BOOK REVIEW : A Mixed Bag of Mostly Gay Fiction Is Evocative, Generic : DANGEROUS DESIRES, <i> by Peter Wells</i> (Viking; $20.95, 220 pages)

Timing is important, even in telling a story that happens all over the world every moment: a young man’s discovery that he is gay. For too long, this story couldn’t be told at all, or had to be disguised. Then, a generation ago, there was a brief, golden moment when a gay writer’s personal struggle coincided with the larger story of gayness going public. Telling it, then, was an act of courage; the social significance of the story enhanced its literary value or, in some cases, compensated for its flaws.

No longer. Even in New Zealand, where Peter Wells sets these three novellas and five short stories, openly gay lives and the ravages of AIDS are old news. This doesn’t mean that Wells’ subject matter is any less suitable for fiction than it was before. Who would object to heterosexual love stories just because they have been written for centuries? But it does mean that, once again, literary value is the only kind that counts.

For Wells, a filmmaker best known for his 1986 adaptation of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family,” this is his first book of fiction. Though “Dangerous Desires” won prizes, including the New Zealand Fiction Award, it’s a mixed bag. Wells’ prose is sometimes subtly evocative, sometimes only mannered; he deals intelligently with serious issues but often without fully rendering them into stories --assuming a margin of error that no longer exists.

Three of the shorter stories are linked. In the first, a 38-year-old Auckland food writer named Eric finds that his old friend Perrin--whom he had met on his first tentative visit to a gay bar--has AIDS. In the second, he cares for the ailing Perrin while trying to relate to his current, much younger lover, Matthew. In the third, with Perrin dead and Matthew gone, Eric consoles himself with anonymous gropings in “that dark zone of pleasure known as a sex club.”

The vain, crotchety Perrin is a good character, but Eric is gen eric. Wells eloquently mourns AIDS’ “savage hewing down of men who had just climbed out of the darkness” of the closet, and celebrates, even in the face of death, “the grid of sexual desire, which lit up the entire globe in great flames of energy . . . a kind of life force,” but the stories themselves, as distinct from the ideas they express, are static.

Things get even slower in one of the novellas, “Bum to You, Chum.” A 34-year-old newspaperman named Nick Burns finds evidence that “Aunty Tizz,” the woman who lived next door to the grandparents who raised him, had actually been his mother. He travels to Sulphur City, a volcanic resort area, to find someone who knew Tizz and can shed light on her life of pretense, which he compares to his own life as a gay man.

An interesting idea, surely. Add a colorful setting, good dialogue (though not enough of it) and a brave affirmation that even pickup sex in public toilets need not be sordid, and the story should work. But it doesn’t. Too much of it consists of Nick brooding over old photos in his motel room and drinking gin; and Wells’ description, like steam from the sulfur pools, blurs more than it reveals.

The other two novellas, in contrast, show Wells at his best. “One of THEM!” is the basic gay coming-of-age story, told with the drama and individuality that each retelling needs. Two teen-age boys--slim Jamie and fat Lemmy--don’t yet know they are gay, though we know and their parents and teachers have suspicions. Jamie tells the story, but it’s Lemmy who first identifies the fate that has been bearing down on them all along.

Plenty of conflicts here, against a backdrop of schoolboy pranks, popular music and dreams of Swinging London, epicenter of hipness for the English-speaking world. Plenty of scenes-- this is what we miss in Wells’ less successful stories, in which the characters tend to slip by one another rather than collide.

“Of Memory and Desire” is a twofold departure: The lovers are heterosexual and Japanese. A young executive, Keiji, marries an older, lower-class woman, Sayo, against his mother’s wishes. He is a virgin; she is sexually experienced. On honeymoon in New Zealand, they struggle to communicate in erotic, savage scenes that recall D.H. Lawrence or Yukio Mishima. The foreignness of his characters forces Wells to make them act as much as they think. And, as in the gay stories, their fringe status only emphasizes the human ordinariness of most of what they feel.