My Husband and My Wives

It seems I am a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards in the memoir/biography category, results to be announced on June 3.  Naturally I am pleased although I don't think that I have the smallest chance of winning.  The book has been well covered in the gay press; Out printed a passage from it, various publications reviewed it, Andrew Holleran in The Gay and Lesbian Journal called it "Booth Tarkington with blow jobs," a memorable phrase that I guess Farrar, Straus & Giroux would not feel comfortable putting on the cover of paperback reprint.  Not that there will necessarily be a paperback.  The general response to the book has been lukewarm, I should say, although sales started off with a flourish on the heels of Maureen Corrigan's praise for it on NPR's Fresh Air program soon after publication.  Interestingly enough, as we used to say in the academic game, that was the only coverage the memoir received in the straight press.  I have always lamented this, since I think there is a potential audience among straight women.  Women readers from my own sampling have much liked it (I am talking about the female readers' comments on Amazon as well as women I know--not much of a sample!). 
I always sense that the gay community finds the memoir irrelevant; so much of the book is taken up with the description of  negotiating my life as a bourgeois husband and father. Another objection from gay readers is that I spend such a disproportionate number of pages on my wives, scanting my poor husband Richard, when I finally get to him.  But as Tolstoy wrote as the first sentence of Anna Karenina "Happy families are all alike . . ."  After chronicling the enchanting and enchanted first year of our relationship, I was pretty much left with a monotonous recount of a happy, easy going, conventional emotional and physical gay relationship between two aging guys that would have put any reader to sleep.  Richard quite agrees with me; he was also just as happy not to read about himself in excessive detail in the memoir.  
Straight male friends and acquaintances who have read it seem disenchanted.  As a category they are made nervous, I believe, by the frequent reference to their brethren having engaged in some kind of physical relation with me.  It is a phenomenon I have always found fascinating; it is one of the reasons I catalog so many sexual encounters in the memoir.  And possibly that emphasis has turned off straight critics who might otherwise have reviewed the book.  Who knows?  I thought the descriptions neither titillated nor repulsed; I meant them to be simply part of a record.  I was interested to read in the February issue of Prospect, that always so very bright London journal, an article by Richard Beck on Sheila Hedi (the author of What Should A Person Be?) who remarks that Hedi "jokes that the current age cries out for a new kind of genius, by definition unavailable to heterosexual men.  'We live in the age of some really great blow-job artists,' she writes.  'Every era has its art form.  The 19th century, I know, was tops for the novel.' "  So, just maybe, Booth Tarkington with blow jobs is on the really, really cutting edge, and the world has not caught up to me.