The Boys In The Bars

The Boys In The Bars
by Christopher Davis

Paperback: 216 pages

• Publisher: Knights Pr (May 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091517538X
• ISBN-13: 978-0915175383
• E-book: No

The Boys In The Bars by Christopher Davis is a collection of short, and not so short stories that for the most part take place in pre-AIDS America. My first introduction to the writing of Christopher Davis was Joseph And The Old Man, which I reviewed earlier on this blog. The stories in The Boys In The Bars focus primarily on love, the search for love, the getting, or almost getting of love, and the loss of love. These are situations we all experience in some way, each different, each compelling, each a thread woven into the fabric of our lives. This book is a serious work. The writing, which I confess to envy, is compact. Davis uses simple, yet elegant phrases to describe complex emotions.

In Kaleidoscope he writes about the loss of love. ‘The bed was mine and he had left it. He left a large photograph of himself propped against the pillows. He was naked in it, and he looked very good. I looked closely at it and I remembered when we had first met and then I held it against my cheek and cried.’ In two sentences Christopher Davis admits loss and hints too of a love that is safe in memory.

In Fireflies, Davis touches on the loss of a loved one through AIDS. ‘…I learned how to live alone, how to know that there would be no one else there when I went to sleep, or when I woke up, how to live with silence, how to shop, how to cook for one, how to depend on television for companionship.’

History is the longest of the stories and it deals with AIDS before it had a name. ‘We were still young then, my friends and I…. We lived for fun, for sex…. We are old now, Danny and I. Survivors, as many gay men over sixty-five are now called. Most of us are gone…. But there are the young—God bless the young—and they are open and strong and confident, and when they read the histories of our youth and the neglect that accompanied the early years… they anger and they promise the world that it will never happen again. God bless the young.’

I said before this book is a serious work. Davis explores the nerve centers of our being in a way that deserves to be read.
The Boys In The Bars is out of print but good clean copies can be purchased online for less than 10 US dollars.