Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Wisconsin Project on American Writers)

Rating:
Summary: Smart literary views without heavy theory.
Review: Bergman, a gay academic and poet, wrote one of the better books of gay men's criticism in the 1990s with GAIETY TRANSFIGURED (1991). It is a sign of its times that Bergman tried to float a proposal for a book like it ten years before and had no luck doing it. The second time around, someone came looking for him: Frank Lentricchia, to be exact. The result is a thoughtful, unsystematic treatment of the evolution of gay men's literary "self-representation" (as the subtitle has it). The ten chapters here range widely in period and type of authors covered, from Whitman to Holleran. Issues related to AIDS and antigay witchhunts (which contributed to F. O. Matthiessen's decision to kill himself) keep the book firmly in the realm of sexual politics, but aesthetics (a chapter on camp) and multicultural queerness (a treatment of Eldridge Cleaver's attack on James Baldwin as a gay writer) are included. The most unusual chapter has to do with cannibalism as a metaphor for homosexual sensibility in works like Melville's TYPEE and Williams's SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. While most of the standard writers of the emerging gay canon are here, Bergman also brought my attention to a number of writers I didn't know, such as Francis Grierson. The author is conversant with contemporary theory (particularly feminist), but theory doesn't dominate here. What does is a fresh, quirky survey of a wide variety of literary works from a gay perspective. Anyone who wants a readable tour of one man's encounter with (primarily) American gay writers would do well to pick this book up.