Customer Reviews

Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life

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For me, the theme of this very intriguing book can be found in editor Wendell Ricketts's story "Raspberry Pie." Regarding his posh, patrician ex-lover across the lunch table, the narrator's only desire is to make him understand that, "I am not like you."

Fortunately for readers, Ricketts, unlike the protagonist of his story, doesn't plan to drag us out to his favourite splatter films to prove his point. Instead he has given us this fascinating, diverse and refreshingly unique short fiction anthology in order to blow apart many of the tired stereotypes of gay men that persist in Western culture.

The struggling protagonists of these stories are acutely aware, not only of their place in the social strata, but of their status as outsiders. They remark on more privileged men that surround them sometimes with frustration and contempt, as in the Rickett's story, sometimes with envy and desire, like the anonymous Harvard cutie sporting Brooks Brothers and Bass Weejuns on the MTA in John Gilgun's "Cream," or merely with simple bewilderment, as with the outreach worker whose green polo shirt "...looked as if it'd never seen a stain," in Rick Laurent Feely's "Skins."

But even though their working class origins are plainly evident most of them occupy an uncomfortable grey area in between the two worlds, for it is with an equal degree of detachment they regard their own families and the environments they grew up in. Fathers are often belching, farting brutes firmly planted in front of the TV with beers in hand, while mothers are ineffectual, chain smoking, church-ladies. Even in a story where the narrator and his boyfriend are unconditionally embraced by a warm, loving family (the lovely, winsome holiday tale, "My Special Friend" by Christopher Lord) the author still takes pains to describe the orange and brown crocheted afghan draping the sofa, the twin Barcaloungers, the beanbag ashtrays and a collection of ceramic chickens in the kitchen. In this way, it seems as if they are saying, "But I am not like you, either."

Most of the men in these stories are transplants to major cities or metropolitan areas - Portland, Baltimore, Toronto, New Orleans, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Some are in college or recent graduates, others newly employed or recently promoted. And all of them, with several notable exceptions (like the trucker in Timothy Anderson's hilarious "Hooters, Tooters and the Big Dog") appear to be trying, with varying degrees of success, to transcend their roots while still rejecting the stereotypical lifestyle that the media insistently sells as the gay ideal.

And that's the beauty of this book. The characters refuse to be pigeonholed. They come across as living, breathing individuals and thus are the strong suit in most of the stories. I highly recommend this book to readers of gay fiction who are seeking a unique perspective and some terrifically original characters.

I've never met Wendell Ricketts, but I have long admired his writing, and the tremendous power of his own writing in many genres he now brings to an editorial project which must have seemed daunting at the start, but which winds up, in his able hands, a terrifically rewarding anthology. It's not your typical book of working class porn, where middle class designers drool over the mechanics perched under their Mercedes. Nor is it precisely a book of agitprop urging the proletariat to armed revolution by any means necessary. James Barr's long story, "The Bottom of the Cloud," which must have been written a good fifty years ago, has everything but period charm, thank God. It might have been written today, and only some of its circumlocutions tag it as the product of an era in which Henry James was widely read, even by John Fante types whose labor is of the dust. Barr's story (from his collection DERRICKS) is amazing on a sentence by sentence level, even if you don't know what exactly is happening to our hero, Robin, and his anguished pilgrimage through the gray areas of "Central City." Barr was able to rewrite John Bunyan for our own time, and out of a fiery, almost blindsided gay sensibility. Torment, bruises, bondage and pain abound, and he takes you there. Keith Banner's story "How to Get from This to This" shares some of Barr's bleakness of vision. Two gay brothers, Danny and Lucas, argue it out from either side of a tavern that might itself be mistaken for a class marker, and from either side of alcoholism itself. Lucas is pulling himself up by the bootstraps, edging himself into a higher class status, while Danny, at age 33 (Christ's age) is sinking deeper into a nickel and dime pit. "I see my apartment the way it truly is, a mouse-bit bag of bread, Old Crow bottles, old textbooks I never sold back to the bookstore. The magical couch with no cushions." He doesn't have much self-esteem, as we say here in California. But maybe that lack keeps us honest. Not all of the stories are as hard hitting as these, but in general there's a rock-solid thrust to them that feels good.

Ricketts has taken this material and made some hard sense out of it, in a long, engaging afterword that serves as a sort of Apologia pro Vita Sua. Are there working class people in gay literature? Or is working class "contra gay"? Ricketts' thesis is a tough one, but he asserts that his own best experiences of bonding with men have occurred not in gay contexts, or even in the context of gay sexuality, but while working shoulder to shoulder in prisons and union hiring halls with other working class guys, even murderers. You may meet some dangerous scum there, but at least they're honest about it, unlike the coiffured and manicured men about whom, and by whom, so much of gay writing is being written. The working class gay man receives nothing but confusion and shame when he attempts to enter the bourgey world of "gay community."

