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 B

hands. I missed him and searched the rear window. Metro was standing in the middle of West 12 th Street, oblivious to the traffic veering around him. He scared me. I wanted the cab to turn around and pick him up, but it was too late.
     
    As the story unfolds through the voices of Jesse, his fellow dancer and brief love interest Ruella, and the disturbed youth Lonny, we learn more about Metro, his relationship with Jesse and what led to his brutal murder. What first attracted a black dancer from Hartford, Connecticut to a white farm boy from Lafayette, Louisiana? At a campus demonstration to memorialize Malcolm X’s death, Jesse describes his first sight of Metro:
    Thick, wavy brown hair, angular forehead and chin, horn-rimmed glasses, stubby fingers clutching a reporter’s steno pad. Eyes like reaching hands. When he looked straight at me, I felt pulled into his whole face. His stare made me feel weightless, light, angled toward him on wings suddenly fluttering from inside me and begging for air. I wanted then to get under his skin, travel at break-neck speed through his veins and right to his heart.
     
    Suddenly the demonstration seems unimportant to Jesse compared to the emotions given wing by the force of his attraction. It’s a mutual hunger that brings them together, yet what is the basis of this need? Dixon did not aim for definitive answers to this question; the subject is too complex for cut-and-dried explanations. When I first reread Vanishing Rooms , I was struck by how much I’d idealized or forgotten regarding Jesse and Metro’s relationship. The ugly moments between them, including a disturbing sexual flashback, startled more than the first time. Was their bond doomed to be severed even before Metro’s murder? When Metro joins Jesse in New York after a trip back home, something has changed but we never find out what, though one suspects it has something to do with Metro’s parents, Jesse’s race, and an erotic childhood memory recalled by Metro involving a black maid’s son.
    While pursuing their respective dreams, Jesse and Metro have different schedules and see different aspects of the city. Jesse’s world involves dance studios, part-time work for a choreographer, the ceaseless awareness of prejudice. Metro’s job as a night shift journalist constantly exposes him to the poverty, crime and corruption in the city, and when it takes its toll on him he begins abusing drugs and pursuing anonymous sex in the streets, trying unsuccessfully to make Jesse understand the guilt, rage and disappointment that he feels.
    Dixon does not make his characters one-dimensional or stereo-typical. Therefore Metro is not some unsympathetic racist using Jesse for his pleasure and Jesse is not entirely blameless in the downward spiral the relationship takes. In the novel’s first line, we learn, “Metro wasn’t his real name, but I called him that.” His real name is Jon-Michael Barthe but to Jesse he is Metro for “the fast, slippery train we were on,” for having traveled underground, to places where Jesse wanted to go. Metro, increasingly frustrated with life in New York City, questions Jesse’s refusal to call him by his true name. Does he believe that by calling him Metro his lover is denying his identity, not truly seeing him for who he is? In his worsening emotional state, does Metro come to associate Jesse’s blackness with the criminals that he fears, with everything he comes to hate about the city?
    Vanishing Rooms makes it clear that other factors work against the success of Jesse and Metro’s relationship, not only the issue of race. The uglier side of urban life, with its teeming masses, homelessness, crowded subways, rampant crime and racism also play a significant part in affecting the novel’s characters.
    Having lived in New York City since I was12, one of the thrills in reading Dixon’s book was recognizing the streets and locales his characters inhabit, being able to relate to the city’s