| In
this issue, our multidimensional reviewer, Jerry Flack reviews Comfort & Joy and Whose Eye is on Which Sparrow |  Jerry Flack is a retired
professor of
education from the University of Colorado. He lives in Denver, Colorado
with his partner of fourteen years, who is also a retired educator. He
loves reading, especially gay literature, and watching gay cinema
(current favorites are "ROAD TRIP" and "GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN"), and
traveling throughout the glorious Southwest, especially in Santa Fe and
Taos, New Mexico, and the Colorado Rockies. Contact |
 God
Rest You Merry, Gentleman:A Thank You to Jim Grimsley for the Gift of Comfort and Joy No doubt Scrooge and the Grinch detest Jim Grimsley’s novel, Comfort and Joy, one of the most genuine and thoughtful gay love stories published in the past decade. Most likely they secretly prefer erotica set in sweaty fitness centers, gay murders in dark alleys, or Hollywood-based narratives wherein studs from small towns in Kansas or Texas become overnight super stars by sleeping on the couch with sleazy, closeted producers. I prefer the unsure steps, fumbling miscues, and the frequently sad yet intensely humanizing attempts of Dr. Ford McKinney and Dan Crell to be honest with themselves, their families, and most of all with each other in the difficult process of building a lasting relationship that will be a gay marriage to last for eternity. Comfort and Joy is chronologically spread across three Christmases as it charts the often difficult times but ever-growing love and understanding of each man for the other. The title of the novel comes from a beloved English Christmas carol that first brings Dan Crell, an assistant administrator at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, to the attention of Dr. Ford McKinney, a resident pediatrician. In the season of miracles, Ford is initially drawn to Dan’s angelic voice. Dan Crell and Ford McKinney come from vastly different worlds. Dan has been doubly fated with hemophilia (a beloved younger brother Grove died in childhood of the family’s health curse) and being HIV+ because he was given tainted blood in one of many transfusions. (“It’s really funny. I’ve had two lovers in my life. Two. But I’ve had the blood from thousands of men.”) Dan has also earned everything that he has: education, job, car, apartment, and limited financial security. What he has not earned is the loneliness of his solitary and romance-devoid existence. Dan Crell not only has a history of extreme family abuse and demoralizing memories of childhood poverty, his HIV+ status causes him to be lethal – poisonous – in the eyes of men so blessed as Ford McKinney. Ford could not be more different. He is the scion of one of Savannah’s upper crust families and solely bears the mantle on his shoulders of the future of generations of Old Southern money and all its privileges. He is handsome. He is a trust fund grandson, and hence financially secure even from the financial penalties his wealthy surgeon father and socially prominent mother could impose. He is also blessed with a loving and loyal sister, Courtenay, to whom he first comes out. Comfort and Joy has three basic settings: the backwoods poverty of eastern North Carolina where Dan’s mother and step-father live in a house trailer and own and operate a cemetery; the old money and society heights that accompany Ford’s Savannah family home address: and the year-around cosmopolitan Atlanta, the bachelor home in the lives of Dan and Ford where they try to build a life together. Dan has long before admitted being gay to both himself and his mother. Ford is not even sure he is gay when he invites Dan to dinner and then awkwardly backs out due to fear of public scrutiny. When he discovers that Dan is a hemophiliac and HIV+ on their first date, he escapes by pushing all his inner “information overload” buttons. The greatest barricade to the burgeoning growth of real love between these two good and decent men, however, is the total denial of Ford’s class- and society-conscious parents to recognize that their only son might be gay. Match-making has become an obsession for them. In their minds, there is only one possible life for Ford – marry a woman of high social standing and begin a traditional family. Danny, whose childhood memories are dark, is somewhat surprised at the ease with which Ford, such a strong man otherwise, is so intimidated by family traditions. Ford’s wealth and privilege is also a barrier for Danny, who has worked hard to achieve so little in comparison to Ford’s first-class fortune and luxurious home in an elite Atlanta neighborhood. Danny’s refusal to accept Ford’s largess (e.g., first-class airline tickets) and his insistence on hiding his bruises and internal bleeding and not asking Ford for help are barriers that Ford similarly cannot comprehend. Romance is also made difficult by the seemingly endless hours of Ford’s residency. At home he only wants to sleep. The ever-present and very real differences of their HIV statuses and Dan’s hemophilia cloud issues between the two men even more. As a physician, Ford is acutely aware of the dangers of the exchange of body fluids. Dan is smart and sensitive enough to realize that Ford loves him but is also fundamentally afraid of his physical condition. Sex is awkward and often unfulfilling. Throughout much of Comfort and Joy, Ford and Danny seem more determined to drive themselves apart rather than to seek ways and means to celebrate their love together. Despite the tensions the lovers experience, Comfort and Joy is an especially life-affirming