 In this issue, Jerry Flack reviews the film, "Camp," and the book by Blair Mastbaum, Clay's Way  |
 Clay's Wayby Blair Mastbaum Paperback: 256 pages ; Consortium; (July 15, 2004) ISBN: 1555838197 Coming-of-age gay novels have been published with such frequency in the past few years that they have become a separate and distinct genre within GLBT writing. Certainly, it is vital that young gay men (as well as other homo- and bisexual youths) have novels that match their sexual identity and natural sexual maturing, but Clay’s Way is the most troubling of all such books about adolescents that this reviewer has read. First-time novelist Blair Mastbaum is a talented writer and readers will hopefully see many future works from him. Clay’s Way is a masterfully written novel, but comparing it with other recent gay coming-of-age novels such as Rainbow High by Alex Sanchez or Brent Hartinger’s superbly life-affirming Geography Club is a bit like comparing William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch with Jan Brett’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Blair Mastbaum is a noteworthy new voice in the field of gay fiction but even the most liberal school librarians in the world are unlikely to (purchase or display) place Clay’s Way on the senior high school shelves. Despite the virtuoso writing of Mastbaum, the novel is filled with page after page of instances of substance abuse of virtually every kind imaginable, exceptional vulgarity of language (e.g., “Shit fuck asshole fuck, liar fuckface shithead boy, asshole dumb-ass fuck!” p. 112), senseless physical violence and brutality, unsafe and unprotected sex, a drug-induced suicide attempt (with the near-drowning victim treated by a bare-breasted student nurse high on drugs herself), total contempt for conventional society values, racial antagonism, and even what might technically be considered pedophile behavior on the part of the titular character Clay (18+ years) with the first-person narrator Sam who is only fifteen when the novel opens. (Older readers beware: “Dude” and “Rad” after the “F…” word, of course, are surely the most overworked words in the novel as used by Clay, Sam, and their on-again, off-again friends and new acquaintances.) Despite all its drawbacks, Mastbaum’s novel is definitely not pornography. It is powerful literature with an important story to tell that packs a powerhouse pair of morals: Don’t confuse pent-up sexual passion with love, and be especially careful of the particular Adonis you choose to worship. His reality may be much more of a nightmare than a dream come true. Clay is the object of Sam’s idol worship and his first passionate love affair. But “Clay” is a perfect name for Sam’s obsession. Clay is anything but the rock he pretends to be. Clay may be earthy, but his love and loyalty are as fragile as terracotta and most certainly not a solid foundation upon which to build a loving and trusting relationship. Clay is both irresponsible and a drug dealer. Sam is far younger in raw life experiences, but he appears far more destined to ultimately become a man capable of love than the lying, crazed, and confused Clay will ever become. Clay’s Way, set on the Hawaiian Islands of Oahu and Kauai, tells the story of Sam, a rebellious teen, just sixteen, who is a wannabe punk with smelly, unwashed clothes and hair colored with dyes in such hues as blue, green, red and violet and spiked with Elmer’s glue. He also writes volumes of bad haiku poems that rarely conform to the five-seven-five syllable traditional format. Mastbaum skillfully makes use of Sam’s naive haiku to introduce each chapter, but Sam’s artless haiku is also a metaphor for his life. The verse is a worthy attempt at defining himself and his world, but both the haiku and his life are hopelessly and woefully out of sync. Sam has only contempt for his conventional, business-driven parents and even his age peers. Being gay is not Sam’s problem. He has long been reconciled to his love for men, but he is still a skateboard and bicycle-bound boy who is helplessly infatuated with Sam, the masculine, older surfer guy he yearns to have as a lover, plus he desperately seeks to display the bravado and manhood he associates with Clay and his surfer gang. The raw physical violence, language, and sheer sexual intensity of Clay’s Way may well cause even liberal parents and readers to cringe. And, yet a reasonable defense of Clay’s Way can be made beyond the appreciation of Blair Mastbaum’s fine writing. Are all of today’s questioning gay teens going to grow up to be high school valedictorians? Class presidents? Log Cabin Republicans? Company executives? Are there not gay teens in the world with abusive families and negative community influences who are often isolated and confused as they try to navigate the move from adolescence to manhood who need Sam’s story? To deny gay youth who are punk skateboarders or surfers any protagonists with whom they can relate seems wrong. Clay’s Way may offer these gay youth the first real