GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE SEPTEMBER 17, 1993

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Unspoken love under Wyoming's big sky

Native

by William Haywood Henderson Dutton, $20.00 hardcover

Reviewed by Timothy Robson

Contrary to what many might believe, gay life does not begin and end in America's urban centers. Gay life might not always even be identified as gay.

William Haywood Henderson's brilliant first novel explores the relationships of three men to one another and to their tightly-knit community amid the mountains and high prairies of Wyoming. It is a community in which to be different is suspect and in which love between men can lead to violent reprisal and injury or death. It would be difficult to characterize this as a "gay book" with "gay characters"; indeed, the principals would probably recoil at being identified as gay. The townspeople would say, "It's not gay, it's just wrong." Yet through Henderson's finely wrought character study we see the emerging bonds among three striking individuals.

Blue Parker has lived in the valley between the Wind River Range and the Absarokas nearly all his life. Working up from hired hand to ranch foreman, riding through the lands to track his boss's cattle herd, this cowboy knows every trail, every boulder, every abandoned cabin in his beloved hills. The mountain landscape becomes a surrogate parent to Blue; Henderson's scenarios are important characters in this story.

Although Blue treasures his isolation, he has a nagging feeling of being incomplete until he hires Sam, a new ranch hand, to ride the upper range for the summer season. Their relationship is unspoken and ambiguous until self-styled berdache. (In traditional Native American culture a berdache is a man without gender, with both feminine and masculine traits, honored by the tribe, mate to warriors, magical in his powers.) Gilbert is the catalyst who forces Blue to confront his feelings for Sam. After a violent attack on Sam by a drunken townsman, Blue makes a decision which affects his career and life. Love even that unspoken-is a more powerful force than home, job, or friends.

Although there are moments of high drama Gilbert's first magical appearance in the bar; the attack on Sam; Blue's dis-

missal as ranch foreman-Native is more concerned with the interior thoughts and loneliness of its characters, particularly Blue. Henderson weaves a supple fabric of time and place, not concerned with expository narrative.

The character Gilbert, who actually appears in only a few scenes, becomes a presence like a spirit enfolding Blue and Sam in his spell; his words mesmerize them. The scenes with the three men are sensuous and evocative, although not overtly erotic. In bits and pieces we learn of Blue's childhood, abandoned by an absent truck-driver father and orphaned by the premature death of his mother. We meet the townspeople, who don't know anything more than what they've always known and aren't much interested in anything more either. But more than anything else, the mountains tower above these squabbling humans.

Those readers looking for a fast-paced, high-energy western will be disappointed with Native. Its beauty is much more subtle. William Haywood Henderson has written lyric poetry in the form of a novel.

· More on berdaches:

Readers interested in the idea of the berdache are referred to Will Roscoe's excellent book The Zuni Man-Woman (University of New Mexico Press, 1992. $24.95, hardcover; $14.95, paper). Roscoe traces the life of We'wha (1849-1896), the most famous Zuni berdache. The author explores Zuni concepts of gender and sexuality as they relate to religion, mythology, and the encompassing Zuni idea of harmony with nature.

In Zuni culture the place of the berdache explorers) was well-defined. Europeans had no equivalent status, so were forced to use words as "men-women," "hermaphrodite," "sodomite," and the like. The berdache engaged in a combination of male and female activities. We'wha's occupations were listed in an 1881 census as "farmer, weaver, potter, housekeeper"—the first two were considered male occupations, the latter two female. Male and female terms of address and kinship were also equally intermingled.

The Zuni Man-Woman is a fascinating discussion of an almost unknown topic in American history. ♡

Jeffrey J. Gerhardstein, L.I.S.W., A.C.C.

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