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lb_leeRogan: So, George Nader is probably someone most of you have never heard of, and for good reason. He was apparently a pretty successful actor in movies and television for over twenty years, but none of his stuff has really stuck in cultural memory except the first, worst starring role he ever had, Robot Monster from 1953. (I have seen it. It is bad.) In 1972, he suffered a detached retina which led to glaucoma, which rendered him unable to handle film lights, forcing him to quit acting, and in 1978, he published his only novel, a gay robomance entitled Chrome (Footnote). (His entry on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is here. Note the author photo of him pumping iron.)
As the description of Chrome probably leads you to suspect, George Nader was also gay. He met his partner, Mark Miller, in "1947, when they met while performing in Oh, Susannah! at the Pasadena Playhouse. Mark was a singer, playing Clem, and George was a student at the Playhouse, dancing and singing in the chorus. During the six-week run, their friendship was cemented and they have not been apart since. 'Both of us were brought up to believe you fall in love and stay in love for life,' George says. 'The relationship had to have meaning and be for the long run.'" (Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson: His Story, pg. 52) Chrome's dedication page reads, "for Mark Lincoln Miller," and they stayed together for over fifty years, until Nader died in 2002 at the age of 80. (Mark Miller survived until 2015.)
George Nader and Mark Miller are probably known less for any of those things than they are for being very close friends with the more famous Rock Hudson, the romantic leading man and studly beefcake of the '50s who only got dragged out of the closet as he was dying of AIDS in 1984. Rock Hudson isn't interesting to me, but as he was dying and all his charades were going down in flames, he gave his friends permission and encouragement to get his 1986 biography written by Sara Davidson, Rock Hudson: His Story. This means that George Nader and Mark Miller get interviewed a lot and talk a lot in that book, and so yes, I am reading a book about a celebrity I don't care about, just so I can learn about the one I do.
First of all, because someone always asks: yes, believe it or not, they truly were just friends. In fact, seeing the revolving door of Rock Hudson's love life, it was probably the nonsexual nature of their relationship that contributed to its longevity. Mark Miller describes once having to share a hotel bed with Hudson as, "We had one double bed for two big men. I slept on the edge of the mattress facing the wall, and Rock slept on the other edge, You could have driven a freight train between us. I was scared to death his foot might touch me in the night and I'd scream." (Hudson and Davidson, 80) When Nader lost his acting career, Hudson hired Miller on as his personal secretary to help bankroll his friends, and yes, I truly am talking about three gay men who were extremely close friends for over thirty years, two of whom were boss and secretary for over a decade, and it isn't a euphemism for anything.
The three men met as aspiring actors in 1951, through various gay film connections in common, and had a sort of camaraderie of the closet... though they dealt with it in different ways. "Rock and George knew that if they were going to be stars, they had to present a masculine image without a chink, without a suggestion of softness. [...] If exposed [as gay], an actor could not continue playing sexy parts, making love to women. The audience, it is feared, would lose their ability to believe him." (ibid, 57)
"This was the 'Dark Ages,' when there was no such word as 'gay.' Homosexuals were 'fairies' who were ridiculed and shunned. [...] They rarely spoke about being homosexual, or if they did, they used code phrases, like, 'Is he musical?'" (ibid, 53-54) Nader is quoted as saying, "We lived in fear of an expose, or even one small remark, a veiled suggestion that someone was homosexual. Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the Studio. Every month, when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to churn. Which of us would be in it?" (ibid, 74)
In the midst of the homophobia of the '50s, the three built their own family, which endured until Rock Hudson's death in 1985. Nader says, "We felt rejected as homosexuals by everyone else, but in our group, we were accepted. There was a bonding between the three of us, and we've remained absolutely tied together no matter what. We've had fights, we didn't speak for two different years in two different decades. We've been excluded by Rock and we've turned him down, and none of that has made any difference. Because here we are, at the end of our lives, grieving at the loss of the best friend we ever had." (ibid, 58)
Miller and Nader were the ones to carry Hudson through the bitter end... and bitter it was, though they remained stalwart. "When they learned he hadn't eaten all day, they started a chant for a chocolate milk shake. 'James [Hudson's butler] makes the best chocolate shakes in the world! Milk shake! Let's have a milk shake!' Mark and George jollied Rock into the shower. James brought up the shakes, and Rock came out of the shower and collapsed in a chair. George helped him put on his shirt and pants, then pulled on his socks and shoes for him, all the while giving him sips of the milk shake. 'Praise whatever powers,' George says, 'he finished the whole milk shake.'" (Hudson and Davidson, 23-24)
This scene is a sad inversion of one in Chrome, written seven years earlier, where Chrome feeds his beloved Vortex a chocolate malt-o-milk because he doesn't have the use of his arms. "I raised the glass of malt-o-milk for him. As I tipped it further, he drained it and gave a satisfied sigh. [...] For a moment the vortex, with its dizzying spin, vanished, and in its place was a little boy eager for another piece of candy.
