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BOOK REVIEWS:
Below are two very recent (7/14/08 & 12/18/08) unsolicited reviews by Gay Mystery Writer, Josh Thomas, who recently discovered my website & re-read my revised novel, I WANT IT ALL, plus the original Other Traveller (Olympia)'s ALL IS WELL:
Dirk Vanden Gives His All
Pre-Stonewall Novel Broke the "Fag-Hot" Mold
By Josh Thomas
When is the last time you read a stroke-book twice?
Have you ever even finished a stroke-book once? Did you then display it on your bookshelf in the permanent collection, or tear it to shreds and toss it in the landfill before your mom, your wife or your lover found it?
In 1969, a few months before the Stonewall Riots broke out in June, a fly-by-night publisher issued a title by Dirk Vanden called "I Want It All" as part of a throwaway series called Frenchy's Gay Line, sold only in dirty bookstores, two bucks a pop. But "I Want It All" turned out to be a real novel, winning a respected place in the history of Gay Lit. The wonder is, it's just as hot and every bit as readable today.
I've just finished my second read of the 1995 reprint from Brass Ring Books; it's a remarkable little piece. Yes, it will get you hard, but it also takes you on a young man's 1200-mile journey of self-discovery, love and affirmation.
Through Richard Nixon's America! "I Want It All" is quite an achievement.
Vanden knows how to tell a story as Aristotle taught: starting in the right place, where the action must start; through the middle on to the end, where it must stop. The hero Warren Miller, a 27-year-old Colorado cowboy (who mostly shovels manure for a living), transforms by becoming true to himself. It's Gay Liberation, baby, before the Stonewall drag queens invented it.
The violent opening chapter, featuring a gang rape, not only sets the action in motion, it begins Warren's transformation. A second reading actually makes the scene less repulsive than this description, as Vanden provides clear signals of the characters' motives and reactions. There's more than one layer here, which makes the reader want to find out what's going on.
The book also ends with seeming violence, but the participants get off, understand each other better (and trade phone numbers).
Along the way we get treated to Warren's unhappy experiences with hustling, the hostility between old-school "sweater girls" and Leather-Levi Marlboro Men, a mild pup-play 3-way, interracial tearoom highjinks, a toss in the sling, a psychedelic mushroom-and-piss orgy and Warren's first fuck by the man of his dreams in a San Francisco bathhouse.
Through it all Vanden wrestles with the Gay self-destructive impulse we now call internalized homophobia. Warren notices it in every Gay guy he meets—and rejects it. The novel isn't preachy in the least, but it does probe real issues we haven't yet resolved: how, in a homophobic world, do we undo the hateful programming we grew up with and come to an understanding of what it means to be human?
Don't miss the Preface; Neil Armstrong had just landed on the Moon after a superhuman, multi-billion-dollar effort, and Vanden wonders why we can't spend the same kind of money to figure out Homo sapiens.
"I Want It All" is ultimately a love story by one Gay guy to all Gay guys. I disagree with his ending, but many will find it understandable and satisfying; Warren gets the guy, but not on the terms dictated by The World.
What's amazing about this book is that it isn't a period piece, though it is very much of a certain flower-power time. It reads today like a modern movie which, though set in the past, is still contemporary. We're still working through many of these issues, politically, psychologically, spiritually and in our physical health. Much has changed but much has not.
For Vanden to produce a work like this in 1969, on stroke-book wages, is a singular achievement. The main character doesn't kill himself, he fucks his way across the West and falls in love. Wow.
Just in time for a 40th Anniversary Edition next year: order it today, starting here www.alibris.com. > Dirk Vanden, I WANT IT ALL.
Josh Thomas is the author of Murder at Willow Slough and Andy's Big Idea.
http://joshtom.wordpress.com
Dirk Vanden’s Remarkable Novel “All Is Well”
Posted on December 18, 2008 by josh
I’ve just finished reading Dirk Vanden’s magnum opus, “All Is Well.”
