The Golden Age of Promiscuity

A seriously intended anatomy of the intersection of the art world and Manhattan's gay club scene in 1970s, Gooch's second novel (after Scary Kisses and the nonfiction City Poet) is misfire, flawed by flat characters and pretentious prose. Intentionally reminiscent of Robert Mapplethorpe, Sean Devlin drops out of Columbia to recreate himself as an avant-garde maker of pornographic art films and to lose himself in the sordid pleasures of drugs, Studio 54 and the ritualistic self-abasement of S&M. Gooch drops clusterbombs of famous names (Auden, Jerome Robbins, Dylan, Scorsese, Godard, Pasolini), but this only magnifies the paltriness of his own characterizations, his failure to evoke a palpable and important time and place. The novel ends in 1979 at a gay S&M bar, the Anvil; while Sean looks on, the strains of Wagner's Gotterdammerung swirl around one Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian airline steward better known as ""Patient Zero,'' the person whom AIDS researchers believe introduced the HIV virus to North America. Though Sean has cleaned himself up, turning away from brutal master-slave games to happier relationships, the threat of AIDS that will forever alter the Manhattan he knows is just around the corner. Typical of the novel's tone is the following: "" `The two wires of love and violence are crossed in me,' Sean explained trippingly.'' It's the kind of statement that renders this work one fatal step shy of the deliberate campiness that would have turned a reader's pain into pleasure. (June)