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January 1966. On leave, Dennis Eastman, a 20-year-old plebe at the US Naval Academy, arrives nervously in Los Angeles. Just a year earlier his friend Lincoln Gardner had proposed they create a life together. Incapable of admitting his sexuality, particularly given his desire for a Navy career -- in fact, incapable of accepting who he is, let alone committing to another man -- Dennis at that time begged to spend a year without any communication between the two of them. Now the time has come for him to decide either to accept the relationship or to break it off for good. Death takes the decision out of his hands. Linc was supposed to pick Dennis up at the airport, but no one meets him. When he arrives at Linc’s home, he finds his friend is not there either. Before Dennis can decide what he should do, a detective from the Beverly Hills Police, one Sergeant Mathews, rings the doorbell. He informs Dennis that an unknown assailant shot Linc here, in his own home, just two nights earlier. Sgt Mathews further informs him that Linc was last seen in a disreputable leather bar. He had left there in the company of someone named Jeff, his presumed killer. Surprisingly for the times, the officer seems quite at ease with homosexuality, creating the suspicion that he himself is closeted. However, he seems disinclined to seek alternate explanations for Linc’s murder. Yet everything Dennis learns about Linc’s final night seems so utterly out of character that he feels compelled to investigate for himself. As a result, he pays a visit to the bar in question, the first gay bar he has ever been inside. When he thinks he overhears someone being called Jeff, he makes a play for the young man. He wonders whether he can actually go through with the evening and bed the man he suspects murdered his friend. But, with mixed emotions, he realizes that he actually does not want to back out. Complications beyond the undeniable attraction he feels for this man who calls himself Sandy quickly multiply. Dennis has already learned that a large sum of money is missing. Soon he discovers that blackmail is part of the picture. Then another murder occurs. The cast of characters is small, and a reader can guess rather easily who the murderer is. Clues are planted fairly and adroitly, with just enough red herrings to create the proper amount of doubt and suspense. The motive behind the murder now seems a bit of a cliche, but it is used here for the first time in a gay mystery. The novel was originally published in 1966 by Greenleaf Classics under a house pseudonym, JX Williams. The reprint, though lightly revised, retains the flavor of the time. The most significant changes are the omission of two extraneous sex scenes that were not written by Banis, and the addition of a short paragraph that gives new meaning to the title. The new edition retains the original cover art by Darryl Milsap. It corresponds to no scene within the novel, but the use of the chessboard, the colors, and the juxtaposition of the two men are symbolically powerful. GOODBYE, MY LOVER remains a remarkable work. Its plotting retains interest. Its lead character is a likeable individual. In one essential, the novel provides a first. Though Dennis cannot fully out himself because of his budding naval career, he does come to accept himself as a gay man. Thus, he becomes the prototype of the sleuth who, in the process of solving the murder mystery, solves the greater mystery of his own identity. This will be a pattern to be endlessly repeated right up to the present day. Simultaneously, Dennis falls in love. He thus answers his own question: "How could two men love one another . . . ? Friendship, yes, and physical gratification, certainly . . . but not love." When Dennis leaves Los Angeles for the East Coast, it is with the intention to return to be with the man to whom he has given his heart. He now knows the books he read as he struggled with his sexuality were wrong when they "all said homosexuals were unstable, fickle people." Like only a very few other writers before him, Banis thus took not just the gay mystery but the gay novel itself out of the "sad young men" tradition that dominated it throughout the 1950s (think Vidal, think Baldwin) and made it "gay" in every sense of the word. In addition to GOODBYE, MY LOVER, Borgo Press has reprinted two of the C.A.M.P. series (COLOR HIM GAY and THE GAY DOGS) and Banis’s very different kind of mystery, KENNY’S BACK. The publishers deserve the gratitude of all readers in making Banis’s corpus readily available again, this time under his own name.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, March 2007
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