The Gay Haunt

Victor J. Banis (as Victor Jay), The Other Traveller / Olympia Press, 1979

Victor J. Banis' comedy of  self-delusion and rude awakening revolves around Paul Ross, who’s abandoned his literary ambitions and honest gay identity to pursue a life of closeted man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit conformity. The final step — making partner at the engineering firm Seller & Seller — is contingent on marrying Margo, his boss's plain, plump, prudish and pampered daughter. The only person who might have been able to talk Paul down is dead, but fortunately for Paul, the luscious, lascivious ghost of his late lover, Lorin Gebhard, has appointed himself guardian fairy.

Party-boy Lorin, who choked to death five years earlier on a diamond that dropped unnoticed from his cuff link into a delicious cocktail, first appears at Paul and Margo's engagement party stark naked — visible only to Paul, of course — and throws Paul for an exponential variation on the proverbial loop. The more vigorously Paul insists his queer days were just a phase, the more forcefully — in all senses of the word — Lorin applies himself to jogging Paul's memories of smoking-hot sex, drunken debauchery and gay times, landing Paul in one mortifying but genuinely funny situation after another. It’s Topper, with a top.

Paul is arrested for driving naked and under the influence (of Lorin's lustful lips) and later compelled to hijack a fire engine. Still naked, he blunders into an apartment where pragmatic chippie Doris is trysting with her married sugar daddy mere moments before the old guy gets hauled off to jail; she and Paul then enjoy a brief love-the-one-you’re-with tryst. Paul also has sex with Margo's cute, gay and none-too-bright cousin Don (though only after Lorin paves the way) and is forced to flee a party thrown by Elliot Maxwell, the stable, studly, intellectually stimulating painter Paul threw over for flighty, thrill-a-minute social-butterfly Lorin.… Oh, and Paul makes his departure in a dress.

Lorin's reign of "closet case, know thyself" terror culminates in a nightmarish weekend at the Seller family ranch, during which Paul promises to sneak into Margo's bedroom for a night of passion but instead goes looking for Don, only to find himself groping Margo's delighted mother. He’s caught in flagrante by Margo's father but manages to extricate himself from the nightmare of impropriety by claiming he was just looking for the bathroom; returning to his own room he beats a hasty retreat when he realizes Mrs. Seller has already made her way there. Paul finally finds Don's room — but not Don — and decides to call it a night, passing out in the safety of Mrs. Sellers' abandoned boudoir, only to be awakened by Lorin's expert caresses ... except it's not Lorin doing the caressing. When the lights go on, Paul and a seriously traumatized Margo — who’s fresh off paying a surprise visit to Paul's room, where she found her mother and swishy cousin making the beast with two backs — simultaneously discover that he's actually under the sheets with Margo’s father. Feydeau could not have choreographed a comedy of sexual errors more exquisitely attuned to the hypocrisies and shared social fictions of its time.

And it only gets better: Paul beats a hasty retreat with Don, atypically morose because he's just realized he's probably going to be disinherited, only to find Lorin waiting to offer Don his by-now-familiar brand of pick-me-up. No sooner has Paul retreated to his own place than Mr. Sellers shows up, Margo in tow, and puts his cards on the table: Margo wants Paul. Paul wants to make partner. Mr. Sellers wants everyone to forget last night ever happened and thinks a quickie marriage should do the trick. Trouble is, putting the cards on the table can queer a bad deal (if you’ll excuse the expression) as easily as it can close a good one; after taking a hard look at the hands they’ve been trying to play, Margo and Paul both fold.

Margo is heartbroken but wiser; one day she’ll realize just how devastating a bullet she dodged. Paul calls Elliot, who comes running but makes it painfully, thrillingly clear he’s through playing Mr. Nice Guy. As to Lorin, it's time to return whence he came. But thanks to a gas leak that went unnoticed as Lorin was teaching Don some new tricks that produced literal sparks, Don’s mortal coil has been shuffled off, allowing Don and Lorin to be reunited.

The Gay Haunt was credited to Banis’ frequent pseudonym “Victor Jay,” one of many under which he wrote a mind-boggling array of genre novels, from gay smut to female-friendly fantasy. In his informative and hugely entertaining memoir Spine Intact, Some Creases (2004, Borgo Books / Wildside Press), he readily acknowledges that The Gay Haunt is a variation on Thorne Smith’s hugely popular 1926 novel Topper, in which the madcap ghosts of wealthy jazz babies George and Marion Kerby (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in the 1937 film adaptation) show a stuffy, henpecked banker how to loosen up and have a little fun. But Lorin’s life-coaching is more problematic than that of Team Kerby: For all their drunken carousing, George and Marion are nice people whose antics never really hurt anyone … except themselves, of course, as they did die in a a drunken, one-car accident. Lorin’s good deeds from beyond the grave, like showing Paul that living a sexual lie just makes everyone miserable, is unimpeachable without being exactly selfless. Lorin revels in the chaos his meddling creates, and while collateral-damage Margo will one day realize she’s better off not married to a gay man, that emotional gut punch is going to take some getting over.

Before Lorin, aspiring-writer Paul and Elliot were living la vie boheme, supporting each other’s creative ambitions and sharing mutual goals, overlapping interests and a circle of smart friends with provocative ideas. The sexy, bitchy, spontaneous, shallow, fun-loving and self-centered Lorin bewitched Paul, but their wild fling devolved into a mind-numbing bender that cost Paul his relationship with Elliot, his old friends (supplanted by Lorin’s chattering coterie of silly party boys) and his passion for writing. Lorin's death broke the spell but left Paul nursing an emotional hangover laced with self-loathing that convinced him he hated being gay, when what he actually hated was the kind of superficial, hedonistic and self-destructive gay life Lorin epitomized.

In any event, Lorin owes it to Paul to rectify the damage, but can’t resist doing it with the same kind of fabulous, chaotic, self-serving drama he used to live for: After all, don't the top girls all say there's nothing like a little disaster to sort things out? And by the time the dust starts settling, Paul is both back on track and able to acknowledge the good things about Lorin without forgetting the bad, which allows them to part on a note of bittersweet acceptance. That’s a complicated knot of emotions and intentions to untangle, especially in an adults-only, supernatural sex farce; Banis nails every note and makes it look like a breeze.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Banis was convinced that erotica and humor weren’t mutually exclusive, and proved it with his 1965 The Man from C.A.M.P., credited to “Don Holliday,” a frequent nom de plume used by a variety of writers. A parody of spy thrillers whose title pointedly tweaked the 1964-1968 TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. — which for all its macho machinations was hands-down the campest thing on TV until Batman came along in ‘66 — The Man from C.A.M.P. introduced Jackie Holmes, an elite agent with a top-secret organization dedicated to eradicating crimes against gay men. He works out of C.A.M.P.'s Los Angeles office, whose high-tech nerve center is reached through a secret panel in the men’s room of gay bar The Round-Up, his default cover a pretty, dandified pansy with a poodle. The Man from C.A.M.P. spawned nine sequels and three spin-offs (including a cookbook); the titles outsold everything else the prolific Banis wrote. Everything except The Gay Haunt, which Banis figured sold about 150,000 copies — a runaway bestseller by gay-pulp standards.