Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I have owned this gay novel for a few years, but it is only recently that I have gotten around to reading it. Totempole was first published, judging from the copyright (presumably for the hardbound ed.) in 1961, and Michael Bronski in his survey and anthology of gay pulp (and other) novels includes it in his book's chronology of gay novels under 1965, at which time it came out in an earlier Signet paperback edition or printing (the "Signet" series, mass-printed and widely distributed, being an imprint moniker of the publisher New American Library, New York City). Totempole most assuredly deserved to be perpetuated in this much later edition, but in all of its prior and later editions. What Michael Bronski says of this novel (on pg. 364 of Pulp Fiction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, St. Martin's Griffin, 2003) is quite true; Totempole's approach to the subject matter is surprisingly probing and positive, dealing very seriously and intuitively with homosexuality for the time of the novel's composition, when so much fiction, apart from outright pornography, was usually at least rather equivocal about male homosexuality, when not outrightly gloomy and/or negative about it; Totempole was a return, after the "uptight" years following W.W. II, to the more positive depictions of gay male sexuality that had been common in works of literary merit dating from the 1930s and 1940s.
The book is uneven and the pervading Freudian psychoanalytic overlay becomes a bit too strong at times, especially in recounting the early childhood of Stephen, the principal character, but Totempole really does merit continuing attention as a fine novel and a sympathetic yet unsentimental approach to gay maleness. The book is so excellent that it is difficult to understand why Bronski, who praises the work so highly, did not sample some of it in that annotated anthology of his! Bronski would have done well to include from this novel the chapters where Stephen finally gives himself in physical love to the handsome and appealingly sensitive Korean doctor (held prisoner by the American occupying troops, whose soldiers include Stephen), in which Stephen first takes on repeated occasions the "active" sexual role of penetrator, then, at last, passively surrenders blissfully to the Korean prisoner's penetration of himself, chapters which the author quite beautifully and movingly recounts, as he so finely handles many other aspects of Stephen's formerly conflicted childhood and early adult sexuality, which his love for the Korean doctor at last resolves. The book is a bit dated, for sure, but it is as sympathetic and understanding a depiction of gay male sexuality as many fine works that followed in subsequent decades, and is warmly recommendable to Amazon's clientele of eager readers
Click Here to see more reviews about: Totempole
No comments:
Post a Comment