Alternative Service: Families in Recent American Gay Fiction

Toward the center of Andrew Holleran’s novel Nights in Aruba, the narrator and his friend Vittorio watch “a slender cocoa-colored youth in red polyester pants” give himself a bath from a water fountain in Union Square.¹ “How beautiful he is,” remarks Vittorio. “This is just what I live for. You see why I never want to go back to [my hometown]. You can have boys like that, or you can have the pleasures of family life. But you can’t have both” (p. 107). The narrator accepts this axiom of gay life and is agonized by it. “I was a man,” he tells us, “whose past and present were divided by an abrupt schism.” Like Matthew Arnold he finds himself “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

What is most telling about this little incident—one of so many in both Nights in Aruba and Holleran’s earlier novel Dancer from the Dance—is the extent to which it confirms the most anti-homosexual prejudices, that gay society is irreconcilable to “family life,” that those who choose boys have rejected not only the pleasures but the virtues of heterosexuality. “Homosexuality flies in the face of the one fact we know,” writes no less an authority than Anita Bryant in her autobiography subtitled The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality, “which is that male and female are programmed to mate with the opposite sex. This is the story of two and a half billion years of civilization, and any society that hopes to survive will have to recognize this.”² She continues by quoting the psychiatrist Charles Socarides, who warns, “Homosexuality militates against the family, drives the sexes in opposite directions and neglects the child’s growth and sexual identity” (p.115). The choice is dire. One can either select the boy in “red polyester pants” and with him chaos, anarchy, the end of civilization, or raise a family and preserve the universe from destruction. No wonder Holleran’s characters are so uncertain, torn, plagued by guilt and doubt.