It was 1980, three years after Anita Bryant launched her "Save Our Children" campaign that equated homosexuals to child molesters. According to the General Social Survey, approximately 70 percent of U.S. residents believed homosexuality to be "always wrong."
The power of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was burgeoning and helped to put Ronald Reagan into office. Stories were emerging from California and New York of healthy, young gay men who were dying of cancer and pneumonia. The CDC would eventually release a report documenting the cases of five of them, the first official recognition in the United States of what became known as the "gay plague." It was during this turbulent year that author Barry Gifford published his first novel, 'Landscape with Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves. ' The book was drawn from the life of his gay friend, Marshall Clements.
The reaction was surprising. Gifford became the first straight man to make the cover of Christopher Street magazine, one of the most popular gay publications in the United States. Leonard Bernstein and Quentin Crisp wanted to meet him, gay people lined up in droves to have copies signed and, during an interview with Jane Pauley, Gifford was asked, "What did your wife and mother think?"
Gifford was in his mid-thirties at the time. He was born in a Chicago hotel to a father with mob ties and a mother who was a former beauty queen modeling fur coats at the Merchandise Mart for Joseph Kennedy. Gifford spent a great deal of his formative years in hotels, places he describes as the "greatest university for a writer" given the vast confluence of people who checked in and out from all over the world combined with time spent alone in his room, where he began to gain a sense of who he was. Gifford applied that education towards a career that produced more than 40 published works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the seven-part saga of two of his most enduring characters, Sailor and Luna, which began with the novel Wild at Heart.
Fifteen years after 'Landscape with Traveler' went out of print, a new edition has been published by Seven Stories. On October 9th, Gifford was back at a Chicago hotel, recalling the man whose steadfast friendship inspired an intimate diary of observation, reflection and the occasional haiku about life as a homosexual.
Windy City Times: It's been said that you've mastered the darker side of the American psyche. So I'm curious to know your thoughts on the homophobia in this country. Where do you think the hatred comes from?
Barry Gifford: Anybody who's different. That's always been the answer. It's the fear that most people have always had, whether its color, or sexual habits or because they dress differently. If everyone was exactly the same, they'd argue over nail polish. Last night, I was with a bunch of people having dinner and somebody asked me, "Who were you named after?" And I said, "Well I was named after a gay head waiter at the Beldon Stratford Hotel in Chicago." The thing was, I never heard a racist or homophobic remark from either of my parents and now we're going back to the late '40s, early '50s. My mother never had an attitude like that. She was friends with this guy whose name was Barry and he was an Irishman and he was gay. Anyway, I don't think people change much at all. I think they gather in groups and create a life for themselves but they still encounter prejudice of different kinds.
WCT: You touched on that in Landscape, where the gay character of Francis talks about his friendship with Jim, a straight man. He says, in their need for walls, people "divide homosexuals and heterosexuals. It's a pity, because there's such beauty in everyone."
BG: I accept the differences in people. I always did. I was always interested in it. It's all in the details, you know? That's why I wrote the introduction to Landscape with Traveler, to talk about my friend Marshall, because, when it was published, people couldn't understand why I was writing this book, being this little macho shit that I was. I mean that in the sense that, on the surface, I was the antithesis of somebody like Marshall, but he was the greatest person I've ever known. What a wonderful thing for me and I was lucky that I was open to a friendship. People were suspicious of his motives and mine but, you know, fuck 'em.
WCT: You lived in San Francisco and Marshall lived in New York. Was the connection you found with him the thing that kept you friends for so long over such a long distance?
BG: I was fortunate for thirty years to be able to go to New York to see him a lot. He was kind of a teacher for me. I had many lacunae, you know, missing parts because I didn't have a formal education and Marshall had such an eclectic knowledge of everything from opera to ballet. But, it was his manner, more than anything that I thought was so special. I miss him all the time. He wasn't perfect, but he knew the world.
WCT: Being LGBT can be a tough struggle, when you're finding your identity. There's this fear of who you are.
BG: I think it is for almost everybody, anyway. If you have a deeper struggle in terms of sexual identity, I can't even imagine how people get through. Marshall learned of his own sexual identity pretty early on and he found it perfectly natural. He never complained.
WCT: Tell me about the initial reaction to the book.
BG: It was a curious case and some people, like reviewers, would confuse me with Francis Reeves.
WCT: But it was embraced by the gay community.
BG: That was the really amazing thing. I didn't know what to expect, but they made it a best seller. But then there was that group who didn't like its more conservative views on sexual practices. I called it a pre-AIDS fervor. They were into sticking their dick into every telephone booth they came to. I didn't think it was a good idea and Marshall had that take. He thought it was too profligate. He was a pretty intelligent guy.
WCT: Once HIV became known, the far right used it to lambast gays. They still do.
BG: To hell with those people, they're idiots. Everything's based on fear. The insurance business wouldn't exist without propagating fear. You might say it's better now because gay people can come out or be in public office. So there's been movement that you might call progressive but Pat Robertson might call "dancing with the devil." People are short-sighted. You don't have to accept it. You have to speak out, at the risk of losing your life in some situations.
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When it came to speaking in the voice of a gay man, Gifford will always give the credit to Marshall Reeves Clements, a man unique in his experience who simply knew what he liked and had his opinions. "He was very proud of the book," Gifford said with a smile. "He was happy with it."
