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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

August 21, 1992

Entertainment

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Was

by Geoff Ryman

Knopf hardcover, $22.00.

by Timothy Robson

Geoff Ryman's Was is a brilliant and dark improvisation of one of the twentieth century's most beloved sets of myths and icons, The Wizard of Oz. Ryman also concerns himself with the idea of finding and making a place home, no matter how grim; and the concept of lost childhood, in which happiness and unhappiness are inextricably bound.

Was has multiple interdependent plots, spinning and weaving their individual lines without regard to traditional narrative of time and place. The first and most significant plot is the "true life story" of Dorothy Gael, orphaned in a diphtheria epidemic in 1875 and sent (along with her dog Toto) to live in Kansas with her mother's sister, Aunty Em and Aunty Em's husband Henry Gulch. A brief but dramatic classroom encounter between Dorothy and a substitute teacher, Frank Baum, much later provides Baum the inspiration for his Oz books.

Dorothy's "real" story is, however, much sterner stuff: Aunty Em and Uncle Henry are desperately poor dirt farmers who don't need another mouth to feed; Dorothy is treated as a servant; Aunty Em has Toto shot for chasing chickens; Uncle Henry sexually abuses Dorothy; the children of Zeandale, Kansas, make fun of Dorothy for her "differentness." Dorothy finally runs away to become a prostitute in Wichita and ultimately winds up in an insane asylum where she spends the last

A Promise to Remember: The Names Project Book of Letters edited by Joe Brown Avon Books, $10, (author royalties go to the Names Project)

by Paddy O'Light

This book is a collection of some of the letters that were sent along with the panels for the Names Project Quilt. Typically written by a person who helped make the panel, the letter sometimes explains why a certain material or design was used, sometimes tells part of the life story of the person remembered, but always contains emotion and love.

This is not a quick read. Hundreds of letters are included, most of them reasonably brief. But you get caught up in the human drama being played out on the page--an intellectual equivalent to the emotion felt when viewing the Quilt. I don't envy Brown, having sifted through thousands of these to come up with a "representative" sampling. There is no way to generalize each dead person's life or worth. There is no way to condense a relative's grief, a friend's love, a stranger's response.

Brown has done as good a job as anyone could. About halfway through the book I reacted negatively when I read yet another letter about a child's death due to an HIVinfected blood transfusion. What was this,

The Scarlet Pansy Badboy Books, $4.95

by Paddy O'Light

Badboy recently published a wad, oh, all right, a load of paperbacks, trumpeting the reprinting of classics such as Mr. Benson. Not all of them are classics, of course, but I suppose The Scarlet Pansy is. At least on the back cover it says it's "the great American gay camp classic." I must say, this was also one of the odder porn reads I've had the pleasure of. It was written by that prolific author "Anonymous."

Principally set around the early 1900's, the story follows the escapades of Randall Etrange. This poor wretch, grown up on an isolated farm and moving into a dreary city life, is cursed with the guilt about the sexual act so many of us have been taught. He sees

sixty years of her life.

Another plot revolves around the lost childhood of Frances Gumm (a.k.a. Judy Garland), whose star-struck mother forces her to perform. A third story involves Jonathan, an actor dying of AIDS, whose childhood obsession with the Oz story returns during his final days, and Bill, his counselor, who, thirty years before, worked as an orderly in an asylum where one of the patients was a crazy old lady known as Dynamite Dotty. Yes, it was our heroine, Dorothy Gael.

Ryman's use of language and plotting cannot be conveyed in two-sentence summaries. The descriptions of pioneer life in Kansas are well-researched. Ryman's Dorothy is probably much closer to truth than either Baum's or MGM's. Jonathan's AIDSinduced dementia is vividly described; his Oz fantasies lend further surrealism to the story. Ryman's portrait of Judy Garland is from the point of view of her make-up lady at MGM and Judy's mother, who carries on a particularly harrowing interior monologue about how Judy's secretly homosexual father ruined their family.

Was is not being marketed as a "gay book," however, its themes of "differentness," childhood unhappiness, and loss of innocence, will appeal to many gay and lesbian readers. (The new interpretation of the Oz themes will also be an obvious appeal to many gay readers.) Was is every bit as full of fantasy of its own type as the Oz books are, albeit much less rose(emerald?-) colored than Baum's visions. This astonishingly intricate book is a worthy addition to the repertoire of Oz lore. ▼

the second or third of these? Why not just one of "those" letters as the representative sample? And what's this, another panel letter about a woman? Is this book trying to coddle the gay issue and appeal to the mainstream book-buying public? Why not concentrate on the gay men?

And then I saw past my own anger, my own resentment, my perceived ownership of the Quilt. This is meant for everyone. There are plenty of gay men represented here. The Quilt is doing its job of helping people come to terms with the loss, the denial, the love shared in final moments. The letters reflect that.

The order of the letters in the book is almost completely random, much as the lives that have been lost to the AIDS epidemic. The authors have gone through much change during the death of their loved one, making the Quilt panel, and finally writing the letter. You will see the full range of human emotion expressed in these, including the qualified bitterness from a man who helped make the panel for his lover's co-dependent ex. The unexpected ones are equally touching, such as a grandmother who felt the need to make a panel for a dead prostitute ("who's the same age as my granddaughter") that she read about in the newspaper.

These are not all the stories, but they are enough for now. Read them and remember.

love of a man as one thing, but the sex act as an aberration. Yet somehow, within a matter of a few pages, Randall has changed attitude faster than Clark Kent, making sex a constant obsession. The bulk of the book is Randall and his "dandy" crowd cavorting through life, camping it up, winking to immigrant police officers who take bribes and a femme bottom as part of life.

Now, if you're in heat and can't wait to read a page-after-page, blow-after-blow description of lust and sexual energy, this ain't the book. What we have here is something a little more dainty, sort of faux Victorian, a romance novel left partly to the imagination, but with an occasional explanation of events so you know that Anonymous at least took anatomy class like his hero.

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