Free The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered by Christopher Bram, Tom Cardamone, Michael Graves, Jameson Currier, Larry Duplechan, Sean Meriwether, Wayne Courtois, Andy Quan, Michael Bronski, Philip Gambone Page A

who takes part in Metro’s assault.
    The book’s original dust jacket illustration, by Alain Gauthier, features the moonlit silhouette of a black man cradling a white man whose mouth bleeds a heart-shape onto one black forearm, while in the background stand three ominous male figures before an urban landscape; a crescent moon tinged red hovers in the sky. It’s an illustration that daringly shows the novel’s central elements and one of the reasons why I was drawn to Vanishing Rooms . In comparison, the cover of the Cleis Press 2001 edition is a photograph of a handsome bare-chested black man in profile. A sensual, attractive cover, yet there is no hint of the gay interracial issues at the heart of the novel.
    I have read this book three or four times, and returned to favorite passages more times than I can recall; each reading has brought new insights or raised questions not considered before. A book often changes in recollection and when revisited there can be a conflict between our memories of the book and the book’s reality. When I first read Vanishing Rooms I was eager for stories depicting gay interracial relationships, a subject that I rarely saw portrayed convincingly (if at all) in the art, books or films that I would come across. Through imaginative works like those of Baldwin and Dixon, I sought like-minded spirits who were exploring this subject as well as the various challenges faced by individuals in such relationships. How did others feel about their attraction to someone of a different race? What are the various implications of desiring people of a certain color? And in the case of Vanishing Rooms , can two men, one black and the other white, love each other in a world that condemns not only their sexuality but also their difference in race?
    Melvin Dixon was born May 29, 1950 in Stamford, Connecticut to parents originally from the Carolinas. A Professor of English at Queens College from 1980 to 1992, Dixon was a poet, translator, and novelist whose books include the poetry collection Change of Territory (1983), Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (1987), and The Collected Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor (1990), a translation of poetry by the one-time president of Senegal. His first novel, 1989’s Trouble the Water , combines Dixon’s urban upbringing with his family’s southern roots for a tale featuring his talent for creating the gritty, layered realities and surreal lyricism that would be explored further in Vanishing Rooms .
    While the protagonist of the first novel is a married teacher at a celebrated New England college, Jesse Durand in Vanishing Rooms is a young dancer sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with his white lover. The subject of gay biracial relationships was controversial not only during the novel’s 1970s setting but also at the time of Vanishing Room ’s publication in 1991, and still to the present day. I admit my own hesitation at approaching the subject; disapproval and misunderstanding remain in the minds of many individuals gay and straight. Maybe part of why I read Melvin Dixon’s book was because at the time I needed some form of validation for my desires, to see an interracial couple explored with the same depth of imagination and complexity as lovers in other works of literature.
    Yet from page one, the reader knows that Jesse and Metro’s romance is anything but idyllic. Metro, a night shift reporter for the Daily News , has summoned Jesse to a warehouse on a rotting pier where men meet for sex. They emerge covered in dust and splinters, and Jesse is appalled by the experience but will not admit it. Late for a dance class, Jesse leaves Metro to get in a cab, not realizing it will be the last time he sees him alive.
    I’d be gone only a few hours. Metro would be home when I got back. Yet I missed him. My stomach fluttered. Maybe it was that empty, searching look in his eyes, or his suddenly pale skin against my oily brown