This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

More than just a bookstore, DC’s Lambda Rising (1625 Connecticut Ave., NW,) functions also as a community center and intellectual resource for the capital’s queer residents. Please continue to support it by buying this and other titles on their website or at the TNG shelf at their brick and mortar location. If you do the latter you get to chat with their employees, which I promise is always a pleasant experience.

I first discovered David Leavitt when I found his short story “Territory” in a highschool literary anthology. That piece — about a supposedly liberal California mother who falls apart when her son brings his boyfriend home from New York — so overwhelmed every other story in the collection (including Brokeback Mountain) that I can no longer count how many times I have read it. 

That discovery, and subsequent supplement that “Territory” was the first gay story published in The New Yorker, lead me to Leavitt’s 1986 debut novel “The Lost Language of Cranes.” It is the story of one family living in New York. Philip is a young man in his first serious relationship who is debating how he will tell his parents he is gay. His mother, Rose, is reeling over the fact that she and her husband are being priced out of their apartment after 26 years. And said husband, Owen, will be forced to reconcile his adverse reaction to his son’s coming out with the fact that he has spends his Sundays in gay porn movie theaters.

Though story is compelling, as are its side characters — Philip’s boyfried Elliot, who was raised by a famous children’s author and his male partner, and takes for granted that sex and affection are things that he can have when he wants and Jarene, Philip’s roommate who was disowned by her mother for being a lesbian, and slowly finds herself becoming a the kind of preppy femme her mother might have loved — it stands to me as a sort of creation myth for our modern gay culture, as it was written at a time when that culture began to liberate itself from the bonds of raw lust and face the sobering effects of AIDS and real life.

Lest you think this is a big leap, the second of the book’s four sections is called “Myths of Origin” and the book itself seems primarly concerned with (as so many other works of literature) people either resisting or giving in to a changing world. Not to go off on a “kids these days don’t know their history” lecture (mostly because I am “kids these days) this book is helpful at taking an oft mythologized time and place (New York in the 1980s) and revealing the gritty heart behind the gloss. A fitting companion to Larry Kramer’s “Faggots,” “The Lost Language of Cranes” gives a glimpse into our collective gay past. Our older readers will have to tell me if its accurate or not, but they can’t question it’s role as a moving character study.

Support your local bookstore today by purchasing this book at LambdaRising.com.

---

First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...

---