I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana

I Can Give You Anything But Love Reviews

• 
  Alvin

  This jumpy and unsettlingly unsentimental memoir will fascinate anyone interested in recent queer social history... or anyone who (like me) has a major crush on Indiana's brain. Why do I love him so? Not only does he write with keen political intelligence and great charm, his prose often strays into a sort of Raymond Chandler-inflected wittiness that leaves one stunned with bedazzlement.
• 
  Conor Ahern

  I can't remember why I marked this as a "Want to Read," or whence the tip came. I finally got it on order from the Brooklyn Public Library, and really enjoyed it, sad as it was. It's part gonzo amphetamine-fueled gay sex romp, part tale of self-destruction, part coming to terms with the gradual attenuation of significant relationships in the author's past. There are amusing send ups of Susan Sontag, David Lynch, and Ernest Hemingway. But the title betrays the most significant and depressing takeaway from the book: that for all of the author's wild exploits and hedonistic excesses, anyone he ever loves either rejects him or abandons him until one day he wakes up outside the gates of a world he used to inhabit whose credentials require youth, wealth, or attractiveness, qualities that have leeched from him over time. I suspect this is the story of so many queer men, too many of whom succumbed to HIV/AIDS before their time, who inhabited a world of sexual liberation so profound and unlike the oppression that clouded the past that the pleasure and freedom overwhelmed the ability to comprehend and prioritize the humanity of others. I still think vestiges of these tendencies benight the gay world to some extent, but Gary Indiana's generation suffered the worst of it.
  
  And the epilogue underscores the weary sadness that this book conveys. A page in front of a weathered, downcast, depleted-looking picture of the author's face, wrapped in a rainbow scarf, summarizes the gloom well:
  
  

  The book... has turned out radically different than I expected. At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of "triumph over adversity" theme that gongs through much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist--which has not, in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity. I'm almost sixty-five, I still have practically nothing of my own, and could very well end up on the same trash heap where most old people in America get tossed, regardless of whatever "cultural capital" I've accumulated.

  
  
  Poor Gary. I hope you find love after all.
• 
  Jamie

  Each of these individual tales are great, like hanging out with a slightly drunk old bon vivant at a bar or a party. Gary Indiana is a fearless writer, who had a fascinatingly edgy early life.
  
  Together, they don't quite gel. There's the other part of hanging out with drunk old bon vivants - they way they drop people into the story with no (or very little) context and you're led thinking "Who the hell is Joey? Why do I care what he has to say here?"
  
  Quick and fascinating read if you're into the counterculture and was a PERFECT read while on a work trip to San Francisco.
• 
  Gareth Schweitzer

  Indiana's views on Susan Sontag, David Lynch and Ernest Hemingway are hilarious... and refreshing...and who, knew Kathy Acker was a trust fund kid!
  
  A nice easy, entertaining read.
  
  
• 
  Charlie Smith

  This review was part of a 5-book-round-up at my blog, HereWeAreGoing, here:
  https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/...
  
  Gary Indiana’s use of sometimes pejorative terms for gay men in his memoir also gave me pause. I don’t know, perhaps I am the duddiest of fuddies, but the phrase “buxom giddy queen” is the sort of thing meant to cut and harm and I just would rather not live in that or read about it. That said, otherwise, I loved LOVED LOVED this book. Perhaps it is because Mr. Indiana and I are long-distance contemporaries belonging to a cohort of shared experience if not geography, and at this crepuscular state in my life, finding resonance and kind — even at the remove of hardcover pages — is a comfort. Mr. Indiana’s writing is compelling, evocative, and eviscerating in its honesty; he spares no one, including himself. My (bought) copy is festooned with sticky-notes and scribbled marginalia. Here, just a few lines I marked:
  
  Time is glacially slow in this country, but my face races on, across all the mirrors, en route to the eternity of nothingness behind the finish line. [page 12]
  
  I’m told I think too much, and have too many emotions. For some reason this terrifies people. In my own estimation, I’m emotionally blocked, stupid in practical matters, and cursed with an isolating intelligence that’s worthless, . . . I can be whatever somebody wants temporarily, if I glean a clear intuition of what it might be. I’m so solitary that roles I try playing for other people seem contrived and arbitrary. I’m uncertain enough of my existence to absorb nearby tastes and opinions, as if claiming them as my own will bring me into clearer focus. . . . I don’t fit with anyone I meet, except in a lubricious, sweaty, transient junction of organs and holes, a fusion of raw desires that discharge themselves with two spurts of jism. The guys I pick up are impervious to emotional complications, . . . What I look for is an abridged version of what I want: a no-fault fuck in the parking lot of time between last call and the morning reality principle, and a modicum of cordiality. [page 81-82]
  
