Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. LGBT Studies. Originally published by Grey Fox Press in 1979, Triton Books, the new imprint of Spuyten Duyvil, restores this classic novel to print with a new introduction by the author. "Rumaker an original prose creator of great shamed heroic sensitivity has taken up his pen again to describe a hidden psychological and physical reality. As an old sex fiend from the baths myself I'm grateful and relieved to see thru his eyes and feel thru his body"--Allen Ginsberg.
Synopsis
The dates are important to mention in order to put the open sensuality in the novel in perspective., that is, pre-AIDS, when male-male sexuality was being liberated from its centuries-long subterranean hiddenness into a visibility if only, in this instance, of the twilit and claustrophobic "freedom" of a bath house.
(M.R. from the intro)
About the Author
Michael Rumaker is an American author (born March 5, 1932 in Philadelphia, PA), to Michael Joseph and Winifred Marvel Rumaker. He is a graduate of Black Mountain College (1955) and Columbia University (1970). Most of Rumaker's fiction concerns his life as a gay man. His first book, The Butterfly, is a fictionalized memoir of his brief affair with a young Yoko Ono, published before Ono became famous. His short stories, Gringos and Other Stories, appeared in 1967. A revised and expanded version appeared in 1991. He began to write directly about his life as a gay man in the volumes A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and MY FIRST SATYRNALIA (1981). The novel Pagan Days (1991) is told from the perspective of an eight-year old boy struggling to understand his gay self. Black Mountain Days, a memoir of his time at Black Mountain College, has a strong autobiographical element In addition, there are portraits of many students, faculty, and visitors (especially the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson) during its last years, 1952-1956.