novel with men who seem both authentic and truly in love. As sympathetic as Danny is as a man to truly care about, he is not without his selfish moments and unreasonable expectations of Ford. Ford, handsome, successful, and spoiled has never really grown up to become a man capable of loving another man with all the commitment and hard choices that act requires of him. Through three Christmas seasons, readers witness love struggle through birthing, infancy, and finally candid and trustworthy maturation. It is not my place to give away the ending of Jim Grimsley’s fine novel of gay love, but I want to say “Thank-you” to him for writing a story that never fails to move me deeply no matter how often I open its pages and once again imagine being Ford McKinney first hearing Dan Crell singing “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” in the lobby of Grady Memorial Hospital. It is easy today to find “light” romantic gay and lesbian fiction not unlike the 1960s Doris Day-Rock Hudson straight movie love stories that any fool realizes were ludicrous: two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after with nary a complication. What Comfort and Joy offers readers is exactly the opposite kind of story. Life and love and eternal commitment are hard and not the easy whimsy of a Technicolor dream world. Love between homosexuals is especially complex. Family love, joy, and comfort are not always givens. Difficult choices and compromises have to be made. Near the end of the novel, Ford tells Danny that his parents’ plan is finally clear to him. He must choose between Danny and his family. No other option is acceptable. Because marriage between same-sex lovers is made more difficult by the absence of external support and love, compromise and mutual respect between lovers is crucial. They must supply each other with acceptance and confidence and good will even when they are unsure that their loved one is making the right choice. The message of Comfort and Joy is not that love is easy. It is just the opposite: pledging eternal love is intensely difficult. But, it is worth the struggle. Grimsley writes these truths cinematically and it is a shame and a loss that the film industry and movie-going public are so homophobic as to prevent Comfort and Joy from becoming a beautiful film of gay love and devotion. Jim Grimsley’s wonderful novel has previously been expertly reviewed in the pages of The Independent Gay Writer by Ken Newman (Volume 2, Issue 4), but I have attempted to write about Comfort and Joy from a different perspective. These words are my personal testament as to how a single book can change another person’s life. Jim Grimsley has given me a wonderful gift that I will always treasure. Comfort and Joy has given me so many hours of peace, joy and solace that I believe I owe its author, whom I have never met, a special seasonal message of thanks. One example. Two years ago, my youngest sister died very suddenly at the age of 46. Not only did I have to deal with the shocking blow to my family, I had to fly 1200 miles across the country under trying circumstances. As I rapidly made plans to travel and hastily threw a decent suit and tie into my luggage, I automatically walked to my bookshelf and pulled down my copy of Grimsley’s poignant and very beautiful story of two men trying to find their own identities, their places in their own families, and most importantly love each other. Comfort and Joy is not only a tender love story, it is also a story of hope and survival. It is most essentially a work of extraordinary comfort for the only population I can honestly speak for, gay men. If I had to fly 1200 miles to look upon my sister in a casket and say goodbye to her one last time at a cemetery, I wanted this special book to be a part of my journey. As a child often turns to a favorite teddy bear or toy when confronted with the imagined or real unfairness of life, I turn to books for comfort. Some I return to frequently because of the breath-taking beauty of the written word (West with Night), the particular courage of the author (The Diary of Anne Frank), or the soul-giving sustenance of the story (Comfort and Joy). Merry Christmas, Jim Grimsley. Thank you very much for writing a beautiful novel that I read yet again this very week. For this gay man, Comfort and Joy is better than mother’s chicken soup, a dozen roses, or a walk in the autumn woods. It is the perfect Christmas gift. Thanks. Jerry Flack, Denver, Colorado jflack@ix.netcom.com |
 Whose
Eye is on Which Sparrow? by Robert Taylor New York: Southern Tier/Haworth Press, 2004. “The truth is cruel,
but it can be loved,
—George Santayanaand it makes free those who have loved it.” Current events rarely have a significant influence on fiction, but they most definitely affect the credibility of Robert Taylor’s new novel of gay love. The old adage that truth is stranger than fiction works to the considerable advantage of Whose Eye Is on Which Sparrow? The enormity of publicity surrounding the “coming out” and resignation of Governor James E. McGreevey of New Jersey last summer instantly added a note of verisimilitude to this work of fiction. Many readers might have considered Taylor’s novel and especially its denouement unrealistic just a few months ago. Now, America has a real former governor who is remarkably like one of the key protagonists in Whose Eye is on Which Sparrow? The news from New Jersey could not be a better selling point for Taylor’s love story. Although the conclusion of Taylor’s romantic novel appears less unlikely as backlit by the bright lights of real-life