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The Summer They Came: A Novel by William Storandt
by Euan Bear
What would happen if two guys who spied the perfect undiscovered resort started putting ads in gay publications inviting the queers to stay in starchy old New England bed-and-breakfasts – without telling the owners?
That proposition is what kept percolating in William Storandt’s mind when he and his partner sailed. “My partner Brian and I used to keep our sailboat in Stonington, Connecticut, next door to Watch Hill, Rhode Island,” he admitted in a recent phone conversation. “We used to go sailing every weekend and go by this long sand spit with a perfect beach that was always empty. We just kept thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if we put ads in gay publications for the B&B’s and didn’t tell them.”
And yes, Watch Hill, RI, is the model for “Long Spit,” the down-at-heels village about to be “discovered” and invaded by a horde of buffed boys looking for the latest and greatest in circuit parties by the sea in Storandt’s novel The Summer They Came. It’s the story of Provincetown and Rehoboth and Palm Springs and Key West, but condensed into a single summer of frantic activity that exposes the closeted and confronts the bigoted while making everyone else consider where their interests lay.
A group of six friends and entrepreneurs decide they will take over the stodgy village and begin by placing suggestive ads in national gay publications. The first ad is for The Lilac Bush, run by elderly widow Helen Boothroyd. “Find him in the dunes,” it reads, characterizing Long Spit as a gay resort town “for the discerning male traveler who’s had enough of the same old same old.”
Her first gay customers for the honeymoon suite are Derek and Tracy – two big guys dressed in ripped cutoffs and work boots, wearing “boot-camp buzz cuts, tiny goatees, and cheeky grins” – setting up the inevitable moment of awkwardness at the door, when she was clearly expecting “Tracy” to be female. They are followed by a gay plastic surgeon from Nebraska and one of the entrepreneurs looking to buy a fading seaside restaurant and turn it into “The Crab Hole” bar, complete with glory holes.
Things only escalate from there as more gay men hear the buzz and create a bona fide scene, posing and waiting for sex partners or simple adoration in the dunes, tuning up all summer for the eventual circuit party with dynamite climax at Labor Day weekend.
There’s a closet queen antique dealer – Hollis Wynbourne, scion of an old-money family and retired concert singer – whose private collection of slave artifacts keeps him in the closet. He is tolerated by the rest of the starchy blue bloods somehow more as one of their own than as belonging to the flashy queers taking over the town.
And, of course there is Anthony Giannini, the local boy just out of high school, on his way to college and working the local cafˇ. He’s diplomatic and flattered when his slim nubile body gets those looks from the new clientele. No surprise there.
Round out the characters with a religious zealot (Anthony’s mom), a disgruntled batch of working class guys, a few business owners who are having their best summer ever, a woman preservationist single-handedly staving off the aluminum-siding and jalousie-window philistines and welcoming preservation-minded men with money, her ally the closeted realtor, and a sleazy gay reporter writing yellow journalism and stirring up trouble, and you’ve got the makings for a confrontation.
William Storandt once played tambourine for the Monkees, lived in Vermont for more than a dozen years, sailed across the Atlantic (and wrote a Lambda-nominated memoir about it), and is currently teaching in the Bass Writing Program at Yale.
“I lived for 13 years in a geodesic dome in Westford,” recalled Storandt, “I was married when I arrived in Vermont, although I knew I was gay from third grade on. I had just thrown away a career as a freelance studio musician coming out of Julliard. I drove 100-dollar cars that I fixed myself, cut blow-down trees for firewood. I taught at Johnson State and at UVM and conducted the Johnson State Jazz Ensemble.” Storandt and I played “who do you know” for a few minutes, coming up with a couple of names.
Storand wrote The Summer They Came while with his partner on sabbatical to Cape Town, South Africa, doing AIDS prevention work.
The novel is all-boy, all the time. There’s one presumptive lesbian who comes along at the end to provide teaser material for a sequel. When I brought that point to Storandt’s attention, he said, “The basis of the comedy is that it has to be gay men. There’s that conversation in the beginning where one of the men says, ‘Maybe we should get it going with the nature-dykes first. They could do their bird watching thing, you know, not piss anybody off too much.’ And then the other guy says, ‘No way. They already bought up P-town while the boys were worrying about their tans.’”
He characterized himself as “an equal-opportunity skewerer” but maintained that although a significant proportion of his characters embody stereotypes, “there are angels and jerks on both sides of the story. Leathery guys, buffed bodies, you know. I’ve been to P-town, Key West, San Francisco, and those guys are definitely there. If I portray a couple of characters as stereotypes, there’s a reason for it. I also tried to show a bit more depth, to flesh out some characters, even those on the other side.”
One of his goals for the book was to examine the attitudes of locals who might view gays as “the other,” to look at how each side saw the other side. “How might stuffy, uptight, old New England, starchy villagers view gay men coming into town and spending money, buying real estate, promenading. It’s a different culture. Each side is warily eyeing each other.”
He went for a long time, he said, trying not to deal with his sexuality, as do a couple of characters in the novel. “But now I’m happy to be gay, having a great time. My partner and I have been together for 23 years.”
There’s likely a sequel coming. “A lot of stories get set in motion – Florian, this black man who moves into a household, the boy Anthony who is just discovering what it means to be gay, the lesbian restaurateur. You sort of want to know what’s going to happen. I left it with some intriguing story lines to be dealt with later,” Storandt said.
We agreed that the book is a light read, an entertaining-enough way to spend an afternoon at the beach or on the deck of a boat.
William Storandt will be reading from The Summer They Came on Tuesday June 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the South Burlington Barnes & Noble.