"'Why the amusement, Chrome?'
"'Nothing, only glad that you like it.'" (34)
I remember having similar interactions, both the sad and the happy kind, with my husband Mac, when mental illness made it near-impossible for me to eat. I remember him jollying me into eating, learning what foods had the best odds of getting into my stomach, cooking according to my crazy requirements. To this day, whenever he cooks me a bowl of couscous and veg, I remember how he learned the dish over a decade ago, when I was sick and crazy and could barely stand to eat anything else. That food represents love to me, and not the glamorous, dramatic kind, but the hard-wearing kind, the determined kind, the kind that gets you through the worst days of your life (or death). I may not give a fig for Rock Hudson, but if he deserved the friends he had, he must've been a hell of a guy.
Miller and Nader ended up inheriting the Rock Hudson estate. But what were these men like?
"Mark is like a big, huggable bear. [...] He loves laughter and shenanigans, is a great storyteller and is loyal to the point of fierceness. 'That's the Iowa farm boy,' he says. 'I remember being snowed in for six weeks in 1936 [at around age ten], during one of the great snows [...] there were fifteen-foot drifts, we had to make tunnels to go tho the barn, and we couldn't go two miles to town to get coal or food. You know how we survived? [...] Three families that lived close together pooled everything--canned food, potatoes, coal--and shared it three ways. Otherwise we'd have frozen to death. That's when you learn you don't desert in time of need, because you weren't deserted then." (Hudson and Davidson, 52-53)
"Where Mark can be excitable, George is like a river, calm on the surface with powerful currents deep below. He does not stew on what is petty or trivial, but has a knack for seeing beyond. He uses tact and gentleness to persuade people and resolve problems." (ibid, 53)
"Mark Miller? What else can I say about the man?" Rock Hudson said. "He runs my life. He's my man Friday. He makes me laugh. He's my best friend drunk or sober. I couldn't exist without Mark Miller. George Nader? I can trust him to tell me the truth. If you ever need to know something, ask George. George is always right.
"You know how many people have tried to break us up? Every new person that's come along--the first thing he does is try to get rid of Mark and George. It's never worked." (ibid, pg. 51)
I can't help but like George Nader. As far as I can tell, Rock Hudson was a man who wanted, more than anything, to be a star, who would become whatever that stardom required, and the only thing that makes him stand out from all the others is that he was unable to completely negate his homosexual horndoggery--his biggest secret, which, perversely, is now what he's most known for, in my circles anyway. Nader, though... Nader is most known for his worst film and the torrid gay sci-fi/romance novel he wrote, by choice. And that's kinda glorious to me.
nevanna got me a copy of Chrome a few years back, because she is my friend who knows my taste, and it's one of the best gifts anyone has ever given me. Because oh, it is gay, and oh it is torrid, and oh, do I love how Nader makes robothood a socially constructed category. For his robots are biologically "undetectable from humans," (48) who work hard to "obscure his basic flaw: the inability to be concerned with, to love, if you will, any life form but his own!" (54) Other humans treat them with disdain, "that sneer which covers the average man's fear of anything alien to his narrow knowledge." (49) Compare and contrast: on page 80, Rock Hudson: His Story quotes Nader as saying, "In that age, homosexuals were looked on as alien beings. People would feel nervous and avoid your eyes."
