Angels Into Dust: The New Town Anthology
By Justin Hayford
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It seems Chicago columnist Jon-Henri Damski (who died in 1997 at the age of 60) devoted his life to answering this question, applying a PhD in classics to Chicago street culture, chronicling gay life over a period of 22 years. “My routine was to walk continually–day and night–and gather stories,” he wrote in the introduction to his collected essays, Angels Into Dust: The New Town Anthology. “From one person I would get one story, which would alert me to a theme or situation. Once I heard a similar story from someone else, I took that for verification and wrote it down.”
But Damski was not simply an oral historian. He was also a fierce moralist who strove to reenvision those aspects of gay culture often disparaged by gays and straights alike as perverted. One of his most extraordinary columns–“Sex Clinic on the Hill,” from Gay Life in 1984–transforms a stretch of late-night Lincoln Park bushes full of sex-crazed men into a healing ground, where sexual dysfunction, both personal and cultural, is relieved through the intervention of Greek deities. This tour de force brings the reader to a sophisticated understanding of the transgressive power of promiscuity.
Damski’s writings also remind us how precariously that heritage is poised above the neoconservative chasm of assimilation. Rather than create new cultural institutions, gay leaders today fight for admittance into such oppressive heterosexist clubs as marriage and the military. We hail as “progress” a multibillion-dollar corporation’s marketing plan, which includes a way to openly manipulate gay consumers. And in the ultimate act of amnesia and betrayal, the whole gay liberation movement of the 70s–which finally enabled gays to hold their heads high and even be elected to national office–has been cast as nothing but a hedonistic party. I think we’re overdue for a Gay Shame Day.
But Bare isn’t about barebacking at all. True, the main character, Webb, is a sexual renegade who sleeps with anything that moves and refuses to use condoms (“It’s the one freedom I won’t surrender to straight society” is his nonsensical remark). But Kirst gives him about three sentences to justify his behavior and then drops the subject. In its place he offers a confused, overwrought story of family and romantic relationships torn asunder by Webb’s self-absorbed self-destructiveness.