  I had the sense of always standing a little apart from the narrative, of missing the point, of nothing ever being quite enough or never adding up. Life was a choppy sequence of images unfolding in several worlds whose only connection was the fact that I slipped into one after another like an actor performing several plays in the same twenty-four-hour span. [page 170]
  
  And this, story of my life:
  
  It sounds ridiculous now, but his sexual indifference embarrassed me for years after this whole period was finished, as a high point of humiliation. It was a purely willful, physical attraction, but I had fastened on Don as the person I wanted to love me back, imagining my desire could make this person I didn’t really know into the person I wanted him to be. [page 172]
  
  And one-offs aplenty, like, “At least with an ex-convict, there’s a little damaged tenderness.” [page 228] and, “…the inbred assurance of an upper-middle-class Eagle Scout, a wide-eyed, impervious optimism that only needed a dusting of freckles and a few amphetamines to turn him into Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.” [page 199] and, “. . . Ferd sighed, with an oracular exhaustion I can still hear after thirty-five years.” [page 205]
  
  I share an exhaustion with Mr. Indiana, if not quite as oracular, at least as weary, and brought on more than a little by having come of age in an age where a coming out like Mr. Carver’s would have meant the end of many possibilities and opportunities, and so we internalized our self-hatred and fear, the disgust with ourselves into which we’d been brainwashed and acculturated, seeking lovers and tricks and John Rechy-esque numbers for partners, those men who were but were not what we were and were afraid of being, reflections of our own rejections of self.
  
  Damn it’s been a freaking long road. And Bowie has died. On the day Charlie Carver came out. And there are echoes and connections there. And I am feeling ancient. And Mr. Indiana’s book echoes and ruminates on all of the angst and agita that brought him to this same place, from where we were, who we were, what we have been, to here, where we are, going.
• 
  Chris

  An entertaining memoir by a writer who I feel some affinity towards (his grouchy negativity and sense of humor seem almost attuned to my own, this book sways back and forth between present day Cuba and 70's Los Angeles in a way that doesn't always strike me as very meaningful. However, Indiana's snarky anecdotes are both funny and hideously sad, and reading about the punk era in LA is interesting to me, as I'm more accustomed to people writing about New York at that time, and the differences between the two are pretty vast.
• 
  Michael

  “I Can Give You Anything But Love” is basically a memoir, but it is also part travelogue, diary entries, fragments and insanely dishy portraits of a variety of noteworthy people.
  The first part of each chapter deals with the near present. Each contains a vivid, atmospheric and personal recollection of raw sexuality and a sordid sub-culture in Havana, Cuba, where Indiana occasionally lived and worked for fifteen years. The second part of each chapter narrates an episode from first three decades of Indiana’s life (50’s, 60’s & 70’s). The result is an entertaining and engrossing read.
• 
  Jennifer Blowdryer

  I love it because it's him - weak parts is padding about Cuba, and having to guess some chunks of who people actually were because the author is not going to blow everything up with subjects who are alive, kicking, and not so bad in the long run. What a truely horrible peerage and family, though - I've got a socio significant family member too, but I can't write like this - Indiana is a genuistic tuning fork for psychotic reaction, boring drug dealers, and malignant narcissism.
• 
  Glen Helfand

  This book wasn't quite what I expected, but perhaps neither was it what Indiana had planned upon when he began. On the last page he writes "At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of 'triumph over adversity' theme that gongs through much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist--which has not, in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity." For a writer so identified with New York, this memoir alternates between Cuba, presumably in the present moment where he is writing this book, and California, where he spent some formative years as a queer bohemian. What is recounted is sex and drugs, longing for love and a career as a writer. What he doesn't prune away is the richly described squalor of San Francisco in the late 1960s and LA in the 1970s, when it was kind of a backwater, and full of difficulty. Indiana recounts a couple of instances of horrific assault that caught me off guard, and some honest (bitchy) takes his acquaintances with Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker, both brilliant and difficult. A lot like Indiana. The worldview is rough and pessimistic, even in the youthful period of his life that is recounted here. But who ever said that optimism was the be all and end all? No one turns to this writer for that. He delivers on such a vivid description of a world view.
• 
  Rick

