|
Home
Contact the
Editor:
editor@everythingihaveisblue.com
|
|
James Barr was
born in 1922 “in an oilfield boomtown in either Texas or
Oklahoma,” according to a biographical sketch he wrote in 1990. He
never knew his father, and his mother died shortly after his birth. Barr
served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946, later moving to New York to begin
work on his first novel, Quatrefoil.
When it appeared in 1950, Barr became an instant gay celebrity. (Quatrefoil was reprinted in 1991 by
Alyson.) Barr re-enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, but the Office
of Naval Intelligence learned he was the author of Quatrefoil and ordered him discharged. His collection of short
stories, Derricks (from which
“Bottom of the Cloud” is taken) appeared in 1951. Both books were
eventually pulled off the market when the U.S. Post Office threatened to
prosecute Barr’s publisher for “peddling pornography.” When
Barr’s foster father was diagnosed with leukemia, Barr returned to
Kansas where he worked as an oilfield roustabout and continued to write,
including stories, articles, and reviews for One Magazine and The Mattachine Review. He later moved back to New York
for a time, where he struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, only to
make another return to Kansas and a new career as a newspaperman in the
mid-sixties when his foster mother fell ill. A second novel, The Occasional Man, appeared in 1966.
Barr died of liver cancer at the Oklahoma Veterans Center in 1995. (Excerpted
with kind permission from Hubert Kennedy’s excellent article, “A
Touch of Royalty: Gay Author James Barr,” available for download at: http://home.pacbell.net/dendy/Barr.pdf.)
|