Buddies by Phillip Hoyle

     Last week I visited my family, the one related to my long-standing marriage with my ex-wife, the one that produced two interesting children, the one that has graced me with ten grandchildren. That family has extensions: my family of origin with four sisters and their husbands and, for three of them, children; my ex-wife’s family of origin with three siblings and their families; an informally adopted child and his wife and children. My week seemed both long and short, long in that I was away from my Denver family of Jim and his mother, a group of close friends, and other important relationships with storytellers, writers, artists, and neighbors. But my stay was also short in that the whirlwind of Mid-Missouri card playing, discussions of writing and art, politics and theology, observations of life at my son’s new farm, graduations, parties, trips to coffee shops, supporting my daughter when she heard her partner had been arrested at the Mexico-USA border, grandkids going to new jobs, two little girls who still drive me crazy, and themes related to my nine years of residence there when I served on the staff of a local church made the time fly by like a Kansas storm. At the end of the week I was tired. Upon returning to Denver I was united with my urban family of gay friends that sometimes reminds me of one of my favorite books, Ethan Mordden’s Buddies.

     Philosophy and science work hard at defining concepts and terms. The words of sexuality get such treatment and with them an assignment into moral categories, behavioral norms, psychological perspectives, and the like. The author of Buddies (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1982) seems also to have been on a search for definitions, particularly of gay and straight. In telling his stories, Mordden played with the feelings and sensibilities of readers. Bud, the writer-protagonist of the book plays similarly with the feelings and sensibilities of quite a few of the other characters, some of whom argue with him about the meanings. Mordden’s meanings arose from the emerging gay life of Stonewall and post-Stonewall Manhattan and proposed a new kind of relationship characterized by sexual freedom but not without norms.

     When back in the 1980s I stood in a mid-Missouri bookstore reading the novel during several consecutive noon-hour stops there, I was most taken by the chapter “Hardhats” in which Mordden tells a story of ironworkers, a tale that provides a glance at their social profile, extremely macho lives, blended in with an instance of homosexuality or bisexuality. (Mordden didn’t like bi-sexual, didn’t believe in it.) But his language of friendship paired with the need for a sexual component made great sense to me. The picture Mordden provided of homosexuality among the most macho of all macho construction workers surprised me with a world that contrasted with that of artists found in most of the gay narratives I’d read up to that time. The privacy of the ironworkers’ gay experience—or the closeted character rarely uttered—engaged me. I liked other Mordden characters as well; the ironworker who was friend to the homosexual worker but didn’t have sex with him or even realize he was homosexual, the school-teacher gay, and the hooker gay young man who had little interest in work, and a 20s something kept man with great and odd creativity. Mostly, though, I liked this plain ironworker who drank too much but who, on occasion, could express his love through sex and sexual words. He seemed a homosexual who didn’t make a career of his sexuality. I may have liked his story so much because I experienced a similar yet contrasting closeted experience. I sought a discrete homosexual relationship that wouldn’t destroy the rest of my life. Standing there reading the new book, I saw that novel-writing gay critic Mordden understood and valued that kind of life. He also showed how it wasn’t gay in the Stonewall sense of gay—an existence with the social demand for recognition, tolerance, acceptance, and civil rights for homosexual persons. 

     Still, Mordden urged closeted folk out of the closet even while he accepted that homosexual ironworkers could never be openly gay. Their understanding of faggot was different. They separated men from fagots by their build, muscles, costume, etc., but they couldn’t fit in with the 80s macho gay crowd. Mordden concluded that their distinction was ultimately cultural, not sexual.

     Buddies examines family of origin with siblings and parents, theatre (especially the American musical), social class, language, defining ethos of work, writer/storyteller, friendship, romance, families of choice (although I don’t think he uses that jargon), personal perspective, and more. This work reminds me a lot of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales although Buddies does have a bit more discernable plot. If Bud is the protagonist, he really has no evil antagonist. His quest is observation and storytelling for the purpose of definition. His friends and subjects are his only antagonists in that they resist his categories and argue with him over his whole project. This gay family gathers around Bud and his long-time friend Denis Savage who live in the same building. Stories occur in their apartments, in others around the city, on streets, in bars, and often on Fire Island. 

     I have my gay family, too. I don’t care so much about definition since I’m not trying to define Gay life in Denver, but like Bud, I too make some of my friends nervous. Will they end up as characters in one of my stories? They sometimes wonder. And yes, they will be in stories even if effectively camouflaged. But this family is more for me, also including folk I know from an annual retreat, massage friends, and clients. 

     So yesterday I attended a birthday party held at the Denver Wrangler Sunday beer bust. There I was surrounded by that solidarity (at least many guys had solid physiques), and I was there with my family of the five guys I’m most often with and saw others I knew who are related to the annual retreat I attend. I laughed, hugged, and felt comfortable with this nutty, sometimes nelly, crowd of like-minded, like-inclined gays. I felt at home and knew my feelings connected with Mordden’s as I stood there with my Buddies.



About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”