This guy started out writing stroke books for money, but ended up authoring real novels—all the more remarkable because they first appeared just two years after Stonewall. Gone were the sissy stereotypes, the internalized homophobia, the clueless guesses by Straight pornographers of what motivates Gay men. “All Is Well” finishes a story begun two books earlier, as a morally upright and uptight Mormon discovers, after terrifying pain, who he really is.
Due to Proposition 8, massively funded by upright, uptight Mormons, this story couldn’t be more timely. It’s a product of its times, 1971, complete with flower power and hallucinogens, but it’s fresh for today’s readers too.
A heterosexually married man is forced to confront his own desires. That’s the basic plot. He goes through hell—as men who live a lie still do. You don’t have to be Mormon to recognize the gut-chewing conflict. You could be Baptist or Catholic or Jew.
There is much to respect in the Mormon religion, and much that’s corrupt to its core. At its best it produces a sweetness in its adherents, a sincerity and genuineness the whole world could want. But then there’s a dark side, intolerant and vicious, sex-crazed and just plain crazy. They actually think that if they just fuck enough and make more babies (see polygamy), they’ll end up as gods on other planets. It’s the wackiest damn religion there ever was.
So what do you do if you’re Mormon and Gay? So much kindness, so little tolerance of those who don’t reproduce. Mormons ideologically oppose Gay people; we don’t fit their salvation idea that the way to heaven is to max out the baby-making, the more women you use the better. “Be fruitful and multiply,” the only ordinance of God mankind has ever obeyed, is the only rule that matters to these men. Why else do they maintain the world’s largest geneaological database? Why else do they baptize long-dead Jews?
It’s male-dominated religion run amok.
They think they’ll become gods on R-596. They portray themselves in public as circumspect (if you knew their secrets you’d see how rotten they are), but in their heads they’re wannabe fuck-machines, because babies are how they become gods. Joseph Smith was a world-class pervert.
Newsflash: men are not gods. Men are the exact opposite of gods. God transcends the flesh and rises above it; Mormons revel in it, and never get where they’re wanting to go.
Gay men represent a complete threat to this Mormon-god economy. We fuck for the fun of it, as sex-crazed as they are, without making new babies. They can’t stand the thought of all that seed spilled for naught. Fucking without becoming gods? Who do those fags think they are?
Vanden’s novel is both confused and confusing at first, but it does make you turn the page. And then you arrive at Robert’s grand awakening. He must be who he really is, before toxic religion drives him crazy.
...Joseph Smith was a ripoff artist, but it’s the fastest-growing religion in the world.
“All Is Well” is a journey book, where a man from Salt Lake City winds up in San Francisco; in keeping with his mental evolution, he grows up along the drive in an old VW bug.
The genuine ethic of this novel comes in the final chapter; Robert, liberated and Gay, takes responsibility and addresses his son, even as he’s leaving him. Dad admits everything and apologizes, and points to a better life. Always with a Vanden novel, hope arrives. We know the kid’s going to turn out okay. Now, in this era when Gay and Lesbian marriage and parenting are hotly debated, we have an example from 35 years ago of a Gay dad being a true father. In a way it’s the most Mormon moment in the book; it’s also the Gayest.
When you have children out of duty, and not from the free-flowing effulgence of your innate sexuality, maybe you think a little harder about the impact of your actions on your kids. Or maybe it’s just that Gay people are a little bit smarter, a little more thoughtful; heterosexual dads don’t even have to get licensed. But this father thinks about what he’s doing, reaches out to his child and makes a friend for life.
Yeah. Them’s my kind.
It’s amazing that Vanden came up with all this in 1971. He’s a genius, a visionary, an artist. He loves Gay men, and knows our troubles, and brings us into a positive sexual place. The important thing is to come to self-acceptance. Personal integrity is a pearl of great price.
Josh Thomas is the author of Murder at Willow Slough & Andy's Big Idea, available on www.Amazon.com.
http://joshtom.wordpress.com
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Back to 1969:
I WANT IT ALL review
by Charles McAllister
A well-produced series of gay novels appeared during the year under the Greenleaf Classics label, from San Diego. Foremost in their stable was Dirk Vanden, who not only is a talented writer, but whose vivid imagination and interesting “sexuations” made Leather Queens, Leather and other titles most readable. His latest novel, I Take It All* was published by a new outfit called Frenchy’s Gay Line. It is his best work and tells almost all there is to know about the bike set. (The setting is San Francisco’s Folsom Street bars.) Unlike so many gay novels it has a plot that is believable and is written in an easy style that makes it hard to put down. Unfortunately the typography leaves much to be desired, even in a $1.95 paperback. Perhaps now that Frenchy’s Gay Line has a writer of Dirk Vanden’s caliber they will try to do justice to his obvious talent by turning out a less sloppy product.”
