Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing
Raphael Kadushin (editor)
Travel and Writing. Both can be drug-like experiences, yielding sensations and perceptions that make you feel like your brain is abloom: reaching, expanding, seeking light, growing beautiful. If you're inclined to either, Wonderlands packs a phenomenal contact high. As I read the nineteen impeccably selected pieces in editor Raphael Kadushin's Wonderlands over the course of two winter weeks, my mind caught fire over and over again.
This is a book to turn to for inspiration, virtually every page hollers "Go!" Not specifically Go to China! (or France, or Africa, or Antarctica—all of which are visited within Wonderlands' selections), but to the mental state of heightened observance and nuanced sensitivity that writing or traveling and deliver you into. I kept setting Wonderlands down and walking over to my computer desk; about half the time I dove into my current literary projects, the other times I went surfing the web for affordable airfares during my vacation periods in the year ahead.
Good travelers and good writers are blessed with alien eyes. They can pinpoint—and draw pleasure from—the thrilling details that make everything worth knowing. Even the mundane grows fantastic when seen with this vision, as if the whole world is a fluttering American Beauty bag. "I saw important as well as unimportant things," notes Wayne Koestenbaum, recounting a visit to the museum built around Sigmund Freud's home in Vienna, "The apartment's modesty and ordinariness overwhelmed me." This ability to be enthralled by the ordinary is part of what differentiates the tourist from the traveler and the journal-jotter from the Writer. Koestenbaum does a wonderful job describing celebrated opera house architecture, but he's also sublime on staple food: "I ordered a light, large Wiener Schnitzel—not unlike a veal version of tempura, containing hills and dales, fried undulations."
This theme of finding the notable in the usual crops up again in "An Untropical Island", Bruce Shenitz's account of a trip to Texel, a Dutch island in the North Sea. Shenitz's greatest souvenir of his voyage to an obscure destination is the remembered flight of a common bird:
"The white trim of its wings had caught the fading rays of the summer sun and suddenly flashed against the darkening sky, as if they'd been dipped into fluorescent paint. Perhaps I'd traveled a terribly long distance just to watch a drifting gull, but the peace of that summer night and the shifting balance of light, water and land are the memories of Texel that will stay with me the longest."
In "When Will You Be Here Again?", Michael Lowenthal recounts a tale of secret gay life in a remote Outer Hebrides village with wistful irony, but the line from Lowenthal's piece that lingered longest for this reader was his description of a foreign tongue:
"In the ferry's cafeteria I ordered a plate of haddock, then sat listening to the men around me bantering in Gaelic, with its otherworldly, abracadabric lilt."
How delightful that tuning in to an unfamiliar language inspires the writer to generate his own extraordinarly apt neologism.
Looking and listening micro-closely, finding the familiar in the strange and the strange in the familiar, and internally translating it to a language of one's own; this is what leads to that abracadabric frisson of epiphany—that I-get-it click—that can make writing and traveling so magically, addictively pleasurable.
For better and for worse, the alien eye found in the best travelers and writers is built into the gay psyche. Because most of our day-to-day lives take place beyond gay ghettos, embedded in a culture based on heterosexualized norms, we are interpreters by nature. We travel through foreign terrain every day. We are sensitized to notice what connects us to the prevailing culture and what differentiates us as well. This can become draining. But it can also make us vibrate with a rich sense of being alive. When we travel away from home, we appreciate it as a special ability, not just a survival skill. Consider Boyer Rickel , recounting his first trip to Europe at age 40 in an essay called "Reading The Body." Four decades of requisite attention to minute detail becomes a game and a joy:
"Everything delights, now that I am in Italy...I can hardly sit still for the thrum of adrenaline. In this mood, not unlike the cell-to-cell heightening of sensation I used to experience in the early days of a new sexual love, every image seems to bear significance."
While Rickel's piece, along with those by Philip Gambone, David Masello, Matthew Link and others address gay sexuality head-on, there are other selections that speak to gay readers with wanderlust alone: Colm Toibin's "Girona" is a stunning avalanche of imagery and Rigoberto Gonzalez's "Destino" is an emotional meditation which, like Masello's piece, insightfully addresses journeys across class borders as well as geographical ones.
Just as it's impossible to ever capture the full essence of a trip in writing, so it is to sum up the range of echoing themes that emerge across this collection's diverse pieces (mostly memoirs, but also some fiction and journalistic work). If you're inclined to read, to write, or to travel, Wonderlands is a trip well-worth taking for yourself.
