PAGE 20

HIGH GEAR

OCTOBER 1976

FUN AND DEATH

AT THE BATHS

RAINBOW

Cleveland's Friendliest Club! PRESENTS THEIR

HALLOWEEN

SHOW

11 PM SUNDAY OCTOBER 31

Prizes For The Best Costume

2211 E. 9th St. Cleveland, Ohio

Phone (216) 621-8667

Melissa Ross, Miss Twiggy's

The Judges, Elizabeth, Director of Higbee's Skin Spa, Jeff, Asst. Buyer at Halle's and Hilly, Manager at Park Plaza Hotel.

What Happened

to Good Queen Bess Her Last Night at the Cosmopolitan Baths?

SUPERSTAR MURDER?

by John Paul Hudson and Warren Wexler

(Superstar Murder? A Prose Flick by John Paul Hudson and Warren Wexler, Insider Press, 1976, $9.50)

If it had reached me earlier in the year, I would be calling attention to Superstar Murder? as good summer reading P-town or Fire Island or as a diversion instead of TV reruns while waiting for a respectable hour to appear at a bar at home. It's never the wrong season for entertainment, and Hudson and Wexler's mystery novel does provide that.

To label it a "mystery novel" is to overlook several other elements. It is a roman a clef with names and personalities thinly veiling people well known to gays. The reader's familiarity with the New York gay scene will determine how many real people he is able to recognize. Most recognize (if for no other reason than the parody portrait on the dust jacket and title page) of the characters who appear at the Cosmopolitan Baths in Bess Mittman, the superstar whose return engagement at the gay bathhouse where she rose to fame sets the novel's action in motion. Also recognizable are accompanist, Lionel Davidow, and, less obviously, Edgar Ball, who reports on the gay lib blues in the Village Vision.

her

The mystery novel is also, to some extent, a polemic for gay awareness and gay liberation. Hudson has been a militant gay and, under the name of John Francis Hunter, wrote columns for The Advocate and Gay and two earlier books, Gay Insider/New York and The Gay Insider/USA. Although the mystery novel does state the case for gay liberation, the authors never stay on the soapbox long enough to interfere with the progress of the action. They present a recognizable

picture of several facets of the gay world and a believable concern for the rights of all gays. A central character presents the ultimate gay liberationist position near the end of the book by saying, "When you're gay the way I'm coming to read it, you fuck whichever person you choose to, as long as they want it. In the gay utopia there is room for all kinds of loving."

The mystery element generates sufficient suspense to keep the reader intrigued. Hudson and Wexler are no serious challenge to Agatha Christie or John MacDonald, but they have ,devised a complex plot that will keep the reader pleasurably guessing who did what to whom.

Adding to the suspense for the reader is the question of several characters' sexual identify, so that he also wonders who wants to do what with whom. There are several titillating sex episodes that are developed well enough to be erotic but are not so protracted that they are destroyed by the boredom of pornography. Among the characters are a few who are likable enough that the readers root for

their having the right sexual orientation to figure in his fantasy life.

Superstar Murder? has no pretensions to being literature, but it is literate. The authors are especially adept at capturing the jargon of various sub-groups within the New York gay scene. The mystery novel lover may feel that the plot is too full of red herrings and that the solution is at the same time too complicated and too easy in pulling loose ends together. Nevertheless, the novel works in several ways. A book that is likely to call up pleasant associations with such flicks as The Last of Sheila, The Ritz and Murder by Death obviously has qualities to recommend it. I had fun reading

it.

Mitchell Menegu

HOMESTOY ST