February ‘70: *Last month I reviewed Dirk Vanden’s I Want It All as I Take It All by mistake. Highly recommended. Another recent title of his in the Greenleaf Classic series is a wildly imaginative science fiction novel called Twin Orbs.”
CALIFORNIA SCENE, January & February, 1970:
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD,
by Michael Perkins:
I Want It All by Dirk Vanden,
also Boy-Watcher by Kym Allyson, Screw 22 by Jeff Lawton, The Gods of Tlen by William J. Lambert, Homage to Priapus, E.V. Griffith, ed
“If gay sexual life is reflected in these gay fuckbooks, then good as some of these books are, there is more of a radical difference in the quality of heterosexual and homosexual erotic activities than I’d thought. I’d always assumed – on a very superficial level, I suppose – that the differences were mainly of function, i.e., where the cock goes in, the kind of sex-play, and so forth. But after reading this half-dozen, I wonder if the difference isn’t inherent in the nature of the sexes – as moralists and Victorians have always told us: that is, the act of sex, as opposed to love and sex, is far more important to males than females, whether in a hetero- or homosexual situation. To put it plainly: in these fuckbooks there’s almost no talk of love, union, or much of anything not relevant to the semen exploding in the ass, whereas in heterosexual fuckbooks – the best, at least – other things are going on... but there’s so much honest fucking for fucking’s sake here, so little of the window-dressing of the soul I find so stimulating in sex and sexual writing, that I wonder if I'm not a closet lesbian..
“All this is not to say that there isn’t good reading here. I Want It All is the best homosexual fuckbook I’ve ever read (“fuckbook” as contrasted with the more literary Proust, Baldwin, Rechy, D’Arcangelo, etc.) Dirk Vanden, writing in the first person, creates a character named Warren Miller, who begins as a “straight”...cowboy in Colorado – in an alley saving a hapless cocksucker from getting stomped by suggesting to the boys that they gang-rape him. In the process, Warren discovers his own bent, saves the man’s life, and undertakes a journey to San Francisco, where by the end of the book, he has come full circle and established a love relationship with another male. Vanden is so good at taking his reader step-by-step through the stages of homosexuality that gay people will find themselves remembering their own beginnings, and heterosexuals, well, they’ll get a vicarious trip through what many of them have wondered about, behind the eyes of a character so “normal” he is totally empathetic.”
SCREW (Newsmagazine, New York) Oct. 5, 1970:
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I Want It All review excerpts
by Ralph Collins
“A book...the S&M-leather-bike crowd should make sure not to miss is Dirk Vanden’s I Want It All...
Vanden writes beautifully, and his stories are always extremely readable... If you dig leather, you almost have to dig Vanden. Even if you don’t go the route, it’s still exciting to read about it.”
THE VOICE magazine
Issue # 108, circa 1970
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ALL OR NOTHING
Book Review
by Victor DeStefano
Dirk Vanden’s All or Nothing is the sequel to his successful I Want It All, published by Frenchy’s Gay Line ($1.95) ...Always written in a style and with smoothly structured syntax (though with several typographical errors) that rival those of our top-flight novelists, Vanden’s story describes the overwhelming guilt” felt by Bill Thorne, instigator of the gang-rape in I Want It All... “The action takes us to the West Coast, first to Los Angeles and later to San Francisco. At first, out of his need for atonement, and later because of his own increasing desire for sexual release...Bill finds himself involved with the San Francisco leather-set after some other interesting encounters along the way. In this highly masculine atmosphere, he discovers that same-sex love need not reflect the stereotype mannerisms of the ‘fairy.’