As a multiple, I still feel like an alien being that makes humans nervous, and Nader's id and mine are apparently kindred, so I am HERE to read his loving, luxurious scenes of male robots cuddling and giving each other oil massages by the pool. I am here to read his exultation of forbidden queer robot love, which brings me comfort even though forty-five years have passed since its publication. His queer robots get to escape the homophobic earth and join Gay Fantasy Sparta in Space. It is shamelessly utopian, dedicated to Nader's lover, all while Rock Hudson was still desperately trying to pretend he was the most heterosexual thing since white bread, and I respect that.
Nader's publicist advised him to do as Rock Hudson did and marry a woman: "'You're losing parts because you're thirty-five and you're not married.' George had a long talk about it with Mark. They had a secretary who would have married George for that purpose. 'She would have done it for Rock, too, and divorced him a few years later.' But George decided he couldn't go through with it, and besides, Mark joked, 'Where would I sleep?'" (Hudson and Davidson, 98)
Even in a book devoted to Hudson, the dynamic between Nader and Miller shines through: "From the start, they pooled their resources. They realized that if they were to stay together, they could not pursue two careers. Mark wanted to study opera seriously, which would take him to New York, while George would have to stay in California to succeed as a film actor. So Mark gave up his singing and took jobs to support George. [...] Mark worked as a carhop at Jack's Drive-In, sold ladies' shoes at Chander's, and bought a Foster's Freeze in Alhambra, which he ran for a year. By 1952, George was earning enough of as an actor so that Mark could stop working. He became George's business manager, handled mail, invested the money George was earning in real estate, restored houses and eventually got his real-estate license." (ibid, 52) Nader's "understanding with Rock had always been that he and Mark did not keep secrets from each other" (ibid, 108) and when Hudson makes out his will, "Rock knew that Mark and George pooled their funds, so it did not matter which was named ahead of the other." (ibid, 192) Though the book never focuses on it, Miller and Nader seem to discuss everything together, work as a team, while Hudson was notorious for not having deep conversations or discussing emotions--his ex-wife insisted she never knew he was gay. Indeed, Nader's career may never have reached the heights of Hudson's in part because "for George, his relationship with Mark came first. Rock always said, 'I'd like to have a Mark in my life,' but for Rock, career was everything." (ibid, 58)
Nader also just doesn't seem to have had the star temperament that Hudson did. Davidson quotes him as saying, "It was more fun to stay home anyway. If you didn't go out, you didn't get in trouble." (54) She also describes him as one with "no love of crowds or society. In his later years, he has chosen to live in the [Sonora] desert, to avoid parties and gatherings. He has begun writing novels [...] and seems more suited to the reclusive life than to that of an actor." (ibid, 53) And it is clear that Nader does love the Sonora Desert; he sets the first half of Chrome there, lavishly describing the land and sky: "the vast tableland, now smudged to velvet black" (6), "the hint of dew on desert shrubs and the crisp fragrant clarity of early morning were revitalizing medicine. [...] From behind the far-distant mountain range it came; first an ever-brightening glow, then the tiny sliver of fire which slowly became a blinding, burning, molten disk." (54) Never once in the book does he describe a party, or any significant gathering as anything but a pain in the ass.
In July 1978, when Hudson goes out boys clubbing with Armistead Maupin (Rock Hudson: His Story has to explain what a glory hole is to heterosexual middle America; the phrase "stereophonic weenie" is used, which all by itself makes the book worth my three bucks), "the next morning, [...] Rock gave a detailed report which startled and horrified George, who wrote in his journal, 'My GOD.' George felt Rock was getting a kick out of 'shocking the hell out of me, like I was a fuddy-duddy, the straitlaced country cousin.' George had always chosen to stay away from gay gatherings, and the description of clubs where mass sex was taking place between strangers seemed to him the beginning of the end of civilization." (210)
That might sound funny, for a man who just a few months prior had published a book with the cover review, "An unholy mixture of science fiction and gay porn" from Kirkus Reviews, but Chrome is comparatively tame. It is a story of two gay robots falling in love over poolside massage, peanut butter sandwiches, and chocolate malt-o-milk, and while they have lurid sex, it's more in the softcore stylings of a bodice-ripper than the raunch of Tom of Finland. In some ways, Nader seems to have been old-fashioned, but that just further endears him to me. I've got plenty of raunch on my shelves; he's the only chassis-ripper. His robots prefer sex with women, men, both, or machines, or no sex at all, and they find community amongst themselves, but it's a slow, gradual process, one meeting another and introducing each other. There are no parties, no clubs for the robots to go. They have to hide, even from themselves, or be sequestered away from society. For someone like Nader, who seems to have found gay community the same slow, rooting way, it seems to read pretty true to life. Less important than exactly what kind of sex the robots have (or if they have sex at all) is the taboo love and desire they feel for each other... which, even if asexual, is still considered not proper love. A recurring phrase in the book is, "It is death to love a robot."
