Smut. Simply delicious, and it even includes an actual plot and link between the three books, Warning: a few spoilers ahead,
Readers who missed thes and earlys the Summer of Love, the Age of Aquarius and those who cant remember the spirit of that time need to read the “All” trilogy by pioneer gay writer “Dirk Vanden” Richard Fullmer.
He explains certain things in an introduction to I Want It All, the first novel in the set:
“In, when the book was originally written, condoms were for heterosexuals and fetishists.
Real Men didnt wear rubbers, The characters in the story engage in high risk sex without batting an eye, . . In those days, no homosex was really safe, but we naively believed that anything we caught from crabs to syphilis could be easily cured, ”
Hindsight, as they say, is perfect,
The author goes on: “In those days, Nixon was president, Reagon was governor of California, and I was very much the AngryYoungDisenfranchisedGayManonaMission with a forum: my books were popular and I was committed to aggressively telling it like it is! Drugs, fetishes, fisting and all! We were still illegal it wasnt untilthat California decided consensual homosex wasnt a punishable crime.
”
And homosexuality had only been removed as a “mental illness” from the standard diagnostic manual for psychiatrists in,
Dirk Vandens trilogy of novels follows an interrelated cast of characters, The men at the center of each novel undergo considerable internal transformation before they can admit their sexual attraction to other men, even to themselves, Violent repulsion toward homosexuality especially mantoman is shown to be the standard reaction of “normal” people, In some cases, disgust and outrage are shown to be closely related to lust,
While the culture at large was hostile and dangerous to gay men, a small section of the “porn” publishing business catered to them by producing fiction that was assumed to be disposable onehanded reading.
Dirk Vanden wrote about the “comingout” process in this context, and incorporated elements of his life in novels that are necessarily focused on hot, sweaty sex, As he explains in his introduction to the reprinted version, he also had a reallife Muse:
“When I first wrote I Want It All, in, I had just met and fallen in love with a Gay man who looked enough like me to be my brother.
Many thought we were twins, We were living together in San Francisco, on Buena Vista Terrace, overlooking the Castro, The story was based on his favorite sex fantasy: being gangraped by cowboys, ”
The gangrape of a male traveller outside a bar in a deadend town in Colorado at the beginning of the novel seems all too realistic and representative of the hypocrisy of the era.
Luckily for the victim, one of the rapists is remorseful enough to help him leave town as quickly as possible,
What follows is an odyssey in which Warren, the remorseful narrator, finds his way through an actual and metaphorical desert to the barelyhidden gay community of San Francisco.
Considering the socially unacceptable status of “homosex” at the time, it stands to reason that the characters in Dirk Vandens work who break through their own inhibitions to reach for this forbidden fruit would also discover polamory, mindexpanding substances mostly illegal, then and now, and even incest in the form of consensual sex between adult brothers.
These novels combine a folksy, straightforward style and a certain joyful innocence with scenes from a lifestyle that still looks radical compared with the HappyEverAfter endings of contemporary gay erotic romance.
These novels show the current reader what was lost when some gay men especially white professionals gained suburban respectability,
The third novel in the trilogy, All Is Well, has the most depth and suspense, Although it includes explicit sex, it seems at first to be a horror novel about an upright Mormon husband and father in Utah who is being stalked by someone who knows things about his family and especially about his teenage son, who like other teenagers has become a mystery to his parents.
Robert, the thirtysomething businessman who fathered a child before he was fully an adult himself, discovers that his bland middleclass image is a hollow shell and that he doesnt know himself any better than he knows his son, his wife, or the fiveyearold twin daughters that she conceived by another man.
On a fateful Easter Sunday, Robert is tempted by a ruggedly handsome stranger that he meets, apparently at random, on the plane that brings him home from a business trip.
Robert undergoes a spiritual and emotional ordeal which enables him to remember a traumatic event in his past which involved his brother Bill, the ringleader of the rape in the first volume.
Robert remembers that their father was a narrowminded patriarch in the most literal sense,
Along the way, Robert discovers the counterculture of thes through his son Chuck, and reconceives the entire universe, After Robert is found naked by Chuck, who takes on a parental role by guiding his father through his first drug trip, Robert has an epiphany:
“All these years Id been trying to protect Chuck by never letting him see my naked body! Always closing the doors, wearing those ridiculous uncomfortable pajamas, or my bathrobe, or something.
Something covering up my terrible, shameful body!
“Why
“Why had I ever felt that my body was shameful or terrible God had made man in his own image! His Own Image! The idea seemed totally new to me, although I knew I had known it all of my life.
