Michael Denneny published ten of my books, both fiction and non-fiction, at St. Martin’s Press, where he spent most of his career as an editor. He died recently (in his sleep, at the age of eighty), and the obits I read failed to outline his quirky, even weird personality and also underrated his influence on not only gay writing but gay liberation generally. So this is my two cents.
(Above: Ethan dons we now our gay apparel during his spell as a Michael Denneny author, long long ago in a galaxy far far away.)
Essentially, Michael felt—as I did—that the habilitation of unplaced minority groups begins in the arts. In the late 1800s, Irish stereotypes in vaudeville and the theatre were risible, but they provided exposure and personability. It was the same with Jewish performers such as Weber and Fields, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor. Their humor may have been far-fetched, but it was all the same ingratiating, humanizing, especially in Brice’s Rose alter-ego and comparable characters, who in songs and sketches viewed American culture from an immigrant’s point of view: about the arts (“Becky is Back in the Ballet,” clumsy and manic yet somehow triumphant) or the social distance between retail and wholesale (“Second Hand Rose”).
Black performers followed suit later, because they were already busy with their own show biz, the so-called “black time,” with its particular theatres, staff, and audience, wholly separate from the “white time.” (The two terms are long vanished, but note that we still speak of the “big time.”) By the 1920s, racial heterogeneity was undergoing accommodation, and black integration on Broadway—a single star name in this or that thirties revue but half the ensemble in Finian’s Rainbow and many principals in Beggar’s Holiday, both in the forties—heralded the emergence that, as with other groups, led to further social integration.
For his part in this, Michael used St. Martin’s Press in the same way, as a launching pad for a library of gay literature of all kinds, tales of imagination and poetry side by side with naturalistic narratives and analyses of the progress of The Revolution—the cultural and legal angles of the normalization of gay rights.
Actually, by the late 1970s, when Michael launched his campaign, readers had had access to more than a few novels on life on the secret gay planet, perhaps most famously Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind, a sort of Harlequin romance for gay men. For a picturesque touch, in youth its author had been known as the handsomest actor on Broadway and made playwright Moss Hart so dizzy with need that Hart used psychiatry to self-medicate his conversion therapy and go straight.
However, The Lord Won’t Mind and the other gay storybooks were strongly pre-Stonewall in tone, somewhat fantastical, even. We didn’t lead Harlequin lives, especially not after the testosterone drag fest of the Rebellion. In 1969, they called it a “riot”; nowadays it’s simply “pushback,” because you can’t appease the bully. You smite him. There was an air of the Bobbsey Twins about these pre-Michael novels, or Elsie Dinsmore or the Hardy Boys. Readers and editors alike bought into the hoax that tales without straights in them were bad art, a false positive. A world without straights, they said, lacked reality.
Like…wut?
But Michael had a cure for this. As it happened, the president of St. Martin’s, Tom McCormack, wanted minority voices heard in his shop. He at first found Michael difficult to wrangle (McCormack even tried to fire him, but Michael simply avoided the office) yet even so St. Martin’s was all in for gay lit. All Michael had to was create it.
The Revolution arrived when Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples was submitted. As Michael himself told me, he pulled an all-nighter reading—twice!—this more or less plotless dream novel in which cruising is a search for the divine in men. The next morning, Michael thought it over: it was niche but arty, as exotic as a wyvern and likely to catch on as a prestige curio. And it was relatively short and would thus be inexpensive to produce.
Best of all, it was penetratingly gay—and the next morning Michael, tired and disheveled, stumbled into the St. Martin’s editorial meeting, announced that the house would publish this book or Michael would resign, and promptly went home and fell into bed.
Other gay books followed. Some succeeded and some failed, but the library was now open, and it’s worth noting that, while other editors did try a gay book or two as the readership opened up, only Michael assembled a collection.
One reason why was the size of the closet in those days, the 1980s and 1990s. If was huge, and while more and more men and women in the arts took a few steps out, Michael was jet-propelled, the go-to in How To Write a Gay Novel. He is famous for having introduced new gay voices and ignoring the established authors of name and fashion, but he had no choice, for St. Martin’s was stingy with advances and Michael an enthusiast of the house’s financial system. Agents tended to steer their clients elsewhere.
Even Randy Shilts’ landmark AIDS history, And the Band Played On, a huge seller for the house, got only a tiny advance. I know this because I happened to be in Michael’s office when he was on the telephone and I was standing right over a letter handwritten on tall, lined yellow paper. You know, those pads the grownups use. It was to Michael from Shilts, and I couldn’t resist reading it. The entire thing was a (doubtless justified) harangue about Shilts’ economic difficulties when researching the book. How he had had to go into debt, and so on. Another house would have paid more for the manuscript, but another house might have feared to publish it, and Michael knew that. It was a buyer’s market.
