Overview
Gay life in New York City in the 1950s and '60s was an entirely different world from today. Intensely secretive and desperately determined to stay that way, its action took place behind the unmarked doors of bars and in apartments where the shades were always drawn. Underlying the frenetic living and high hilarity was a sense of shame that was inevitable during a time when shock treatment and lobotomies were considered acceptable "cures" for homosexuality. In Young Man from the Provinces, Alan Helms tells his story of those times. Escaping from a painful midwestern adolescence to the scholarly refuge of Columbia University, Alan threw himself headlong into New York's gay world. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he turned his back on academia and became a successful model and stage actor, moving in glamorous circles whose members included Anthony Perkins, Stephen Sondheim, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Edward Albee. Alan attended glittering parties, traveled around the world with his lover, and spent summers on Fire Island immersed in the company of young, beautiful men. After starting a new life in Boston in the early 1970s, Alan realized that the gay social world was changing drastically and that he was facing middle age by himself. He subsequently battled drug abuse and severe depression, but his biggest battle was his struggle for self-acceptance and his attempt to build a better life. His success helped him remain strong as he faced his mother's death from cancer in the 1980s and the deaths of many of his friends and former lovers from AIDS - more than eighty and still climbing.Helms vividly brings to life the time just before Stonewall and the Gay Liberations Movement in this poignant, insightful, often humorous remembrance of his journey from a midwestern adolescence to a self-absorbed life as a male model in New York and Europe in the 1960s, ending with his self-acceptance as a gay man in a homophobic society.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In his 20s and early 30s, Helms was at once the most privileged and self-destructive of men, at the giddy peak of his career as ``the most celebrated young man in all of gay New York.'' The Manhattan of the 1950s and '60s embraced the Columbia student as a ``U.T.''-a ``universal type,'' or ``someone everybody wants,'' photographed by Avedon, directed by Edward Albee and pursued by any number of men. Repudiating the drab miseries of his Indiana boyhood, Helms pursued those who pursued him: his more celebrated lovers included Anthony Perkins, Larry Kert and Luchino Visconti. Leonard Bernstein wooed him ardently, and chum Nol Coward helped Helms reconcile with a lover. But the relationships were doomed to fall apart, as Helms (held aloft by adoration, alcohol and drugs; brought thuddingly to earth by excess-bulimia; alcoholism; joyless, frenetic promiscuity) began to self-destruct. Self-acceptance came with the more temperate joys of work as a college professor and with counseling from the Harvard psychologist Robert Coles. As he grew older, Helms was better able to distance himself from the past. Because Helms is neither an elegant nor a modest writer, the reader is less willing to repudiate his glittering excesses; Helms's vigorous name-dropping has more charm than the somber self-reproaches that accompany his sobriety. This self-described ``D student in the school of life'' depicts a New York that, after the Stonewall riots, would never be as closeted-or as cozily familiar-again. (Dec.)Library Journal
Even if you don't recognize Helms as the epitome of New York's and Europe's golden "boymen" during the late 1950s and 1960s, you will appreciate his poignant, picaresque memoir, which vividly captures with humor and insight the chronicle of his journey: from the unhappiness of his abusive, alcoholic family life in Indianapolis and an overwhelming need for acceptance, seemingly fulfilled by becoming a cynosure in the world of the beautiful people, to his aborted careers as a model, actor, and writer. Among the many names dropped are friendships with Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Luchino Visconti and affairs with Larry Kert, Tony Perkins, and scores of other famous and/or handsome young men. But after years of addiction to the gym, cigarettes, adulation, booze, sex, dope, and later drugs and bulimia, Helms finally faces his fears and creates a new life as professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For gay studies collections.-James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.Dwight Garner
Alan Helms' frank and engaging new memoir, about his life among the Silent Generation of gay men in the 1950s and early 1960s, comes garnished with three of the best jacket blurbs you're likely to see this year. Novelist Edmund White coos that the author was "the best piece of ass of my generation;" playwright Terrence McNally confesses that "Alan Helms was the young man I wanted to be;" and Gore Vidal calls Helms a "homme fatale" who "wittily and sharply reports what it is like to have so many Humberts and Aschenbachs on his case."What this dream team is referring to is Helms' legendary fifteen-year reign as a "golden boyman" -- a beautiful and naive young midwesterner who quickly ascended to the highest social levels of New York's gay scene. Helms' "corn-fed good looks" (he was born in Indiana) and sculpted physique opened doors, and his book is largely a warm and dishy account of "glamour parties & opening nights & famous people & fabulous fucks." He recounts friendships -- and, often, affairs -- with Nureyev, Noel Coward, Anthony Perkins and Leonard Bernstein, and his writing often picks up a friendly, funny, funky glow. The copious sex, he writes, "came with the role of being a golden boyman. It was as if I'd auditioned for Hamlet and gotten the part, only to find that I had to fence."
Fencing and dishing aside, an alternative narrative percolates under the surface here. Helms relates his difficult childhood as "the worst thing an American boy can be -- a sissy," and details the insecurities (and conversely, the narcissism) that attended a life spent marinating in the reflected glow of the wealthy and famous. Helms, who now teaches literature at the University of Massachusetts, also rages at the pervasive homophobia of the era: among other things, he lost a possible Rhodes Scholarship because it was known he was gay.
Young Man From the Provinces isn't perfect. When Helms climbs into confessional mode he can sound awfully pop-psych, and his use of ampersands instead of the word "and" quickly cloys. But his book is ruthlessly honest and never less than captivating, and that's something. --Salon