Who Will Cliff Date?
Shifting cultural messages about masculinity and sexuality filter into a man’s daily life in the musing historical novel Who Will Cliff Date?
David A. Robinson’s wry novel Who Will Cliff Date? is about sexuality, identity, and cultural change in America.
In 1961, eight-year-old Cliff watches John F. Kennedy’s inauguration on television, situating his story within a broad historical backdrop. Indeed, he comes of age amid the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation, Watergate, and shifting cultural norms—his story a prism through which to glimpse evolving cultural attitudes about gender, sexuality, and relationships. The rise of bodybuilding culture and the advent of the internet also inform his personal growth, as each new era carries its own set of challenges and cultural influences.
Cliff’s experiences with awkward school dances, confusing locker-room encounters (he has an erection while showering close to a more physically imposing boy), and bar mitzvah parties are used to speak to his lifelong uncertainty about sexual attraction. Neither easily categorized nor comfortably aligned with social expectations of him, he is fascinated with muscular women. He has anxieties about being “gay” or “straight,” and his encounters with psychiatrists, girlfriends, and peers frustrate him. He finds little value in rigid labels, which obscure, more than clarify, his sense of self.
Its prose clear and often witty, this is an extended character study that lacks sentimentality. Cliff’s shallowness, indecision, and fixation on physical features signal him as a flawed hero. Unable to settle into simple definitions of himself or others, he is nonetheless a searching and introspective man whose experiences underscore the complexity of love. He has incredible difficulty fitting his individual experiences into collective norms, and he often pauses to reflect on personal histories, cultural inheritances, and the often messy ways in which identity takes shape.
While its tender subjects are handled with nuance, Cliff’s story is also undermined by its heavy-handed messaging. It includes several asides on the meanings of words including “communion” and “draft”; it incorporates a discussion about the evolving use of “gay” from meaning happiness to referencing homosexuality. Conversations often move it forward—between Cliff and his parents, girlfriends, professors, and psychiatrists. However, these unfold as miniature debates about gender roles, attraction, and the meaning of love; they are quite didactic, spelling ideas out in too-explicit terms. Indeed, Cliff’s story sometimes reads like a series of case studies in confronting changing norms across time.
A funny, decades-spanning story about an individual search for love and identity, Who Will Cliff Date? is an intimate historical novel.
Reviewed by
pine breaks
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