Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Scott Heim and Michael Lowenthal

153 Scott Heim and Michael Lowenthal My conversation with novelists Scott Heim and Michael Lowenthal takes place the day after the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Sitting around the kitchen table in the house they share in Roslindale, a working-class neighborhood of one- and two-family homes in Boston, I ask them how they marked the occasion. “We were at a fund-raiser for our softball league,” Heim tells me. “I come from a big baseball family,” adds Lowenthal, whose third novel, Charity Girl, is set during the 1918 Red Sox season. “My dad’s bar mitzvah speech was all about baseball and the Red Sox. During summers on the Cape we would drive up to Fenway for games. At Shabbos dinner on Friday nights, we would make sure the TV was on before sundown so we could watch the game afterward.” With three novels apiece to their credit, Lowenthal and Heim, one of Boston’s “Power Couples,” according to Spirit magazine, spend their days writing—or avoiding writing, as their respective styles may dictate—and, now that it’s summer, tending to their backyard vegetable garden. Heim, the older (by three years) and the first to publish, broke onto the literary scene in 1995 with Mysterious Skin, a hauntingly weird and beautiful novel about memory and childhood sexual abuse. “The greatest first novel by a gay writer under thirty since Other Voices, Other Rooms,” gushed the reviewer for the New York gay weekly LGNY. “Heim is breathtakingly unafraid to take chances,” seconded the San Francisco Chronicle, “and the fact that he doesn’t self-destruct in the process is one of the reasons he can rightly be called a promising author.” Lowenthal’s debut as a novelist came three years later with The Same Embrace, about two identical twin brothers, one gay, the other an Orthodox Jew. It, too, received widespread praise. “An eloquent exploration of the nature of faith, the consequences of judgment and the stubborn endurance of family ties,” wrote Linda Barrett Osborne in the New York Times Book Review. On this sunny, early summer afternoon, Heim and Lowenthal are wearing T-shirts that might very well stand for their respective tastes and personalities: Heim’s, in chocolate brown, is emblazoned with the name of the indie record label MORR MUSIC. “I worked at a record store when I was a teenager,” he tells me. “We would get catalogs . I’d see something that looked interesting and I’d order it.” Lowenthal’s T-shirt advertises the Strand Book Store in New York. “I didn’t buy any of the music my peers were listening to,” he confesses. “I almost never went to the movies. I just missed all of that.” “He seriously didn’t even know who the Carpenters were!” Heim recollects about one of their first dates. “That could have been the end of it right there.” Heim grew up in Little River, a “minuscule Kansas town.” His father, a shop teacher and football coach, was “in some ways very close to the father of Brian in Mysterious Skin. He wasn’t mean in any way, but he was very emotionally distant. He would assume boys knew the rules of football and how to build a house. I didn’t know any of those things. I quit football after the first couple weeks.” Heim says that longing “pretty much defined my entire boyhood. We lived out in the country. I spent an hour and a half on the bus each way to school, reading Steven King, science fiction, unsolved mysteries and murders—anything that was the opposite of hometown Kansas. I wanted to get out.” In a poem entitled “The Day I Learned the F Word,” from his 1993 chapbook, Saved from Drowning , Heim wrote about “the true fascination of the forbidden.” When I mention this, he tells me about the “illegal magazines” his mother would bring home from her job in the sheriff’s office at a Kansas prison. “I’d read stories in True Detective about rapes and murders. To this day, that’s the sort of thing that fuels my writing.” 154 Scott Heim and Michael Lowenthal 155 Scott Heim and Michael Lowenthal Lowenthal says that longing also defined his childhood. “And continues to define my every day. I remember walking around our D.C. neighborhood, wanting to connect with boys. I longed for all sorts of things...