This comes off as unusually fluid and accepting of ambiguity by today, but it also reflects how homosexuality was viewed in the '50s: "the accepted wisdom was that men were either normal or queer. There was no such thing as bisexuality. The consensus in both the straight and gay communities was: If you were bisexual, you hadn't come all the way out of the closet." (Davidson and Hudson, 56). So Chrome may have fathered children and had sex with women, but loving Vortex makes him queer. Vortex prefers sex with machines until he meets Chrome, and is considered queer the whole time, as is Rover, who never has any desire for any sex whatsoever. All lack what would make them "normal": sole sexual interest in women.
Chrome has one of my favorite depictions of asexuality in literature... which is weird in such a horny book. Rover, a robot with brain-damage from a coerced corrective lobotomy, states flat out "I'm very good at comforting others [...] but it can be a problem, because people get a wrong impression. It's mistaken for that variety of affection which arouses the individual to sexual stimulation. When that happens all I feel is embarrassment--for the other person." (225) Rover does his best to be polite regarding other people's interest in sex, but he clearly has zero interest in it himself. When the gay protagonist gets turned on by the cuddling, Rover says, "Well, you're never going to get used to me if you run away. I like you, Chrome. I'm not bothered by anything about you, so let your body become confused if it wants to." (227) What's more, this "reverse seduction" works: "at last I could accept his attentions almost as casually as they were given. It became customary for him to hold my arm or hand as we walked along through the carefully plotted pathways of our glass-domed tropical forest. I even amazed myself by firmly retrieving his hand one time when he'd taken it from mine to gesture at something." (228) And the book states explicitly that there is nothing wrong with Rover as he is. When Chrome attempts to faith-heal his brain damage, the closest thing the book has to gods tell him no: "Calm negation echoed around me, and then the Immortals were no longer there. [...] There was, in truth, nothing here which needed curing." (232)
Keep in mind that Chrome came out a bare five years after homosexuality was replaced with "sexual orientation disturbance" in the DSM. People sometimes phrase this as "being gay stopped being a mental illness," but that's not altogether true; the DSM-II revision in 1973 writes, "homosexual activist groups will claim that psychiatry has at last recognized that homosexuality is as 'normal' as heterosexuality. They will be wrong. In removing homosexuality per se from the nomenclature we are only recognizing that by itself homosexuality does not meet the criteria for being considered a psychiatric disorder. We will in no way be aligning ourselves with any particular viewpoint regarding the etiology or desirability of homosexual behavior." Sexual Orientation Disturbance was specifically for homosexuals who were unhappy being homosexual and wanted to change their orientation... as many did under the burdens of homophobia. George Nader, being a man born in the 1920s, spent the first fifty years of his life in a society that saw him as unambiguously sick and needing curing, and that surely influenced the scene with Rover. It's a scene that still has power today, the statement that we are not a problem that needs curing. And he uses the gods of the book to express this!
I never will know George Nader or Mark Miller. Obviously, I have no way of knowing that they were truly happy together. But I like to think that they were, and it makes me happy to know that even in a deeply homophobic time, when "musical" people were considered mentally ill, dangerous, and unemployable, they were able to find love, friendship, and chocolate milk products.
EDIT: apparently George Nader wrote a second book! It was called Perils of Paul, but it was never published. There is a sole copy scrounged from his estate available for $500.
