Salon.com > Austin Bunn

The leader of my pack was gay

Fri, 07 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Over a series of summers when I was a young teenager, my twin brother and I went to Camp Alamuche in northern New Jersey for two weeks of Boy Scout camp. Alamuche gave us the chance to stockpile merit badges, and attendance was mandatory if you had any ambition to achieve Eagle Scout, the top rank in scouting and the pinnacle of boyhood achievement.

My brother and I were in different troops. In my ragtag Troop 29, we all knew that Mr. Wheeler, our bearded, goofy scoutmaster, was gay. Looking back now, I'm not exactly sure how we knew. Perhaps it was because he was in his 50s, was unmarried and still lived with his mother in a big Victorian house in our hometown. It was rumored that he had entered a Scout's tent at night and looked at him while he slept. But we treated his sexuality, or what we knew of it, as an open secret. And nobody ever called him "gay," "queer" or "faggot."

“Mondo Desperado” by Patrick McCabe

Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Barntrosna is not a bed-and-breakfast kind of place. Pass McConkey's field and you'll spy sweet-eyed, angelic Declan Coyningham with an air hose inserted "snugly between his sad but acceptant buttocks," inflated from a schoolboy into a "hideous, bladderesque monstrosity." Drop by Shamey Henley's for a pint and you'll run into the socially maladjusted Tom Gully, though the boil on his face will introduce itself to you first, leaning toward you like "some eerie red eye" and winking. A trip to the Barntrosna Arms Hotel is not recommended, but if you have to go, if a dark curiosity compels you, ignore the mad doctor in the corner raving about the creatures, half-human and half-horse, with a smidgen of bird -- bargain-bin Pegasuses born of a science experiment gone horribly wrong -- living in the hills nearby.

You'll need a healthy amount of dark curiosity to get through Patrick McCabe's new collection, "Mondo Desperado," which is almost as punishing as his novel "The Butcher Boy," but without the carving knife. The stories all circle about Barntrosna, a whacked Irish backwater rife with bitter shut-ins, nefarious schoolboys, cheeky prostitutes, closeted-lesbian nurses and more than one boil. But the town is only a backdrop to the Gothic punishments of McCabe's ruthless imagination and pitch-black humor.

“Nobrow” by John Seabrook and “No Logo” by Naomi Klein

Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Consider this passage from John Seabrook's new book, "Nobrow":

By the 1990s, the end of the High-Low hierarchy of distinctions was at hand ... It could be felt in the change of manners: in the old days if you said to your dinner partner, "How are you?" he or she would say, "Fine thank you. How are you?" But in the present, when you said, "How are you?" you heard "Fabulous. I've just published my memoir about my incestuous affair with my alcoholic father, and the film rights have been optioned by Oliver Stone, and he's talking to Kate Winslet for the role of the heroine, and Entertainment Weekly has an item about me this week."
My response to this, and it was quite visceral, was to put the book down and promptly take a shower. I wanted these ideas off me. We're supposed to be laughing along with Seabrook here, shaking our heads at the rise of the ridiculously self-involved. But the delusion that sticks with me is Seabrook's: a smugness masquerading as thoughtful indignation, a lazy conviction that the study of a dinner greeting constitutes cultural analysis and that annoyingly inclusive "you" that assumes your friends sound like Seabrook's friends, which is to say, like press agents. Just who is John Seabrook speaking to? In the airless world of "Nobrow," he's talking to those both old enough to sincerely believe that Tina Brown ruined the New Yorker and young enough to think that the Chemical Brothers lost something when they landed on MTV. In other words, no one.
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Prisoner of love

Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery still left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature -- or for love, for that matter.

--Mavis Gallant, "The Affair of Gabrielle Russier."
You're housed in maximum-security isolation -- what they call the "segregation unit" -- fettered in chains, because you tried to make inappropriate contact with your victim. You're in until 2005, when you'll be released to a world where you'll have to tell your neighbors about your time in the big house as a sex offender. No need for introductions; they'll recognize you. You won't be able to find work; at least not doing what you loved. Your family will have vanished long ago, and the one good thing you've still got, your boyfriend, will be barred from seeing you since, well, he's what got you into prison in the first place.
Needless to say, life in 2005 doesn't look much like life at all. But if you're Mary Kay Letourneau, the 35-year-old teacher who got pregnant twice by her 13-year-old student, Vili Fualaau, you were never very good at thinking in the future tense anyway. Fortunately for Letourneau, January 2000 looks almost like redemption.
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Unarmed and under fire: An oral history of female Vietnam vets

Thu, 11 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs knows exactly how many men served in Vietnam (2,594,200) and how many were killed in action (58,188). It can furnish all kinds of stats about those soldiers, like the percentage of men who worked in supply (between 60 and 70 percent) as opposed to combat (30 to 40 percent). But ask about the women who served in Vietnam -- women other than nurses -- and the numbers disappear. The records are muddled, they say; the files don't work that way. Yes, the armed forces sent women to Vietnam, but an official record of their presence there doesn't really exist.

