© 1989 Rich Grzesiak, all rights reserved.
Note: I may not agree with many attitudes expressed here—but Nelson's point of view is hardly unknown among gay men, and quite prevalent beyond the gay ghettos of West Hollywood, nonetheless. The continuing popularity of his writing proves that. -RG
What did you do in the war, Daddy?
An interview with the author of The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up and its sequel, Panthers in the Skins of Men.
A lot of gay novels were published during the 1980's, but few exerted quite the spell over gay readers which a vainglorious narrative originally released in 1981 did - a no nonsense story of gay soldiers in Vietnam entitled The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up. (It centers around a deceptively homespun Navy medical corpsman called Kurt Strom who cons seeming battalions of soldiers to do his bidding, have sex with him, go into combat with them, and even fall in love).
The book caused a sensation when released (and sold some 100,000 copies during the last decade). When first published, it drew plaudits from discerning critics like Felice Picano, and immediately hit the (gay) bookstore bestseller lists.
But then the controversy began, which, I fear, will continue with release of its long awaited (and much delayed) sequel, Panthers in the Skins of Men [Meadowland Books/Lyle Stuart; $9.95, softcover].
Blacks found Kurt Strom a racist. Women were appalled by the sexist antics of Kurt's character, and his implied contempt toward the female gender because of their "inadequacy" in meeting the sexual needs of straight men (which, naturally, soldier Kurt always supplied). Peace activists were not enamored with Kurt's ambivalence toward the military as an institution. Gay liberationists couldn't fathom Kurt's obsession with straight identified guys, or his disdain toward effeminate men.
Novelist Charles ["Chuck"] Nelson didn't help things along, either, by failing to clarify his fictional intentions, or to seriously challenge his critics with a thoughtful defense of his much loved protagonist, his "Boy."
But readers adored the character of Kurt Strom, and its not hard to see why - he was one of them. Yes, he might be bigoted or sexist or closeted or otherwise imperfect, but they identified with the character, and found the military backdrop an irresistible fictional setting for serious fantasy or fun.
At long, long, long last, the throngs of fans who snapped up copies of The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up will be delighted to know a sequel is finally in print, bringing their hero up to date: Kurt relocates to the U. S. following his Vietnam tour of duty, and tries to integrate himself stateside with the Navy at home. (Critics of the "Boy" and Nelson will find that little has changed in the last decade, too).
Nelson defends himself in the following interview against his critics, and implies he should be held accountable only as a storyteller of a vanished world of sex and 1968 - a purveyor of a "picaresque erotic tale" and no Sinclair Lewis polemically railing against injustice.
One thing is for sure - Nelson is a conservative Southerner, recently turned 47, and, like many unemployed writers, very defensive about his creation.
I recently tracked him down to ask why he's taken so goddamn long to release this much awaited sequel, and probe just what makes him tick - the psychology of feeling behind a very unusual gay writer and his fictional character, Kurt Strom, sailor, sinner, cynic and literary stud. We had a very frank conversation and - frankly! - if you're easily offended by direct language, skip this piece.
Rich Grzesiak (RG): The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up made quite a splash with many gay male readers, and its sequel has been eagerly awaited. Why has it taken you 8 years to write it?
Charles Nelson (CN): Well, I've flunked English and I'm no writer, and Boy was the first thing I ever wrote. I felt I wanted to top the Boy, to write an epic novel, but it wound up being terribly cumbersome, so much so that I've wound up breaking the enormous text down into five different novels, one of which is Panthers. So it took me 8 years to write 5 novels, and Panthers is only one of them. I have 2 other novels in the process of being completed.
I intend to follow Kurt Strom from Bullets until his thirtieth birthday. The two in process now concern his childhood [to be called Bad Little Angel), and adolescent experiences prior to his getting into the Navy (Pages of Gold). The next book concerning his days after getting out of the Navy will be called Hitchhiking of a Wild Vagabond. All of the titles, incidentally, come from Rimbaud.
RG: Your book makes me wonder how you want readers to approach your work - is it fiction or sex fantasy?
CN: Actually, it's memoirs, Rich! An awful lot of Panthers is true, and pretty much most of it happened. I try to write what's fun, and fun for somebody to read.
RG: What doesn't ring true for me is the excessively promiscuous, profligate, unremitting torrent of sexuality. Nobody, even in the pre-AIDS days, ever had that much sex, did they Chuck?
CN: It was everywhere, Rich - I doubt I ever made a bus or plane trip or hitchhiked from Newport to Boston, or down to Manhattan where I didn't encounter sex of some sort. It was everywhere, every street corner. There were guys drinking or who didn't have women, and they were available, if you approached them right - if you were one of those clean cut people who didn't look funny.
