Duke University Press, 1996
The incandescent African American writer Gary Fisher was completely unpublished when he died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of thirty-two. This volume, which includes all of Fisher’s stories and a generous selection from his journals, notebooks, and poems, will introduce readers to a tender, graphic, extravagant, and unswervingly incisive talent. In Fisher’s writings the razor-sharp rage is equalled only by the enveloping sweetness; the raw eroticism by a dazzling writerly elegance. Evocations of a haunting and mobile childhood are mixed in Fisher’s stories with an X-ray view of the racialized sexual vernaculars of gay San Francisco; while the journals braid together the narratives of sexual exploration and discovery, a joyous and deepening vocation as a writer, a growing intimacy with death, and an engagement with racial problematics that becomes ever more gravely and probingly imaginative.
A uniquely intimate, unflinching testimony of the experience of a young, African American gay man in the AIDS emergency, Gary in Your Pocket includes an introduction by Don Belton that describes Fisher’s achievement in the context of other work by Black gay men such as Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill, and a biographical afterword by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. -From the jacket copy
“It is impossible to read Gary in Your Pocket and not marvel at [Fisher’s] talent…. Here is the unfolding world of a young gay man of the post-Stonewall generation, learning to embrace a gay identity with innocence and without shame… Gary in Your Pocket redefines the dimensions of African American literature. The body of black gay literature is all the more so enriched.” -Mark Haile, Lambda Book Report
“The importance of Gary Fisher’s work cannot be overstated. Presenting a singular and now lost artist, Gary in Your Pocket adds much needed insight into the forum of AIDS and sexuality. It will handily transcend any normal sense of audience or perceived notions of appeal.” -Randall Kenan
CONTENTS
Gary at the Table: An Introduction, Don Belton
Walking
a cat poem
Tawny
“I hope he smiles”
Picaro
age of consent
Mo-day
Love in Prepositions
After the Box
geese on a string
Before Sleep
“Are you smart enough for Laurie”
Red Cream Soda
end of the semester
Little thieves
Games
Four men
Arabesque
“please, father”
Be-ing dead
Second Virginity
Cornerstone
Several Lies about Mom
From a notebook
Three Boys
cat sense
The Villains of Necessity
Journals and Notebooks
Afterword, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick