It Will Come

“Every NOW is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until—later or sooner—perhaps—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: it will come.”

–Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

My partner and I recently saw A Single Man, fashion designer-cum-film director Tom Ford’s visually rich adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood classic 1964 novel. It presents “a day in the life” of a gay middle-aged college professor who mourns for his lover, whose tragic death has nearly paralyzed him from living until the day on which the story begins.

This being the ‘60’s, George wasn’t even able to go to his partner’s funeral since the small ceremony was for “the family” only. He goes through the motions of his daily life, driven to a resolution which the viewer quickly realizes. (Spoiler alert: there’s no happy ending, not even in the almost-sex scene.)

After the movie, my other half complained: “another depressing gay movie.” True enough, but not the whole picture. Not unlike another film, Boys in the Band, a character study of gay archetypes that was based on a successful off-Broadway play.

Between the play’s opening in 1968 and the movie’s production in 1970, however, a seemingly inconsequential act of civil disobedience at a bar called the Stonewall Inn became the Bunker Hill of the gay liberation movement. Almost as soon as it came out, the movie’s stereotypes and self-hate seemed dated. Still, Boys was the first major film centered on a group of gay men who, despite their neuroses and self-doubts, were determined to live their lives despite what society thought of them. Every cloud has a rainbow lining, and in its own way it advanced the cause of liberation: “You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be,” Harold tells Michael in the last scene, “but there’s nothing you can do to change it.” In other words, homosexuality wasn’t a lifestyle choice, for who would choose this life?

With A Single Man, aside from appreciating Ford’s hand in the stylized cinematography, I judged it as a product of its time, a snapshot of the social isolation one endured being gay before Stonewall made the world safe for homocracy. I read the book a few months before seeing the movie, my yellowed paperback copy printed a few years before I was even born. In what passed in the ’60’s for a broad-minded review by the Nashville Tennessean: “by making the lead character a sex deviate, [Isherwood] has provided a sharp contrast with the normal man, and yet he has been able to show that all people experience the same emotions and face similar crises…. It certainly may be his most controversial [novel].”

Yes, in 1964 it was controversial that gays and lesbians could “experience the same emotions and face similar crises” as “normal” people.

Looking back from the comfort of the Information Age, that review seems patronizing at best, yet it’s hard to understate the profound changes taking place in our society at the time. It was only a generation earlier, after all, that books like Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness were banned for indecency in Britain for depicting a lesbian protagonist. Never mind that she was a product of Edwardian pop-psychology: distant from her mother, too close to her father (who insisted on giving her the boy’s name, Stephen); a stereotype of self-loathing doomed to a string of unhappy affairs and thus, ultimately, reinforcing society’s view of homosexuals as maladjusted. No, Stephen was just human enough to evoke some compassion for her plight, and that was indecent.

Lest I be accused of sugarcoating the budding tolerance of the 1960’s, I will offer that in the author’s bio at the end of the book, Christopher Isherwood was noted as being “unmarried.” On its face, true, yet at the time, he was almost a decade into a long-term relationship with portrait artist Don Bachardy, who would be with him until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Controversial enough to portray a sympathetic gay character, let’s not hint at the “buttsecks” he has with his partner, at least not in a mass market paperback. Think of the children!

You don’t have to look very far today to find a book written by a gay man that is dedicated to his partner, or at least acknowledges him. And there are a multitude of genres in the umbrella of gay lit. From the more literary Edmund White and Andrew Holleran; the humorous Rita Mae Brown and Augusten Burroughs; guilty pleasures in the vein of Jackie Collins, and everything in between. There are stories like Rainbow Boys, about gay high school students—something I couldn’t imagine while I was coming of age in the 1980’s. There are gay or lesbian cowgirls/boys, pirates, vampires, detectives, mysteries, headmasters of schools of wizardry, even a transsexual landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. We have self-help books about finding the boyfriend within, financial planning with your partner, queer history in the Middle Ages, and travel guides. We are no longer invisible to the general public or, more importantly, to each other. And the more visible we are, the more people will know us as people, making it easier for straight married folks like dreamy New Orleans Saints linebacker Scott Fujita to publicly support gay marriage. (Pardon me while I wipe some drool off my keyboard.)

If “Life imitates Art, “then the Culture Wars really are lost. Time is on our side. The generals know it, which is why we have this last gasp, this “Battle of the Bulge”—from California to every red state that can find enough homophobic outrage to ban gay marriage with a constitutional amendment. When I think about how far the gay rights movement has come in its short life, it makes me hopeful, despite its setbacks. As Isherwood said above, every now will come.

Tags: A Single Man, Boys in the Band, Christopher Isherwood, Gay, GLBT, Lesbian, Stonewall, Tom Ford