Edge by Jeff Mann
Review by Jameson Currier

There is a lot to admire in Edge, Jeff Mann’s collection of autobiographical essays about growing up in West Virginia and his sexual awakenings as a gay man. Mann, a poet and a writing teacher at Virginia Tech, expresses a deep appreciation for his life as a Southerner and his Appalachian roots, and many of the cultural touchstones he encounters as an adolescent reverberate through his consciousness and experiences as an adult gay male. Take, for example, his essay “Watching Dark Shadows,” about the daily gothic soap opera about vampires and witches which aired in the afternoons from 1966-1971 and left its indelible impression on a generation of youngsters. Mann, a fifth grader at the time he became addicted to the soap, writes about his infatuation with the outcast Barnabas Collins, the reluctant vampire with a dark secret, “brooding, charming, courtly, aristocratic, tormented and heroic.” Mann does not outgrow this boyhood passion, though for decades it is relegated to the coffins of his memory until it is re-awakened in the early 1990s when the series is re-made and Mann meets another gay fan and he embarks “red-eyed and ravenous” into a disastrous and short-lived affair. Mann’s infatuation for Dark Shadows continues on, however, despite this romantic setback, but not without Mann revealing his own secret sheepishness with his growing obsession with the series; he writes about attending the Dark Shadows Festival in New York in 1997 sans “heavy wool inverness or my cane,” and in 2000, he takes a side trip to Newport, RI, to visit the Carey Mansion, the huge, turreted house which served as the exterior of the fictional estate of Collinwood. “I do not want to be dismissed as another DS crackpot,” he states. “When my boyfriend and I arrive, I hide my Barnabas ring, evidence of my fanaticism, in my pocket.”

In “Raised by Lesbians,” Mann likens himself to his hometown’s Heathcliff, another brooding, passionate gothic outcast, and it is the author’s awareness of his own contemplative and often conflicted personality as an outsider which gives this memoir its particular sharpness — and hence the book’s title metaphor. Mann sees himself as both a part of the South, but also distinctive from other Southerners because of his homosexuality. Yet at the same time he sees himself as a part of the larger national gay community, but also as someone at its edges because of his Southern roots, and even further removed to the margins as he becomes aware he is drawn to leather bars and bear culture, away from the more “mainstream” tastes of gay life. Throughout the book, as a young gay man, Mann finds himself standing in corners, observing others, his own “painful shyness masked with stiff-faced butch reserve.” Mann also timidly dismisses his own potential sexual allure as he moves through his adventures at gay resorts and bars, particularly in his exploratory adventures as a young gay man. At Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, for instance, in 1983, he observes, “I stare at hairy chests and black-briefed buttocks only yards away and envy the sunlight its untrammeled intimacy.” Six years later, while standing at a bar in the same town, he genuinely observes, “The lust I feel for the bearded guy beside me, with his tight black muscle-shirt, his forearm hair glinting gold, his nicely differentiated triceps, that yearning too uncertain to reveal itself, at least makes me feel alive yet, yet able to desire. What a curse it is to ache for the beautiful yet not be gifted with beauty yourself.”

Throughout Edge, Mann visits many gay meccas; the resorts of Key West, Provincetown, and Rehoboth Beach, along with several European destinations such as Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and Scotland, have important cameo roles in these essays. Mann spends time detailing and describing his experiences at these places and often the psychology behind their allure, particularly for himself and other gay travelers. Along the way Mann ruminates on a variety of subjects, from lost lovers to wearing kilts, theophany, Sylvia Plath, adult videos, and bathhouses. The strength of Mann’s collection is not through these individual observances or the travel reports of his adventures, but the interior destinations he arrives at through his repeated visits to several of these places — revealing insights into his life that he has accumulated through aging and experience. His vacations in Provincetown and Key West, for instance, are unveiled through triptychs — three separate trips spaced by the passage of many years. Again in Provincetown in 2000, Mann has returned with his partner and observes of both himself and his destination, “Only when I gave up and resigned myself to an increasingly comfortable bachelorhood did I meet someone worth loving. Freed of that constant throb of lust, I can see more clearly the way fog swallows the top of the Pilgrim Monument, the way the first crocuses lift their purple heads from the earth of these New England cottage gardens. Desire unsatisfied has a way of making everything a metaphor of itself.” And during a third visit to Key West, on the eve of his fortieth birthday, Mann contemplates getting a “henna tattoo,” only to recognize his middle-aged crisis while walking along Duval Street. “I never did learn to ride a motorcycle,” he writes. “I never did get a real tattoo, a nipple ring, a Prince Albert, or any other vain and trifling gesture that means Rebellious Bad Boy to the middle class. A shaved head, a leather jacket, and an earring were as far as I’d gotten. Hell, I didn’t even like pot.”

Read an Interview with Jeff Mann by Shane Allison
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Jameson Currier is the author of the novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, and a collection of short stories, Desire Lust Passion Sex. His short fiction can also be found in the anthologies Men on Men, Best American Gay Fiction, Best Gay Erotica, Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, Making Literature Matter, Rebel Yell, and Circa 2000, among others. His story “Snow,” published in the first issue of Velvet Mafia, was selected for Best Gay Erotica 2003 and Best American Erotica 2004.

Online Fiction: "Alibis" Excerpted from Desire Lust Passion Sex
Website: JamesonCurrier.com