AUGUST 18, 1995
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 23
BOOKS
Becoming a slave in the temple of culture
Temple Slave
by Robert Patrick
Reviewed by Quentin Crisp
At long last I have received from Los Angeles, where he now lives, Mister Patrick's eagerly awaited first novel, but not, I hope, his last. Mister Patrick was, in the eighties, the resident dramatist of Mew York's Lower ALLAN GASSMAN
Robert Patrick
1
East Side. All his plays (of which the bestknown is Kennedy's Children and the bestwritten Judas) were performed to great acclaim in dim cellars, in cramped attics and holes in walls in this district. He appealed to the cultural elite.
Temple Slave describes in sometimes shocking detail his humble not to say squalid-initiation when he arrived, an innocent from Santa Fe, and how he became a "slave" in the "temple" of culture. This socalled temple was a tiny eating, drinking, and talking place at the unfashionable end of an obscure street named (I believe) Niobe Street, to which Mister Patrick was led by fate and his insatiable sexual curiosity.
It was called the Espresso Buono because its proprietor was a man named Joe Buono. The shows performed at the Buono-well back in the not-yet-liberated sixties-were almost all homosexual and almost all acted by gay actors. Apparently the lives of the clientele merged riotously with the action on the minimalist stage, and it is the lives of these strolling-nay, meandering-players, but chiefly the life of Mister Buono himself, a lost soul, a patron of lost souls, and fighter of losing battles that occupy the pages of this fascinating novel.
The book is written in a style resembling that of Mister Joyce: Every page is sprinkled with puns, alliterations, spoonerisms, and
other verbal chicanery. Judged by another standard, it could have been written by Henry Miller. It is crammed with bawdy stories and descriptions of homosexual orgies so detailed and prolonged that I, personally, found it hard to believe in them, but what the hell! This is a novel. Two passages which Mister Patrick cut from it as being too filthy have been included in erotic anthologies.
If you wish, you can ignore the word play and skip the debauchery, but you must read this book. It draws such a tragic, and, in a way, noble portrait of Mister Buono: It leads the reader, almost against his will, into a deep sympathy with this strange man who tried to comfort, to encourage, and to feed both the worthy and the worthless. Mister Buono's battles were lost before they began, because all who profited from his patronage inevitably left his cafe for the crimson plush and the gilt cupids of Broadway. When he killed himself, as though it were his life blood, experimental theatre flowed out across the neighborhood and into all those dim cellars. where it still lives and thrives-chiefly with the help of Mister Patrick's indefatigable enthusiasm.
It is impossible not to mourn this manimpossible not to praise this book.
Quentin Crisp is a writer, actor, public speaker, and gay icon living in New York City. He was recently named by Utne Reader as being one of the "leading thinkers and visionaries" of our time. He is also known for his portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in Sally Potter's film based on Virginia Woolf's Orlando.
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