ACQUAINTANCE

A doctor and his jazz pianist lover square off against intolerance in the Roaring Twenties in this knotty gay romance.

It’s 1923, and Carl Holman, a 32-year-old, up-and-coming surgeon in Portland, Oregon, is attending a society wedding reception when he is smitten with piano player Jimmy Harper. Jimmy sports sandy hair, a trim body, and a strong jaw line, all of them “bathed in light from a stained-glass skylight.” Carl must keep his ogling discreet since he doesn’t know if Jimmy would reciprocate his affections, and because gay sexuality is illegal. That’s just one of many bigotries plaguing Oregon, where the Ku Klux Klan is a potent political force that backs eugenics laws, an education act that could ban Roman Catholic schools, and a general suppression of suspicious cultural influences. (When Jimmy and his band start playing conspicuously Black-sounding hot jazz music at a dance, club-carrying Klan louts insist they cut it out.) Carl gingerly pursues Jimmy, who agrees to a fishing trip that escalates to skinny-dipping, lunch, a Chaplin movie, and a spontaneous make-out session. Jimmy’s fiancee, Mary, dumps him after he confesses his same-sex inclinations, and he moves into Carl’s house, which accommodates much graphic, untrammeled sex. Alas, a boy spies them kissing through a window and the ensuing gossip gets Carl ostracized by neighbors and patients and draws the wrath of his boss, a Klan stalwart who is pressuring him to join the Invisible Empire. Carl’s only hope of salvaging his career is to quiet all the talk by contracting a sham engagement to his lesbian pal Gwen Cook.

Stookey’s period piece, the first installment of his Medicine for the Blues Trilogy, paints a frank, atmospheric portrait of closeted gay life in a hostile time, full of furtive eye contact, assignations in parks, a claustrophobic dread of exposure and violence, and a poignant sense of being shunned and abandoned. (“I don’t want to end up a lonely old fairy,” mourns Jimmy after his breakup with Mary.) The author’s prose, filtered through Carl’s first-person voice and medical sensibility, is often vivid and evocative, whether he’s describing jazz—“The music writhed and pulsated like a heart on an operating table, refusing to stop beating, pounding with joy and rambunctious freedom”—or a sensual touch. (“We delighted in the way the pliable, soft skin rides over the bony areas and adheres to the muscled parts of the body, in the sensations of warmth from the flesh attached by sinews and ligaments to the sturdy armature of skeleton.”) Unfortunately, the novel’s nods to historical details (“I suppose you haven’t heard about the inflation in Germany”) and intellectual fads feel tacked on. Supporting characters like teen hustler Billy Butler, tragic queen Jerry the Fairy, and Gwen’s raucous lover, Charlene Devereaux, are lively and magnetic, but the romantic leads are not. Carl is a staid liberal, Jimmy a bland ingénue, and their interactions often feel stilted. (“Jimmy asked about my work and I shared with him some humorous encounters I’d had with patients recently. Then he told me a funny story about his Uncle Wally’s gall bladder operation.”) The result is a love story that feels more like a yarn about an acquaintance than a tale of real passion.

An intriguing and well-written, if emotionally flat, rendering of a gay relationship under siege.