"Pictures of Men" By John Pruitt
Earlier today, yellowing, dog-eared, underlined copies of Nathan Aldyne’s gay murder mystery Vermillion and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar showed up in my mailbox, so I warily added them to the tower of classic gay novels that have mysteriously appeared without a note over the past five months. So now I have first editions of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Robert Ferro’s The Others, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, William Burroughs’ Queer, and now these.
I’ve stopped wondering who’s so interested in my literacy and cultural awareness. I’ve looked unsuccessfully in the plots and cryptic notes in each book for a clue, trying to lift meaning from a checkmark in the margin, a circled word, a scrawled phone number inside the front cover, the break in the spine where the reader focused attention a little too long.
Instead, I’ve decided that the men in the grainy photos I found on an upper shelf in my bedroom closet have bequeathed them to me, groups of men from decades past welcoming me into their space. They beam at me through the lens of a Polaroid with a blinding flash cube, pin-stripes and horn-rimmed glasses embracing hairy chests, full mustaches, and tight bell bottom jeans; long wavy hair and sideburns laughing with army jackets, afros, and scraggly beards; bow ties accessorizing sweater vests, entwining fingers and sipping scotch.
They’re the sort of men who would leave books for me, alluring and interesting men, and I think of them as I cover their fingerprints with my own. Through these books I’m sinking into their world, before Stonewall, before condoms, before fur became taboo, when different sorts of gay liberation happened inside, instead of outside. They’re all enjoying their present but themselves recall a time before penicillin, before the hepatitis-B vaccine, before monogamy.
These men read, spoke, and kept journals within these novels and pictures just for me, an audience who guesses at their motives, weighs the secrets among them, laughs at the inside jokes, lives in their marginalia. These men anticipated me at least forty years in their future, their offspring who also cracks his knuckles before picking up a pencil to draft what will decades later be called an example of early twenty-first-century gay prose. My own writerly and readerly offspring, the gay man born just today, will find the piece I wrote about my first piercing in that issue of Our Lives magazine in a moldy box in a basement, and he’ll scrutinize the photograph that makes me look taller than I actually am and gives the impression that I enjoy the outdoors. “Did gay guys really dress like that?” he’ll wonder. “Did they actually write in complete sentences and spell all their words? Did this John Pruitt read (what was that Tales in the City guy’s name?) Arthur or Anthony something, Mopin, and that funny guy, David Septimus, wait, no, Sedarius? I don’t know, but I love that old school writing. I’ll bet life was simpler then.”
I write for him, the future common gay reader with a cat on his lap and a vintage Alan Hollinghurst novel like The Stranger’s Child, that relic from 2011, or maybe Michael Cunningham’s memoir Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, the summer gay mecca on Cape Cod that he’ll remember washed away during Hurricane Jacob in 2027.
Those are the books I’ll scratch my pencil through and leave in the mailbox for him to find.
I’ve stopped wondering who’s so interested in my literacy and cultural awareness. I’ve looked unsuccessfully in the plots and cryptic notes in each book for a clue, trying to lift meaning from a checkmark in the margin, a circled word, a scrawled phone number inside the front cover, the break in the spine where the reader focused attention a little too long.
Instead, I’ve decided that the men in the grainy photos I found on an upper shelf in my bedroom closet have bequeathed them to me, groups of men from decades past welcoming me into their space. They beam at me through the lens of a Polaroid with a blinding flash cube, pin-stripes and horn-rimmed glasses embracing hairy chests, full mustaches, and tight bell bottom jeans; long wavy hair and sideburns laughing with army jackets, afros, and scraggly beards; bow ties accessorizing sweater vests, entwining fingers and sipping scotch.
They’re the sort of men who would leave books for me, alluring and interesting men, and I think of them as I cover their fingerprints with my own. Through these books I’m sinking into their world, before Stonewall, before condoms, before fur became taboo, when different sorts of gay liberation happened inside, instead of outside. They’re all enjoying their present but themselves recall a time before penicillin, before the hepatitis-B vaccine, before monogamy.
These men read, spoke, and kept journals within these novels and pictures just for me, an audience who guesses at their motives, weighs the secrets among them, laughs at the inside jokes, lives in their marginalia. These men anticipated me at least forty years in their future, their offspring who also cracks his knuckles before picking up a pencil to draft what will decades later be called an example of early twenty-first-century gay prose. My own writerly and readerly offspring, the gay man born just today, will find the piece I wrote about my first piercing in that issue of Our Lives magazine in a moldy box in a basement, and he’ll scrutinize the photograph that makes me look taller than I actually am and gives the impression that I enjoy the outdoors. “Did gay guys really dress like that?” he’ll wonder. “Did they actually write in complete sentences and spell all their words? Did this John Pruitt read (what was that Tales in the City guy’s name?) Arthur or Anthony something, Mopin, and that funny guy, David Septimus, wait, no, Sedarius? I don’t know, but I love that old school writing. I’ll bet life was simpler then.”
I write for him, the future common gay reader with a cat on his lap and a vintage Alan Hollinghurst novel like The Stranger’s Child, that relic from 2011, or maybe Michael Cunningham’s memoir Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, the summer gay mecca on Cape Cod that he’ll remember washed away during Hurricane Jacob in 2027.
Those are the books I’ll scratch my pencil through and leave in the mailbox for him to find.