characters with whom they can identify. As offensive as the language and substance abuse may be, there is not an obscene word nor a drug in Clay’s Way that is not heard or accessible in virtually any high school in America. Of course, one hopes youth who read this novel will profit by its hero’s mistakes, wounds, and heartbreak and not imitate them. In an ideal world, a gay son and his ever helpful and nonjudgmental parent(s) or another caring adult will share Clay’s Way as a paired reading. Mastbaum offers solace and positive life lessons that do examine all the harm one can bring down upon oneself if all convention is thrown to the wind and all that remains is the tyranny of drug-induced confusion, abuse, chaos, and personal heartbreak. Beyond these ethical issues, Clay’s Way is impressively written. Mastbaum’s powers of description are admirable. He describes hurricane-force storms and torrential rains with such energy that readers feel the need to seek shelter. He also expertly uses storms that rage across the Pacific as a metaphor to define the tempest and fury that Sam is experiencing. Here Sam describes one of the storms on the Na Pali cliffs and shores of Kauai that match the turmoil going on within himself. “I look out into the black sea. The waves are building. Sets of eight-footers are increasing. Another hurricane is out at sea, waiting till we least expect it to wreck our tidy lives and houses and erode away the mountains slightly more, making them lose some of their familiarity. The mountains elude us by seeming so permanent. They can change as fast as we do.” (p. 162) If the massive cliffs of Na Pali cannot withstand the torment of the enraged storm, how can a boy, just turned sixteen, withstand the furious turbulence of his own evolving life? The ocean is a lie. The Pacific is not peaceful. There is nothing tranquil about Sam’s life save for the pathetic haiku he unfailingly pens. No author of recall has ever written about scent, especially pungent male smells of sweat and sex, as mightily as Mastbaum. His descriptions of raw body scents are all at once filled with electricity, erotically charged, and ready to detonate into a veritable sexual mushroom cloud. Sweat, armpits, genitals, semen. One can barely escape a page without carrying away the sheer physicality and masculine sexuality of the smell of the characters, the primeval settings, the horrific storms, or the raw physical action. Mastbaum is a cinematic author. Readers leave the pages of Clay’s Way imagining the novel being the genesis of an impressive and sensually made independent film. The author could just as well be a screenwriter as a novelist. He has already given a director two fully developed, three-dimensional teen-age lead characters ready-made for future Marlon Brandos or Robert DeNiros as the lead actors, plus captivating supporting characters such as the darkly mysterious Anar who is critical to the Kauai sequences. He provides two vastly different cinema-like settings. The novel begins and ends in the conquered and overly tamed Oahu with all its prettified tourism, homophobia, racial resentments and tensions, and particularly its smothering feeling of isolation and containment. (A close friend describes her home island of Oahu as “Alcatraz in Technicolor.” One believes Mastbaum would love that description.) But, the counterpoint setting is Kauai’s Na Pali coast with its westernmost sheer cliffs, turbulent surf, and the vast open sea that is one of the most remote and untamed places on earth. Here the ancient Hawaii spirits and not corporate types reign. This is truly wild country. In his finale, the author provides the most cinematic climax of all. One can but image the breath-taking beauty a great cinematographer could make of Sam’s final act, his final coming to terms with the person he really is and what his destiny may become. The scene is written with magnetic beauty rarely witnessed in the pages of a book. It is possessed of a dazzling Technicolor splendor all its own. The denouement is emotionally powerful and wonderfully written. Clay’s Way is that unique book that will divide most readers. Unquestionably, some readers will be repulsed by its crude elements, but just as adamantly others will defend the novel because of the mastery in Mastbaum’s use of language and his honest handling of Sam’s journey toward adulthood. Yet another dividing line may be age. Older readers may perceive the audacity of the language and behaviors of the characters offensive while younger readers may find the same things to be only natural and commonplace. Clay’s Way has been called a gay Catcher in the Rye, but that sells the novel and its author short. In reality, this is an amazing, confounding, and totally unique novel in its own right. In conclusion, it is worth noting that Mastbaum has his own creative web site at http://www.blairmastbaum.com, and that http://store.yahoo.com/alysonbooks/claysway.html features a substantial excerpt from the book. |
