Self, Will. Dorian: An Imitation. New York: Grove Press, 2002.

Self's title here works two ways. His Dorian is an imitation of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Self's Dorian Gray, which is to say his hero, is an imitation of whatever he needs to be, given the situation at hand. Numerous times the narrator refers to this man as a chameleon, and indeed there's something far more sinister about this Dorian than Wilde's.

Self has updated the story to AIDS-era Britain. Instead of a picture, Dorian is reproduced as Cathode Narcissus, a nine-monitor video installation of Dorian's nude body seen voyeuristically at all angles at once. It's this video that Dorian wishes would age while he stays young, and, indeed, this is what happens. But Self pushes the central magic further: Dorian's video self also bears AIDS's ravages of the body, while the live Dorian is able to live with (and spread) the virus without any personal threat.

What's great about this novel is how it sits right at that line between anti-gay and anti-"gay"—which is to say, borderline homophobic but really in the end just smartly critical of all the failures of post-Stonewall gay culture. Self attacks the whole notion of gay identity and identification, most explicitly in the dialogue of his heroin-shooting novelist stand-in character Devenish:

"It's been the misfortune of people who prefer sex with their own gender to be forced to regard this as some essential part of themselves. After all, homosexuality was only defined as a pathology in response to the alleged healthiness of heterosexuality. It's the great mistake of you ... erm ... you gays to mistake a mere attribute for an essence." (212)

And the same character attacks gay/our culture's youth obsession:

"If Gray were able to stay young and have this video installation age in his stead, he'd be the icon of an era in which everyone seeks to hang on to their childhood until they're pressing furry fucking teddy bears against wrinkled cheeks." [. . .] "You homosexuals are only the vanguard of a mutton army dressed as denim lambs. (220)

Will Self is straight (or, well, "straight" or whatever), which complicates all this in stupid ways. What I mean is, if it were, say, Foucault saying this (which he did, essentially, regarding the first quote), or Roy Cohn in Angels in America (who said something similar to the second quote regarding clout and anti-discrimination laws), I'd be fine with it. The "community" or whatever would be fine with it, but as Self doesn't identify as gay (nor could he I don't think), his writing could be seen as homophobic. I could find some critical quotes or whatever but it's not even 8am yet.

At any rate, there's this, too, a longer quote, which I think really just shows how astutely Self's developed his sense of gay culture's failures (which I mean like temporary failures that haven't yet been overcome; not like inherent failures that make it some hot eternal mess):

"They say now that those few short years between the Stonewall Riots and the arrival of AIDS were characterised by a mounting sense of liberation, that we gay men felt the time had come to be ourselves, to express ourselves, to live as we truly wanted to live, free of guilt, free of convention, free of interference. They say now that the disease is a ghastly, one-off, one-act play. A piece of incomprehensible dramatic irony, inflicted on up happy Arcadians by a god who doesn't even exist. They say now that those damp bath-houses and fetid gyms, the bloody meat racks and the shitty cottages were the perfect places for the virus to fester, to replicate, to pump its own iron. The glory hole turned out to be a gory hole. [This kind of stupid punning is I'm afraid a common thread in the book, one of the many places where Self happily tries to channel Wilde and the rest of us cringe.*] They say HIV may have ben present for years in the West, and that it was only this ever lengthening conga line of sodomy—with jet travel connecting cock from San Francisco with asshole in NYC, cock from NYC with asshole in London—that allowed it to get so out of control. They say a lot of things, but for those of use who were there it was simple. Simple to observe that for men who were meant to be free, how readily they draped themselves in chains..." (95).

This is almost relentless in its animosity, particularly at the end, but I should note that it's spoken by an HIV-positive gay man, specifically Basil Hallward, who, as Wilde wrote, "is what I think I am."

I can't read this passage and not help but think about what Gurganus had to say about the coming of AIDS and the coming of war, or what David Foster Wallace had to say in Might magazine all those years ago about AIDS and the end of guilt-free sport-fucking. It's like somehow in seeing the benefits or the good that can come out of the presence of AIDS, these writers have turned the tables, and exposed AIDS victimization as a kind of pollyannaism?

The question is: which is the line of thought that will lead to victory over those who want to oppress us? It's all well and good to read Foucault and argue that our homosexuality is as banal and set in stone as our eye color (well, contacts, but you know what I mean) and therefore nothing to make any grand deal of. But to me this smells a little too much of "I don't mind homosexuals as long as they don't flaunt themselves in my face" and "Whatever you do in your bedroom, why is it my business?"

At any rate, I'm glad for Self's book. I'd much rather read something critical and thought-provoking than the easy bromides of rah-rah "Good for us!" gay fiction. Even if the former isn't accurate, the latter feels like a lie.
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* It's not all bad, though. "I adore destructive spectacles; they are the last refuge of the creative." Henry Wotton (of course) says this. And this: "Violent crimes are in astonishingly bad taste, just as bad taste is a violent crime."