mandingo does give an unflinching look at the treatment of slaves like animals (at the movie’s opening a slave trader, played by Paul Benedict, is shown inspecting a selection of potential merchandise for hemorrhoids and then making one fetch a stick like a dog to see how fast he moves), punished for minor infractions (Agamemnon is strung up naked and whipped for learning to read) and, should they escape, murdered upon capture.

Cicero’s (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) final words: “After you hang me,
you can kiss my ass!”

But the movie also has a scene in which Charles, right before beating and raping a female slave, says: “Cousin Hammond, you take the virgin. I don’t care for hard work.” Or how about the advice Warren gets from a doctor for curing his rheumatism: sleep with a slave boy curled around his feet and press his feet hard against the boy to “kindly force the rheumatiz right out the soles.” Considering the shit people believe today you could probably post this advice on Facebook and be guaranteed that a small percentage of people would be pressing their feet against their grandchildren as a rheumatism treatment. But, hey, at least they wouldn’t be using slaves, so, progress.

Because doTERRA wasn’t yet a thing: The patriarch of Falconhurst
plantation, Warren Maxwell (James Mason) tries an unconventional
treatment for his rheumatism

Other pearls of wisdom include Warren’s advice to Hammond about his husbandly duties: “When [your wife] do submit, though, you keep on your shirt and drawers. It plagues a white lady ’most to death to see a man nekkid.” This advice, ironically, is delivered after King’s full-frontal nude scene.

Fortunately, Perry King wasn’t concerned with plaguing the
audience with his nakedness, and neither was Brenda Sykes.

And then there’s Blanche. In a different type of movie, the audience would appreciate how she is also a victim, trapped in a loveless marriage with no means of escape. Her husband can get all the strange he can get it up for with impunity, but the consequences are severe should she have any extramarital affairs. Her only value is being white and pumping out an heir.

But thanks to Wexler’s drive-in caliber screenplay and Susan George’s hysterical performance (she just barely edges out James Mason in the over-Southerning department), Blanche is the source of many of Mandingo’s unintentional laughs.

Occasionally, George dials back her Daisy Mae-zilla performance to allow the audience to see Blanche’s pain. Unfortunately, while George is an attractive woman, she is cursed with a resting (and active) Who Farted? face that’s so aggressive that any expression other than a wide smile suggests she smelt it and dealt it, resulting in more unintentional—and inappropriate—laughs.

 

Culturally Relevant, But Still Trash

One of the arguments given to absolve the plantation porn genre—and its readers—of racism is that white characters are never the winners in the end. That’s usually true, but while the white characters are ultimately punished (there are exceptions), it’s still their story. The slaves’ perspective is secondary. But most people don’t read these books because they condone slavery or racism; they read them because they’re titillating. They appeal to the same part of our lizard brains that attracts us to porn, Tiger King and the Bravo network.

Some versions of Mandingo have
alternate clothed scenes or remove
nudity altogether, because that was
what made the movie offensive.

Yet, Mandingo’s lack of restraint also accounts for its authenticity, an argument Quentin Tarantino made during a 2013 interview on Fresh Air while promoting Django Unchained, a movie that merged slaveploitation and spaghetti western tropes into one bloody revenge fantasy. Because they are striving to remain tasteful, TV movies about the history of slavery, Tarantino said, “keep you at arm’s length dramatically[.] Frankly, oftentimes, they just feel like dusty textbooks barely dramatized.” On the other hand, he added, movies like Mandingo get much closer to the truth. “Having said that, the sensationalistic aspect, and almost [exploitative] aspect of the films can’t be ignored.” (You can hear the whole interview, including the part where Tarantino gets butt hurt after Terry Gross asks him about the excessive violence in his movies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, here.)

