Wisconsin Book Festival: No country for gay men

Wisconsinites in search of a gay-welcoming vacation spot between the coasts often look across the lake from Milwaukee to tiny, tony Saugatuck, Mich. (think Door County with a Queer Eye makeover). Given the town’s progressive social vibe and its sublime natural setting on the side of Lake Michigan that isn’t an open sewer, it isn’t unusual for Saugatuck’s gay urbanite visitors to dream of becoming permanent residents. St. Louis native and Wisconsin Book Festival author (Oct. 9, A Room of One’s Own) Wade Rouse aimed at that dream, but landed a few miles outside town in the Michigan quasi-wilderness, a change of scenery he chronicles in his new memoir At Least In The City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures In Search Of The Simple Life.

Rouse casts himself effectively as the stereotypical vain, materialistic, wisecracking gay male diva—but maybe too effectively. Depends if you’re a gay reader who’s put off rather than amused by portrayals like, “I work out two hours a day. I highlight my hair so it looks ‘sun-kissed’ rather than highlighted. I tan. I whiten my teeth...” Still, he puts the conceit (literary and otherwise) to good use, putting a fresh coat of rainbow-colored paint on the old tale of city mouse in the country.

When Rouse and his partner make an impulse buy out of a cottage in the Michigan woods, it is part-escape, part-return for Rouse, who hails originally from the Ozarks and has not-so-fond memories of growing up pink in a redneck world. His childhood muse and savior was his grandmother, who instilled in him a love of her favorite book (next to the Bible), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Rouse references Walden throughout, using its transcendental tone to throw his own reformed-party-boy attempts at embracing solitude and self-sufficiency into stark comic relief.

The book is at its best, though, when Rouse breaks his isolation and encounters his wary rural neighbors, who are accustomed just enough to the depraved resort town down the road not to be completely flummoxed by the male couple at the feed store. If you’ve spent any time in and around Saugatuck—as my own partner and I have for the past 20 summers—you’ll get a special chuckle out of scenes like the one in which two busty girls in western blouses and denim are foiled trying to pick up Rouse and partner at a local bar, prompting one of the girls to observe, “God, everyone in this area is either gay or straight.”

Alongside the laughs, Rouse pulls off some poignant moments, as wacky Lucy-in-Connecticut homesickness for the city yields at least partway to appreciation for a new and more thoughtful pace of living. When a straight couple invites the new neighbors over for dinner and a gift of a hand-carved wooden dove, the newcomers open up to their hosts, “...waiting to be interrupted, waiting for them to jump up and air-kiss someone better walking through the door.” Of course, that doesn’t happen, and the chapter closes with a lyrical passage in which the carved bird receives a prominent place in the male couple’s new home.

Rouse does a credible job of mining 300-plus pages out of what little lies outside Saugatuck and its emerging twin resort town, Douglas. Saugatuck familiars, though, may wonder at the opportunity Rouse missed to cram his book more densely with real-life characters worthy of literary enshrinement. In addition to LGBT travelers, Saugatuck has long been a magnet for artists, spiritualists, clothing-averse sun worshippers, and others whose grain doesn’t run in the standard Midwestern direction. There’s the photographer/philosopher who runs the guard shack for the private nude beach on behalf of the reclusive billionaire who owns it; the Chicago transplant who “does fabrics” for major motion pictures (“The napkins for that dinner scene drove me crazy...”); the mildly cantankerous bookshop lady, who also happens to have been Ted Turner’s first wife.

But maybe that’s for Rouse’s next book, and next Book Festival. This one helps give Rouse his own sequin-spangled spot in the literary tradition of displaced city dwellers trying to make sense out of a foreign countryside.