As the description of Chrome probably leads you to suspect, George Nader was also gay. He met his partner, Mark Miller, in "1947, when they met while performing in Oh, Susannah! at the Pasadena Playhouse. Mark was a singer, playing Clem, and George was a student at the Playhouse, dancing and singing in the chorus. During the six-week run, their friendship was cemented and they have not been apart since. 'Both of us were brought up to believe you fall in love and stay in love for life,' George says. 'The relationship had to have meaning and be for the long run.'" (Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson: His Story, pg. 52) Chrome's dedication page reads, "for Mark Lincoln Miller," and they stayed together for over fifty years, until Nader died in 2002 at the age of 80. (Mark Miller survived until 2015.)
George Nader and Mark Miller are probably known less for any of those things than they are for being very close friends with the more famous Rock Hudson, the romantic leading man and studly beefcake of the '50s who only got dragged out of the closet as he was dying of AIDS in 1984. Rock Hudson isn't interesting to me, but as he was dying and all his charades were going down in flames, he gave his friends permission and encouragement to get his 1986 biography written by Sara Davidson, Rock Hudson: His Story. This means that George Nader and Mark Miller get interviewed a lot and talk a lot in that book, and so yes, I am reading a book about a celebrity I don't care about, just so I can learn about the one I do.
First of all, because someone always asks: yes, believe it or not, they truly were just friends. In fact, seeing the revolving door of Rock Hudson's love life, it was probably the nonsexual nature of their relationship that contributed to its longevity. Mark Miller describes once having to share a hotel bed with Hudson as, "We had one double bed for two big men. I slept on the edge of the mattress facing the wall, and Rock slept on the other edge, You could have driven a freight train between us. I was scared to death his foot might touch me in the night and I'd scream." (Hudson and Davidson, 80) When Nader lost his acting career, Hudson hired Miller on as his personal secretary to help bankroll his friends, and yes, I truly am talking about three gay men who were extremely close friends for over thirty years, two of whom were boss and secretary for over a decade, and it isn't a euphemism for anything.
The three men met as aspiring actors in 1951, through various gay film connections in common, and had a sort of camaraderie of the closet... though they dealt with it in different ways. "Rock and George knew that if they were going to be stars, they had to present a masculine image without a chink, without a suggestion of softness. [...] If exposed [as gay], an actor could not continue playing sexy parts, making love to women. The audience, it is feared, would lose their ability to believe him." (ibid, 57)
"This was the 'Dark Ages,' when there was no such word as 'gay.' Homosexuals were 'fairies' who were ridiculed and shunned. [...] They rarely spoke about being homosexual, or if they did, they used code phrases, like, 'Is he musical?'" (ibid, 53-54) Nader is quoted as saying, "We lived in fear of an expose, or even one small remark, a veiled suggestion that someone was homosexual. Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the Studio. Every month, when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to churn. Which of us would be in it?" (ibid, 74)
In the midst of the homophobia of the '50s, the three built their own family, which endured until Rock Hudson's death in 1985. Nader says, "We felt rejected as homosexuals by everyone else, but in our group, we were accepted. There was a bonding between the three of us, and we've remained absolutely tied together no matter what. We've had fights, we didn't speak for two different years in two different decades. We've been excluded by Rock and we've turned him down, and none of that has made any difference. Because here we are, at the end of our lives, grieving at the loss of the best friend we ever had." (ibid, 58)
Miller and Nader were the ones to carry Hudson through the bitter end... and bitter it was, though they remained stalwart. "When they learned he hadn't eaten all day, they started a chant for a chocolate milk shake. 'James [Hudson's butler] makes the best chocolate shakes in the world! Milk shake! Let's have a milk shake!' Mark and George jollied Rock into the shower. James brought up the shakes, and Rock came out of the shower and collapsed in a chair. George helped him put on his shirt and pants, then pulled on his socks and shoes for him, all the while giving him sips of the milk shake. 'Praise whatever powers,' George says, 'he finished the whole milk shake.'" (Hudson and Davidson, 23-24)
This scene is a sad inversion of one in Chrome, written seven years earlier, where Chrome feeds his beloved Vortex a chocolate malt-o-milk because he doesn't have the use of his arms. "I raised the glass of malt-o-milk for him. As I tipped it further, he drained it and gave a satisfied sigh. [...] For a moment the vortex, with its dizzying spin, vanished, and in its place was a little boy eager for another piece of candy.