RG: [laughter] Like Paul Lynde?
CN: [laughter] Some day I'll show you my trick book, a journal where I am completely honest at some point or other, and where exactly what each trick looked like, etc.
RG: Well, I dearly hope that wherever your boy Kurt Strom is today he practices safe sex.
CN: No, the Boy doesn't have sex at all these days. When the Boy turned 40 and walked down Castro Street with his lady friend and everyone looked at her, he knew it was over! When the Boy went to one of those bars where they only admitted cute ones - no ethnic minorities, fatties or oldies - and they told him he was too old, that was it!
RG: Your fiction is very unlike anyone else's in the gay subculture - down to earth, patriotic, gutsy and visionary. The writing style is uniquely your own, and not just because you're writing about gay men and war.
At the same time, there are certain anomalies in your literature that drive gay liberationists bonkers. Does Kurt, for example, hate women? The impression I get is that females constantly get in the way of his seducing heterosexual dudes who lack effeminate mannerisms.
CN: Well, don't they? Kurt kind of likes women. That's the hard thing about writing 3 or 4 books at the same time, you forget you're not interpolating what he likes women for in any of the installments. Remember, Kurt does have a nice relationship with an actress friend. He does try to make it with her. He's good in bed with a guy, and he just doesn't feel [sexually] adequate with a girl, and it bothers him a whole lot.
Actually, in a military environment like Kurt's, you're not around women that much. You're around WAVES - female military, which isn't quite the same as being around real women.
RG: A lot of that has changed in today's military. But perhaps your view of the sixties is right - women in uniform then were either closeted bull dykes or nastily mannish souls.
CN: They were fucked up in the face, the pussy, or the head [sic].
RG: Let's be serious, Chuck. At one point, you write that women don't "realize that men have erogenous zones." You don't believe that, do you?
CN: I lived with a very, very pretty girl for a long time. She came from a good family, and a privileged educational background. She loved me, and the only way for her to hold me was for us to have threesomes with other guys. I always felt inadequate as far as straight guys were concerned. I figured they wanted women in bed, so they would be good at it.
I discovered, however, that a large percentage of them are lousy in bed Yet how would a woman know? I mean, 20 years ago she was trained to lie back and act receptively.
RG: I suspect that one of the reasons your books are so appealing is they connect with gay guys who like traditional masculine values. I think a lot of your readers are partially, if not completely in the closet. I don't see gay fiction giving those dudes what they want to read.
CN: Almost every gay guy must have one straight guy in his life he wanted, somebody he was afraid of trying for, or used the wrong technique on, or whatever. My books address a lot of that.
RG: I know what you mean. There's a straight guy I know whose body drives me nuts. I would give anything to rape him, yet I know he's probably at home either having sex with his wife or watching TV!
CN: I was hitchhiking after I got out of the Navy. A kid who was a dead ringer for the hottest number at a Da Nang first med battalion picked me up. I learned he just left the Coast Guard and was getting married that weekend. He spent five years doing long distance truck driving so he would have enough money to buy a ranch. I had to have this man, he was so good looking!
So I wrote a short story, adapting things that really happened. I seduced the guy, and that was when I realized I really wanted to become a writer - and straight guys could be had!
It's that revelation that a lot of people hit my books for, because Kurt is raping the guys he seduces, basically. He's a very powerful personality.
That's also what I did - psychologically use any amount of trickery to get these guys in bed.
RG: Your Kurt is a con artist!
CN: Guys do the same thing to women! Kurt knows what he wants! Kurt is someone who's constantly been put down through his youth, particularly by a mother who says he worthless, and he's not.
So this is Kurt's outlet for his brain - straight guys!
RG: Why are straight guys such a turn on for gay men? Especially guys in the military?
CN: [Laughing] They're cleaner! They look cleaner! They taste cleaner! Their cum tastes better!
[Seriously] They're a percentage of men who are gay, only some 10%. Why eliminate the other 90% if they're hunky and good looking? Just because they're not gay?
RG: Let me put you to the test: I'm going to show you two guys who are equally good looking - one is straight and the other is gay. Who you gonna ball?
CN: The straight one.
RG: Why? What if he 's a cop - he might arrest you!
CN: Because he's mysterious and I don't know what he's thinking. I know that a gay guy goes to bed with another gay guy because he's gay. That I know.
But I don't know why a straight guy would have sex with a gay guy. I like the idea of making him want it.
RG: But the counter argument to that is that the straight guy would then be at least technically bisexual.
CN: You can seduce anybody. Anybody can be had.
RG: Gore Vidal used to make a similar claim, saying that under the right set of circumstances, anybody could be had.
