Book Review

[Guest tomcal]

I found this book very interesting reading as it documents a gay man's life before stonewall. Alan Helms was from Indiana, very bright and ended up in NYC as a top male model in the '50s also on academic scholorship and ended up with a Ph.d Several years ago while he was still on the faculty at Univ. Mass., I wrote to him and we ended up having dinner in NYC.

He had affairs with various celebraties of that era such as Anthony Perkins but those tidbits are a small part of what was a very interesting time and life.

Here is what the NY Times review said:

YOUNG MAN FROM THE PROVINCES

A Gay Life Before Stonewall.

By Alan Helms.

206 pp. Boston:

Faber & Faber. $22.95.

Text:

IN ''Young Man From the Provinces,'' Alan Helms asks why ''an anonymous man'' would ''bother to write a memoir.'' The answer is in the subtitle, ''A Gay Life Before Stonewall,'' which recalls a milieu ''whose historians have been dying untimely deaths before they could tell their own stories.''

''Learning how to listen to other people's stories is one of the few things that can help us survive these intolerant times,'' says Mr. Helms, a professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. His own story is riveting: glitter and be gay and find a way to survive life and yourself.

Mr. Helms's ''provinces'' were in midcentury Indiana, which ''seemed to proclaim . . . that life is hard & mean & unyielding, unlovely & without grace, & all those things forever. I could never find an echo of myself anywhere I looked.'' Certainly not in the violent, alcoholic household he survived, ''drowning in sadness'' and already aware he was gay. He hoped to find compensation in hard-won track meets, school prizes and awards, Hoosier popularity. Or maybe in ''suffering promised redemption.'' When the suffering did not deliver redemption he vowed ''never again to show pain, or accept, or forgive, or give satisfaction, or feel deeply, or love. . . . In flight from my pain & confusion, I buried my treasure & decimated the powers that people the city of the heart.''

He exchanged ''the city of the heart'' for Manhattan and Columbia University, about as far from Indiana as you could get in 1955. New York didn't offer redemption either, but it did deliver a life into which Mr. Helms plunged with ingenuous rapture, literally cartwheeling through Times Square on his arrival, fueled by grasshoppers from the Astor Bar. Later, discovering the gay scene: ''I simultaneously experienced two overwhelming, diametrically opposed responses: 'My moral universe has been turned upside down,' & 'Thank God, I'm no longer alone.' ''

He was, after all those track meets, not only a beauty but a ''golden boyman.'' It was much easier in those pre-Stonewall days. ''If you were a presentable young gay man with manners & a good suit, there wasn't anywhere you couldn't go in the worlds of art & entertainment, & those worlds easily opened up other vistas. Because I was gay, I had much more social mobility than if I'd been straight.'' He entered a world in which ''it was as if I'd auditioned for Hamlet and gotten the part, only to find that I had to fence.''

But it was exhilarating to fence with people -- gay or straight -- who needed only first names to be instantly identifiable: Noel and Judy and Marlene and Lenny and Rudy and Tab and Rock and Monty and Gore and Adlai and even Jackie. Later there were Marcello and Luchino and Federico and dukes and princes and even the Dalai Lama. He wasn't alone anymore. He modeled for Richard Avedon and Francesco Scavullo; he acted for Edward Albee (''Of course I wanted to become a good actor; it would help in becoming a star''). After college, Noel got him a part in Noel's ''Sail Away,'' and his hopeful nobody of a mother drove from bleak Indiana to share his opening night. After the show he left her standing on the sidewalk: ''I had to have what I wanted, & I got it,'' Mr. Helms reports. ''All I'd had to do was betray my mother.''

Somehow, despite a great deal of this extracurricular activity, the young man had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, but lost a Rhodes scholarship because committee eyebrows elevated when he admitted he roomed with a dancer. Male. ''It was clear I would pay dearly in the straight world for being gay,'' he realized. ''Maybe it was better to cut out of the straight world completely, leave it as far behind as possible . . . get away from being despised & humiliated. I would be safe from all of that in the gay world.'' In pre-Stonewall days, he says, ''the only places I knew where that was possible were gay bars & parties & the baths & my fantasies.''

He admits to his promiscuity, but ''there was no AIDS to slow anybody down. . . . The really good stuff we keep going back to for more, right? I've never known anybody to say 'Beethoven's Ninth? Thanks but I've heard it.' ''

Through all the famous names and faces, the galas and gyms and affairs and tricks and Fire Island weekends and discos and Cartier baubles and handmade suits and shoes, Mr. Helms perceived he was merely an object of desire, fulfilling other people's fantasies and turning heads, seldom considering what was in his own. He says he ''began to feel like a fraud, so I tried harder to please, & succeeded more, & became more confused, & felt more like a fraud.'' He learned that dissembling was the bitter key to being gay in a homophobic society, ''an essential lesson for gay people but a deeply damaging one, for unless you learn how to unlearn the lesson, the deceit comes to figure in all relationships.''

It did. None of the golden boy attraction or dissembling stopped. They led him to a bit part in Fellini's ''8 1/2,'' to the various palazzi of Luchino Visconti, to more admirers and sex and drugs and booze and -- secretly -- to bulimia, blackouts, insomnia, fits of trembling and nameless nightmarish fears. ''I hated my life.''

IT is easy to lose patience with suffering in the upper depths, and there were times I wanted to hurl this book through one of those Cartier or palazzo windows. But the misery and remorse over squandered gifts here are too genuine to reject. ''How could anyone's life end up meaning so little?'' he asks from within swamps of alcohol, sex, drugs, fear and the unceasing desire to be desired.

Help, if not redemption, is provided by the psychiatrist Robert Coles, who agrees to treat him for free about the time Mr. Helms has decided to earn a Ph.D. at Rutgers. Therapy helps him realize that that wall he erected long ago against ''the city of the heart'' might have a door in it. At last -- at 34 -- Mr. Helms is employed in his first full-time career job, as a teacher.

The cast of characters changes from Noel and Judy to Alice Walker and Robert Lowell, and a friend (somewhat tardily) suggests Alanon. Slogans there are ''superficial & Pollyanna,'' but suggest the acceptance of things that can't be changed, and acceptance necessarily leads him back to those provinces ''flat as despair'' to confront ''the life I lived, in cahoots with my childhood.''

''Young Man From the Provinces'' is finally about a gay man's ''effort to make a good life'' from ''a mixed bag of blessings & an endless paradox -- love out of hatred, strength out of yielding, courage from acceptance.'' There is a hint, an echo of another big name here -- St. Francis -- but Mr. Helms doesn't lean on it or even spell it out. He doesn't have to. He warned us that this would be ''a cautionary tale.'' It is: one to heed, one to read.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/06/nnp/18787.html

[Guest EXPAT]

Thanks for that. Looks interesting.

[Guest CharliePS]

I read the book a few years ago and found it very enjoyable. Yesterday I finished "Secret Historian," a biography of Samuel Steward, a young man from a similar background who took a very different turn, eventually becoming a college professor, then a noted tattoo artist, and finally a gay fiction writer under the name Phil Andros. He also kept records of thousands of encounters with hustlers (not respectable "escorts'). Of the two, I would have been more comfortable socializing with Helms, but Steward is by far the more interesting character.

[eeyore]

Thanks for the review(s). I'm putting both on my reading list.