In an essay comparing Mandingo to 12 Years a Slave, author James Hannaham, who is Black, comes down, surprisingly, on team Mandingo. “One might well ask whether it isn’t somehow fitting that the exploitation represented by chattel slavery should be represented by an exploitation film,” he writes. 12 Years’ avoidance of its characters’ sexuality, as well as the sexual mores of the time, actually renders its narrative sterile, making it less impactful. As Hanahan concludes in his essay:

“12 Years presents its hero as an entirely honorable victim in an expertly crafted and elegant film, while Mandingo throws us into the ugly mess that slavery and sex create when they collide, among a complicated, unruly, and rude group of tragic characters controlled by the brutality of the social milieu in which they live, their base cravings, and their denial. Its sexual frankness plays on our own attractions to various actors/characters in order to show us how our baser drives can control us in similar ways. It’s hard to deny that the fictional, less carefully handled, more confounding depiction of this time period seems more alive — even if it isn’t as good.”

I recently re-watched Mandingo, and while I still consider it exploitative and uncomfortably campy, I found parts of the movie resonating on a new level. It’s not a big jump to relate the murder of captured slaves to the murder of Black citizens by police, or Blanche exerting her power over Mede to coerce him into having sex, to Amy Cooper using her white privilege when calling police on a Black man in Central Park. I realized my embarrassment over Mandingo was misplaced. It’s not how crudely this 1975 film presented America’s racist past I should be ashamed of, but rather, our racist present.

Of Course He Prefers Dick to Karen

The original poster for Tom DeSimone’s
1979 classic The Idol.

As many a queer person can attest, the hardest person too come out to is often yourself. It can be obvious to everyone around you, but you’ll still perform some truly awesome feats of mental gymnastics to land on the conclusion that lots of 14-year-old boys have a passion for the works Barbra Streisand, and that it’s perfectly normal to be distracted by the size of Brian’s package, especially when he wears those 501s where you can practically see the outline of his dick. It doesn’t mean you’re gay.

Others are so deeply in denial that they don’t even realize they’re gay until they get a rim job from the coach. At least that’s how it happens for the protagonist of Tom DeSimone’s 1979 gay porn classic THE IDOL.

Gary (Kevin Redding) is the star of his college track team with a cute, if hairstyle-challenged, girlfriend. He’s such a big deal that his glamor shot practically takes of the entire top half of the Los Angeles Chronicle. But don’t go thinking Gary has a charmed existence. He’s got some big problems, his biggest being he’s dead. That glamor shot accompanies the news story about Gary being killed in a car accident. (Front page, above the fold coverage seems a bit much for the death of a college athlete, but maybe it was a slow news day.)  What we learn of Gary’s life—specifically his sex life—we learn posthumously.

Mark Bitler puts his whole face into the role of Terry.

Terry (Mark Bitler, who, if we’re being kind,  sort of resembles a young Roger Daltry) was one of Gary’s biggest fans. One might even say he Idolized him (and then immediately hate oneself for saying it). But as much as Terry pined for the hunky track star, he always remained on the sidelines. Even at Gary’s funeral the mopey loner keeps his distance. As Terry watches the outdoor funeral from behind a tree the audience is treated to flashbacks involving specific attendees—and often Terry as well.

Gary’s ex-girlfriend Karen (that’s unfortunate) remembers when she met Gary in a secluded wooded area to make out. Gary, of course, wants to do more than smooch and hold hands. “Everybody doesn’t do it, and it’s only natural when two people are married,” says Karen (Darla-Lee Barnett), shooting down Gary’s two arguments for fucking. After Gary tells her his previous girlfriends gave it up, Karen asks why, then, does he take her out. Gary’s reply is fit for a drag queen’s Valentine’s card: “Because I love you, bitch.”

“I want a Dorothy Hamill haircut...no, wait, stop!
Make it Suzanne Somers instead.”

Karen leaves in a huff, as Karens are wont to do, almost running over Terry, out for a late-night bike ride, while driving her VW Bug out of the woods. (Karen demands to know what he’s doing out there, because of course she does. “Catching fireflies” is Terry’s lame-ass excuse.) Meanwhile, Gary takes things into his own hands, as it were. While Gary beats off to Barry White playing on the radio—music that I’m 99.9% sure wasn’t used with permission—Terry watches from the bushes. In a surprising subversion of porn tropes, Terry neither rubs one out as he watches nor joins Gary.

Not the “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” that Meatloaf
— or Gary— had in mind, but it gets the job done.