"'Why the amusement, Chrome?'
"'Nothing, only glad that you like it.'" (34)
I remember having similar interactions, both the sad and the happy kind, with my husband Mac, when mental illness made it near-impossible for me to eat. I remember him jollying me into eating, learning what foods had the best odds of getting into my stomach, cooking according to my crazy requirements. To this day, whenever he cooks me a bowl of couscous and veg, I remember how he learned the dish over a decade ago, when I was sick and crazy and could barely stand to eat anything else. That food represents love to me, and not the glamorous, dramatic kind, but the hard-wearing kind, the determined kind, the kind that gets you through the worst days of your life (or death). I may not give a fig for Rock Hudson, but if he deserved the friends he had, he must've been a hell of a guy.
Miller and Nader ended up inheriting the Rock Hudson estate. But what were these men like?
"Mark is like a big, huggable bear. [...] He loves laughter and shenanigans, is a great storyteller and is loyal to the point of fierceness. 'That's the Iowa farm boy,' he says. 'I remember being snowed in for six weeks in 1936 [at around age ten], during one of the great snows [...] there were fifteen-foot drifts, we had to make tunnels to go tho the barn, and we couldn't go two miles to town to get coal or food. You know how we survived? [...] Three families that lived close together pooled everything--canned food, potatoes, coal--and shared it three ways. Otherwise we'd have frozen to death. That's when you learn you don't desert in time of need, because you weren't deserted then." (Hudson and Davidson, 52-53)
"Where Mark can be excitable, George is like a river, calm on the surface with powerful currents deep below. He does not stew on what is petty or trivial, but has a knack for seeing beyond. He uses tact and gentleness to persuade people and resolve problems." (ibid, 53)
"Mark Miller? What else can I say about the man?" Rock Hudson said. "He runs my life. He's my man Friday. He makes me laugh. He's my best friend drunk or sober. I couldn't exist without Mark Miller. George Nader? I can trust him to tell me the truth. If you ever need to know something, ask George. George is always right.
"You know how many people have tried to break us up? Every new person that's come along--the first thing he does is try to get rid of Mark and George. It's never worked." (ibid, pg. 51)
I can't help but like George Nader. As far as I can tell, Rock Hudson was a man who wanted, more than anything, to be a star, who would become whatever that stardom required, and the only thing that makes him stand out from all the others is that he was unable to completely negate his homosexual horndoggery--his biggest secret, which, perversely, is now what he's most known for, in my circles anyway. Nader, though... Nader is most known for his worst film and the torrid gay sci-fi/romance novel he wrote, by choice. And that's kinda glorious to me.
nevanna got me a copy of Chrome a few years back, because she is my friend who knows my taste, and it's one of the best gifts anyone has ever given me. Because oh, it is gay, and oh it is torrid, and oh, do I love how Nader makes robothood a socially constructed category. For his robots are biologically "undetectable from humans," (48) who work hard to "obscure his basic flaw: the inability to be concerned with, to love, if you will, any life form but his own!" (54) Other humans treat them with disdain, "that sneer which covers the average man's fear of anything alien to his narrow knowledge." (49) Compare and contrast: on page 80, Rock Hudson: His Story quotes Nader as saying, "In that age, homosexuals were looked on as alien beings. People would feel nervous and avoid your eyes."As a multiple, I still feel like an alien being that makes humans nervous, and Nader's id and mine are apparently kindred, so I am HERE to read his loving, luxurious scenes of male robots cuddling and giving each other oil massages by the pool. I am here to read his exultation of forbidden queer robot love, which brings me comfort even though forty-five years have passed since its publication. His queer robots get to escape the homophobic earth and join Gay Fantasy Sparta in Space. It is shamelessly utopian, dedicated to Nader's lover, all while Rock Hudson was still desperately trying to pretend he was the most heterosexual thing since white bread, and I respect that.
