Words by Eric Page
An American queer classic, originally published in Paris by the legendary Olympia Press in 1958 to avoid US and UK obscenity laws and faded out of reach the last 30 years, The Gaudy Image is an important “lost” gay novel. Looking at the way that gay, queer and bi men and gender non-conforming working-class men lived in and around New Orleans through the lens of the Rococo prose of its passionate protagonist, ‘Tit’.
It has a curious vintage feel, in language, social intercourse and setting, like Rebel without a Cause but ‘Queer without a Hope’. It features a colourful cast of louche, some so laid back they’re virtually horizontal, others tightly wound up decadent ne’er-do-wells, but all characters who have something to love about them.
We get to know them and the places they hang out, the bars, flop houses, boarding rooms, and back rooms where they live out decadent lives, grasping at snatches of love and relationships in a word set hard against them.
The story follows Titania, queen of the fairies, aka Thomas Schwartz through the backstreets, bars and clubs as s/he moves from lover to lover, rake to fool, abuser to loser, trying to find the elusive ‘Gaudy Image’, a kind of New Orleans Great Dark Man, the perfect lover, a masculine man who ‘knows what he wants’.
Tit’s internal narrative reads heady, hot and steamy, it reminded me of By Grand Central Station I Laid Down and Wept, it’s oddly beautiful, erotic and sensual without ever being exactly sexual, it’s all epic suggestion, clearly directed towards sex between men but rarely overstepping the boundaries of the pages of the times to explicitly state so. But we understand, those of us who know how to read.
Tit knows how to read, in all senses of the word, and rarely misses an opportunity to share opinion and insight into the men who live with and around, sometimes off her/him. This is breathless prose, which speaks of steamy bayous, sub-tropical heat, suffocating intense secrets, and sweaty assignations, it’s grab it while you can, tooth and claw raw abandonment to the moment. Tit’s narrative is sultry, sweet, peachy, their voice beguiling sweet like honey, distracting from the omnipresent sharp sting of reality.
We follow their torrid adventures in love and lust, they are always funny, sometimes caustic, brutally honest, other times teasing and batting heavy eyelids with faux innocence as we slowly understand the joke, but the humour is at the heart of this book and Tit’s narrative of thriving and surviving. Tit is a shaman of their time, shape-shifting to suit the spaces.
It captures a hidden world, literally bobbing along just alongside 1950s America, a world where people see what they want to see, allowing queers to navigate the cracks and back alleys of a New Orleans happy to exploit them, just not acknowledge them.
The Gaudy Image is a sympathetic recounting of a community of queer (mostly) men, full of passion, care, insight and occasional bursts of shocking violence. It’s of it’s time, so modern notions of gender identity, queerness or femme/butch identities are somewhat removed, but at it’s core it echoes a fundamentally queer journey. The search for trust and love in a world walled by rejection, finding others like you, building a community.
The tenacity of Tit and her band of associated misfits to enjoy their lives in the face of disregard is magnificent. It’s seedy setting uplifted by the glorious camp imaginations of Titania who can turn a dime into a diamond with a flick of her tongue.
Written by James M Smith a US writer and poet using the pseudonym William Talsman, Smith was one of the founders of modern gay literature. I was fascinated by this pre-Stonewall shard of LGBTQ+ life.
Out now: £8.99, paperback
For more info or to order the book see the publisher’s website here:
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