‘Nobody’s Asking You to Switch’

Chuck (curly-haired Greg Dale) has some memories of Gary, too, like that time on the beach when he told his friend about an alternative sexual outlet. After Gary complains about his blue balls, and that Karen wouldn’t like it if he saw other girls (“We’re kind of engaged.”), Chuck suggests letting “one of the boys” get him off, adding a limp-wrist gesture to ensure we get his drift. Gary rejects the idea, saying he’s not into that scene. “What scene? Nobody’s asking you to switch,” Chuck says. “All you do is get your rocks off.” According to Chuck, the locker room showers are teeming with friendly homosexuals happily providing orifices for frustrated straight men like Gary. “Half the guys there aren’t even there to make the team. They’re there to make the team. Get it?”

Gary wonders why he’s just now encountering all
the hot man-on-man action in the gym showers.

Then it’s time to hit the showers! And, sure enough, waiting for the pals are two mustachioed hunks, Derrick Stanton and Jim Battaglia, who waste no time in offering their services. Chuck has no reservations about availing himself of Stanton’s blowjob, but Gary is wary of Battaglia’s nipple tweaking. The track star remains frozen in place when Battaglia moves lower down, though his resistance does not extend to his cock which is, well, extended. “Don’t worry about it,” Chuck tells him after everyone has delivered a money shot. “It’ll be a lot easier the next time.” And whatta you know, Gary’s No. 1 fan saw the whole thing from the locker room.

Terry is also around to witness Gary getting a massage from the coach (Nick Rodgers)—a massage that crosses boundaries quicker than the coach peels off Gary’s shorts. “When did you get laid last?” the coach asks, as college coaches do, his hands staying just above the waistband of Gary’s jock. Gary says he got some a couple weeks ago, but even the coach knows Karen’s waiting for a ring. “I know what kind of tense we got here,” the coach says confidently. He then utters a line that could’ve been ripped from some real-life depositions: “It’ll be easier if you just trust me.” Without further ado, the coach gives Gary a rim job. What would drive some to indirectly finance their therapist’s vacation home actually sets Gary on the path of self-discovery. By the time Gary cums, he is, if not gay, at least a confirmed bisexual. The coach is just that good (to be fair, it is one of the movie’s hottest scenes), though he should be careful to lock the door next time. The things Terry could share in open court!

“Let’s get these off.”

Nick Rodgers (left) is a good erotic fantasy stand-in for fans
of Baywatch actor Michael Newman.

Gary later tells his cousin Jerry (Jerry Foxe) about his experience with the coach during an afternoon of nude sunbathing and pot smoking. His cousin admits he’s messed around with the coach, too.

“Did you like it, Jerry?” Gary asks.

“I dunno,” Jerry says tentatively. “How ‘bout you?”

“Yeah,” Gary says, nodding emphatically.

“Me too. You wanna do it?”

After negotiating how to proceed (“First you do me, then I do you”), the cousins get it on to some unlicensed tunes playing on the radio, including John Paul Young’s “Love is in the Air,” which plays while the guys are in a sixty-nine. This is the only one of Gary’s sexual experiences not witnessed by Terry.

If you can’t explore your sexuality with your cousin, who can you
explore it with?

But Terry is more than the Zelig of Gary’s sex life. Just when it appears we’re going to flashback to a scene of Gary blowing the preacher officiating his funeral, it’s revealed that Gary and Terry were boyfriends after all. It’s a scene that successfully balances the romantic with the raunch, though the sappy ballad that’s played over their post-cumshot embrace is overkill. Neither Redding nor Bitler are actors, but they do generate a fair amount of heat. (According to the Bijou Blog, Redding wasn’t interested in Bitler sexually [see link at the end of this post], so maybe he’s more of an actor than I’m giving him credit for.) You could almost believe they’re lovers, which makes Terry’s watching Gary’s funeral from afar that much sadder. IRL, two male college students in 1979 would likely have kept their relationship on the down-low, meaning Terry probably figured it was better not to attend his boyfriend’s funeral service than risk outing him, or have to lie about how he knew Gary. No, that’s not right but that type of thinking is typical within the confines of the closet.