CN: I never had quite the same degree of self confidence, but I did meet with success. You know, there's something about certain guys that just looks clean. That extra something - looks, personality, success - makes them irresistible. There's an intelligence and good nature that separates straight guys from the rest.
RG: It's no secret that your Boy Kurt Strom has been accused of being a racist. How do you react?
CN: I don't feel I have to defend myself. Some of my critics are stupid - they're saying it's all right for Kurt to think this way in 1968, but Mr. Nelson, this is 198-, and you should know better. That's ridiculous, because I'm narrating these books in Kurt's words.
On another occasion, a black bookstore employee accused me of making racial statements in my interviews. I have copies of every interview I've ever given, and there are no racial statements I've ever made.
What can you do against a lie? That's Nazism - it really is, I'm sorry.
RG: If I wanted to, I could go down the list of biases Kurt seems to embody. I could find examples of ageism, sexism, even anti-Semitism in your books. A tough, socially minded book critic would have a field day with Kurt and his attitudes.
CN: Look, I've been around blacks enough to know I enjoy their company.
I was a sissy when I was growing up, and got picked on a lot. As I grew up, I became very sensitive to angry people, so all my life I've avoided them, even in the service - and that's not easy there. An awful lot of blacks are angry, so I just stay away from them. I don't want to be around this anger. I don't feel I deserve to be the subject - my family didn't own slaves it's not my fault.
They have no right to be angry with me - I'm sorry. If that's prejudice, that's prejudice, but I don't want to be around people that are angry with me for no reason.
Several times I have run into blacks who were hurt by The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up, and I feel sorry about that, I really didn't mean to do that. I don't want to hurt people, I want to amuse them, but I want to tell the truth, too, and I think there's an awful lot of people like Kurt out there doing this - they're are a lot of straight guys being seduced by gay guys.
RG: Do gay liberationists make you uncomfortable?
CN: I live in a small Southern town, and I'm the only gay person in town I know, so I have no contact with these libbers.
I am rather grateful for everybody who've made it possible for me to publish my books. If it weren't for the political courage of these people, the Boy would have never been published.
RG: The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up is not a war novel at all, is it? Have you had any involvement with gay veterans groups?
CN: Not really! I went to one gay vets meeting in Los Angeles where I was looking for a place to live until my next paycheck, and the meeting wasn't very interesting. All they were talking about was the next parade and the next rummage sale.
RG: Do you ever get any mail from people who are gay and fought in Vietnam?
CN: You bet! A lot!
Years ago I encountered a very sexy, squarely built young man getting a hair cut and, seeing my book [The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up], he said, "I read that book! It was required reading where I went to school at a military academy in Georgia."
Liberal education lives, but I do wonder about some of its professors.
I have received quite a few letters from counselors, especially Catholic priests who deal with disturbed veterans. They tell me they use the Boy in counseling, 'though I'm not sure how.
The Agent Orange people recommend to the families of victims that they read the Boy, and that surprises me. I've also been invited to speak in front of a German S&M group in West Berlin, but I'd never have the money to travel there.
The biggest thing for any kind of veteran is courage. You'll get a letter from somebody that will say "I never served in the military and I feel I lack courage because of that." Or letters from guys who did indeed serve in Vietnam and they feel they lack courage for some reason or other.
Of course I feel that way, too. There's something about courage that is so abstract I don't think I could ever effectively counsel somebody about it. Or be able to say, "Done it! Earned it!"
RG: Are you uncomfortable around guys who are effeminate?
CN: Yes! I think I remember those high school days when the only fairies in town were the kids you tried to stay away from. Or the old men without teeth who hung around the county courthouse. I also don't feel I have a whole lot in common with effeminate men. If they're going to do all this effeminate stuff, usually they're tremendously into themselves, and I rather like people who are interested in people contact, in telling stories.
RG: Your honesty doesn't exempt even the military establishment from scorn or rancor How do you feel about the military as an institution?
CN: Well, you have to have it. You must have some way of training men to be officers so we can fight a war.
RG: And if you're gay and going into the military, what would your advice be?
CN: I'm against being political about being gay in the military All through history there have been millions of men who have been gay in the military. You just don't flaunt it! You just get in there like everybody else - you don't walk in wearing high heels - you just don't flaunt it!
I have certainly seen people who were openly gay in the service - their lovers were right there with them and they made no secret of going to bed together.
RG: What about [the contributions of] people like the late Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich?
CN: Now what did he do exactly? What did he do? What was his point?
RG: Well, he wanted people to be able to flaunt their gayness in the military. He didn't think you should have to hide the fact you're gay in order to serve your country.
CN: Well, I totally disagree with that. To me [flaunting your gayness in the military] is like going to a family reunion in drag. There are just some things that you don't do.