 “CAMP.” IFC Films (2003). Video and DVD released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment, June, 2004. Written and directed by Todd Graff. “CAMP” is the summer boot camp version of a “Fame” for a new generation of viewers. Although the magical and fantastic premise of the movie seems undiluted “Wizard of Oz,” the film is in fact based on a considerable measure of reality. Camp Ovation is a two-month summer retreat for Broadway-bound, theatre-crazed kids who consider Stephen Sondheim a god and his masterworks holy anthems. They jubilantly dance, act, and sing from morning’s first light until the stars illuminate their particular piece of heaven. In reality, the motion picture is based on the experiences and observations of writer-director Todd Graff who is both an alumnus camper and counselor of the bona fide theatre camp Stagedoor Manor whose alumni include such stars as Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mary Stuart Masterson. Once upon a time they were no doubt youths filled with dreams of fame just as real as those of the contemporary fictional characters at Camp Ovation. “CAMP” is no threat to Oscar fare such as the musical Best Picture “Chicago,” (2003) in terms of production values, Oscar-nominated direction, or Academy-Award winning performances, but it is ALL HEART just as it is exuberant, funny, and genuinely entertaining. The resident campers are so in love with Camp Ovation that they complain little of the ambitious regimen planned for them: a newly performed stage show every two weeks and a benefit as the season’s finale. Unfortunately, the rigors of camp life also leave little room for a substantial plot. Certainly, there is nothing to match the “he done her wrong” murder trials in “Chicago.” In reality, “CAMP” probably best fits the genre of the soap opera, filled as it is with both petty rivalries and jealousies, short-lived crushes and love affairs, and minor tragedies and triumphs among the young troops. The key players are “freaks” headed up by Vlad (Daniel Letterie) the first, honest-to-God straight boy to show up at Camp Ovation in many a season. He is a cutie and he has the field of pretty straight girls all to himself, but he is also a helpless flirt who needs constant attention and flattery in order to feel secure. He needs to be the center of every happening. Vlad tells a fellow camper that at home he is the middle of five brothers and he can’t recall the last time his parents even remembered his name. Plus, even Vlad, the Wonder Boy, has a problem. His brain involuntarily converts the letters of the words people speak into numbers and calculates them forwards and backwards. His mind is like a interminable adding machine. “We’re all freaks,” he confides to his transvestite roomy Michael. “I am a teenage Prozac junkie.” Only when he is acting does the neurological dysfunction disappear. If there is a critical fault with the plotting of “CAMP,” however, it is that too much time and energy is focused on the REAL LIVE BOY, Vlad. Yes, he has the quirky letters-to-numbers mathematics machinations to sort out inside his head, but that misfortune is hardly on a par with the harassment and harm his violently abused and unloved gay roommate Michael (brilliantly played by Robin De Jesus) has suffered. Michael was not only turned away from his junior prom by the adult school officials for showing up in an evening dress, but he was severely beaten by high school bullies in tuxedoes and all the humiliation was topped off by his father being happy about the bashing. (Dad is also too ashamed of his son to come see Michael in his hour of glory as Romeo at Camp Ovation’s Shakespeare performance.) And, granted, Vlad loses his hometown girl, Julie, on Benefit Night at Camp Ovation, but that again is hardly a heartbreaking loss for a super stud when compared to the unceasing humiliation the beautiful but overweight Janna faces while being continuously hounded by her father to lose weight and develop the same svelte figure of her stunning model-like mother. Janna’s Dad had insisted that she go to a Weight Watchers Summer Camp, but he reluctantly compromised and allowed her to return to Camp Ovation, the only place where she is truly accepted, so long as her jaws were wired shut so that she cannot eat solid food. Yet one more saga in the Camp Ovation soap opera is the woeful condition of the camp’s adult music director, Bert Hanley (Don Dixon) an alcoholic who had his one and only Broadway success decades earlier. Superman Vlad, the hetero hero, once again flies to the rescue and even turns Bert’s wasted life around. A compelling young actor (perhaps a Stagedoor Manor alumnus) might have carried off Vlad’s sometimes sweet, but often opportunistic character well, but Daniel Letterie, although handsome, genuine 100% eye candy, is not the powerhouse actor to get that job done. (Give Letterie credit for learning to play the guitar and to ride a skateboard for his role, however.) His camp girlfriend Ellen, previously the wallflower who could not even bribe her brother to take to the