The Best Date of My Life Began in the Gay Section of the Bookstore

We really jumped past the small talk!

Last summer, I went on a date with a lovely ginger fella at an outdoor wine bar at the Grove in Los Angeles. When I found him in the promenade of the shopping center, he said it was a tradition that whenever he met somebody there, he always bought them a book from the Barnes and Noble.

So we strolled into the fluorescent bookshop predictably overflowing with literature from every genre imaginable, and I was immediately seized by the paralysis of choice — I had no idea what I was going to pick.

We rode the escalator to the second floor and suddenly we discovered a little square table that was clearly the “queer literature” section. While I admit I’ve never been as much of a bookworm as I’d like to be, the riches on that table brought forth so many memories and stories from me.

A few years earlier, I had been doing a Terrence McNally play in Austin TX with an actor friend who was a voracious reader, who inspired me to finally get back into reading novels — I mostly read plays and poetry back then.

Of course, the first book I picked up was On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the debut novel by the Vietnamese-American queer poet Ocean Vuong — and I don’t know if I’ll ever find another novel to top that one!

I always said my impatience with novels is that I keep waiting for them to be poetry. When I gave my father a copy of the book, he said he struggled with its “poetic style,” as if it were self-evident why that’d be a bad thing. I savored it! Every sentence has a taste, a sumptuous unbearable beauty.

I read it on my first trip home to LA in eight years. I read it outside a coffee shop across the street from where I got my hair cut as a child. I read it on the curb outside a bar where I was waiting to see my college crush. I read this memoir addressed to the author’s mother on my first visit home after my own mother’s death. And my bittersweet nostalgia was deepened by the author’s lyricism and the visceral intimacy of his story.

Then sitting right next to it on the table at Barnes and Noble was a copy of A Home at the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham, who also wrote The Hours. As a teenager, I was enthralled by the film adaptations of both.

I’ve written about the profound impact A Home at the End of the World had on me. The protagonist’s ability to translate a history of familial loss into an entirely optimistic worldview that’s all about savoring the little joys of life — that really shaped me into the person I am today.

And the queerness in the story is so intricately nuanced. The protagonist is predominantly heterosexual, but he cultivates a deeply tender, clearly romantic lifelong connection with his best friend. That kind of affection between men has always been so inspiring and moving to me.

I saw the film adaptation on my first unaccompanied voyage to an arthouse cinema. And I’ve always wanted to read the book, as I’m sure there must be so many rich details I’d cherish, but I wonder if I could ever read it and not be influenced by my unyielding affinity for the film.

Then I can’t remember if it was a pocket copy of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, or a collection of Frank O’Hara poems, or a William S. Burroughs novel, but something I saw in the bookstore made me aflame with excitement about the queer Beat poets, and all the feet-stomping passion they stoked in me.

Separate and apart from any overtly queer verses, the fervent aesthetic of the Beat poets always felt like a North Star in my youth. The noisy, robust enthusiasm and joyous zest for life I’ve always exhibited — which could be called ‘camp’ — really arose from the Beat sensibility to “never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles...”

In many ways, the love affair in A Home at the End of the World is similar to the affection between Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, embodied by their analogue characters in Jack Kerouac’s classic On The Road.

I recall walking in the park by my apartment in New York, listening to the audiobook of On the Road, and the steady refrain of “I gotta get to Denver,” — echoing Ginsberg’s verse about the “adonis of Denver” — struck me like a thunderbolt as I checked my email and saw an invitation to come star in a short film — in Denver! Such serendipity should never be ignored.

Naturally, the queer literature table wouldn’t be complete without a copy of Call Me By Your Name, which of course inspired an esteemed film as well. And quite fittingly, there was a copy of E.M. Forster’s Maurice beside it.

The film adaptation of Maurice was directed by James Ivory, who later won an Oscar for writing the film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name, so the two are often discussed in tandem. They’re both nostalgic, wistful stories about young men falling in love with each other in lush countrysides.

I wrote about reading Maurice on the subway, while a stranger beside me read Call Me By Your Name, and what enchanting synchronicity that was — especially memorable as it happened right before the lockdown, before I had to avoid strangers altogehter, and stay off the subway for months.

But of course, back at the Barnes and Noble, since I had already read most of those books, they couldn’t be the one I’d pick for the ginger fella to buy me. There were a few other titles I squinted at and realized I had already listened to the audiobooks…and sadly already forgotten the plot.

And then of course there was Dancer From the Dance, a gorgeous, seminal gay novel I bought in SoHo years ago and devoured shortly after Maurice. And there were a couple titles by Garth Greenwell that tempted me, but I was certain I had them waiting on my shelf back in Brooklyn.

I’d been professionally acquainted with an older gentleman in New York who wanted to get rid of some possessions — so he regularly sent me boxes of gay books! Every couple of months, I’d go to my door and get a package filled with paperback copies of Jean Genet and retrospective photo-books of work by Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Wojnarowicz.

Scanning my eye again across the queer offerings at Barnes and Noble, I noticed The Swimming Pool Library, the debut novel by Alan Hollinghurst, who also wrote The Line of Beauty, which I’d read during the pandemic…and that was the one I picked.

But the point is, as I stood there deliberating, I shared all these stories with the ginger fella. Our night had just begun and I’d already told him about my nostalgic homecoming, the cinema that shaped me as a child, poetry that inspires me, flashes of serendipity that have guided me, pre-pandemic memories, and the epic Christmas gifts arriving monthly at my door.

We jumped right past the small talk! And thank heavens. I had to leave LA and fly back to New York only a few days later, so we both wanted to make this a night to remember. Part of me knew, whichever book I picked, as I read it two days later on the plane…I’d probably just be thinking of him.

He bought me the paperback Hollinghurst, and we rode down the escalator and walked out into the sunset. We had yet to order our first drink and it was already one of the best dates of my life.