“If you thought that Vanden’s I Want It All said it all, you are mistaken. Read All or Nothing and see if you agree.
“Whether All or Nothing marks the apex of Vanden’s writing career remains to be seen but he does reach a new height for a homosexual novelist. I recommend this novel highly but at the same time realize that it is not for the sexual novice nor for the old-fashioned sexualist. Of its genre, it has to be the best book ever written.”
CALIFORNIA SCENE, February 1971
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ALL OR NOTHING Review
by Michael Perkins:
All or Nothing is “a sequel to one of the best homosexual porn novels I’ve ever read, I Want It All.... What’s good about both All Or Nothing and its predecessor, besides the requisite fuck scenes, which to both hetero- and homosexual seem very arousingly done, is Vanden’s ability to create two basically American/Vacant characters living in (Colorado) and make both them and their environment seem real and believable. To do this Vanden has to be able to convey the feeling that he was there, and he does.
“The dialog is good, the descriptions of life in a small (Colorado) town are convincing. He is especially good at showing us the feeling of comradeship that exists among homosexuals.
“Put all these abilities together, and you have a novelist, not just a fuckbook writer. A novelist who has decided to write about gay life realistically and even propagandistically, the latter because the straight reader finds himself believing – as the author wishes him to – that the gay world is somehow tenderer and more feeling than the straight world. Not a bad accomplishment.
Place that next to the many erotic scenes...and you’ve got an excellent gay porn novel which raises the standards for the genre.”
SCREW (Newsmagazine, New York) April 5, 1971
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CLOSET NOVELS CALLED DANGEROUS
an article by Peter Hadley
“...I’ve found that some of the most positive literature for homosexuals, in terms of stressing the idea that gay and what gays do is good, is to be found in the paperback novels of several porn writers.
“A novelist like Dirk Vanden...who has written several very sexy novels like I Want It All and All or Nothing, is more than just a sex book writer. His characters go through some very erotic scenes, but their coming out, their growing awareness of their homosexuality and its positive meaning is much more important to the book than the erotica. He makes some very important positive points about homosexuality and this is a good thing.”
GAY Magazine New York
June 7, 1971
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MY VIEW
by Marc Williams
ALL IS WELL by Dirk Vanden
The Other Traveller $1.95
Have you ever picked up a book, planned on reading for an hour or so, then find, many hours later you either get some sleep or finish the book? With a days work ahead, sleep must win out? Well, I got to bed at four A.M. By all means start this book early. You won’t want to put it down.
This has got to be the best gay book on the scene today. Characterization? Near perfect. Sex? Logical, real, lasting only as long as it should and is needed for the particular scene. Story? Robert Thorne has received an anonymous note telling him his son, Chuck, is queer. Being a straight Mormon father, he returns to Utah to confront his son with the letter. His relationship with his wife, his son, the inner struggle with himself and the realization of what the gay scene is and the people that make it go round, builds to a climax, even if you surmise what’s coming, you have to read it to be sure. And for the sheer joy of reading a decent piece of gay fiction. It wouldn’t be fair to tell you more.
Above is a review of FROST, by Richard Amory. Between these two they could set the entire gay fiction scene on its ears. A book doesn’t have to have sex, sex, sex, in order for it to be accepted and be a best seller.... Tell a good story and tell it well. If sex is a part of the character, so, sex is a part of all our lives (almost the most important). There will always be houses that publish the hard core stuff, and there is a wide market for it, as there should be. I like nothing better than to read this type of book, when I’m in the mood.
BUT, the gay population needs and must have its serious writer to present to the public an honest, true picture of that side of life that they deem “deviate.” It takes all manner of propaganda to convince them that we are not going to rape their young boys. People like Amory and Vanden can lead us a long way along that path. Support one of the new publishing houses that has the courage to put out something that might not sell on 42nd street. Buy, read, pass on ALL IS WELL, by Dirk Vanden. You can’t help but feel good after reading this one.
Mattachine Society Magazine,
Christmas Edition, 1971
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“VANDEN’S BEST BOOK”
by Richard Amory
This is Vanden’s best work to date, which makes it a very good book indeed. Freed finally from the fourth-rate visions of at least two fourth-rate publishing houses, Vanden is finally able, with Olympia Press, to do what he wants to do.
