"Dear Aunt Sylvia,
First, thank you for the birthday card. Not that I'm admitting to being thirty-one, but if I hide the thing carefully (perhaps in the vegetable bin) maybe nobody will notice. I think twenty-eight is a much nicer age to be, and I have every intention of being twenty-eight for several more years. So you and I know the truth—so do we have to talk about it?
Now, as to the book. I've read it, and frankly, I'm not impressed. All right, so the poor broad is my age and not married. What does she expect, being a fat, ugly Jewish girl? She thinks maybe men grow on trees? Believe me, they don't. I may be Jewish, but I'm not fat or ugly, and I know: men do not grow on trees. But am I going to kill myself over it? Am I going to stick my head in an oven? Am I going to slit my wrists? No, Aunt Sylvia, I'm not. I'm going to go right on doing what I've been doing. I'm going to pull myself together, put on a nice sweater, pretend it's still 1965 and go out and find a man.
A man, you say? My nephew is going to go out and find himself a man? What have I raised? What kind of pervert did I nourish at my bosom?
That's right, Aunt Sylvia, you got yourself a queer nephew. Now, before you go running off to make Uncle Hymie rip the buttons off his vest, stop and think. It could be a lot worse. I could be a child molester. Or I could be an exhibitionist, and spend my time flashing my schwantz at Haddasah ladies and making them choke on their chicken liver. How would you like that, Aunt Sylvia? So settle down, sew the buttons back on Uncle Hymie's vest, and listen."
And so begins A Fairy Tale, written under the pseudonym S. Steinberg by John Saul.
I stumbled upon this bit of hilarity while I was coming out back in the mid 70s. While the book itself hadn't yet been published, a excerpt appeared several years prior to publication in Christopher Street, a magazine I'd serendipitously discovered in the periodical racks in the basement of the University of Arizona library. I can't tell you how much my grades suffered as a result of spending too many evenings at the library—not studying, or even partaking in, um…other diversions (which I actually didn't discover there until years later)—but rather spent pouring over back issues of Christopher Street and After Dark, tentatively taking my first hesitant steps into that dark, seductive world of the love that dare not speak its name.
When I found the book itself, several years later after moving to San Francisco, it was like meeting up with an old friend. I'd kept a xerox of the Christopher Street piece (in fact, I still have it), but here was the entire novel, fleshed out in full. It wasn't called Tinkerbell is Alive and Hanging Kelp in San Francisco as the Christopher Street excerpt had indicated, and it wasn't written by John Saul (or so I'd originally thought), but the minute I cracked the spine and started reading, I knew it was the same story and the same author.
Much like any piece of gay fiction from the era, it's a little dated in places, and obviously written before AIDS changed the world, but so many aspects of our so-called lifestyle seem timeless. The difference between my first exposure to the prose in 1977 and now is that I've lived a lot of what's in the book, or know people who have.
It was out of print for the longest time (I found my copy used), but it's actually available again—as an e-book, no less. So if you've got a few dollars to throw away, it's worth it to check it out. I don't think you'll be disappointed.