  I first read Gary Indiana many tears ago in the pages of the Village Voice where he was a funny and acerbic art critic. Later on I read and enjoyed a couple of his novels.Indiana reminds me of the novelist Bruce Wagner but with a trashy, flashy queer sensibility.
  In this memoir Indiana ricochets between modern Havana and his younger years. The constants are lots of drugs, lots of anal sex and lots of weird and bizzaro characters. Indiana grew up in New Hampshire but left during the Summer of Love to journey to San Francisco for the demise of peace and love into drug induced violence and paranoia.
  Indiana subsequently travels to Los Angeles and NYC where he continues to live in scroungy conditions and with a lifestyle that makes Keith Richards seem like a Buddhist monk. Indiana is withering in his contempt for most people including such famous names as David Lynch and Susan Sontag. He is also brutal in confronting his own shortcomings.
  I enjoyed this funny well written and angry book. Indiana is a wild crazy who refuses to take the road more traveled . The book is entertaining and his courage is admirable.
• 
  Zach

  No star rating because I have legitimately no idea how to rate it. This is a memoir of sex and drugs, with a side of eccentric characters and struggling to fit in. Most of these sides revolve around the aforementioned drugs and sex. It does not make for a very compelling read. On the other hand, parts of it provide insight into life as a queer person in San Francisco/Los Angeles before HIV, and that perspective is rare to read because so many people who would have written it were taken too young by AIDS. You also get some fairly raw reflections on being in your 20s and trying to figure out who you are and what you want, though it is quite bleak in its perspective and outlook. If you are familiar with the author (I was not), it may be more interesting to read this book, but I would generally not recommend it.
• 
  Critic in the making

  Indiana is a master of narrating life events as if you were sitting with him in a cafe in Paris in warm Fall day. His prose is witty, sarcastic and sometimes very mean.
• 
  A

  Gary Indiana's writing is straightforward and honest. He tells it like he sees (and experiences) it, which makes this memoir a truthful rumination on his past. He lived to tell it all.
• 
  Graeme Aitken

  Gary Indiana has written seven novels (including Rent Boy and Horse Crazy) and as many non-fiction works over the decades, but this is his first memoir. It ranges over his life in a free-wheeling, non-chronological manner and concentrates on two main periods: as a young man in late-1960s California, where he became entangled with Ferd, a porno film-maker and his home-away from home in Cuba, where he has lived on and off for 15 years. The prime attraction of Cuba is the men and the sex. He describes a place he calls ‘Porno Beach’ − ‘rent boys…spend their days there, promoting fantastic endowments against a majestic backdrop of foaming surf and azure skies, wearing the least possible excuses for bathing suits, often improvised from see-through materials’. Indiana is extremely candid about his sex life and halfway through the book he boasts that he possesses ‘an unusually tight asshole and gave fantastic head’ which is undoubtedly the secret to his success. He details both the highs (the carnal bacchanal in Cuba and his relationship with Mastiu, a sexually voracious Cuban deaf-mute) and the lows (being raped at knifepoint by a Hells Angel and the brutal loss of his anal virginity at age 19 when Ferd pimped him out to their landlord when the rent was overdue). Gary Indiana has clearly run with an interesting crowd and luminaries such as Janis Joplin and Susan Sontag crop up in his reminiscing. Though he does not recall Susan Sontag fondly and struggles to say anything complimentary. Apparently, she expropriated her friends discoveries as her own, was ‘unflaggingly rude to waiters, cab drivers, hotel clerks’, and ‘often cultivated people she privately held low opinions about, if they were famous enough.’ But Indiana’s candour is refreshing especially as he doesn’t sugar coat his own failings and foibles.
  
• 
  Kate

  "The ersatz, provincial, 'post 9/11' New York is a holiday camp for university students and a pied-à-terre for Chinese billionaires, a place any young painter, writer, or musician would be wise to avoid, since it's no longer possible to live there on slender means."
  
  Also lots of Susan Sontag talk, and many variations on the word "pingas."
• 
  Karim

  gary indiana forsook his family (the family) and opted for the thrilling life, making kin with drinkers, men with big dicks, speed freaks, try-hards.... the results are really tragic. Just like your bio-mom, eventually these people die or else disappear forever
• 
  Andy White

  This is an amazing journey. The writing is rich with detail and description. The Cuba years are engrossing. It can be a little depressing at times if that bothers you.