All Is Well is a very ambitious book. Vanden takes an emotional casket named Robert Thorne, one of those hollow men that seem to abound inn the Middle West, and brings him through a series of beautifully suspenseful trauma into the warm, loving sunlight of self-realization. In Thorne’s case, the new self happens to be homosexual, but it is more than that too – it is pro sex, pro-love, pro-life; the real enemy, as Vanden sees it, is the desiccated Puritanism of a dead and dying culture, no matter what form it might take, straight or gay.
Right on, brother!
Vanden knows what he is talking about. He can give you the smells and textures of a dirty old Turkish bath in Salt Lake City (Yes, Virginia, there is a Salt Lake City), the strident sounds of an old-culture gay bar on Polk Street, the feeling of mescaline (talk about contact highs – whew!), and the simply incredible hostilities generated by the old, lead-pipe, preacherish morality. Thorne, like Vanden himself, is a Jack Mormon in chapter One, which says a lot right there. Lots of garbage has to be hauled out of his skull before he can even start to define his problem, but define it he does, and deal with it.
Vanden is the only writer I can think of who knows his way around inside the heads of two generations: mine, the unbelievably fucked-up generation now in its forties, the one that sees itself fulfilled in Judy Garland and which will walk a mile out of its way to step in a pile of shit, and the generation now in its twenties, those beautiful, shaggy-headed freaks who seem to know ten times more about loving than we ever dreamed of. He knows these things, and takes his time about developing them and getting them down, starting with a beautifully controlled first chapter and ending in a place I won’t tell you about. This is a thick, prosy work, introspective, thoughtful, sometimes much too essayistic, but always ingenious, probing, suspenseful.
If you’re a Judy Garland fan, read this. Read it if you’re not a Judy Garland fan. It is not a jack-off book; the catharsis is on another level, and besides, jack-off isn’t where it’s at any more.
Highly recommended.
VECTOR Magazine
February, 1972
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AUTHOR’S NOTE:
In 1971, as they were preparing to print ALL IS WELL in their Other Traveller Series, Olympia Press sent one of their best Gay authors, John Francis Hunter (The Gay Insider) to interview me & write a “first page blurb” about the book. He took with him a carbon copy of the book (those were the Good Old Days of IBM Selectrics) and quickly sent me his own yellow onion-skin carbon copy of the letter which got quoted in the book:
“All Is Well is, to date, the best work of fiction of the new gay literature. Its theme is liberation, played with deceptive simplicity and not a trace of political bombast. Yet it is political, in that it is a paean to a way of life that is counter-culture all the way. Suspenseful and phantasmagoric, swift-moving yet entirely thorough in all its revelation of a metamorphosis that could be Everyman’s, All Is Well grabs you and keeps you – and if you dig its message will never let you go. The captive gay, or even part-captive, who carefully reads and really understands and actually applies the wisdom of this novel won’t need a shrink and can get by without an organization or any formal experiment in consciousness-raising.... What’s more, All Is Well is a novel of, for and about sex, with some astoundingly erotic scenes that are as profound a manifesto of the right to discover and be one’s total self as any rhetoric on the essential subject that I’ve heard or read. I recommend it wholeheartedly as a must to today’s – or tomorrow’s – American male homosexual.”
Wow! Talk about “pulling all the stops out!”
He used that “blurb” as the basis of a very long essay on the state of Gay Literature in 1971. He said the same things, but narrowed and modified them with other information & that made it seem like the blurb in the book had been extracted from the essay, not the other way around. It was apparent to me that he had been challenged or questioned about his enthusiastic testimonial & felt the need to explain “What he really meant.”
My questions never got addressed. Olympia Press, granddaddy of U.S. Erotic Publishers, after having collected the best of the best Gay writers in the country under it’s tent, went bankrupt. Everybody lost touch with everybody. Anyway, thanks, John Francis, for both versions of high praise, indeed. Here’s your essay:
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THE NEW EROTICA:
ALL IS WELL!