(Above: It’s blurry, but so true to life. We’re about to attend a promotional event—Jay, Ethan, Michael’s mom holding my first Michael book, and Michael. The location is Michael’s apartment, on West Eighty-Third Street.)
Meanwhile, what kind of line-editor was he? Some writers felt naked without his guidance, and he knew useful technical tricks. One of his authors, in a story collection, had to move directly from a sad tale to a happy one without transition; it seemed abrupt and insincere. What to do? Michael told him, “Start the second story in the rain”—and indeed that covered the jump in tone with a soothing neutrality, opening a path for the droll tale to follow.
The main thing, though, was his ability to appreciate all the forms that gay could take. Some folks like to pretend they don’t know what “a gay novel” would even be. Is that, they ask, a novel that has sex with other novels? No, isn’t it simply any novel about gay people? And while Michael sustained the equipment of The Revolution with software, he had no fixed idea about gay life. An editor at a rival house complained to me that Michael “ghettoizes” his writers. Again, where were the straights? You can’t have art without straights, can you?
As if. Anyway. Michael didn’t “ize” his writers. They wrote what they wanted to write—though he did have a sweet tooth for tales of the gym, the bars, Fire Island Pines (where he weekended in summer), the outfits, the haircuts, the green or white or red party, where a shirtless youth with skin like medieval armor danced while playing castanets, mesmerizing a generation.
Michael took part in all this, too, in his own way. But you couldn’t collect the tasty details of his adventures because he lacked functioning memory cells. (People assumed it was from all that grass smoking, but his mother said he was like that even as a toddler.)
He had a very faint sense of humor. Even when he got a joke, it was well after the punchline. I once told him of a friend of mine who, heading out for a Pines tea, paused to put toilet water behind his ears, and the seat fell on his head. Three minutes passed. Then Michael finally broke into his unique laugh: “Ha-ha!” It had taken him that long to process the joke.
Yes, he was quirky. And he was missing all the moving parts of the Northeast Urban Gay cultural machinery. Like totally. I call this The Knowledge (after London cab drivers’ astonishing ability to reach any of the city’s myriad of addresses without coaching). The Gay Knowledge takes in familiarity with the lively arts, from opera to dance, television to theatre; in an appreciation of movie people from Mary Pickford to Glen Powell; in a knowing smile at the mention of Dagmar, Harry Chess, Letch Feeley, and so on. In short, The Knowledge is a thorough grounding in all or most of the arts, high and low.
Michael was unversed in all of it. He may have known that “Kander” would of necessity be followed by “and Ebb,” but I doubt it. And when topics on the Broadway musical came up, he would get frustrated and even angry if they went on too long, as he plumed himself on his University of Chicago education and frankly didn’t see why the theatre had to enter into it, complicate it with irresponsible trivia. To Michael, education meant history, philosophy, sociology, not a bunch of wastrels singing I Got Rhythm and raising their arms at the end as the curtain fell. I told him, “Theatre makes you smart,” and as young gaylings we need the power of knowledge. Besides, Judy Garland died for our sins. But he had nothing to say about that. Conversations with him sometimes suffered these…lacunae.
It was an ego thing. In certain contexts, Michael had to be “managed,” to help protect his self-esteem from being humiliated by a sensory overload of those perplexing who-knows-whats from The Knowledge, such as Bette Davis or Franco Corelli. These names! Names! And everybody knew what they represented except Michael. I knew him for some four decades, not only as one of his writers but as a companion, and if he ever went to the theatre or the opera, he never mentioned it.
He did see at least one Broadway show, a musical; I am certain of this because I went with him. Somehow he was gifted with a pair of tickets and took me. Maybe he thought this was his chance to collect the experience we others all had, of that chorus with their arms raised singing Gershwin with Jack O’Lantern grins. Or maybe he’d finally see this Ethel Merman he kept hearing about. (She was dead by then.) Anyway, this was the wrong musical for all that, as an extremely heterosexo affair called Leader of the Pack, about and reviving early rock and roll. There was no Reno Sweeney or Harold Hill in this: the characters were the actual people who wrote and introduced numbers like “Chapel of Love.” Imagine Ethel singing that one. After the show, Michael asked me if these people were famous, and I said, “The music is. Bette Midler sings some of the numbers we just heard,” which at least brought him close to the material. He didn’t know Ethel, but he knew Bette.
Michael did observe one gay lifestyle practice: he was very big on brunching. He often hosted them, and I would recruit the guests from the gang of usual suspects (i.e., other gay males somehow or other involved in publishing). These brunches were “ized,” so to say, filled with talk of The Pines and the parties, the summer’s latest “hottest boy in town” who had tongues wagging when he surfaced at tea in my God the tiniest shorts, what hunks were dating and who just broke up. It was all very shallow and lots of fun.