prom, is much more convincingly and sensitively portrayed by Joanna Chilcoat. Still, it is easy to pick on the perceived flaws of “CAMP” and miss the wonder of its youthful exuberance and its terrific musical score. Plus, it is filled with abundant humor. In addition to the predictably straight “Vlad-edictorianisms” that drive the plot, there are also some outright hilarious one liners and scene-stealing scenarios. Early on, a pint-size blond kid is belting out a Sondheim hit on the school bus ride to Camp Ovation when his seat mate, an adult jock, introduces himself as “Bud Miller, camp sports counselor.” Barely missing a beat of Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” the boy suspiciously looks the jock up and down as if he has just stepped off of a spacecraft from another universe and asks with total incredulity, “We have a sports counselor?” This boy has come to Camp Ovation hyped for Olympic-like competition, but not of the sports variety. He is going to camp with his mates to sing and dance his heart out. (And, he does!) Another great one-liner underscores how theatrically- and movie-oriented these supposedly weird kids are. When one of the gay campers bemoans the fact that he spent three hours in the bushes observing his junior prom from afar, his roommate snipes, “Oh, that’s so “‘Stella Dallas!’” Definitely not a line one would overhear from the guys at Camp Touchdown! The totally out-of-place portrayal of school kids in roles written for professional adult actors in famed Broadway musicals such as Sondheim’s Company and Follies is ingeniously (or perhaps unintentionally) hilarious. When an older African-American youth complains to the camp director that he does not want his kid brother always having to play white roles (via the camp’s colorblind casting rule), his wish is granted and a switch in the line up of musical shows is made. Dreamgirls is substituted. The only problem is the reality of the quirky results of colorblind casting. In the crazy, wonderful, totally accepting world of Camp Ovation, a much taller, older, teen-age white girl—complete with a 1960s Diana Ross-like beehive wig—belts out a passionate love ballad to an African-American boy who is perhaps no more than eight years of age. There is also a very funny scenario featuring a modern-day Cinderella and her exceptionally evil step-sister that is side-splittingly played out by Fritzi (Anna Kendrick) and Jill (Alana Allen) culminating in a version of Sondheim’s middle-aged woman’s anthem of angst, regret and bitterness, “The Ladies Who Lunch” (vodka stingers and all!) sung passionately by a young girl of little more than middle school age. “CAMP” is definitely campy, and yes, the STRAIGHT ALL-AMERICAN REAL BOY Vlad may be overused in its story line, BUT the movie is enormous fun. It is also SO refreshing to watch young gays not have to wait until college or even later in their lives to find a safe and accepting place to just be themselves and have that be enough to be truly validated, honored, and loved Moreover, it is not just the gays who find Nirvana at Camp Ovation. The overweight Jennas, the wallflower Ellens, and the insecure Fritzis are also outsiders who discover that there really is a heaven on earth made just for THEM and it is called Camp Ovation. But, the true glories of “CAMP” are the music, singing, and dancing. The rousing score is made up of selections from Broadway musicals such as Follies and Promises, Promises blended in with some truly amazing original songs. Indeed, the soundtrack to “CAMP” may be its strongest selling point. In addition to classics from Sondheim, Burt Bacharach. Hal David and other luminaries of stage and screen scoring, there are new gospel-flavored songs such as “Here’s Where I Stand” and “How Shall I See You Through My Tears” written by composer and lyricist Michael Gore and Lynn Ahrens. Sondheim so believed in Graff’s project that he donated his music, convinced other composers and lyricists to do likewise, and even makes a cameo appearance in order to help make this small miracle of a film possible. “CAMP” celebrates the kids who are misfits, even often in their own families, whether they are gay, overweight, lack self-confidence, or have been told once too often that they are not “special.” And, make no mistake. These kids have REAL talent, even if many of them are amateurs. (Graf deliberately sought young actors who had no prior movie making experience so their awe of the process would be genuine.) The songs are magnificent and are performed with incredible charisma by Tiffany Taylor, Sasha Allen and the cast of great young talent Graff drafted for his low-budget but effervescent salute to the kids who may be outsiders most of the year, but find acceptance, love, and perhaps even stardom at Camp Ovation. And, these “freaks” truly do shine like stars, often for the first time in their lives. No matter your age. Go to “CAMP”! You won’t be sorry you did. “Promises, Promises.” —Jerry Flack
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