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This is the long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today,” Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.
With ''I Can Give You Anything But Love'', Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work — from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality.
Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this — his most personal book yet — the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing.
Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
Author: Gary Indiana
Paperback Published 13 August 2024 240 pages
Originally published in hardcover November 2015
Read and Recommended by Graeme:
'This memoir ranges over Gary Indiana's life in a free-wheeling, non-chronological manner and concentrates on two main periods: as a young man in late-1960s California where he became entangled with Ferd, a porno film-maker, and his home away from home in Cuba, where he has lived on and off for 15 years. The prime attraction of Cuba is the men and the sex. He describes a place he calls 'Porno Beach' - 'rent-boys...spend their days there, promoting fantastic endowments against a background of foaming surf and azure skies, wearing the least possible excuses for bathing suits, often improvised from see-through materials'. Indiana is extremely candid about his sex life and boasts that he has 'an unusually tight asshole and gave fantastic head' which is undoubtedly the secret to his success. He details both the highs (the carnal Bacchanal in Cuba and his relationship with Mastiu, a sexually voracious Cuban deaf-mute) and the lows (being raped at knifepoint by a Hells Angel and the brutal loss of his anal virginity at age 19 when Ferd pimped him out to their landlord when the rent was overdue). Gary Indiana has clearly run with an interesting crowd and luminaries such as Susan Sontag and Janis Joplin crop up in his reminiscing. Though he does not recall Sontag fondly, and claims she appropriated her friends' discoveries as her own, was 'unflaggingly rude to waietrs, cab drivers, hotel clerks' and 'often cultivated people she privately held low opinions about, if they were famous enough'.