My First Satyrnalia

**KIRKUS REVIEW** Anyone familiar with Rumaker's powerful, sometimes scarifyingly bleak stories of the '50s and '60s, collected in Gringos (1967), has some serious acclimating to do when faced with Rumaker's recent work: weak books in a gay genre, autobiographical and serious but shy. Here the first-person narrator has just come to New York for the day from his home upstate, planning to attend a Saturnalia celebration on the Lower East Side given by an all-male group of which he's a part, "The Fairy Circle." Ever the writer, though, he first checks out the gay bookstores that might be selling his new book--which leads him to a bookstore/peep-show palace down by the Hudson River. In a nightmarish backroom darkness, men pass in and out of the peep-show cubicles, mimicking the actions on the screens. The narrator has his share of these anonymous encounters (oral sex primarily), but he also tries to steal a few minutes to jot down some notes on the situation by the flickering light of the films. This is the novel's only interesting sequence--a funny yet discomforting scene, made more so by the narrator's essential reticence, his slant on such promiscuity as an "illusory oasis." Much mo