The Disappearers (5*)

Marlon James made me laugh, he made me cry, and he even made me masturbate.  TMI, I know, but trust me, there are more than a few of what public health officials refer to as MSM or men who have sex with men in this epic novel fueled by trauma and fury.  James describes their encounters so explicitly that I'm afraid he may alienate some queasy readers of The Disappearers, long-listed for this year's Booker Prize, which of course is exactly his intention.  We're here, we're queer, so get used to it, especially you gay men who believe that aping heteronormative behavior will earn you anything more than probationary acceptance so long as you don't ever mention butt fucking.

If only it were that easy in the Jamaica of the late 1980s when eight MSMs join to put on an amateur theatrical production of Fortune and Men's Eyes, a 1967 drama that explores homosexuality in prison, the only place where most contemporary audiences could accept that it occurred due to the lack of women (who are seriously underpopulated in this novel, too).  Havelock Titus, a director a generation older than his cast, is trying to smuggle a taboo topic into his extremely homophobic country, the same strategy, in a sense, that Sal Mineo employed with his much heralded appearance in a San Francisco production co-starring a 19-year-old Don Johnson.

Less than a month into rehearsals, the Blackjacks, an impromptu gang, puts an end to them with a deadly assault led by a reggae singer, one of whose most popular songs includes the lyric "batty is not pussy," batty being patois for an MSM ass.  Because James uses pop lyrics as extensively as George Eliot quotes British poetry in Daniel Deronda, a book I'm reading concurrently, I queried the internet to make sure he wasn't a real person.

Multiple voices narrate the book's action which takes place at the height of the AIDS pandemic (but isn't responsible for any of the principal characters disappearing),  Four dominate in different formats:  Titus, an epistolary narrator, writing to his former pimp in London; Eddy Porteous, a cast member still in high school and "light-skinned enough to look like 90% of TV" who keeps a journal; a TV journalist's interviews with (mostly) Jordan Brown, a brilliant, self-educated Kurt Cobain stan whom I suspect may be closest to James's own heart; and the second-person voice of Matt Chin, another bi-racial character who embraces religion, the self-abnegating kind.  We also briefly inhabit the cesspool consciousnesses of the various Blackjacks, including one whose sexual confusion comes back to bite him.

Jordan Brown loves nothing better than to invoke The Sexual Outlaw, a 1977 non-fiction work by John Rechy that cross cuts among his hustling adventures in the sexual underground of Los Angeles, historical examples of homosexual oppression and the author's commentary.  As a recent gay (and sexually conservative) college graduate who shared the same birthplace, I found it more titillating than political and used it to find cruising spots during a solo trip to the West Coast, just as I had done with City of Night, Rechy's most famous work and one that definitely influenced my desire to live in New York City.  The Sexual Outlaw didn't resonate for me as it does for Jordan, perhaps because by some miracle, I had never encountered any of the physically expressed homophobia that plagues all The Disappearers.

But enough spoiler-free exposition: let some of the battyboys speak for themselves!

Eddy

Bruce Springsteen has a song called “War,” but it’s not him who sang it first, and I’m only writing about it because Bruce is wearing jeans in that video, and Jeeeeeeesus man, them trousers acting like they been waiting from the day they were just cotton balls to run up the length of his legs to hit-and-run the biggest boss bulge in rock and roll where those two thighs are only too happy to meet, so happy that if he turns around to show his backside, right above the crack will be a patch of sweat in a perfect V.

*  *  *  *  *

Homos must be the only men who will send a fist all the way up your bottom and a tongue past your tonsils before they tell you what their parents call them. Not even here an hour and I am tired of people already.

*  *  *  *  *

Also my head is a box because you hide things in a box and I keep too many things up in there. This is why I start to journal in the first place, though I hate when people turn nouns into verbs, like the fucking American teacher . . . The only place I can put them is this journal. Or Dionne. The only difference is that I don’t end up owing my journal anything.

Jordan

Mummy left early for the Wednesday night service at Swallowfield Chapel, a place crawling with so many lesbians they might as well open a can of tuna for potpourri. 

*  *  *  *  *

I might have been afraid of how people would react to me liking dick, but the thought of being gay by itself? It’s like somebody giving you a bottle of perfume you could never buy.

*  *  *  *  *

Hell hath no fury like a man who remembers his wife and 2.75 children right after he just cum from a dick finding planet Pluto up his battyhole.

*  *  *  *  *

I don’t have no words, no words of my own. Daddy didn’t give me any, school didn’t give me any. Literature didn’t give me any, since all the books was white people with snow and bonnets and carriages trying to arrange marriages and bored out of their fucking minds. Rock music was the first time I ever felt something love me back, ever. And only a certain music. Music that people who hate me don’t like.

*  *  *  *  *

Last year I came back from Miami with a book from this homo named Paul Monette. I knew he had AIDS and I knew why I wanted to read it . . . But the only thing I’m going to learn about it is what white man will show you because they seem to be the only ones brave enough to teach. Or maybe the black man who would write is instead going home to the wife he is about to take to bed and kill.

Havelock

And what reason do we have for old age when our own kind throws us out with the rest of the garbage? Nobody makes an old gay feel like a dead gay like a young gay. As we get older, the age where one is considered old gets younger, which makes me wonder who is behind all this considering, a vampire? It gives us a blankness, don’t you think? The same sort of blankness we used to see in the eyes of the hall master and some of the professors at Oxford. The lost stares of the Lost Generation, the bright young things with their lights all blown out. Here I must speak like an American in saying that in me at least there is a fuck you, to the people, the church, the world, the bullies, the righteous ones, even Jehovah himself.

*  *  *  *  *

Do you know what it feels like to flinch when your father puts his arms around you, flinch from a pain you can’t reveal but letting him think that he disgusted you? This man who used to let me step on his toes while he held me and carried me in a dance. He used to look at me, at his children, in amazement, somehow stunned that we came from him. There I was in my fifties, all but murdered, hiding my wounds under my fucking green jacket and thinking of my father.

*  *  *  *  *

The problem with pretty young faggots is that nobody has told them that gay years are like dog years, except people tend to love the dog more as they get older.

Matt

You’re not an American, but you might be a New Yorker.  Today you are not gay but you might not be straight.

So. You emerge from the West 4th Street stop crotch first, hips second, feet last, stretchy jeans sausaging you skinny.  Boy, you gone so far from Jamaica they should call you Tom of Finland now. The trick is to not look at yourself while you window-shop or Jamaica will come for your back.

When the 2026 Booker Prize is awarded, I suspect The Disappearers will suffer the same fate as Brokeback Mountain did twenty years ago at the Oscars, although there's no doubt that the long arc of history, perhaps even in Jamaica, has budged a little and the competition, including John of John, is much, much stiffer.  No matter; James already won in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, an altogether worthy book that also included some MSM in minor roles.  I'm still hoping Quentin, but now you have a second option for adapting a literary work PERFECTLY aligned with your talents.

IMHO, The Disappearers is among the best gay novels written during my lifetime.  It belongs on the same shelf with The Boys on the Rock, The Beauty of Men, At Swim, Two Boys and The Line of Beauty but Marlon James differs from Dorothy's other friends in one major respect: he's the only one I wouldn't describe as a gay novelist despite a you-are-there escape through Kingston's sewers led by an heroic drag queen in red heels!