A DOMESTIC ANIMAL, an early gay-themed novel without a tragic ending

A DOMESTIC ANIMAL
FRANCIS KING (intro. Rumaan Alam)
McNally Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Francis King's 1970 novel A Domestic Animal is the story of Antonio Valli, a brilliant young Italian philosopher, who arrives to do a year's research at a well-to-do university. He lodges with Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist, and his good looks and impulsive yet immensely likeable character soon have Dick captivated.

Valli is someone who needs to be admired and loved and has an insatiable craving for attention from everyone he meets; he needs an audience to perform to and he finds this at the university, but especially in Dick's company. It is not long before Dick Thompson has fallen completely in love with his charming—but very heterosexual—lodger.

What follows is an ill-fated relationship that can only end in disaster, but in A Domestic Animal King has created a novel of bitter longing and painful complexities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it easier to fall in love with someone who can't return your feelings, or someone who won't? Unlike the girl who doesn't love you back, Dick Thompson's love object Antonio Valli can't reciprocate his feelings...Antonio Valli is a straight man.

This is how the story frames its unhappy ending, or at the most charitable of my responses, its bittersweet ending: A straight man with a very intense psychological need to seduce and captivate those he's identified as powerful chooses a gay man whose lust is barely concealed to ensorcel. It was written in the 1960s, so this was pretty advanced stuff. Dick Thompson is not presented as sick,or weird, or as a pervert. He's simply made a bad bet on a man...everyone can relate to that.

Nowadays we'd call Dick Thompson "sapiosexual" and Antonio Valli a "queerbaiter". I suspect that, in a novel written on this model in 2026, Antonio would be heteroflexible if only to cement his conquest of Dick. It is a conquest, a thoroughly (though not consciously, I think) intentional act of subjugation for the purposes of the conqueror's ego gratification.

Antonio Valli is an unapologetic bounder...fucks Pam, a loud, vulgar woman despite pretending (in my opinion it's a pretense) not to know how much this hurts his inappropriately-but-consensually emotionally attached host Dick Thompson, despite being married and having a family with the wife left in Italy. He is fully in control of Dick Thompson's emotions. Only when Dick Thompson dares to display some liveliness of spirit in an indirect calling-out of his caddish behavior towards both women does Antonio Valli deign to treat Dick Thompson's feelings as real, as something not deliberately evoked as part of his power-play, his ownership of Dick Thompson's feelings.

Dick Thompson is utterly besotted by Antonio Valli in so many ways. He's queer, knows he's queer, but does nothing to approach sexual activity with Antonio Valli because, in that time, bottoms like women waited to be approached or risked serious consequences...physical, reputational, emotional. Dick Thompson revels in his emotional subjugation for the same reason submissives everywhere enter into Dom/sub relationships: I'll let you hurt me if you'll really choose me, own me, care for me. If this book was ever filmed it would have to be made like Pillion, an exploration of the consuming need some people have to be the full focus of another's attention. It is a deep, and from what I know about it, life-long need that finds a way to get met that can change over time...but is never satisfied. That fact is never clearer than in the ending of this novel.

Antonio Valli, in his lordly disdain for anything not immediately satisfying to his own clawing desperation to be central to the life of someone he actually admires, chooses Pam over Dick as his bedmate...but never lets Dick off his emotional hook, or allows Pam to be more than a sexual obsession. He is a man of his time, the kind we all hope is disappearing: the thoughtless user, convinced he should be able to do just as he likes and you should do just as he likes as well. It was the privilege of maleness at that time. I suspect that 1970 readers of this novel really didn't interrogate that Antonio Valli was perfectly ordinary, at least until they were confronted by Dick Thompson's emotional responses to his arrogance.

Has all that much changed? Heavens yes. Has it changed for the better? Mixed bag on that one. As a member of Dick Thompson's native minority, I'll say mostly yes on his behalf. One thing that's changed is the desuetude of the unrequited love/unhappy ending novel. I think the point of this story stands out in relief against that uglier truth of the ending: Men loving each other the way Ralph and Mervyn do can exist, men can and do fall in love with each other (even relentlessly heterosexual ones), and gay love is fraught, complicated, and very much as interesting as cishet love.

Lest y'all think Francis King was simply talking about the subject, know that he was my fellow AIDS widower. He, much like Dick Thompson, led a quietly queer life in a time where this could easily have led him onto nasty legal troubles à la Alan Turing. I suspect but cannot prove that Pam, Antonio Valli's object of sexual obsession, was modeled after King's friend Anne Cumming (albeit unflatteringly). King was not exoticizing or fetishizing his straight man in love with a man he had no desire to fuck. He was most likely discussing his own life in too-thinly veiled terms.

Brave of him. A major step towards accurate representation of gay life in the days before liberation began. Still not that great, it's centering desire for a cishet man, but definitely honest and in its day quite positive.