Nader's publicist advised him to do as Rock Hudson did and marry a woman: "'You're losing parts because you're thirty-five and you're not married.' George had a long talk about it with Mark. They had a secretary who would have married George for that purpose. 'She would have done it for Rock, too, and divorced him a few years later.' But George decided he couldn't go through with it, and besides, Mark joked, 'Where would I sleep?'" (Hudson and Davidson, 98)
Even in a book devoted to Hudson, the dynamic between Nader and Miller shines through: "From the start, they pooled their resources. They realized that if they were to stay together, they could not pursue two careers. Mark wanted to study opera seriously, which would take him to New York, while George would have to stay in California to succeed as a film actor. So Mark gave up his singing and took jobs to support George. [...] Mark worked as a carhop at Jack's Drive-In, sold ladies' shoes at Chander's, and bought a Foster's Freeze in Alhambra, which he ran for a year. By 1952, George was earning enough of as an actor so that Mark could stop working. He became George's business manager, handled mail, invested the money George was earning in real estate, restored houses and eventually got his real-estate license." (ibid, 52) Nader's "understanding with Rock had always been that he and Mark did not keep secrets from each other" (ibid, 108) and when Hudson makes out his will, "Rock knew that Mark and George pooled their funds, so it did not matter which was named ahead of the other." (ibid, 192) Though the book never focuses on it, Miller and Nader seem to discuss everything together, work as a team, while Hudson was notorious for not having deep conversations or discussing emotions--his ex-wife insisted she never knew he was gay. Indeed, Nader's career may never have reached the heights of Hudson's in part because "for George, his relationship with Mark came first. Rock always said, 'I'd like to have a Mark in my life,' but for Rock, career was everything." (ibid, 58)
Nader also just doesn't seem to have had the star temperament that Hudson did. Davidson quotes him as saying, "It was more fun to stay home anyway. If you didn't go out, you didn't get in trouble." (54) She also describes him as one with "no love of crowds or society. In his later years, he has chosen to live in the [Sonora] desert, to avoid parties and gatherings. He has begun writing novels [...] and seems more suited to the reclusive life than to that of an actor." (ibid, 53) And it is clear that Nader does love the Sonora Desert; he sets the first half of Chrome there, lavishly describing the land and sky: "the vast tableland, now smudged to velvet black" (6), "the hint of dew on desert shrubs and the crisp fragrant clarity of early morning were revitalizing medicine. [...] From behind the far-distant mountain range it came; first an ever-brightening glow, then the tiny sliver of fire which slowly became a blinding, burning, molten disk." (54) Never once in the book does he describe a party, or any significant gathering as anything but a pain in the ass.
In July 1978, when Hudson goes out boys clubbing with Armistead Maupin (Rock Hudson: His Story has to explain what a glory hole is to heterosexual middle America; the phrase "stereophonic weenie" is used, which all by itself makes the book worth my three bucks), "the next morning, [...] Rock gave a detailed report which startled and horrified George, who wrote in his journal, 'My GOD.' George felt Rock was getting a kick out of 'shocking the hell out of me, like I was a fuddy-duddy, the straitlaced country cousin.' George had always chosen to stay away from gay gatherings, and the description of clubs where mass sex was taking place between strangers seemed to him the beginning of the end of civilization." (210)
That might sound funny, for a man who just a few months prior had published a book with the cover review, "An unholy mixture of science fiction and gay porn" from Kirkus Reviews, but Chrome is comparatively tame. It is a story of two gay robots falling in love over poolside massage, peanut butter sandwiches, and chocolate malt-o-milk, and while they have lurid sex, it's more in the softcore stylings of a bodice-ripper than the raunch of Tom of Finland. In some ways, Nader seems to have been old-fashioned, but that just further endears him to me. I've got plenty of raunch on my shelves; he's the only chassis-ripper. His robots prefer sex with women, men, both, or machines, or no sex at all, and they find community amongst themselves, but it's a slow, gradual process, one meeting another and introducing each other. There are no parties, no clubs for the robots to go. They have to hide, even from themselves, or be sequestered away from society. For someone like Nader, who seems to have found gay community the same slow, rooting way, it seems to read pretty true to life. Less important than exactly what kind of sex the robots have (or if they have sex at all) is the taboo love and desire they feel for each other... which, even if asexual, is still considered not proper love. A recurring phrase in the book is, "It is death to love a robot."
