Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis
written by Eric Myers
DaCapo Press
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It's fashionable for readers to despair about the state of gay fiction. Sure there are always new gay mysteries, new erotic stories, new junky gay romances (mostly set in South Beach or Fire Island and featuring the names of popular new alcoholic drinks). But literary novels, or even literate ones, are harder to find. Sure you have The Hours by Michael Cunningham, The Year of Ice by Brian Malloy, Avoidance by Michael Lowenthal, At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill. But books likes these are getting rarer.

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Don't give up­ there are some great books out there. It's just that they've been out there for a while. Two years ago, St. Martin's Press published a fine biography of Patrick Dennis, the author of a dozen funny, literate, mostly-gay novels, the most famous of which is Auntie Mame. As penned by Eric Myers, Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis (DaCapo, paper, $16), is a funny, insightful, often sad tale of a man who­ despite his enormous success­ most of his books after Auntie Mame became bestsellers­ was rather lost. A biography of Dennis was long deserved, he was a satirist of the first order and a writer with an important vision.

That vision­ as any child who has seen the 1958 film version of Auntie Mame can tell you­ is that people who enjoy life, who flaunt the restricting conventions of American society, who make the pursuit of pleasure (instead of power or money) their main goal in life are often more ethical, moral, nicer­ and certainly more fun­ than those who abide by and work with society's repressive rules. And that, you have to admit, is pretty gay. Even in the 1950s­ or maybe, especially so­ such a message had an eager audience. Besides a bestseller, Auntie Mame became a hit Broadway show and movie. (In the late 1960s it became a hit musical, its message still relevant.)

But Dennis did not appear out of the blue. His ethos, morality, and even­ to some degree­ his style were inspired by the work of Thorne Smith, a popular American novelist of the 1930s and 1940s most famous for Topper, which became a successful film in the 1937 and a popular TV series in the 1950s. Like Dennis, Smith's message was clear­ society is unnecessarily repressive and damaging to individuals as well as general morality. Most of the harm done in the world is done because people accept the most repressive, thwarted, anti-sexual, anti-pleasure proscriptions of "civilization" as the best (or only) rules to live by. In Topper Takes a Trip, his sequel, Smith makes it clear that he's speaking on the grand scale of international politics, not just American life.

Smith's vision ran to the supernatural. In Topper, the title character is an uptight banker who learns how to love life through the actions of two free-wheeling ghosts. In Turnabout, a stuffy, socially- climbing couple are taught a lesson when an impish sprite switches their bodies so she is now a man and he a woman­ much to their delight. This playfulness is exactly what Patrick Dennis took when he created the fabulous Auntie Mame­ a woman whose entire life is bent on bucking convention, or Belle Poitrine, the heroine of Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of That Great Star of Stage, Screen, and Television, a film star so involved with herself that she creates a universe of her own that makes Hollywood look proper.

Luckily the publication of Uncle Mame has sparked the reissue of three Dennis novels. Auntie Mame, The Joyous Season, and Little Me are back in print and easily available. It had been fairly easy to get these titles in used bookstores, in contrast to Thorne Smith's books, so it's also a boon that Random House has reissued Topper, Topper Takes a Trip, and The Nightlife of the Gods (which charts the adventures of the Greek gods in the modern world). All of these books are great gay classics­ even if they are not usually listed as such­ and in this horrible/brave-new-world of Bush and Ashcroft deserve to be read more now than ever.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com