Love That Dares Laugh at Itself...

I’m often asked, with regard to gay humor, “Why now?”--as if Oscar Wilde, F. Benson and Noel Coward had been great tragedians. But today I’ll choose to interpret the question thus: Why, after so many decades of being famously witty about everything else, are gay people finally pointing satiric fingers at ourselves?

The answer, of course, is post-Stonewall liberation. Once Oscar Wilde’s “love that dare not speak its name” got double-dared to do so and did, it was only a matter of time before we started making fun of ourselves. This is, after all, America--land of the free and home of brazen self-deprecation.

This summer alone, a trio of very different books arrived to examine the gay condition in as thigh-slapping a manner as possible. The first is an anthology cleverly called “Out, Loud, & Laughing: A Collection of Gay and Lesbian Humor.” A breezy thing, it belongs to the well-beloved sub-genre I like to call “toilet lit”--these being books in which the contents are edited and arranged in such a way as to provide a complete literary experience for each spell on the porcelain throne. In fact, since almost every contribution to “Out, Loud, & Laughing” is the work of a stand-up comic or performance artist, you can sometimes whip through three or four separate sensibilities between flipping your zipper and soaping up your hands.

Alas, this rapid-fire approach makes it seem as though nothing in gay life were worth more than a cursory, caustic glance. Likewise, most of the contributors aren’t necessarily top-flight writers; they’re top-flight performers. Thus we miss the gestures, inflections and sheer charisma that help put the material over on stage. (There are two fine exceptions to these objections: a heartbreaking one-act play by Emmett Foster and a hilarious ‘zine parody by David Sedaris.)

“Growing up Gay” is a better sustained read (and still terrific toilet lit). With but a single theme and only three contributors (Jaffe Cohen, Bob Smith, and Danny McWilliams, collectively known as Funny Gay Males), the book offers an exhaustive and affectionate look at the way baby-boomer gays differed from our peers in childhood--in everything from social tendencies to cultural preferences. (Gay boys, the authors say, liked “Bewitched” and “Green Acres” and disdained “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Petticoat Junction.”)

This is marvelous, untrod territory; but the book does have a few problems. The authors never really seem to make up their minds about whether to include lesbians; despite almost certainly having no pertinent experience themselves, they stick an anecdote in every so often, as though they’ve just decided they ought to.

And the tone of the thing is a bit wobbly. I adored the authors’ dazzlingly accurate reconstructions of the icons, idols and idylls of gay childhood, but occasionally they leave this behind for speculative what if . . .? shtick or just out-and-out satire. “Long Day’s Journey Into Silent Night,” for example, is a short play about the tough-talking, tyrannical 8-year-old director of a school Christmas pageant. It’s funny on its own, but it departs from the textures of life as we lived it and therefore disappoints.

Only “Pink Highways” by Michael Lane (he of Monk Magazine semi-fame) succeeds completely--and, significantly, breaks away from toilet lit.

This is an honest-to-God book. There are no one-liners, just a litany of Lane’s surreal intersections with all aspects of the Human Comedy during and after his trip to the march on Washington. Lane’s prose is only serviceable, but his love for people is unabashed, unconditional and gorgeous. This dizzy, scary, amazing feat of reconstruction (Lane rewrote the entire manuscript after the original journal was stolen, we learn in an afterword) is the kind of thing that stays etched in your memory long after every joke you ever heard has faded.

As his cast of kooks, weirdos and psychos become--in the best literary manner--beloved friends, you realize that he’s done the summer’s best service to gay humor, by putting it in the service of something larger. Call it Art.