Page 10 HIGH GEAR-SEPTEMBER 1981

Recent Joseph Hansen novel

Gay yearning well depicted

A SMILE IN HIS LIFETIME. By Joseph Hansen. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 292 pages. $13.95 in hardcover.

Eventually the marriage dissolves, much against Miller's will, when Deli finds a man more to her liking. The reasons for the split-up are various, but prominent among them is Dell's objection to Miller's need for male sex.

There is then an affair with Jaime de Santos, a hippie hooked on drugs, and during this episode Hansen gives interesting, if somewhat superfluous, pictures of California flower children and hippies of the 1960's.

By George Brown Joseph Hansen, heretofore known primarily for his classic California private-eye novels, in which the private investigator, Dave Brandstetter, is gay, has now turned to the non-mystery novel, to examining the search for love and emotional security of a homosexual named Whit Miller. A Smile in His Lifetime is set in a period from June of 1967 to December of 1969, with Hansen employing a series of flashbacks which begin with Miller's adolescent homosexual discovery with a friend of his own age in a Caiifornia town. Miller becomes gay but in college marries Dell, a The marriage is threatened heterosexual college instructor three years later when Miller somewhat older than Miller, a becomes enamored of Kenny, a political and social activist, who young ex-serviceman who is in the late 1950's is representatheir neighbor.

Another woman briefly enters the scene, seducing the sexy Miller, the boy from next door tive of the new woman.

Devoid of traditional feminine traits, Dell even has a boyish figure. Before the marriage she was aware of Miller's homosexuality.

Mailbag

Dear Members and Friends:

I know the GEAR Foundation works hard to maintain a nonoppressive stance towards every individual and group, and I know the writer did not intend any offense by his remarks, but the article in last month's HIGH GEAR concerning new board members, their gender and race seemed inappropriate to me, and, as I found out later, many others in our community.

Perhaps because I have always felt comfortable in GEAR as black and a woman, and accepted, or because I hadn't heard about or experienced "the lack of blacks" involved in GEAR, I found the comment smacked of "tokenism" and made us "objects" to fulfill a "quota" rather than persons working to make the GEAR Foundation a viable part of the gay community

here.

Also, in the interest of good journalism, articles which make reference to identifiable individuals should be checked by that individual for accuracy; for example, I'm more Hopewell Indian than Black, and I would have appreciated the chance to discuss the "tokenistic" tone of the article and perhaps revised it before publication.

I feel that as a Board Trustee and an active member of GEAR that it doesn't matter what I happen to be in skin color, but more so that I am willing to work with the Foundation, as so many

others do, to make it an important and safe space for every gay and lesbian in our community. GEAR has always been a warm comfortable place for me, and everyone who comes there I hope will feel the same way.

Editor's Comment

Sincerely, Diana L. Owens

I apologize for the factual error in the piece in last month's paper entitled "Annual GEAR Meeting." Diana Owens has corrected me as to her ethnic identity. Otherwise, I must take issue with her.

I have been involved in the gay community in Cleveland for several years, and my commitment continues to grow.

Repeatedly I have heard charges that the GEAR Foundation is an elitist group comprised of either "power mad dykes" or a social club mostly for snobbish gay white males.

My reporting that the GEAR Foundation Board has twelve members, five women and seven men and that one of the women is a black was not intended as tokenism but was, rather, an attempt to dispel some of the aforementioned notions that are held about the Foundation.

I did not intend any offense to you, Diana, or to anyone else. I am sorry that you took my writing that way.

Gas Lite Inn

-Jeff Wobbecke

638 West Main Street Springfield, Ohio

OPEN DAILY-EXCEPT SUNDAY 7:00-2:30

returns, and there is a landslide on the California coast destroying Miller's expensive beach home.

From 1967 to 1969 Miller has risen from abject poverty to wealth by the success of his novel. (He had previously been a pornographic and hack writer). The money, however, brings no happiness because Miller has no real or lasting love. He yearns for his ex-wife, who was something of a parental figure to him, although their sex life was fantastic, at least to Miller. She has remarried and borne the child Miller refused to give her.

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Miller is representative of many men who are husbe women, who have long sexual lives with them, apparently satisfactory ones, but whose surplus sexual energy is directed to other males. If and when the woman vanishes, she is not replaced with a female.

Hansen is a superb craftsman. He writes with a clean, vivid, economical style that makes Miller and most of the minor characters vivid and believable. The reader understands Miller and is concerned about him.