He may say this, and he may believe this, but paradoxically enough, the stories he has collected here tweak his own definitions of what they portend. Fiction is volatile, like nitro. It doesn't do exactly what you think it will do, and it works different on everyone who comes in contact with it. "Only connect," E M Forster wrote, and the great thing about Ricketts' book is the attention he bears down, with his great brain and heart, onto proving and disproving that way dated dictum.

In Wendell Ricketts' afterward to this collection of short stories "by working-class men about more or less gay life," the author states that "short stories and novels capture the. . . nature of being alive." Some of these stories certainly fit that description and rise to the level of first class literature. I would nominate my favorite, Christopher Lord's "My Special Friend," the euphemism that the narrator's decent and accepting family uses to describe his working-class/blue-collar lover (he replaces brakes for Midas)when he [Rudy] brings him home to rural Oregon for Christmas. Mr. Lord got the details of this family just right from the couch covered with the orange and brown crocheted afghan to the "twin green Barcaloungers." (I thought I was home again.) Rudy's grandmother OotieMae is a wonderfully sympathetic and funny character; she is pleased that "Our Lady of the Menopause" has been replaced by a much younger Mary in the Christmas Eve Living Nativity event at the local church. James Barr's "The Bottom of the Cloud," from his collection of short stories DERRICKS, published in 1951, in many ways was ahead of its time, although Robin and Karl had to remain closeted and pass themselves off as employer and hired man, rather than lovers. "Skins," by Rick Laurent Feely, is the story of two homeless addicts, Rat and Crow, intent on self-destruction; and we care for them deeply. "Hooters, Tooters, and the Big Dog," (Timothy Anderson) really is a hoot as the narrator, driving his "big red truck, Litle Red Ride "Em Good," plays road games with a fellow female trucker curious as to why he will not tell her his handle. There are fourteen more stories here, many of which I liked immensely.

In his afterward Mr. Ricketts laments the absence of working-class men in contemporary gay fiction except in porn and erotica. While his point is well taken, I would submit that some of the very best writing today in on that subject. Ricketts mentions J. G. Hayes' THIS THING CALLED COURAGE. I would add Hayes' latest, NOW BATTING FOR BOSTON, practically anything that Jim Grimsley (included in this anthology) has written as well as all of Tom Spanbauer's novels. Then there are the short stories and novels of Jay Quinn and much of the fiction in the two volumes of REBEL YELL. Finally AT SWIM TWO BOYS, although not written by a U. S. writer, is as good as any fiction, regardless of how you categorize it, gets.

Perhaps the subtitle misled me: "Short fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life."

I hardly think of a popular author like Jim Grimsley as a "working class man," but the bios read in such a way that any writer who grew up middle- or lower-class is qualified. That would be at least 95 percent of us. This book actually consists of stories about working-class men, sort of, but it's not what you expect. A better subtitle would have been "Mostly Edgy Stories in Unusual Formats." Included are writers like rYAN kAMSTRA, cartoonist C. Bard Cole, and poet Rane Arroyo.

The best story here is Grimsley's "Food Chain" because it has strong characterization, a plot, and a decipherable moral. It is also a more traditional length--another welcome point in this collection. One inclusion here, "The Bottom of the Cloud," by James Barr, while commendable, is practically a novella.

The last section of the book, which at first appears to be another story, is titled, "Passing Notes in Class: Some Thoughts on Writing and Culture in the Ga(Y)ted Community" by book editor Wendell Ricketts. This would be an ideal piece for a university literature-criticism publication, but weighs heavy here with the tone and stride of a thesis.

If you like extreme format creativity in short stories, enjoy the Paris Review, and have highbrow tastes in short fiction, you may enjoy this book. But what is being promoted as a collection of gay-ish stories about working-class men by working-class men falls sadly short of its promise.

I'm not a formal critic, simply an avid reader. I have not even finished this book. After about 80 pages I gave up. The stories were disjointed, plots lacking (or so obtuse I couldn't figure out the point(s))and many simply lacked subject matter of interest to this reader. The title suggested an interesting read, yet many of the tales seemed laborious. I personally would not recommend this book to anyone that enjoys reading. Sadly, I consider the purchase a waste of my hard earned money. File 13 for this one.

It's tough to review an anthology as one work since, like Forest Gump's box of chocolates, you're bound to find things you don't like as much as you like. This collection includes works by some names you may have heard before, such as author Jim Grimsley and poet Rene Arroyo, and includes short story writers ranging from career prison inmates to doctoral candidates, with the quality varying as much as the backgrounds of those who created them.

There are stories that will amuse, some that will give an enlightening insight into being gay in a culture you might otherwise never be exposed to, a few that convey sentiments you may personally identify with, and others that may cause you to shrug with bewilderment. (Into that last category I'd put what I'd consider to be an out-of-place scholarly-sounding "treatise" by the editor, who seeks to tie together all of the varying voices in the collection and put them in perspective with the history of the gay community over the past fifty years.) Of course, as a collection of unrelated works, one is free to use the same method Gump used for his box of candy, sample what looks interesting and discard it if it proves to be too distasteful.