Lately I find myself unexpectedly reading a brace of books about homosexuality and sexual experimentation. Both also have strands of unreality and dream imagery running through them. They are "Dorian AN IMITATION" by Will Self and "Lost Girls" a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. Dorian is a re-imagination of the Oscar Wilde story about a man who keeps his youth whilst a picture of him ages in his stead. It is set across the 80s and 90s as the gay sub culture blossoms and goes overground, across this backdrop the titular Dorian debauches his way whilst various friends and acquaintances discuss his increasingly nefarious activities. Meanwhile "Lost Girls" is a story of three famous fictional girls, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, imagined as real women all affected by some traumatic sexual experience in their childhood meeting by chance in a grand European hotel and discovering their similarities and strange connection. It is beautifully illustrated in what looks like coloured pencil by Melinda Gebbie, the images are soft and delicate with a wonderful flowing texture allowing them to seem at times realistic but always allowing for them to flow seamlessly into representations of unreality through dreams, or drug induced states.
In fact dream and drugs play a large part in both these works, it's probably why I like them both so much given my fascination with blurring the boundaries between reality and unreality. Both stories have a certain ambiguity to them, (have events that are described happened, half happened?) in fact it's really about what the flow of events represent as metaphor. In the case of Dorian they create a selective and distorted catalogue of place and time, one gets a snapshot of certain 'scenes' associated with geographical and temporal locations. An example is the burgeoning UK gay scene in the early 80s with its initially innocent yet idolatrous perception of beauty hearkening back to those Classical conceptions of male beauty embodied by Baz Hallward's video installation featuring a nude Dorian, Cathode Narcissus. This period provides the starting point for a journey that describes the transition from an unsullied youth, admittedly self-obsessed as alluded to by the title of Hallward's installation (which also prefigures Dorian's cruelty to the infatuated Hallward and his many future sexual partners), into a character increasingly set free from the confines of conventional morality. Another example is the more physically vigorous, dangerous and experimental NY club scene, characterised in the novel by roughhousing and sadistic and masochistic practices in a memorable descent into the bowels of a lubricated, writhing warehouse club recalling Dante or Bosch and culminating in an ambiguous murder.
In Lost Girls the central location is the Himmelgarten hotel in Austria, as its name suggests it provides a sanctuary from the censure and restrictions of the wider world outside and a place in which Alice acts as a kind of tutor and mentor, first to Dorothy then with her help to Wendy, in sexual awakening which lies not only in the physical world but also that of the imagination. The story moves ahead punctuated by numerous fantastic sequences representing the release of those dreams and desires of the characters that have been suppressed by propriety or repressed by time and the conscious mind. Often these sequences are paralleled visually with events in the real world to illustrate the daydreams of the protagonists. A prime example are the exchanges between Wendy Potter and her dull engineer husband. Their 'conversations' take the form of Mr Potter expounding his views on the denizens of the hotel or bridge construction whilst Wendy tidies up or sits engaged in needlepoint. Visually though we see the imagined sex life of the couple that appears to have in reality gone unconsummated. At one point a rolled up sheaf of papers memorably becomes an erect member fully exploited to elicit pleasure from Wendy and for her husband too. Dorothy is introduced to opium by Alice and this precipitates a hallucinatory lesbian encounter between the two. There is also a trip to the theatre that results in a sexual encounter between the three women that may be part dream paralleling the scandalous performance on stage, a dance culminating in a virgin sacrifice on stage and a riot in the stalls.
Both books deal with a liberation from the rules of society, in the first the increasing hedonism of a sub cultural milieu provides a smokescreen for Dorian's even more extreme behaviour whilst the second feels more like a safe haven for the women to set themselves free from the societal straitjacket in which they had been placed. Dorian could to some degree be considered to be a metaphor for the spread of HIV and AIDs but I think this is too unsubtle to be a very important part of the character, especially since the association is mentioned several times by his friends. Having said this the disease does feature prominently in the novel, the topic couldn't really be avoided given the period and subject matter, and adds to the sense of slow and morbid decay. In a way the two books could be seen as opposites of one another, the sloughing off of conventions being a path to darkness and obsession in the first case and to a feeling of life, light and invigoration in the other. It must just be a coincidence that a cast of mainly men populate the dark side and women the light though surely? Also that I have just watched "Grizzly Man" this evening, a troubled man leaving behind society and getting eaten in the process?
