The Men From the Boys — as a Triangle Classic!
I penned The Men From the Boys during the fall and winter of 1995-96. I tell people that I took a house in Provincetown to finish my long-simmering novel, giving myself a chance to hear the muse sing in the waves and the wind. A nice story, something a real writer would say. But in truth, I took the house in Provincetown because my seven-year relationship with Tim Huber was at a scary turning point. Neither of us knew where we were going, whether we’d stay together or go our separate ways. And then, just to turn the screw a little tighter, our closest friend, the well-known activist Victor D’Lugin, then living in Provincetown, finally became sick, after living for 13 years with AIDS.
Yeah, right. I sat there watching Oprah and reruns of Bewitched and eating too many Reese’s peanut-butter cups. I was miserable. I missed Tim like crazy and meanwhile Victor was failing a little bit more every day. He’d forget dinner plans. He’d fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. He had no interest in the intellectual sparring that had so defined our friendship. In many ways, it really was just me and the wind.
What I wrote that winter evolved into the book you now hold in your hands, but at the time it seemed superfluous, a killing of time, expendable keystrokes that filled up the empty space between increasingly rare journalism assignments. I was living off cash advances on my credit cards, wrapping nickels and pennies to pay for groceries, switching long-distance carriers every month so I could skip out on payments without having my phone turned off. I wasn’t trying to become a novelist. I was simply trying to get by.
So when my agent Malaga Baldi told me she actually thought the finished manuscript was good — and not only good, but sellable — I thought she was just trying to be nice to me. When Matthew Carnicelli at Dutton bought it, writing me an exuberant editorial letter that sang the novel’s praises, I thought he was in cahoots with Malaga to make me feel better. “Be nice to Bill; he’s had a hard time of it lately.” Yeah, that’s it: a New York publishing house buys a novel just to be nice to some unknown writer. Happens all the time.
When the book went to the trades for review, Kirkus, Library Journal and Booklist all gave it such raves that, yes, again, a part of me believed there was a vast conspiracy out there To Be Nice to Bill Mann. To me, the only honest review was the slightly snarky critique in Publisher’s Weekly; only PW, in my opinion, had seen through my fraud. But when Paul Rehme at We Think the World of You bookstore in Boston told me the book had been selling so well it had pretty much single-handedly paid his summer rent, I wasn’t sure how to explain it. All those people out there, buying the book just to make me feel good?
Writers have notoriously fragile egos. Maybe all artists do. Six hundred critics tell you you’re good and one says you suck, and you believe the last guy. But soon, despite all my doubts, I started realizing that this story, banged out in those dark days in my forlorn little cottage in Provincetown, mattered to people. Week after week, I’d open The Advocate to see the book on the best-seller list at gay bookstores all across the country. On Amazon.com, readers left reviews so amazing they blew me away. And best of all, I got letters — old-fashioned, pen-taken-to-paper letters — from readers who were moved enough to write: Men who had been involved with older lovers, men who had struggled with being the “third” in a non-monogamous couple, men and women both who had loved someone with AIDS. Eventually I’d receive nearly four hundred letters, and many offered some variation on the same theme: “You’ve told my story. It’s as if you’ve lived my life.”
But to be honest, there were some responses that weren’t all that favorable. And often these came from older colleagues who seemed just not to “get it”: they’d ask why the 33-year-old narrator would worry about being “too old” to continue playing the gay game. (I presume the last time they were out at a gay club they were shaking their booty with K.C. and the Sunshine Band.) It’s true that the novel takes a very particular generational perspective, reflecting my own belief that those of us born in the 1960s are caught between two cultural behemoths, the Baby Boom and Gen X, having aspects of both but belonging to neither. A bit of a generation gap in responses to the novel, therefore, was probably inevitable.
Cases in point: After a decade of stark division between “literature” and “erotica,” I was writing about sex, and in detail, prompting one straight reviewer to come right out and say there was “too much sex” in the novel. (I loved it; we actually considered using it as a pull-quote on the paperback edition.) For some younger readers, there was mystification over the open relationship between Jeff and Lloyd, while some older readers thought they weren’t open enough.
Most significantly, though, The Men From the Boys offered a portrait of a relationship that was negotiating how to endure, not to end. So much of gay literature during the age of AIDS had been about the <
The original title of the book was Tricks of the Trade. I really liked that title. It seemed to fit: the whole book is, after all, a kind of manifesto on tricking, and “the trade” for me was the gay life that Javitz taught to Jeff and that Jeff tries to pass on to Eduardo. But somebody at Dutton thought it sounded too oldstyle — “tricks” and “trade” being buzzwords of an older generation — so I came up with The Men From the Boys, taken from a line in the text about separating the former from the latter. (We later learned that Mart Crowley was planning on using the title for his sequel to “The Boys in the Band,” which he went on to do. I’ve been told he hasn’t been very pleased when theatergoers assume his play is a dramatization of my novel.)
At readings, I’m invariably asked, “How autobiographical is it?” People assume I’m Jeff, that Tim is Lloyd, and that Victor is Javitz. I can’t deny I’ve layered my fiction onto a pretty strong imprint of my life. Jeff is a freelance writer like I am; Lloyd is a psychologist like Tim; Javitz is a professor and gay activist like Victor. To say that’s there where the similarities stop would be disingenuous — but, in fact, the characters in the novel are not the people in my life. They’re more me than they are anyone else: Jeff is hardly the only character in which I recognize myself, and there are many qualities about Jeff (thank God) that come more from others than they do from me. Ultimately the truth of the book is not in its situations or events, but in its spirit and emotion.
Dark days have a way of retreating. Tim and I celebrate seventeen years together in 2005 – we were legally married in 2004. I live full-time in Provincetown now, and I’ve come to love the winters I once so dreaded (of course, writing about Hollywood in my other career did get us to buy a place in Palm Springs, which keeps me on the West Coast for much of the time between New Year’s and May.) I’ve gone on to write two more novels, one of which, Where the Boys Are, is a followup to The Men From the Boys. (Hope Mart Crowley wasn’t thinking about using that one too; this time the mea culpas, I suppose, go to Connie Francis.) I resisted for a long time writing a sequel, despite editors asking for it, but finally a letter from a reader convinced me: “Gay culture changes so fast,” he wrote. “What would the boys be doing today?”
It’s been said that The Men From the Boys was a slice of gay life, a snapshot of an era, of a time both dark and hopeful. I think it’s also a portrait of a generation, of gay men old enough to remember a time without AIDS but too young to have experienced the heady sense of liberation and limitless opportunity that that time promised.
It’s also the personal story of four guys, of different ages and cultural backgrounds, who love each other. Plain and simple. Maybe, more than anything else, that’s really what matters, what makes it universal beyond one’s age or experience, what keeps people coming back. As Jeff says, “Every time we make love, we’re taking a chance on life. In the end, that’s all we can do.”