Both novels are, finally, morality tales, critiquing a life style that they see as empty, immature, dangerous, doomed both would later be hailed as prescient from the perspective of communities ravaged by AIDS.Īnd yet the experience of reading the books could hardly be more different. In both books, men searching for love settle for ever more elaborate sexual scenes-floggings, fistings, crucifixions-and, in both, men throw away their lives: diving from heights on angel dust, sniffing poppers at the bottom of swimming pools, leaping, “like roaches falling from a hot oven,” out of upper-floor windows at the Everard Baths, where a fire killed nine men in 1977. In 1978, two novels appeared that covered remarkably similar, and largely unexplored, territory, documenting the drug-addled, sex-crazed circuit of bathhouses, dance clubs, and parties that, in the seventies, shuttled gay men between Manhattan and Fire Island, with occasional forays to San Francisco or the more exotic wilds of Brooklyn and Queens.