Goes Beyond the Head of One’s Cock

It’s the poignancy of The Idol’s story that sets it apart from its peers in the genre. In gay porn, one’s gay identity seldom extends beyond the head of one’s cock because who wants to think about the harsh realities of being gay when you’re jacking off? Consequently, the struggles of homosexuals are rarely addressed in gay porn, and the porn films that do address it don’t do it as deftly as writer-director Tom DeSimone does in The Idol. Though some of its messaging is archaic at best (if you don’t put out, girls, your man will turn gay!), problematic at worst (it’s not sexual assault if the student cums), the overall depiction of Gary’s struggle with his homosexual desires, as suddenly aroused as they may be, as well as Terry’s pining for him from afar, resonates.

The Idol is available on DVD from
Bijou World. Not sure what movie the
cover photo came from, though.

I can’t say The Idol is one of my favorite gay porn films from the ’70s (I’m still partial to Joe Gage’s “Working Man Trilogy”: Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Corp., and L.A. Tool & Die), but I did like it and can see why it’s considered a classic in the genre. While there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a porn movie, The Idol looks and plays like a mainstream movie, albeit one released by an exploitation outfit like American International Pictures. It’s definitely better than the R-rated movie DeSimone made for AIP a few years earlier, 1977’s Chatterbox! (still recommended for fans of so-bad-it’s-good entertainment).

DeSimone, who had been directing gay porn movies since 1970, went on to direct quite a few R-rated exploitation films in the 1980s, including The Concrete Jungle, Hell Night (starring Linda Blair), Reform School Girls (a personal favorite), and Angel III: The Final Chapter (well, they can’t all be winners). He continued to make gay adult movies until the 1990s, when he worked exclusively in TV. His last directorial credit is an episode of She Spies in 2002.  

The Idol’s cast did not enjoy the same career longevity. Most only racked up a handful of movie credits before bowing out of the industry, either by choice (Jim Battaglia, Greg Dale) or for more depressing reasons (Nick Rodgers). Only Derrick Stanton worked in porn until 2000, though there are large gaps in his filmography after 1984.

As for the two stars, Kevin Redding and Mark Bitler, they were one and done. I couldn’t find anything online about Bitler beyond his appearance in The Idol, but the Bijou Blog’s post about the making of this movie reveals a bit more of Redding’s story, at least up to 1989. A few choice tidbits include Redding saying he felt like a prostitute after he finished filming The Idol and was embarrassed by it, though DeSimone says Redding was proud of his work and even invited his family to a showing of the movie (oh, hell no!); and that Redding was so turned on by his co-star Jerry Foxe he could barely wait for the cameras to start rolling. The post also mentions Redding had some problems in the decade following The Idol’s release (drugs, rehab, repeat), but he had, circa 1989, started a landscaping design business, so hopefully that worked out for him. You can read the full Bijou Blog post here. As for the movie, it’s definitely worth seeing. It’s a rare example of a porn that actually engages the viewers’ heart as much—well, almost as much—as their crotches. I still wouldn’t invite my family to watch it with me, though.

A Gothic Fit for a Queen

Gaywyck as it first appeared in 1980,
published by Avon.

Back in the mid-2000s, while attending the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, I went to a reading of selections from an anthology of gay erotic short stories. One of the anthology’s authors, a woman, prefaced her reading by telling the audience that her story was originally a heterosexual one but that she re-tooled it to fit the anthology’s genre. Except she hadn’t, really, she just changed the gender of one of her characters, leaving intact the prose of a spicy hetero romance targeting female readers. The give-away was her describing one of her male protagonists as having nipples like primroses.

I thought a lot about that woman’s story while reading Vincent Virga’s GAYWYCK, touted as the first gay gothic romance, published in 1980. Almost all the male characters in this book are written as if they once wore Charvet dresses and had menstrual cycles. In fact, one of the novel’s surprises is there isn’t a revelation that one of our protagonists is a woman in drag, à la Yentl. Were anyone’s nipples described at all, I’m sure they would resemble primroses.

Perhaps no character in Gaywyck could have his gender so easily reassigned as the book’s narrator, Robert Whyte. Really, all it would take is adding an “a” to the end of his first name, changing some pronouns and dressing him in bodices and skirts instead of cardigan vests and double-breasted suits. Robert is a fragile young man, so much so he’s home schooled.  He’s shy, but as he explains to the reader: “‘Shy’ is an evasion of the truth. ‘Easily frightened,’ yes. ‘Morbidly sensitive,’ yes. ‘Timid and cautious,’ yes. But also, much more than that.”