politics, it still comes about so surprisingly and abruptly that readers are almost surely guaranteed a sequel. Too many loose ends remain. Readers can almost imagine the author, editor, and publisher collaborating in a story conference to determine how to move forward the lives of the principals, Dr. Brendan Garrison, his wife Sandra (and their children) and his lover, Jonathan Miles. There is no resolution found anywhere on the final page of this otherwise fine novel that achieves this goal. Taylor plays fair, too. Although readers are undoubtedly expected to sympathize with the intense love Brendan and Jonathan have discovered, Sandra is portrayed as a loving wife and mother, even if she is occasionally jealous of Brendan’s friendships and appears to spend more time as a society charity organizer than as a genuine soccer mom. She is certainly not depicted as an insignificant character without feelings and needs of her own. Indeed, the most difficult part of the novel and a prospective sequel is that at least one person is going to be left bereaved, lost, and lonely no matter the ultimate outcome. These characters, all decent people, are going to suffer for the truth regardless of whether the story evolves with a gay doctor-straight wife reconciliation with a runner-up prize of opera stardom for Jonathan, or the destruction of a family so that Brendan and Jonathan may continue their magical love affair that prompts Brendan to feel truly honest with himself and others for the first time in his life. Dr. Brendan Garrison is one of the two key players in Taylor’s appealing gay romance just meant for a cozy Sunday afternoon of reading. Brendan is the wealthy scion of the most politically powerful family in an unnamed middle-American state. His father is the senior senator and the head of the Republican party in the state, plus a man with so much political capital that he is a major player in Washington, D.C. Brendan has had and continues to have it all: wealth, an exceptionally influential family, a degree from the best medical school in the nation, a thriving medical practice, a luxury car, a fabulous house, a beautiful, loving, and socially prominent wife, and two adoring and greatly loved children. To complete the picture, Brendan is a singularly handsome blond man with eyes as blue as the sky. But, there is also a residue of aloneness, distance, and unhappiness in Brendan’s life despite all the material treasures and his showcase family. He was virtually raised by maids. He has never had a loving or close relationship with either of his parents who forever put politics ahead of parenthood. His father and mother are a potent political team and they had little love and certainly no time left over for a little boy. Even at 35, they have the rest of his Brendan’s life planned for him. He is not so much a son as a product to be promoted. He will sooner or later leave his medical practice, enter politics and inherit his father’s national political place in the world of Washington affairs. Jonathan Miles is equally handsome, but all the other elements of their personal histories and profiles could not be more different. Jonathan is African American and his parents were never wealthy or prominent, but they always gave their children, including their baby Jonathan, total and unconditional love and time. Indeed, Jonathan’s mother deliberately eschewed a job outside the home so that she could devote her life to the welfare of her three children, Jonathan plus his older sister and brother. Whereas Brendan’s gifts lean to the intellectual, Jonathan has a baritone voice that is a gift from God. He is currently the new Choir Director in the conservative Black church in the novel’s city setting, but his real dream and aspiration is to be a part of the world of opera. He has never had the material advantages of Brendan’s youth, education, and life style. Even during the short time span of the novel, Jonathan lives in a small and very modest walk-up apartment whereas Brendan’s home appears to Jonathan to be an estate. The two men meet quite by accident. Jonathan is relatively new in town and in excellent physical shape and conditioning until he develops a painful urinary tract infection. Even though Brendan’s highly successful practice is closed to new clients, a mutual friend influences him to see Jonathan once. From the moment the good doctor enters the examination room and confronts the exceptionally modest, warm, polite and very handsome Jonathan, the life he considered so much on track is derailed. He likes everything about Jonathan from the rich timber of his baritone voice to his magnificently natural masculine body. Brendan is stunned. As the medical condition is explained, he begins to delicately handle Jonathan’s penis and testicles and gentle probes his prostate. In only a few moments, Brendan’s life changes forever; he is taken aback as he has never been before in his life. Indeed, as Jonathan dresses, Brendan keeps his back turned to his new patient, deliberately writing copious notes in Jonathan’s medical chart to buy time for his own erection not to show. Jonathan says nothing at the time but later reveals that he could feel the trembling in Brendan’s hands. Although the formative years of Brendan’s life are not spelled out in great detail, it is apparent that he is not part of a fraternal group of men who, for example, play golf together weekly. Brendan has really never done anything special for himself. His life has been privileged, but one of duty and obligation. He devotes long hours to his medical practice and shares what little free time