A potent portrayal of gay literary giants

Eminent Outlaws

The Gay Writers Who Changed America

By Christopher Bram

Twelve. 384 pp. $27.95

Christopher Bram's 1995 novel The Father of Frankenstein may have been fiction but was so accurate in its depiction of '30s gay film director James Whale that it could have passed for biography. Bram shows even more narrative power in his new nonfiction book Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America.

Bram's portraits of an often-reluctant gay literary vanguard is fascinating enough, but alongside a 50-year narrative of unexplored gay aesthetic, he also provides a parallel history of the gay-rights movement.

Bram will discuss the book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., in a joint appearance with Edmund White, author of Jack Holmes and His Friend.

Eminent Outlaws tracks gay life in post-World War II America, as it was reflected in the stories and characters of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara - all young writers and officially very much in the closet, who were nonetheless defining an emerging literary genre. (Bram deals with gay men in this survey and states that a separate volume would be in order for lesbian writers.)

Even though they used fiction to reveal gay life as it actually was, authors usually didn't identify themselves as gay. The literary closet was a reality, and overtly gay themes or hints at the author's sexuality would have hurt them professionally.

Bram explores what was happening in the writers' personal and professional lives, noting, "It's difficult to keep one's real sexuality buried for too long without the work suffering."

Ginsberg's poem "Howl" was turned into a rebel manifesto of the '50s. "Fifty years later, it's remarkable how the gayness of the poem and Ginsberg himself are often downplayed by admirers," writes Bram, who believes that assessments of Ginsberg and his work should "reconstitute the man in his full homosexual nakedness."

Sexual ambiguity in Williams' plays eventually became a creaky theatrical device that sparked a backlash against the playwright. Bram paints Williams as a fully sexualized man and artist. He pumps blood into what has become a more petrified academic viewpoint of Williams' work. Tennessee would approve.