The novel's construction is as carefully planned as an architect's blueprint, and at times it seems too slick. The flashbacks become complicated, requiring thumbing back to correlate incidents. Hansen the mystery writer uses a mystery technique in this non-mystery novel. His use of the

series of complicated flashbacks for dramatic impact may make some readers feel that they are being manipulated.

The writer has the journalist's skill for clarity and the poet's gift for imagery. The sights and smells of California are continually before you. Consider this passage:

"He heads for the river, guided by the cries of redwings. Sunrise lays a pink line along the horizon. Now he is among the live oaks, stepping over fallen branches, twigs crackling under his shoes."

But, alas, the scene following this description, the final scene in which Kenny appears, although very pertinent to the story, the embarrassingly contrived.

Hansen is fully adept at describing character. When Kenny returns to Miller, Hansen writes, He has grown stocky, thick through the middle. Once he showed Whit a dog-eared photo of his father, a potbellied, sunwrinkled Indian holding a beer can outside some sun-bleached desert roadside bar. Kenny is on

the way to looking like his father. He wears a tattered Levi outfit, short boots scuffed and run over at the heels, a grubby T-shirt.

Sometimes Hansen's writing seems a bit too manicured. The experienced reader guesses that Hansen is well aware of what will sell, what the publishers want. Yet he always saves himself, such as displaying perception in the following concise lines: The Sea Shanty exists for strangers, men from miles away, who come looking for men they've never seen before to spend the night with--men they hope never to see again, men to whom they will not speak if they dee them again.

When the minuses and pluses are weighed against each other, the pluses easily win.

Whit Miller in his despair and raging need, goes to the Sea Shanty, where he picks up a trick and takes him home, to be robbed by him. Later he is beaten . and severely injured in a sordid cruising area at a pier. He looks into a mirror and sees "a child's face worn too long." Miller craves oblivion, death. The only living thing who sticks by him is his cat. At the end of the novel there is

just Miller and his cat. But there is a coming to terms with life. Hansen has followed the current demand for ending a gay novel on an optimistic, or at least a quasioptimist, note. But isn't this the way most of our lives run, the lives of those of us who survive? We seek a smile in our lifetime; and some of us find it, and some of us don't. Miller's life is typical of the lives of many gay people seeking love and fulfillment in a shaky social structure.

Whit Miller, aged 29 when the novel opens, is handsome, talented, and despite his despair, charming. In this respect he is the stereotype of the protagonist in the majority of gay novels. It is fine to be attractive in so many respects. But wouldn't it be interesting sometime to read a novel about a homosexual individual

who is plain, not particularly talented, and with no unusual social grace, but yet a person of sensitivity and principle? The gay woods are full of such individuals. What about their trials and tribulations? But would the publishers buy such a novel? Would the public read it? Perhaps so, if a craftsman such as Joseph Hansen wrote it.

Holly Near plays Kent

By Bonnie J. Berger Her singing has been called "as lyrical as Anne Murray, as earnest as Joni Mitchell, or as (People Magazine 7-13-81). torchy as Barbara Streisand" However one wishes to describe her music, the fact remains that Holly Near possesses an energy, talent, consciousness, and love for women that few artists are able to communicate as well.

Tenth Muse Productions of Kent takes great pride and pleasure in presenting Holly Near with planist Adrienne Torf in concert for one show only on Friday, September 18, 1981 at 8:00 p.m. in the University Auditorium of Kent State University.

The name Holly Near has come to be synonymous with women's music. Her songs deal with issues such as sexual harassment, violence against women, women in prison, and the joys, frustrations, and concerns of being lesbian.

An unmistakable sense of a very real person behind the songs of Holly Near is evident. Holly reaches out to audiences beyond the public "persona."

"Fire in the Rain" Holly's latest album captures the diversity of her appeal by focusing on themes such as war, anti-

RADIO nuclear/pro-solar energy, and FREE LAMBDA

on

WRUW-FM 91.1 Thursday at 10:30pm

relationships. Excerpts from this album as well as from her previous four are sure to be on the bill for her Kent performance.

Tickets for the September 18th show are now on sale for $5.00 in advance and $6.00 at the door.

The Auditorium is accessible and

Kent at the KSU Box Office and the Kent Community Store, in Cleveland at Coventry Books, in Akron at the Akron Food Coop, Flames. For further information and in Columbus at Fan the or directions call Bonnie or Barrie at (216) 678-6665.

child, care will be provided. Ins

addition, the concert will be

a ti b

signed for the hearing impaired. becsola) 9NOLLY NEAR diguontiA Tickets may be purchased in