Reference no: EM133320568

Question: This story about gay life is coming at a moment when there isn't a long history of examples for an aging, out gay man-much less an out, gay writer writing about gay life. In many ways, what was interesting about gay life in the age of Andrew Holleran and E.B. White has been (if you'll forgive the pun) lessened-sterilized and hollowed out by gay liberation's homogenizing respectability politics. We see Greer here wondering, in this satirical novel, whether there's anything distinctive and worth writing about in gay culture now that gays have won legal equality and, in their assimilation into the mainstream, given up the self-destructive but exhilarating lifestyles of the 70s. (Yes, of course, there are still self-destructive and exhilarated gays, to be sure, but that's no longer seen as the default, as standard.)

We might use this context to think about Arthur Less's interesting pattern of relationships: he's always dating a guy either a generation older than he is (Robert Burn is more than twenty years his senior) or a generation younger (both Freddy and Bastian are at least twenty years his junior). There is a symmetry here that I think we're being asked to pay attention to. Recall also that Greer makes it so that Less's relationship with Robert is almost exactly as long as his with Freddy, another notable symmetry. And the one guy who is Less's age and whom he seems to love and regret not pursuing-Javier, the Spaniard from the party in Paris-that possibility is introduced only to be ruled out in the narrative. What's going on here? Why won't Less date seriously within his age group?