This comes off as unusually fluid and accepting of ambiguity by today, but it also reflects how homosexuality was viewed in the '50s: "the accepted wisdom was that men were either normal or queer. There was no such thing as bisexuality. The consensus in both the straight and gay communities was: If you were bisexual, you hadn't come all the way out of the closet." (Davidson and Hudson, 56). So Chrome may have fathered children and had sex with women, but loving Vortex makes him queer. Vortex prefers sex with machines until he meets Chrome, and is considered queer the whole time, as is Rover, who never has any desire for any sex whatsoever. All lack what would make them "normal": sole sexual interest in women.
Chrome has one of my favorite depictions of asexuality in literature... which is weird in such a horny book. Rover, a robot with brain-damage from a coerced corrective lobotomy, states flat out "I'm very good at comforting others [...] but it can be a problem, because people get a wrong impression. It's mistaken for that variety of affection which arouses the individual to sexual stimulation. When that happens all I feel is embarrassment--for the other person." (225) Rover does his best to be polite regarding other people's interest in sex, but he clearly has zero interest in it himself. When the gay protagonist gets turned on by the cuddling, Rover says, "Well, you're never going to get used to me if you run away. I like you, Chrome. I'm not bothered by anything about you, so let your body become confused if it wants to." (227) What's more, this "reverse seduction" works: "at last I could accept his attentions almost as casually as they were given. It became customary for him to hold my arm or hand as we walked along through the carefully plotted pathways of our glass-domed tropical forest. I even amazed myself by firmly retrieving his hand one time when he'd taken it from mine to gesture at something." (228) And the book states explicitly that there is nothing wrong with Rover as he is. When Chrome attempts to faith-heal his brain damage, the closest thing the book has to gods tell him no: "Calm negation echoed around me, and then the Immortals were no longer there. [...] There was, in truth, nothing here which needed curing." (232)
Keep in mind that Chrome came out a bare five years after homosexuality was replaced with "sexual orientation disturbance" in the DSM. People sometimes phrase this as "being gay stopped being a mental illness," but that's not altogether true; the DSM-II revision in 1973 writes, "homosexual activist groups will claim that psychiatry has at last recognized that homosexuality is as 'normal' as heterosexuality. They will be wrong. In removing homosexuality per se from the nomenclature we are only recognizing that by itself homosexuality does not meet the criteria for being considered a psychiatric disorder. We will in no way be aligning ourselves with any particular viewpoint regarding the etiology or desirability of homosexual behavior." Sexual Orientation Disturbance was specifically for homosexuals who were unhappy being homosexual and wanted to change their orientation... as many did under the burdens of homophobia. George Nader, being a man born in the 1920s, spent the first fifty years of his life in a society that saw him as unambiguously sick and needing curing, and that surely influenced the scene with Rover. It's a scene that still has power today, the statement that we are not a problem that needs curing. And he uses the gods of the book to express this!
I never will know George Nader or Mark Miller. Obviously, I have no way of knowing that they were truly happy together. But I like to think that they were, and it makes me happy to know that even in a deeply homophobic time, when "musical" people were considered mentally ill, dangerous, and unemployable, they were able to find love, friendship, and chocolate milk products.
EDIT: apparently George Nader wrote a second book! It was called Perils of Paul, but it was never published. There is a sole copy scrounged from his estate available for $500.
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Date: 2023-11-06 08:25 am (UTC)The ace-afirming nature of Chrome seems only to add to that. Strange to find such a powerful affirmation in 1950s gay culture, but... wow. Very powerful. Thank you for sharing!!! <3
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Date: 2023-11-06 03:39 pm (UTC)Rogan: Chrome came out in the '70s and while I cannot in good faith call it a GOOD book, I am very, very glad it exists. (And so are a decent few geeky gay baby boomers, from what I have seen. They have a nostalgia for it I totally understand. I can only imagine what it felt like to see such a book mainstream-published in 1978!)
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Date: 2023-11-06 05:38 pm (UTC)(On both counts.)
what can i say
Date: 2023-11-06 08:54 pm (UTC)very moving, i am moved/cut to the
O:)
Re: what can i say
Date: 2024-11-26 06:31 pm (UTC)