Page 205 - Rainbow County and Other Stories

Gay American Literature 193

Par is. His rebellious coffee-table book of erotic photo graphs, Jack
Fritscher’s American Men was published in London, 1995, and
in it there is none of the usual coffee-table fare of faceless, svelte
gymbo-modelles leaning in artsy shadows holding hoola-hoops.
The use in “Nada/Mañana” of the present tense makes fiction,
usually written in the past tense, come as alive as a news report.
Actually, “Nada/Mañana” can be read as a perfor mance piece for
an actor after the manner of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Dark-
ness in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
If one reads the reincar nation story, “Wild Blue Yon der,”
outloud, the writer’s rhythms are melodic. He is a philosopher of
the yearning heart who has the ability to write: “Can you imag-
ine being dead...and jealous?” His descrip tion of being inside the
orgasm that conceives the writer himself has to be one of the most
innovative plot twists ever ginned up to reunite two lovers. In the
same vein, “Big Doofer at the Jockstrap Gym” is a droll, comic
parody of and paean to muscular masculinity where, at orgasm,
trees bend, dogs howl, crops fail, trailer parks twist into wreckage.
This is erotic litera ture of desire, because the voice speaking is
wise, funny, and living in a butch-camp that works erotically and
frankly, causing in the reader the shock of recognition: he’s been
reading my dreams!
In the tradition of romantic literature, Fritscher’s content of
the classic ideal embraces beauty and terror. The advice-column
format makes “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home” a horror story
of child abuse or a nostalgic memoir of a Daddy-Son relationship
that gay magazines ritually glorify each issue. Each of Fritscher’s
stories is actually based on a principle of homomasculinity, and
each piece features sexual climax and intellectual payoff. “S&M
Ranch,” debating city-versus-nature values, raises the price of
an existen tial poker chip to a bet where normal folks might not
under stand the coded feelings in the story which is not about bru-
tality, but about transcen dence. Fritscher so actually believes in
the doctrine of Transub stantiation that when the word becomes
flesh in this story, and flesh transcends words, he offers a peek into
a psycholo gy fit for a monastic retreat where fasting and morti-
fication of the flesh lead to crystalline mystical clarity of spirit.
There is religious poetry in “S&M Ranch”: “The sound of the

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