His fragility is indulged by his mother during Robert’s early years living in upstate New York, much to the chagrin of his school principal father. Mrs. Whyte’s mental health begins to decline by the time Robert’s reached his teens, however, and she’s soon institutionalized after being diagnosed with “profound melancholia.” With his mother gone, Robert’s father issues an ultimatum: the 17-year-old can go to Harvard, or he can just go. He is no longer welcome in his father’s home. Robert reaches out to a local priest, who helps secure a new home for Robert at the Long Island estate of the wealthy (and obviously named) Gaylord family. “[O]n 28 September 1899, I left for Gaywyck. My fate galloped to meet me.”

Before arriving at Gaywyck, Robert is first taken to Gramercy Park to meet his benefactor, Donough Gaylord, the sole surviving heir to the Gaylord fortune. He’s hot, of course (think Henry Cavill circa The Tudors or Immortals), as well as mysterious and kind of sad, having lost his mother at an early age, and later losing his twin brother, Cormack, and their father in a fire. He’s initially sympathetic to Robert’s plight—his late mother Mary Rose also had mental health issues—but takes a genuine liking of the teen upon discovering Robert’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for the works of Paul Cézanne. Robert is also easy on the eyes (if you limit your choices to the blonds, you can find a NSFW visual representation here).

At Gaywyck Robert meets Brian, the household’s young, ginger-haired houseboy/apprentice chef, initially described as a mute but he’s later revealed to just have a speech impediment. He quickly becomes Robert’s confidante. Robert also meets Julian Denvers, a former Jesuit who had served as the live-in tutor of Donough and Cormack, and Everard Keyes, the twins’ music teacher, who now has only a tenuous grasp of reality (“Sometimes he is Beethoven and sometimes not”). The two men—especially Keyes—aren’t exactly warm and friendly, but as far as the bookish, “morbidly sensitive” Robert is concerned, Gaywyck is heaven on earth. Not only does he have entrée into a world of extravagant wealth like he’s never known, he’s now part of Donough Gaylord’s world. It’s not long before he’s scrawling hearts with D.G. + R.W. written within them on the pages of his journal. (OK, what he really writes in his journal is “We are the same person, Donough Gaylord and I,” but the gist is the same.)

But Gaywyck houses more than beautiful art and old queens. It is also home to many secrets—secrets that involve incest, hidden rooms, child abuse, mutilated penises, faked deaths and murder. There’s even an out-of-nowhere twins-separated-at-infancy revelation. It’s often too much for young Robert to bear, the poor twink fainting from shock at the merest suggestion of a sordid past or ulterior motive. OK, I’m exaggerating. Robert doesn’t pass out that much, but he does spend an inordinate amount of time in bed recuperating from one thing or another during the course of the novel. I shouldn’t throw shade, though. Who among us hasn’t dreamed of being ordered to stay in bed all day at a fancy estate, waited on by a fawning staff? And yet despite all this time lolling about in bed, Robert is described as having a beautiful, athletic body. Gurl, bye!

Robert isn’t the only delicate flower. The strapping Donough is also frequently so overcome with emotion that he can’t finish stories about his past in a single chapter. Brian disappears when distraught, Keyes locks himself in his room, and Denvers becomes bitchy and brooding.

Gaywyck got a sexed-up cover
when Alyson Publications
reprinted it in 2000.

If the men of Gaywyck aren’t fainting, sulking or disappearing, they’re discussing—and quoting from—the works Walt Whitman, Alexandre Dumas, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and William Shakespeare. And that’s just the authors; art and opera are also discussed at length. When the men get tired of discussing arts and letters with each other, Donough invites his friends from the NYC, an interracial gay couple named Mortimer and Goodbody (they must’ve turned heads in the late 1800s), to spend Thanksgiving at Gaywyck. And what does the group get up to? Reciting passages from The Winter’s Tale.

