The First Openly Gay Party

Reading Mrs. Dalloway in Fire Island

Last month I visited Fire Island a few days after the premiere of the movie Fire Island, the Gaysian rom-com adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Like the movie’s protagonist, I am guilty of bringing books to the Pines and leaving them lying around the house in which I’m staying. Visitors and cohabitants are then free to notice the book, pick it up, turn it over in their hands, and either snobbishly dismiss it or seek out the owner for a little intellectual tête-à-tête (in hopes that he is also hot.)

I’ll have you know I do actually squeeze in some reading on the LIRR ride and the inevitable day that everybody else is too preoccupied with a hangover or a hard-on to go to the beach with me. A solid thirty to forty pages make it into my sun-kissed, Aperol-addled little brain.

It so happened that I was reading Mrs. Dalloway that weekend. It is not light beach reading, but it is what I was already reading because I had always wanted to read a Virginia Woolf novel and never had to in school. I do not really get the concept of “light beach reading,” but I will spare you my objections. I’d started it already and wasn’t going to stop reading it to start something else. I was reading Mrs. Dalloway in Fire Island.

I bring up the Fire Island movie because it was all anyone could talk about that weekend. This was especially the case because I was staying with a few friends from the movie. (Yeah, you heard me— friends of mine from the movie.) It was lovely to see people I like accomplish things which they worked hard for, and it was also demoralizing to watch people I know accomplish things while I am already feeling lousy about hardly working. Obviously I did not express the latter sentiment, just chided, “Hey, I should write a gay adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway. Wait—Fuck—That’s The Hours!”

My remark must have burrowed in a housemate’s head, because when I finally escaped “Showtunes Sundays” at The Pavilion— I will spare you my objections— I returned to a sectional full of boys snorting ketamine and watching Meryl buy the flowers herself in The Hours (2002). Maybe I’m just another gay guy who’s easily enthralled by actresses, but it really is a good movie.

But back to Mrs. Dalloway, the modern masterpiece, the Virgo Bible, the precursor to Melania Trump’s crypto-feminist question, “What is she thinking?” If you haven’t read it before, the plot is contained to a single day. The titular Clarissa goes about her day planning a fabulous party for her friends and members of London society. As her goings-about are intersected by various characters both distant and close to her— a lover from her youth, her servant, her daughter, her husband, a madman and his Italian wife sitting in the park, the madman’s doctor— the narrator drifts across each of their lives and inner worlds like a bedbug in a laundromat.

It is a potent book, with language so boundlessly figurative it resembles the associative hopscotch of an acid trip. Its characters reckon with timeless feelings shot through with modernity— grief stretched by war into madness, idle musings pierced by automobiles, and the pesky matter of purpose among a bourgeoisie whose empire is receding into a nation. It’s even got some gay shit.

I know a gay man or two who resemble Clarissa Dalloway, always throwing parties, thriving in their fuss. I am more of a Peter Walsh (the ex-lover), ambivalent and insatiable, prone to fidgeting and scrutiny. Identifying with any one character maybe misses the point, though. Woolf uses the novel to disintegrate boundaries between time, space, and personality, a connectivity as liberating as it is dispossessive.

I think I took something rather optimistic from Mrs. Dalloway, my reading interrupted by boardwalk banter and Speedo’ed stars, that each of us possesses a rich and rambunctious inner world, no matter how few of us might make that world legible to others through art or conversation. It is terribly easy to be misanthropic in places like the Pines, and even easier to be shallow. But there is something to be said for regarding any stranger or new acquaintance with the assumption that there is probably a lot going on in there, and that we are each trying to roll along toward some joyful purpose, none bigger or smaller than any other.

XO

TY

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PS: You’ve been added to this e-mail list because you were subscribed to Probottom Book Club. This is the same writer, your good friend and confidante Ty Mitchell, but a different Book Club. PBBC, which was at its core a sex column, came to its natural conclusion for me. However, I’ve been eager to practice and share more writing through this medium while I work on more private projects. I hope you enjoy this pivot and continue to subscribe.