Introduction to Dirk Vanden's Short Stories

Commentary for the short stories
IN THE SHADOW OF THE LADY'S TORCH (1961)
and  THE BIRD'S SONG (1963)

     In the summer of 1953 I hitchhiked (sucked) my way across the United States, from Salt Lake City
to New York City. I was 22 years old, illegal, immoral, foolishly gutsy, a newly-disavowed Mormon taking
a year-long "vacation" from Theatre Arts at the University of Utah. Broadway and Manhattan, The Village,
et.al. were overwhelming to a wide-eyed,innocent-but-gay farmboy and after 6 weeks, I got on the
Greyhound bus and went back to the wide-open spaces of Utah. IN THE SHADOW OF THE LADY'S TORCH
is my only "memoir" of that trip, written during my last year of college, 1958.

      Gay Publishers were few and far between in those days. I'd been a subscriber to ONE magazine for
several years, so in 1960 I sent my little short story to them; they liked it, printed it in '61, and asked for
more.

     THE BIRD'S SONG, 1963, is from a piece I wrote during college, remembering my childhood,
then rewrote especially for ONE – whose masthead bore the legend: "'A mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men one.' Carlysle."

      I didn't write any more short-stories after that, but switched to novels. TO THEMSELVES UNKNOWN – a "sensitive" novel I'd written during college, '52-'58, about a young Mormon university student discovering he was gay – was submitted to several major publishers and a couple of agents, all of whom told me, essentially: "Very well written, but we can't publish positive stuff about queers. Good Luck!" My book ended happily for the gay lovers and no one would publish such radical stuff! Queers had to kill themselves, or be "saved" by the schoolteacher's wife or the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold!!

      Then in 1966, Richard Amory's SONG OF THE LOON changed everything in Gay Publishing. I submitted TTU to Greenleaf Classics in San Diego, who had published Song of the Loon, and the rest is history – brief, but my part of Gay History. They edited TO THEMSELVES UNKNOWN, and published it as WHO KILLED QUEEN TOM?  with added "fag-hots." Unlike my four books published by Greenleaf, these two little morsels of gay history are pure – exactly as I wrote them over 40 years ago!

Dirk Vanden/Fullmer

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