Gutter Boys
REMEMBER SYNTHPOP? Now we call it electroclash, but in the early 80s it was a brand-new musical style that married punk DIY to a fey, eyeliner-wearing, pop fashion. Alvin Orloff's characters in Gutter Boys live by its dandified, gender-bending aesthetic.
What happens: Shy, neurotic, 19-year-old Jeremy Rabinowitz falls madly in love with Colin, an embittered Irish Catholic, factory-town escapee who has one of those quirkily brilliant minds that you only seem to find on the periphery of the periphery-self-educated and free. Colin rejects him as a lover, but introduces him to the seethingly sexual gay netherworld of 1981 with all the enthusiasm of a debutante's mom. It is a little chilling for the reader to hear about the free-for-all of anonymous sex, knowing that the AIDS crisis is just about to hit. Soon these people will be blamed for their own alarming death rate. This is not a story about rampant amorality, however. Colin has his own uncompromising moral code rooted in his working-class radicalism and unique reading of popular culture. He has fierce rules for the honorable life, which don't exclude public sex. In addition to having Colin as a moral compass, Jeremy is haunted by his two grandmothers, a Russian Jewish communist and a proper British matron. The two ghosts squabble with each other across a cultural divide that shaped Jeremy in the first place-and comment on Jeremy's decadent life.
Many gay novels from the late 70s and early 80s, such as Larry Kramer's Faggots and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance, explore the affluent, Fire Island side of gay debauchery; Gutter Boys is about the people who cleaned their towels. Here subculture does not equal immorality. While Orloff's penchant for wacky plot devices such as hairdressing space aliens and ghosts will not be to everyone's taste, he maintains a thoroughly non-experimental narrative thread. He's not hard to read.Ê
This is Alvin Orloff's second novel from Manic D Press, an established alternative press in San Francisco that has survived for a remarkable 20 years, without succumbing to an agenda or particular style. Also worth noting from Manic D is Jon Longhi's Wake Up and Smell the Beer, a fictional memoir written in a heavily anecdotal style. Longhi witnesses the deliriously devastating effects of speed and acid, an unusual chronicle, because so few brains come out of a good speed run relatively intact. I'm always on the lookout for a good new drug book, like Party Monster (Simon & Schuster) by James St. James, rereleased last year, which lets you get about as close as most of us would want to something called a K Hole.
JENNIFER BLOWDRYER