By John Francis Hunter
A new new gay literature is emerging, and its virtuosi learned their craft by writing one-hand paperbacks for such meatgrinder outfits as Greenleaf Classics on the West Coast. In being required to clock an erection, if not orgasm, every fourth page, they grew adept at integrating sex into what they wrote to satisfy the publisher and his concepts of the gay market (thus the “fag-hots”), but ultimately in order to express themselves – for what they had to say was important enough to them to try to transcend the de rigeur erotica and say it.
Not that any of them was/is anti-erotic. In fact, several of them are masters of it. But theme and characterization and plot in their works have come to stand on their own merit. Out of their need to earn bread fast they, not unlike the Dickenses and Twains of the Nineteenth Century, have kept their pots boiling and at the same time found their unique voices for a unique era. They began the old new gay literature, just as GAY and The Advocate established the old new gay journalism underground and have now ushered in another era of responsible reporting from out of it.
Among the creators of the old new gay lit and who formed the transition to the new was Richard Amory, whose Loon sagas, with their vivid and jubilant sex scenes that critic/author/guidebook editor (to Europe) Carl Driver has called “sacramental,” became a seminal work of fiction of the late ‘60s. Lusty genital males in a never-never land of the Far West roamed to love uninhibitedly in a homosex civilization which seemed patently to be the only one, the “other” world and its oddball embrances quite inconsequential.
While he also proposed an alternate life-style and presupposed that gay is good, if not better, Angelo d’Arcangelo in his stunning Sookey (Olympia) presented the possibility that there is a mystical heredity among homosexuals, deriving from among great romantic figures of the past, and that great romantic attachments of today descend in essence from those that have already developed, thus predestined.
Because the Loon books and Sookey did not deal with a here-and-now societal struggle, however, they were therefore bridges from the old new to the new new, which has begun to come of age treating of the exigencies and potentials of being down-to-earth gay in today’s hostile world while focusing on individual down-to-earth gay relationships. Whether it be the esoteric adventures of the S&M set and how the personality evolves into pleasure-pain separatism via leather love as in the works of Larry Townsend (his recently published Run, Little Leather Boy, is under the bright now aegis of Olympia’s Other Traveller series, whose benign genie is a non-gay genital female, Frances Green) or finally eschews its excesses (as in Dirk Vanden’s earlier Leather), or mystery-suspense (Douglas Dean’s This Flesh Could Melt), or WASP respectability vs integrity (The Outward Side, James Colton, Olympia), there is and has been a strong message. The message in the new works eclipses the erotica with hardly a race. All these writers have a message for today to deliver which gays can oppose or digest as they are being entertained. A “moral,” if you will...
In his All Is Well, San Francisco’s sage yet incorrigibly idealistic Vanden has come up with the best work of fiction, to date, of the new new gay literature – if one accepts the definition of said body of literature as necessarily incorporating a headline-current message or strictly 1970's psychological perturbation and resolution. If one considers gay-is-good fiction to have been originated and already single-handedly definitively topped by E.M. Forster in his posthumously published Maurice...that the period and background are subordinate, after all, to the universal idea, the time of the writing immaterial, then of course Vanden would take a back seat. But I propose that the new new gay lit and its writers are not yet to be weighed against a posthumous classic and a titan who came out, late, of an establishment actually less restrictive than the porno paperback.... We’re talking about what writers like Vanden are saying from the present peculiar gay viewpoint and how well they say it vis a vis each other. Thus, his is the best of the lot yet. Since he writes about the middle-class closet of today and one man’s escape from it with the aid of the youth Weltansicht and drugs as catalysts, it seems to me that All Is Well is presently the Zeitgeist novel of early ‘70s gaydom. Gaydom today is still peopled overwhelmingly by those who have an over-thirties mentality though they may be chronologically younger than twenty-five. The majority of gays in America are still trailing the green goo of being stepped on though not squashed by the accepted, tolerated bigotry of another era.