he has with his wife and children, the latter most especially. While Sandra is the perfect society wife, relations between the two have become not so much strained as perfunctory and lacking in spontaneous acts of love. Brendan is the best possible provider, and Sandra has her charity groups and social obligations that fulfill her role to keep the family among the most respected in town. In a brief flashback, Brendan realizes that when he was younger he was attracted to two different young men, but nothing sexual ever came from his shocking recognitions of his initial, but fleeting thoughts of homoerotic lust. He quickly buried them and assumed they were repressed forever. With the arrival on Jonathan in his life, everything changes. He is completely, totally in love as he has never been before. He makes furtive plans to meet Jonathan and calls him repeatedly. Both men are truly and deeply in love with each other. With his first spontaneous love making with Jonathan in his humble apartment, Brendan has at once the greatest sexual encounter he has ever experienced and knows that Jonathan will never be a casual affair but is going to be a central part of his existence or memory for the rest of his life. The more the two men are together the more Brendan finally realizes he has found not only his best friend in life, but the great love of his life all wrapped in the same handsome African-American man that is Jonathan. Both men have to be extremely careful in their liaison; Brendan because of his and his family’s social position in the community and Jonathan because his church is very strict and conservative and unquestionably does not condone homosexuality. Opportunities for a longer-term exploration of both their love and friendship blossom during their first summer together when Brendan’s wife Sandra takes the children for a three-week trip to her parents’ home in Arizona and Brendan is a temporary bachelor. He and Jonathan make the most of the time by renting a cabin in a pristine wilderness, only to have the flowering of their love for one another nearly wrecked by a racist white policeman who totally humiliates Jonathan. What could a black man possibly be doing driving alone in an older model car in such a white, upper-crust forest retreat? The racist event not only brings their idyllic time of love and peace together to an abrupt end, Taylor uses the incident to demonstrate both the subtle and overt racism that is still prevalent in the USA, plus how difficult a deep and loving relationship can be for all GLBT couples when other factors such as race, HIV status, and different religions are factored into the gay love equation as well as sexual orientation. Gay and Lesbian couples who are essentially similar cannot appreciate how difficult it is to sustain a loving gay relationship that is bi-racial or where one lover is extremely wealthy and the other, poor. After his humiliation by the police, Jonathan refuses even Brendan’s comforting touch or any conversation. Jonathan’s bitter farewell the very next morning leaves Brendan confused and feeling terribly alone. A measure of a fine novel is the ambivalence that readers experience toward the end of the book. They want to read even faster to discover the ending the author has prepared for them, but they also want to slow down and savor particularly beautiful passages of writing. One of the joys of Whose Eye is on Which Sparrow? is that it is precisely that kind of novel. Readers who have inevitably fallen in love with Jonathan and Brendan and are cheering for them to succeed in love, also know that they have passed into territory that is immensely difficult. Catastrophe lies in their pathways if they make their love for each other known, but they also will both have empty lives if they separate and turn away from what life might have been like to be so completely and helplessly in love with another man and to share that love forever? A pivotal turn of events leads to a hurried conclusion in the lives of Brendan and Sandra and Jonathan that might have been perceived as a “cop out” finale even three or four months ago. But, as previously cited and without giving away the ending, the real-life drama of former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey was an incredible stroke of good fortune for author Robert Taylor. Taylor is a fine writer of gay romance. All of his characters, including the wronged Sandra, are drawn well and are believable. His descriptions of deeply loving and tender intercourse between the two men are poetic in their description and never pornographic. Although the plots are completely different, Taylor writes with the same sort of love and affection for his conflicted characters as Stephen M. Hart did in Through the Ruins (Writer’s Showcase, 2000). Both explore the abundant joy in the discovery of true love, and the intense melancholy of lost love. One senses that Taylor is describing his beloved characters as he sees their goodness rather than any weaknesses, most especially in the portrayals of Jonathan and Brendan. Robert Taylor’s Whose Eye is on Which Sparrow? is not a great novel nor does it contain the tragic elements found in much dramatic gay fiction where one of the heroes is dying of AIDS, is killed by gay bashers, or where lovers lives are ruined due to their same-sex romance. Nevertheless, Taylor has written a story that will resonate with readers who love men and particularly those very fortunate men who find true and lasting love with each other. Taylor’s work of fiction is an affectionate Valentine. Jerry Flack Denver, CO jflack@ix.netcom.com |