To be fair, the book is set at the turn of the twentieth century, with characters who inhabit the rarefied air of the One Percent, so it’s entirely appropriate that the majority of the men in the story have a keen interest in music, art and literature. It’s not like they’d be talking about James J. Corbett’s chances in the ring against Jim “The Boilermaker” Jeffries. That said, there is only so much swooning over Paul Cézanne or Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde a reader can take. Virga is a very learned man with an impressive resumé (feel free to download a copy) and he makes sure to share his knowledge on every fucking one of Gaywyck’s pages. By the book’s midpoint I felt I was entitled to college credits in art and music appreciation.

Vincent Virga’s 2001 Gaywyck
sequel, Vadriel Vail.

You can also throw in a half credit for classic literature. As much, if not more, attention is given to Gaywyck’s prose as its story. Almost every paragraph in Gaywyck’s 376 pages is dipped in gold and presented on a red velvet pillow for the reader to admire. I found Virga’s word craft simultaneously effective—it really does transport the reader back to the dawn of the twentieth century—and enervating. By the time I got to the juicy parts I was so exhausted that it was all I could do to raise an eyebrow in surprise.

I know it sounds like I’m shitting all over this novel, but it is not bad. (Armistead Maupin supposedly dug it.) It’s just not to my taste. I bought my copy of Gaywyck a few years ago, excited to discover there was such a thing as a gay Gothic. I tend to prefer a more straight-forward prose, however, and my gay characters a bit more…carnal. Gaywyck’s prose—very purple, bordering on turgid—just isn’t my thing. I enjoyed parts of it more than the whole. One of the parts I especially enjoyed was when we’re introduced to a character named Jonesy, the teen-aged son of a recently deceased employee of Donough’s who comes to stay at Gaywyck. Jonesy is ill-mannered, poorly educated, and willing to use his body to get what he wants (think a young Daniel Craig with poor dental hygiene, or maybe Tiger King’s John Finlay, pre-dentures and minus the tattoos). Jonesy is a horrible character, but he livened up the story considerably. Finally, I thought, after 200 pages this story is springing to life. Alas, Jonesy is only a supporting character, and we’re soon back to the florid observations of Robert Whyte.

Virga published a sequel to Gaywyck, Vadriel Vail, in 2001. A third book in the Gaywyck saga, Children of Paradise, was written in 2010 but it never found a publisher, though there is a copy of the manuscript available to students and faculty of the College of William and Mary. Virga writes on his website about his frustration of trying to get his work re-released:

[A] young twinkie gay editor at Plume recently told my agent he couldn’t understand why anyone would care about old gay romances... He found Gaywyck unreadable! (I admit it bears no resemblance to the dreary stuff being churned out by graduates of the Iowa School of Writing, thank god, which is probably his and most NYC fiction editors’ idea of “real” writing!)

I think that “young twinkie gay editor” was being short sighted, not to mention unfair. There is a market for old gay romances, and that market is straight women. Virga might be asked to punch up the sex scenes, however. (When it comes to sex, Virga is so coy that it’s not always obvious anything naughty has occurred.) I could also see this adapted into a pretty enjoyable movie. A visual medium could bring the story to life in a whole new way, streamlining the narrative by showing in a single shot what the novel takes pages to describe—or show what the novel doesn’t dare describe. Virga would hate it, I imagine, but I’m sure he’d enjoy cashing the check.
 

I’d watch it!

Bonus Vocabulary Section

Not only does Gaywyck bombard one with an avalanche of references to classic literature, art and music, it also expands the reader's vocabulary. Or maybe that’s just me? At any rate, here is a list of some of my newly acquired vocabulary words I can attribute to Gaywyck. I doubt I’ll ever use them in conversation, and I see very few of them finding their way into my writing, but it’s still nice knowing there’s a fancy word for horny.

Eventide — end of the day; evening.

Orangery — greenhouse where trees are grown.

Cupidity — greed for money or possessions. (Eileen Bassing gets credit for exposing me to this one first. Who knew I’d encounter the word again so soon?)

Purling — (of a stream or river) flow with a swirling motion and babbling sound.

Gamboge — a strong yellow

Tintinnabulation — a ringing or tinkling sound.

Dado — the lower part of the wall of a room, below about waist height, if it is a different color or has a different covering than the upper part.

Concupiscence — strong sexual desire; lust.