Two new books explore sexuality and murder
by Phillip Rhodes
Don't believe the hype. Beneath the multitude of sunny, pride-proclaiming media outlets, shiny, happy millennial marches, and cheery sit-coms that are often a bizarre study of stereotypes, lies a core of depression at the heart of homosexuality. It's the inevitable product of centuries of repression combined with the crushing blow of a deadly epidemic that arrived just as the sex-centered persona first peered out of the closet door's crack.
There's no roadmap for battling back from these kinds of crushing obstacles; it's a tough trip. But Men on Men 2000: The Best New Gay Fiction for the New Millennium (Plume, $12.95), a collection of short stories by gay authors, is mired in the kind of depressing morbidity that signals defeat.
Obsession with sex and death looms large in nearly every story—nearly every character in every story stands on the lip of a bottomless void. Those who aren't killed or mangled by disease meet other unpleasant fates. There's the narrator of "Second Island" who is driven slowly insane when an outdoor tryst ends with his trick plunging into a black pit—really. "Ciccone Youths 1990" imaginatively skewers diva worship, but uses terrorist drag queens who randomly jab HIV-tainted needles into unsuspecting women to do so.
These stories are almost a throwback to the old pulp fiction days where deviance earned severe punishment. What makes their depressing tone so much worse is the self-absorption that runs horribly amok throughout. Narrators rarely recede; they haven't come to share another's story. They're here, they're queer, and they simply can't see the light beyond the self-induced fogs woven around their lives.
The relatively new gay issue of parenthood, and the subversion of self that the act and lifestyle necessitates, does create a few bright spots, though. "Quality Time" glimmers with honest questioning as it takes a gentle, loving look at the multiple struggles and parallel coming-of-age processes gay fathers face as their sons grow. "Sperm and Egg Tango" puts the friendship of a gay man and a lesbian to the test as they ponder the unique responsibilities children will bring to their lives.
As African-Americans well know, minstrelization is not the best path to effecting positive social change. Laugh, and the world may laugh at you. But what's missing from Men on Men is the dry Wildean wit that has bought gay men so much mileage and success in the face of overwhelming adversity. Where is the precise, bitter-tinged insight colored by scathing humor exemplified in the short stories of David Sedaris? The worldly tone of Gore Vidal, which is rife with the cultured knowledge and aloof attitude that sends the weak-willed scurrying? Quentin Crisp's decadent appreciation of art and beauty?
Good and bad are yin and yang; one obviously can't exist without the other. But if literature illuminates the collective unconscious of a given social group, then this collection paints a very bleak and narrow picture of gay life at the dawn of a new century.
So it comes as little surprise that out of this strangely humorless gray gay world is born the maniacally depressive Andrew Cunanan of Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever (Cliff Street Books, $12.95), a Capote-esque fictionalized true crime thriller.
Originally published last year, the book unleashed a firestorm of controversy as liberal gay community leaders struggled to deal with the "gay serial killer" moniker while combating the impressions left behind by the undeniably shallow, drug- and sex-drenched world from which he emerged. Now available in paperback, Three Month Fever gets off to a bang before the reader even opens it. The lurid cover contains large circular die-cuts over Andrew Cunanan's grainy wanted poster photograph; the cuts open on to a picture of Gianni Versace whose eyes have been covered with angry red circles. The image perfectly encapsulates the metaphor of the soulless leading the blind that serves as Fever's central theme.
Divided into four sections, the book tracks Cunanan's cross-country descent from pathological liar to pathological murderer. The imagined dialogues and thoughts Indiana creates for the killer and his victims are interspersed with commentary from real-life figures who became enmeshed in the sickening story and from mechanical police department investigative reports that dryly document the data.
In between, Indiana casts his cold eye in every direction, fixing caustic insight on Cunanan's fair-weather friends, Versace's celebrity-studded cadre, and the scandal-ravenous media for particularly scathing and ingenious moments of criticism.
But the book falls completely apart where it should be strongest—the point where a desperate Cunanan zeroes in on his famous final victim. Indiana steps his narrative back and resorts to using second- and third-hand police reports to relate most of this crucial element. The sketchy connection between these two figures is very sketchily drawn here and Indiana, who has provided richly imaged readings of Cunanan's activities and motivations throughout, supplies little conclusion as to how this horrifying escapade came to such a vivid, explosive end. Cunanan, who has remained lucid, if murderous, throughout the book's events quite abruptly becomes full-on crazy. He just suddenly begins seeing visions and hearing voices in tropical Miami and then—boom!—everyone's dead.
Cunanan's end, trapped aboard a suspicious houseboat, warrants only four perfunctory pages. The final thought that Indiana creates for Cunanan—that the multiple murderer looked beautiful in death, splayed out dramatically against soft, satin sheets—serves as the ridiculously self-absorbed coda to a life lead by the self-defeating principle that one's image reflected in others' eyes is everything.
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