But Michael maintained other sides unknown to us. The Revolution was ecumenical, it seems, for he had sex with one of his woman writers, very advanced on The Issues. He told me about the encounter, prideful in recounting her praise for the authenticity of his lovemaking in language that would bring down a monarchy today. But “The past is a foreign country” (says L. P. Hartley). Michael wasn’t bi, however, or not, at least, in any real sense. This was political sex, a way for these two to set up a threeway with the Zeitgeist.
But back to the brunches. The usual guests included Eric, another writer (though not one of Michael’s); Jay, tall, handsome, built, and hung, and Michael’s longtime partner, because he had very good taste in pleasure; and some of the Christopher Street magazine crowd. One of them was the magazine’s chief cartoonist, very cute with prematurely white hair, which Eric thought was a smart career move. We all talked like that then. (The one exception was Michael. He never really got gay humor.)
(Above: Crazed antics by an unknown magazine merrymaker at a Michael brunch. Some dare call it treason, but Eric (at right) remains calm. He came, he saw, he Mimosa’ed. And The Revolution will be lip-synched.)
Eric and I wrote monthly columns for Christopher Street, and (unbeknown to its publisher, Chuck Ortleb), I wrote also the letters section, because Christopher Street never got letters, and you look like losers unless you print a few. The editor would call me up and say, for instance, “I need eight lines of 23 pica (or whatever it was) correcting the error in the something-or-other piece,” and I’d dictate it. We were like wicked children getting into the cookie jar.
The fare at Michael’s brunches was typical—Mimosas, omelets, and some sherbet thing with raspberry liqueur (very big on Fire Island then). After, we would troop down to a flea market held in a school playground where we had to keep Michael away from the Melmac kiosk lest he launch for the thousandth time into his Melmac lecture on how it didn’t matter if pieces broke because the pastel coloring allowed you to mix and match. Or something like that.
I intend this memoir not as a rounded obit but as personal recollection of what Michael was like, and to emphasize that his attraction to "Who cares what breeders think?” gay writing very, very strongly influenced gay unity and hastened the opening of society to us. To us as we were, rather than as the professional doormats wished us to be. Restraint is surrender; you cannot appease the enemy. You kill him or die.
And for that reason, I repeat, it is impossible to imagine what gay writing would have been like without Michael’s leadership. In a way, he was The Revolution.
(Above: The literary life after Michael: Another promotional event, with Mary Rodgers. Ethan, and Bill Hammerstein.)
Or, in a way, was Michael just a part of The Revolution, though it was his creation? One brunch day, after the flea market, Michael, Eric, and I were walking back to his apartment up Central Park West. It must have been October, because it was a sort of summery day but it was already dusk, and as we passed an exit from the park, out came a runner, fresh from his laps.
He wore nothing but sneakers and jazzy shorts with a racing stripe, and I will call him Brandt Larsson, which is close enough. A well-known circuit rider back in those days, when New York gay was a village, Brandt was not only a beauty but the possessor of a vast Cock of Wonderful Death. Some have an exploso, some the larger bazooka, but Brandt’s was gigantic, a Red October. So you can imagine the effect he cast in running shorts, stalking out of the green world at dusk.
His surname was one of those Scandinavian patronymics, this one meaning “son of Lars,” and when he unpacked for a rendezvous, his partner would cry, “Where did you get a cock like that?” and Brandt would say, “Sweden.”
As he came toward us that brunch day, he was utterly unaware of us or his surroundings, as he was experiencing that rapture that runners attain when their exercise has zonked them onto a higher plane of being. Wet with perspiration, Brandt was radiant, and Eric and I stopped to absorb the wonder of it.
Blind to all this, Michael continued marching northward as Brandt crossed the road to get home, shower, and rest before going out to hear the nocturnes, tour the dangerous gay night. He walked past Eric and me—if we hadn’t been clutching each other in the thrilling realization that the god had come, we could have touched him without reaching—and as he turned the corner, Michael finally realized he was alone and revolved to see where we were.
Where? In the zone with the avatar of the dream that awakens you, everything that Stonewall meant to us. The Revolution, Michael, was not just about storytelling. It might even have been about something completely different.
This is a pot roast at home with Nona and a 10 karat Van Cleef & Arpels desert with Marilyn Monroe. So throughly interesting...and touching, exciting and with the pure simplicity of admiration for a man who had impact. It commands the metronome of my attention full speed ahead. I wanted more. No one writes like you, and for that and more, my admiration burns brightly.