”
For the men in Dirk Vandens fictional universe, coming to understand oneself requires coming to know ones father, ones son and ones brother, There seems to be no other way to penetrate so to speak the mysteries of God,
These novels have the flavor of their time, but they are also ahead of their time, Even the briefest of malemale hookups enable the participants to shed a suffocating masculine image without becoming feminine in any obvious way, Love between men is shown to be exactly what a hatefilled world needs, In thes or thest century, it certainly couldnt hurt,
Kudos to loveyoudivine Alterotica for rereleasing Dirk Vanden's "All" trilogy: "I Want It All", "All Or Nothing" and "All is Well" in one combined book, The three stories stand alone, each told from the first person viewpoint of a different character, however common characters and a couple of common events link them together,
The first version was released before the Stonewall Riots, and to quote Dirk: "My books weren't considered worthy of editing when they were first published, We were lucky just to get the books published and to get a few bucks for an outright sale, "
Drugs feature unapologetically strongly throughout, Both the upside the euphoric feeling that you had all the answers, understood the essence of life and the universe and then the downside as reality stabbed euphoria in the back and painted black shadows around everything.
Apparently, one publisher wanted Dirk to "apologise" for all the drug use in his books, but as he explained it to me in an email: "We were illegal, immoral perverts in those days and anything we could do to our heads to keep from thinking how terrible we were just to have sex with each other and how even more terrible we were to write about it.
As a result, I tried marijuana, mescaline and LSD and discovered that they "opened doors in my mind, Drug use in Gay bars in thes ands was as common as beer and cigarettes, and, of course, like nicotine, and alcohol, the drugs were addictive, "
The books are set solidly in the late sixties, early seventies, an era famous for its music, its hippies and its drug taking, but still a time when homosexuality was illegal in most States.
The times they were achanging though, Chuck, the son of the last All Together's protagonist, sees it as a time when sex was not a big deal, and who you did it with was almost irrelevant,
In each story, a man who always thought of himself as straight, discovers he is happier being gay, Remember that in those days, this was a fate considered far worse than death, Those who identified as such were hounded by the law, consigned to the depths of hell by religion, rejected by family and rebuffed by their peers,
Making an apology is another theme in common, The viewpoint character has to acknowledge and seek forgiveness for a hurtful act, Until this is done, the character can never find peace within himself,
So let's get into the stories themselves, If the concept of golden showers and other such things turns you off, don't read this trilogy,
If you don't like learning about what it was like to be gay back in the's, don't read this trilogy,
If politically incorrect sections like this:
"Gay guys are the most bewildering people on earth! One minute they can be so damned pleasantand then turn right around and be the bitchiest bastards you've ever seen.offends your sensibilities don't read these stories.
It's like they all had splitpersonalities! I kept remembering that kid I'd picked up in Nevada, and the JekylHyde thing that happened to him, I don't knowit's like gay guys live on a tightrope or something you never know what's going to set them off! Likea guy would come in and order his drink, and usually he'd be smiling and happy, saying "hi" to everyoneand he'd pick out a spot to stand and display himself and cruise but then, maybe half an hour later, you'd hear him snapping at people, swearingor go storming out, shoving people out of his way! And who knows what the hell happened Maybe he cruised someone and got turned downor maybe he thought things weren't happening fast enoughor got hungup thinking nobody wanted him! Or, you're down at one end of the bar and a guy wants to talkand someone else goes down to the other end, wanting a drinkand no matter what you do then, you're wrong they act like you're insulting them both by not being in two places at once! Or if you're out of the one kind of beer a guy likes, it's like you've said something against his mother!"
If reading about rape upsets you again don't start reading,
While there is a "Happy Ever After" for each, if you're looking for a sweet m/m romance, don't read "All Together",
Are you getting the picture, yet
However, if you want an honest, noholdsbarred look at the scene back then, check it out, The background is painted around a basic plot of what happens to three different "straight" men involved in the rape of a gay man passing through town,
The second story, "All or Nothing", runs in parallel to "I Want it All", The first chapters cover the same territory but it's seen from a different point of view,
Being a painter himself, Dirk has a very observant eye, He remarked to me in an email: "My head works differently somehow, I see "more" than other people, I don't know what that means, I've always thought of it as "paying attention, "
Here's an example:
"They were all fascinating to watchthe way most of them tried to look so casual they really worked at it, leaning against the wall, or the bar, or the pool table in the alcove, in just the right stray gleam of light to show off their "baskets.
" I learned many new words that night, They were posing in every sense of the wordsome of them not just for a possible "trick" but for themselves I got the feeling that if anything happened to disturb the pose, they wouldn't be able to function until they got back into it.
"
Once again, he is also not afraid to make some statements about being gay and what it means:
"At any rate, I learned that night that there were almost as many "types" as there were gay men.
