Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and
by Kevin Bentley
Green Candy Press
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Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After, by Kevin Bentley (Green Candy Press, paper, $12.95)

Queer biography and autobiography has a long history. Certainly Suetonius knew what he was doing in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars when he documented Claudius's penchant for boys swimming in his pool and nipping at his thighs. And John Addington Symonds's Memoirs­ while published privately­ were eye-opening stuff for his crowd of Victorian friends. Contemporary queer biography was greatly enhanced by the fact that you could now say who was and who wasn't and queer, and autobiography was immeasurably aided by Gay Lib (and feminism) telling us that the personal was the political.

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The problem is that as homosexuality­ and its literary offshoots­ flourished, the writing of queer autobiography and memoir has become respectable. Taking their cues from Proust rather than Boyd McDonald, the memoirs and autobiographies of the past two decades have increasing relied upon the patina of culture and sophistication rather then hard-edged sexual truth-telling. Occasional works combined the two­ Martin Duberman's Mid-Life Queer or Ricardo Brown's The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's all give a good sense of how life, love, and sex are integrated in individual lives. But for the most part, once the contemporary gay memoirist tastes that madeleine, you just know that he's usually going to get high-tone and boring.

Kevin Bentley's wonderful Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After, which recalls a period from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, is that rare mixture of Marcel Proust and Boyd McDonald. While the book is an astute, psychologically complex journey of a young, naive gay man growing into a complicated, intelligent, and caring adult, it never avoids what's at the heart of the human condition: sex. Sometime in 1980­ well, lots of times in 1980­ he meets a man in the park: "We didn't say a word, just stood face to face, running our hands over each others chests and crotches. His hard-on was apparent and accessible in the loose terry cloth shorts; I'd had a boner since turning back to see him staring at me. I knelt and sucked his cock a bit, opening my pants and stroking mine. Then we changed positions and he blew me while I looked out to the trees and the other occasional man passing by." Obviously, whatever Bentley was eating had more imaginative potency than a madeleine.

Bentley's plainspoken narrative voice and his ordinary (in the best sense) demeanor elevates his everyday encounters with sexuality, books, relationships, people, drugs, and food to a near transcendental level. There's an honesty, immediacy, and a clarity in his expression that could be read as a Frank O'Hara-esque tone of "then I did that and then I did this," but which is really a more sophisticated narrative device that brings us into his consciousness without the folderol of literariness.

One of the amazing, perhaps unique, aspects of Wild Animals I Have Known is how simply the prose style blends in with the history. The first part of the book takes place in pre-AIDS San Francisco, where getting a blow job while going out for the Sunday morning paper was a commonplace. Bentley captures perfectly how sex, friendship, and socializing went together so easily and how queerness becomes as natural as worrying that you had dry cum on the edges of your mouth when you were walking down the street.

As Bentley goes in and out of relationships­ some of them very loving and serious, some just where he happens to be at the moment­ he conveys the fluidity of gay men's lives and emotions. This fluidity helps maintain a sane existence in a world overwrought with the burden of society's expectations of heterosexuality. Not that there isn't a lot in Bentley's life to test his sanity­ his lover Jack who was love-at-first sight dies of AIDS. Bentley is never unaware or easy on himself­ that would be unbearable in a book this emotionally honest­ and there are plenty of times when his own failures of living and loving come to the fore. But what makes the book so refreshing is his continually unassuming attitude towards himself, his friends, and the men he loves. The memoir becomes a history of a slice of San Francisco gay culture. Smart, sexy, funny, and moving, Wild Animals I Have Known conveys what it is like to be a gay men these last three decades.

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