The Incandescence of Memory: A Review of Did You Ever See A Horse Go By?

For several months now, your Head Trucker has been reading and re-reading a wonderful book, and struggling to find the words to describe it. The reasons for the struggle are various: for one thing, since late summer life here has been full of sundry and boring domestic, financial, digital, and physical crises that have kept me alternately upset or immobilized.  And then there was the election, for chrissake.  Sometimes life is just one damn thing after another, you know what I mean, fellas?

For another thing, despite the book's lovely, impeccable writing, it so often moves me to tears or makes my heart double-clutch with recognition that I have been able to read only a few pages at a time before having to close it up and set it down again. It's that good: them old Greek boys you may have heard something about in lit class between daydreams and snoozes held that art should be the mirror of life; and this book is a mirror indeed, polished to a high sheen and often casting a glaring, dangerous light into shaded nooks and crannies of the author's soul, and even into my own, it seems.

The book is Did You Ever See a Horse Go By? by my longtime truckbuddy Frank De Francesco, and though it is his first and only book to date, it is well worth the cover price: a little gem of a memoir that I recommend wholeheartedly to all my other truckbuddies and readers. Frank says, "While I'm not sure the world really needs another coming-out story, I feel deeply the need to tell it."

I think the world does need this particular story.  In her well-known essay "On Keeping a Notebook," author Joan Didion wrote that the reason for recording her memories was to "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point."  Because, she said, "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."  And of course we know what happens to those who forget the past.

Frank's book recounts in exquisite detail the fears and feelings and fantasies, the loves and lovers, the guilt and shame, the confessions and repressions, the one night stands and the long-term commitments, the lost and the found, the hopes and the terrors of coming out at age 36, after many years of sheltering in a devoutly Catholic closet in New England. How odd, then, that his memories, feelings, regrets, and joys should so well parallel all that I went through in my fundamentalist Protestant closet down in the Deep South. And yet not so odd after all -- what Frank is really writing about here is not merely his coming out, his life, his memories, but the human experience of being gay and alone and afraid of so many things: censure, rejection, failure, despair, the acid drip of loneliness. All men and women since the world began have endured, or at least feared, these things, for such is the nature of sublunary life:  it is not good for the man to be alone.  But certain exquisite pains and torments are reserved for the gays, or were.

 And he writes about it all very clearly and concretely, with smooth, careful cadences that lead the reader through some fearsomely honest revelations, which normally one might confide only in one's closest friends.  But that's what this book is like:  a comfortable conversation with an old and trusted friend, patiently explaining the real reasons why he did whatever it was he did, trusting that you in turn will listen and understand, not laugh or turn away.

Frank is a very brave writer; I could never be so brave. It's not that I have forgotten anything, but that it's all still too close, too vivid in my memory. After all these years, the scars of battle on my soul and on my heart are still too tender to bear much touching. I admire Frank for the courage and the toughness of his writing, which I am sure was not easy. But somehow he was able to bare his soul to the reader, as all great writers must do sooner or later.

We who were born in the first decade or two after the last world war have been privileged to witness a remarkable period in human history, when homosexuality went from being "the love that dare not speak its name" to being publicly affirmed, even celebrated, by the President, the United Nations, and just about every major city and (who would have thought?) major-league sports team across the country, while same-sex marriage went from being a laughable fantasy to being enshrined in constitutional law by the Supreme Court:  truly a breathtaking phenomenon when you stop to think about it, and all within the span of one ordinary lifetime. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself.

Frank says of his motivation for writing the book:

For me, the value in telling my story here, beyond the healing, is to preserve a tiny slice of collective history--to document what it was to be gay and to come out in a particular time and place. I want to remember all the others who were there along with me, creating our lives together and defining our sexuality as we went along. My hope is that others find some value in that as well.

I'm quite sure that everyone who reads the book will find that value. It's a fine book, beautifully written and deeply moving, which I hope will find its way into the hands of many readers.


P.S. I forgot to mention all the candid sex scenes, guys. Those are good too, yessir:  real Adults Only stuff.  No, I'm not putting you on; go buy the book and see for yourself.

Review: American Gospel

In lieu of a hymn today, your Head Trucker would like to post this excerpt from a brilliantly written book by Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer-prize-winning historian and former editor of Newsweek, entitled American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, published in 2006.  In this thoughtful, well-balanced survey of the relationship between religion and reason, faith and freedom, from the birth of the Republic down till today, Meacham (who is, by the way, both a Tennessee boy and an Episcopalian) conducts the reader through a fascinating summary of the twin poles of American thought, beginning with the Founding Fathers, who were indeed, most of them, of a religious cast of mind, but widely varied about the details and application of religious principles.

Even Jefferson, the most secular-minded of them all, wrote, it must be remembered, the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom, a ringing declaration of Americans' liberty to believe everything or nothing at all, without coercion or penalty by government - a principle later incorporated into the Bill of Rights.  And yet, as Meacham demonstrates in his masterly synthesis of American history and thought, the separation of church and state has never meant the complete eradication of one or the other, for liberty as we understand it in this country depends upon the complementarity of both to sustain what Meacham calls the "sensible center."

I hope this short excerpt, which displays to your Head Trucker the thoroughly Anglican ethos of the via media, the middle way, will whet the appetite of some of my truckbuddies to read the book, which is partly viewable on Google Books, or can be had for about five bucks in print form from Amazon, or for twelve bucks on Kindle.

Remarkably, upon publication Meacham's book was praised by critics and commentators on both the right and the left, deservedly so.  It's quite pertitent to today's headlines, and I recommend it very highly it to all of you.  Click to enlarge these screen captures, where Meacham is speaking about today's poisonous divide between the ultra-religious and the ultra-secular:

The Story Behind Lawrence v. Texas

Excerpt from the New Yorker's review of Flagrant Conduct by Dale Carpenter, professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law, about the landmark 2003 Supreme Court case:

Lawrence and Garner may have been reluctant to talk to civil-rights lawyers from the outset, and reluctant to become the face of gay sodomy in Texas, and yet this imperfect test case could be made over into something more than serviceable. Lambda Legal, a national gay-rights advocacy group, agreed to represent them as a means both of directly challenging Bowers v. Hardwick and of highlighting the consequences of criminalizing consensual gay sex. Sodomy laws were almost never enforced, but their very existence legitimatized a culture of homophobia, and as long as Bowers was still on the books gay-rights arguments would be stymied in the courts.

The legal opportunity depended, however, upon persuading the defendants to go along with an unusual strategy. High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.