THE FEMININE VIEWPOINT

by and about women

for writers: AN APPEAL

Chris Rezak

Having just thrown the latest novel on a homosexual theme the length of my room, I turn to my typewriter for relief. For as long as I can remember, my question has been the same: when is the homosexual novel going to grow up?

The pussy-footed bid for sympathy extended by the "pity us, we're only human" school gets no response from me. The self-styled avant-garde, always noisily discovering what everyone else has long taken for granted, leaves me cold. These folk work as hard nowadays at being ambiguous as their Greenwich Village predecessors worked at being Bohemian a generation ago. The pitiful ones and the avant-garde seldom produce more than harmless nonentities-it is the so-called exposé artists who fill me with a cold rage. Their books promise on eye-catching covers to give the "confidential low-down" on all the sordid trappings of a world about which they know nothing, a world for which they have no sympathy except insofar as it will help them turn a fast buck. These sensation mongers feed on, and in turn nourish, the ignorance of homosexuality in the average reader.

Whatever their source, these books all agree, as if they had voted on it, that homosexuality is a tragic occurrence. Storybook inverts never greet the world with a humorous eye-unless the wild screams of pasteboard stereotypes are supposed to pass for the light touch. Most of these characters pursue a hectic daily round of panting sex, usually rebuffed, and this inevitably leads them to suicide. So they turn on the gas or jump out the window and the author virtuously rids the world of another fictional nuisance. When, very rarely, the woebegone invert discovers that the plumber has shut off the gas or that the window opens out on a flower garden one floor down, his exit is on a flood of bathos and tearful self-recrimination which should keep even the most normal reader from complaining too much. The writing is atrocious, the emotion is maudlin or synthetic and the characters have difficulty claiming even one dimension, but at least the author once more convinces the great American reading public that to be homosexual is to be abjectly miserable.

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