Vanden writes of a man being torn apart by his attempt to remain consistent with the values of a Philistine culture, in Salt Lake City. His exposure to outside opportunities for becoming a whole person occur in San Francisco – hardly a typical American city, it’s true – but mostly right on solid fetid Mormon soil where there is no gay lib movement, no cosmopolitan bar scene, no charismatic gay personality to seek out for counsel., the Sturm und Drang of his double life, his excruciating celibacy, his violent and often insane fight to triumph over internal suicide and master his forces for beginning a new life are of a recognizable provincial world, where one is alienated smack in the middle of the madding American Gothic crowd, not lost in the variegation of Greenwich Village or the Vieux Carre or the Left Bank or the Via Veneto.
The theme of All Is Well is liberation, played with deceptive simplicity and not a trace of political bombast. Yet it is political, in that it is a paean to a way of life that is counter-culture all the way. Robert Thorne, who has been receiving illiterate anonymous letters threatening him with death and accusing him of making his son “queer,” returns home from a business trip to San Francisco, hoping to catch his son “in the act.” On the plane he meets John Adams, who resembles Robert’s brother Bill, though Robert is hardly aware at first of the resemblance or what it signifies. Adams makes an overture to Robert in the airport tearoom, which Robert violently rejects. At home, with his son absent, he blacks out, then finds himself clutching an envelope containing another nasty note and lurid photos of genital males having sex, and these revolt him. He flees to a steam bath–is driven to take refuge there, of course, as he is driven throughout the novel to make contact with other homosexuals and thus his central self – where he mouth-rapes (yep) another male. Symbolic dreams, more notes, and remembrances of times past when he forced his brother to go down on him, an accidental (and highly beneficial) mescaline trip, finally a moving encounter with his enlightened 15-year-old son, and then one side of his split personality – Bobby – takes over until Robert finally gets himself together in San Francisco. His is a nightmarish closet, though his predicament is uncommonly dramatic and the solution to his “problem” super erotic.
What’s more, All Is Well is a novel of, for and about sex – voluntarily and legitimately so – with some astoundingly erotic scenes that are as profound a manifesto of the right to discover and be one’s total self as any non-fiction rhetoric on the subject that I’ve heard or read. You really cannot remove the sex, but it is the man Vanden is writing about who is preoccupied with it, like a child in puberty who summons the poltergeist, not Vanden under publisher’s pressure. To make that quite clear, in an author’s note Vanden says:
“In all my previous books, sex has necessarily bee the predominant theme because whether or not their assumption was correct, my publishers insisted on ‘hot sex’ and lots of it, the kinkier the better ... Olympia has allowed me far more freedom in writing All Is Well; the sex is still there (as it must be in gay novels as well as gay lives) but only as one of many aspects of the story...There are thousands of books which supply masturbatory fantasies for those who want them; there are very few books which advance the idea that being gay isn’t as wretched and sinful as we’ve all been taught to believe it is. ... there is a tremendously exciting reformation going on, all over the world, and I fell that gay people are going to... find themselves in the vanguard of that reformation... We must understand ourselves – and that, more than anything else, is what All Is Well is all about.”
The fault I bother mentioning in this little gem of a work is that in its rampaging celebration of maleness it approaches male chauvinism, offering little counsel or comfort to the effete, the androgynous or the poorly-hung. So far, it seems to me, all the virtuosi I have mentioned in this piece are concerned with the mainstream gay male when it comes to appearance and superficial mannerisms – and I include the leathermen in that category. No doubt all shuddered at the casting of Giton in Fellini’s Satyricon, and the boy in Death in Venice. These writers, when they sing the body electric, seldom hum anything about the short-circuited sissy, which means that the new new gay literature has room for lots more diversity.
Otherwise, the spirit of All Is Well is unassailable, and I recommend it whole-heartedly as a must to today’s – or tomorrow’s – American male homosexual. I agree with Michael Perkins, who said of Vanden in SCREW, that he is “a novelist who has decided to write about gay life realistically and even propagandistically, the latter because the straight reader finds himself believing – as the author wishes him to do – that the gay world is somewhat tenderer and more feeling than the straight world. Not a bad accomplishment.”
That is essentially what the new new gay literature is all about.
GAY Magazine
December 6, 1971
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“All Is Well...should be required reading on any gay booklist. Read it. You might learn something about yourself and gay life in general.”
“K.C.”
DAVID Magazine
February 1972
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