At least 1,200 female soldiers were stationed in Vietnam in various branches of the military as photojournalists, clerks, typists, intelligence officers, translators, flight controllers, even band leaders. They served prominently in Saigon, in the Mekong Delta and at Long Binh, which was, for a time, the largest Army headquarters in the world.

They could not fight, nor were they allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves. Most were part of the pioneering Women's Army Corps (WAC), created in 1942 to integrate the armed forces. All of them enlisted for service in Vietnam, mostly in the early part of the war.

“The Wonders of the Invisible World”

Wed, 30 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

You might want to think twice before inviting David Gates into your life -- he's going to rifle through your medicine cabinet, pop the tape into your VCR, even paw through the top drawer where you cache your weed, and tell everything he knows. He's the kind of writer who gets between his characters and their favorite cereal (Count Chocula). Minutiae are his prima materia.

But the sadness and vacancy they describe is anything but small-scale. In his affecting short-story collection "The Wonders of the Invisible World," Gates, the author of the dark, alcohol-soaked suburban tragedies "Jernigan" and "Preston Falls," slyly captures the brooding disconnect of an overeducated, underoccupied American middle class. He builds his characters via crushingly accurate details: their bedside massage oil from the Gap, Tropicana HomeStyle O.J., "What Would Jesus Do" bracelets. For the most part, they are couples with two homes but barely one happiness between them. Plot isn't exactly the point. It's his characters' condition -- playful and despairing at precisely the same time -- that makes them so transfixing.

Molotovs and mailing lists

Wed, 03 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

It starts, as usual, with an argument about tone -- in this case, vibrato. Back in December 1994, Katherine Nagel watched the Early-Music mailing list erupt for the umpteenth time into "The Wobble War," over the use (and abuse) of vibrato in medieval music. "Mild-mannered effete snobs" turned into "raving lunatics," she says. It was "truly vicious."

Fed up with the race-to-the-bottom routine, she posted a curt, sociological summary called "The Natural Life Cyles of Mailing Lists." According to her theory, all lists went through initial stages of "enthusiasm" and "evangelism" that rapidly spiraled down into "discomfort with diversity," and then to "stagnation," "smug complacency" or (if you're lucky) "maturity."

She missed one critical step between "discomfort" and "maturity" -- spontaneous combustion. Not all mailing lists go through it, and even the bad cases usually survive. But more often than not, a single person lights the fuse.

Take a close look at the wreckage and talk to survivors, and it's evident that mailing-list flare-ups are the handiwork of agent provocateurs determined to pump the bellows. They want to take your attention hostage and jam your mailbox with their agenda. At best, they're a kind of online performance artist trying to expose some elusive truth; but at their worst, they're rogues waging list-serv terrorism.

Misadventures In The (213)

Tue, 14 Jul 1998 19:00:00 +0000

| "Misadventures in the (213)," the debut of Detour columnist Dennis Hensley, may be the first novel that really should have been a Web soap opera: It's woefully episodic, feverish for attention and utterly confused about just what makes the medium interesting in the first place. Since the medium we're talking about here is the bound, papyrus kind, it makes for rough going when the novel reads like shorthand for some other form -- the chatty coverage of a hyperactive B-movie. But the structural problems here are just the beginning. Hensley's opus is so shallow you could wade in it without getting wet.

Hensley's alter ego is Craig Clybourn, a soi-disant "Hollywood clichi: the new kid on the cul-de-sac with a script to schmoose." Craig, an ex-cruise ship worker, arrives in L.A. to bang out revisions of his screenplay "Deck Games," fumble his way out of the closet and support the never-ending sexcapades of his friends Dandy (a sitcom star), |ber-publicist Miles and his earnest pal Ulysses (who seems to be commuting over from another sensibility entirely).

Sweet Machine

Thu, 07 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000

It is by no means a slight to call Mark Doty's poetry a sublime form of interior decorating. If anything, color, surface and the particularities of light are the antidote to his harrowing subject matter: the particularities of dying. Both poet and documentarian, Doty is perhaps best known for his deeply moving memoir, "Heaven's Coast," about the surrender of his lover, Wally, to an AIDS-related illness in 1995. His four collections of poetry, like the most recent, "My Alexandria," and "Atlantis" (both dedicated to Wally), are equally elegiac. Loosely enjambed paeans to the barnacled trawlers in Provincetown, Mass., and the fabulous resilience of drag shows are haunted by the slow ruin of his longtime companion.

But in his new book, "Sweet Machine," Doty makes one telling redaction, and the work hurtles forward from that point on: There is no dedication to Wally. It is a tender omission, for this collection of 30 poems is not about the aftereffects of Wally's passing, but about the new. Wally appears -- or is it radiates? -- only once here, and it is in an early eulogy for one of their friends. Instead, Doty turns toward the immediacy of New York street life, his slavering golden retrievers and, more importantly, his next effulgent romance. "I'm breathing here,/a new man next to me who's beginning/to matter ..." he writes in the courageous "Mercy on Broadway." "Somebody's going to live through this./Suppose it's you?"