Amis & Gays--1

Topic:	Amis & Homosexuality
Conf:	Martin Amis Discussion Web
From:	masma sbrockwell@500cc.com
Date:	Thursday, June 28, 2001 01:26 AM

Amis & Homosexuality

In 1999 one “ Bill J ” asserted on this site, the title of the piece tells it best, “ Amis is not a homophobe but Bellow is ” ( you'll find it under “ MA on sex and gender ” on the front page of this discussion board ). Bill J reasons, quite plausibly, that Amis’s short story ‘ Straight Fiction ’ does not make him guilty of the titled crime but is “ homo-satirical ”.

‘ Straight Fiction ’ is gently satirical, its plot device being the reversal of the real life majority/minority positions of heterosexuals and homosexuals. It evinces the author’s wry bemusement over certain aspects of the culture of Manhattan’s homosexual community; the predilection for body-building forms an especially amusing thread. However any reader of Amis will discern a darker, sharper, less equanimitous examination of the homosexual world. Consistent with Amis’s refusal to genuflect to contemporary sacred cows like feminism, one certainly will not find in Amis’s novels the dutifully respectful attitude to homosexuality that has become the only acceptable position in public discourse over the past quarter century.

Curiously, Bill J, who I will refer to henceforth by the eponymous “ Bilge”, juxtaposes the position vis-a-vis homosexuality that he imagines Amis to occupy with that of three authors: Bellow, Mailer and Epstein. As Bilge so felicitously puts it:

“ If you're looking to get incensed by true-blue congenital homophobia, check out some of these Jewish writers. ( And I can say this cause I'm a Sagittarius.) God's Chosen People pioneered the practice of homophobia. The Jews think that homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord.”

After thanking the three authors for proving: “ my theory that human personality is 99% congenital.” Bilge delivers the evidence - I’m sure you’ll agree that Bellow’s statement in particular is right down there with the very worst expressions of human hatefulness and deeply connected with the Judaism of his forefathers:

“ When *Playboy* magazine asks Saul Bellow: "What do you make of the AIDS epidemic?" And Saul Bellow's reply is: "If I believed in God, I would say that this is God's way of restoring the seriousness to sexual
connections." ”

The truly remarkable thing about this reply is that Amis has, through a first person narrative, made an uncannily similar observation. In ‘ Money ’ (1984 - the date is significant ) the narrator, after alluding to the carryings on at “ The Water Closet ” , “ The Spike “, “ The Mother Load ” and ( I paraphrase from memory ):

“ the other really heavy gay joints of Manhattan where the average patron leaves his sock in one cab but returns in two and has, by any reasonable measure, a really bad time. Fielding tells me that there is some nasty new disease afoot. Mother nature, always a champion of monogamy, is looking on at all this crossing her arms and tut- tutting, she just will not stand for it. ”

Make the easy substitution of “ mother nature” for Bellow’s not-believed-in God and the comity of the minds of Amis and Bellow on this subject is crystal clear. John Self , Money’s narrator, asks the reader ( paraphrasing again):

“ Whats going on here guys ? Just because the women have gotten a bit stroppy after 20,000 years of docility , the first thing you do is go running off into eachother’s arms. I mean come
on, after all they’re only chicks.”

More broadly the portrayal of male homosexual characters in all Amis novels presents a gallery of unenviable, unhappy, sometimes deeply disturbed men. Money’s smooth, gleaming plutocrat, Fielding Goodney, turns out to be , a deranged psychopath exacting vengeance on the overtly, exaggeratedly, heterosexual John Self through an elaborate and fiendish plan to humiliate and financially ruin him.

In ‘Success ’ the downward spiral from delusion to reality of the strutting bisexual narcissist Gregory Riding is, after having been the favourite at the orgies at the home of the “ famous Torka” , marked by his gradual relegation to the smallest room of Torka’s house, the one “ reserved for the most scorched and peed on catamite.” Riding realises that he was merely the boy of the month for Torka and his glamorous friends - disposed of when his novelty value wore thin.

In ‘ Dead Babies ’ the malevolent suiciding Skip, who functions as the kept houseboy/sodomite for the American pair who rescued him from the gutter, is said “ he would rim a rattlesnake if he could keep it still ...” . Skip with his grotesque history of sexual and physical abuse at his white-trash father’s hands found his teenaged escape route as the sexual plaything of local college students.

In “ Other People” there are two homosexual men: the amiable body building brother of the alcoholic girl who befriends Mary Lamb/Amy Hide; and the TV journalist who had once been Amy’s boyfriend. The second claims that after his time with Amy he “ almost went queer for a year...” , the narrator tells us that he did in fact go queer and remain there. The narrator then digresses to elaborate upon his theory of why some men are homosexual. The narrator cites but rejects the conventional : they were loved by their mummys too much and by their daddies too little so that they are unable to sexualise women in adult life; in favour of a: “ unable to-deal-with-the-female-lunar-tempest ” theory. This lunar tempest notion re-appears elsewhere in Amis’s writing.

Bilge damns the second in his trio of Jewish writers with this:

“ When Norman Mailer says: "My feeling is that homosexuals want to
become heterosexual. If you're homosexual, you might have to ask
what God thinks of you." Now THAT'S clear-cut homophobia.”

The first of the homosexuals in “ Other People” says this to Mary about his sexuality
( I paraphrase again): “ Its meant to be good being queer; you’re supposed to enjoy it. But I don’t. I don’t like being queer at all. I wish I didn’t have to be.”

As to the third of Bilge’s trio of “ homophobes” :

“ When Joseph Epstein makes the following Talmudic pronouncement:
"If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it."
That's what you call homophobia with a heart of gold.”

With obvious satisfaction Bilge cites the somewhat chilling riposte of Gore Vidal:

“ Epstein's comment provoked the following response from Gore Vidal: "No Jew ought ever to mention the removal of any minority from the face of the earth. It is unkind. It is also unwise in a Christer [sic]-dominated society where a pogrom is never *not* a possibility." ”

In “ Visiting Mrs Nabakov ” Amis adds a postscript to his interview with Vidal. The sole editorial change Vidal insisted upon after his contractually mandated preview of the draft was the substitution, in Amis’s opening description of him, of the term “ pansexualist ” for “ homosexualist ”. Vidal has built a public persona around the notion that everybody is homosexually inclined but only brave, independent, souls such as himself live it; the rest are just mindless proles adhering to the dominant, enforced, sexual paradigm. When asked whether his first sexual experience was heterosexual or homosexual, Vidal famously offered the implausible evasion: “ I was too polite to ask.”

Amis himself had this to say about Vidal on the subject :

“ Yes, because Vidal has always believed that heterosexuals got that way purely through the conditioning of the powerful middle class. . . . . Vidal expands his platform. The ruling classes fear the gays because they aren't as easily dominated as the hen-pecked, ball-broken
straights with their nagging wives and grasping children. Everyone--oh, happy day--is a potential 'same-sexer.' ”

You’d have to be fairly obtuse not to read that for what it was - a heterosexual shaking his head with a sarcastic expression at the ostensible inability of homosexuals to understand that some people do not share their sexual urges; that others are simply not sexually attracted to the same gender but the opposite gender. The notion of a “ phobia”, ie a pathological fear, a psychological disorder, such as that one might have of spiders or enclosed spaces, doesn’t enter into it.