Young Man from the Provinces: A Gay Life before Stonewall - Hardcover

Helms, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571198805 ISBN 13: 9780571198801

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1995

Synopsis

Gay life in New York City in the 1950s and '60s was an entirely different world from today. Intensely secretive and desperately determined to stay that way, its action took place behind the unmarked doors of bars and in apartments where the shades were always drawn. Underlying the frenetic living and high hilarity was a sense of shame that was inevitable during a time when shock treatment and lobotomies were considered acceptable "cures" for homosexuality.
In Young Man from the Provinces, Alan Helms tells his story of those times. Escaping from a painful midwestern adolescence to the scholarly refuge of Columbia University, Alan threw himself headlong into New York's gay world. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he turned his back on academia and became a successful model and stage actor, moving in glamorous circles whose members included Anthony Perkins, Stephen Sondheim, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Edward Albee. Alan attended glittering parties, traveled around the world with his lover, and spent summers on Fire Island immersed in the company of young, beautiful men.
After starting a new life in Boston in the early 1970s, Alan realized that the gay social world was changing drastically and that he was facing middle age by himself. He subsequently battled drug abuse and severe depression, but his biggest battle was his struggle for self-acceptance and his attempt to build a better life. His success helped him remain strong as he faced his mother's death from cancer in the 1980s and the deaths of many of his friends and former lovers from AIDS - more than eighty and still climbing.

About this title

About the Author:

Alan Helms is a professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

In his 20s and early 30s, Helms was at once the most privileged and self-destructive of men, at the giddy peak of his career as "the most celebrated young man in all of gay New York." The Manhattan of the 1950s and '60s embraced the Columbia student as a "U.T."?a "universal type," or "someone everybody wants," photographed by Avedon, directed by Edward Albee and pursued by any number of men. Repudiating the drab miseries of his Indiana boyhood, Helms pursued those who pursued him: his more celebrated lovers included Anthony Perkins, Larry Kert and Luchino Visconti. Leonard Bernstein wooed him ardently, and chum Noel Coward helped Helms reconcile with a lover. But the relationships were doomed to fall apart, as Helms (held aloft by adoration, alcohol and drugs; brought thuddingly to earth by excess?bulimia; alcoholism; joyless, frenetic promiscuity) began to self-destruct. Self-acceptance came with the more temperate joys of work as a college professor and with counseling from the Harvard psychologist Robert Coles. As he grew older, Helms was better able to distance himself from the past. Because Helms is neither an elegant nor a modest writer, the reader is less willing to repudiate his glittering excesses; Helms's vigorous name-dropping has more charm than the somber self-reproaches that accompany his sobriety. This self-described "D student in the school of life" depicts a New York that, after the Stonewall riots, would never be as closeted?or as cozily familiar?again.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0571198805
• ISBN 13: 9780571198801
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208