Apparently something had changed since I'd first heard about "fairies, ""
and remember this was written back in the seventies,
Dirk, via his character, has some interesting takes on marriage too:
"Maybe someday the laws and ideas about marriage will change also, and when that happens, maybe it won't be impossible to have both a wife and a family and a male loverfriend, all at the same time.
"
and earlier in a description that parallels his own relationship with his partner who died in the AIDS epidemic,
"Gay marriages just don't work, Bill, The only ones that do are where they're not really lovers, you know Not in the sense of a husband and wife at least, They're friends. Each one does his own thing for sex, but they live together as friends, "
This is backed up by his thoughts about why the character's marriage didn't work:
"the part of the female personality that, to me, made females unattractivea blind preoccupation with two people getting together in a "marriage" and devoting their entire lives to it.
"
In his recent interview on Lambda Literary, sitelink lambdaliterary. org/feature Dirk commented that he wrote the stories to say: "It's okay to be Gay!" "There are those who believe that Gay Liberation started at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich
Village on June,.
That is like believing that a flower can blossom without having been planted, " Most of Richard Amory's and my books were published before Stonewall, I would like to think that all those Gay dirty books were the fertilizer to make the Gay flowers grow, "
"All is Well", the final story in the trilogy is different, It's a lot more cerebral for a start, A lot of the "action" takes place inside the hero, Bob's, head,
Being the son of a Mormon Minister, for Bob, religion played a large part in his upbringing, I've read two other books that use this religion as part of the plot: James Buchanan's "Hard Fall" and Z, A. Maxfield's "The Pharaoh's Concubine". While these two authors may have done meticulous research, they don't capture that overwhelming feeling of guilt and stultifying constriction of attitudes and beliefs that Dirk conveys so well, having been brought up a Mormon himself.
The trilogy as a whole is uncompromising "All Together" is by no means an easy read, but worth it in the end, Dirk's writing makes you care even when the guys are at their worst, wallowing in their misery particularly the last story, You just want Bob to break out of his funk, I'm not a fan of paranormal, and this is a good example of what you can do without resorting to that level of fantasy, We all have the capacity to do these things ourselves, Be the strong invincible vampire, the werewolf that can change to a form that can vanquish its enemies and we can all harbor the demon from hell within,
In some ways, "All is Well" covers the steps of the archetypal hero's journey, complete with the wrong goal, the black moment and the mentor in this case drugs.
As in all such journeys, the hero has to reach deep inside himself to find the solution to his predicament and confront his worst fears in doing so:
"I had created the problems myself, however childish or illadvised I had been, and now I had to solve those problems myself.
"
I don't know whether this was intentional on Dirk's part to follow Joseph Campbell's prescription, but there are definitely elements there, There's even the symbolism of the epiphany happening on Easter Sunday when the hero leaves his past behind and is reborn, complete with the biblically significant three day turnaround from the time he leaves San Francisco and returns.
None of these literary elements intrude on the narrative, Many readers may not even see the story at this level, but I enjoyed "All is Well" that much more after I recognised what had happened,
Another theme that ran through this story was:
"I had to keep an open mind, adjust myself to the changes in the world, "
The world was definitely achanging, Another book that came to mind as I read was Andrew Holleran's The Beauty of Men, Set in the nineties, after AIDS had decimated the gay population, the different scenes in steam baths bear comparison, Although there are two very different establishments in "All is Well" neither have that pathetic lost quality that imbues Holleran's classic,
In Dirk Vanden's time:
"Here there were dozens of men wandering around, most of them young, and many of them very attractive, manlylooking, wellmuscled, with white towels narrowly wrapped around trim tanned waists.
One or two I saw were cleanshaven and short haired, but most of them had long hair, moustaches, sideburns, many with full luxuriant beards,
While in Holleran's book, the middleaged Lark describes it thus:
Driving to the baths inwas like going to Valhalla, he thinks as he walks down the hall.
Going to the baths inis like driving to have his tires rotated and oil changed,
In the end, the title of the last segment of the trilogy takes on a new tripleedged meaning as the different worlds collide and become one, Not only do the three characters come together, but for Bob, the hero of "All is Well", "all" the facets of his personality converge as well, Very neatly done.
There is almost a messianic fervor in the closing pages, The certainty hippies had in the seventies that a New Age was coming: The Age of Aquarius, Forty years on we can see that unfortunately the Roberts of the world didn't quite lose their grip, And while the Bobs may no longer be jailed for their sexuality, there is still room for more change to happen,
Dirk's writing style is fluid, his dialogue natural and his characters are vivid, It's great to see the trilogy, reedited to tidy up a few problems and published with a great new cover based on one of Dirk's own paintings, Again, congrats to loveyoudivine Alterotica for recognising what should be seen as one of the building blocks of gay fiction, .