It's pretty much the standard analysis of the deepseated urges in all of our psyches which make such a place inevitable. Exactly what you'd expect - for the most part. I haven't read the whole book yet, so maybe the tone changes further on.
However, Mr. Van Der Zee actually did "penetrate the sacred precincts in the guise of a waiter", so there is much in it about happenings at the Grove.
Here's some excerpts, illustrating the homo-erotic atmosphere which pervades the book:
"A distinguished-looking snow-haired man is pissing on a tree. Another man opens his fly and stands beside him, talking. There is a sense of feelings returning that one has had to deny again and again in the course of carving out a career. Of the possibility that perhaps, for a while at least, one can take a refresher course in affection, both public and private."
"For the man who disliked his work or his wife, who was bored or lonely or frustrated, who needed the solace of male companionship, or who had a lingering interest in the arts but no outlet for it, in short, for a fortunate minority of the overwhelming majority, it was an ideal refuge."
"In the kitchen all the amenities are dropped. The chefs yell at the waiters and the waiters yell back. A gay waiter and a straight bus boy stride angrily outside to the garbage area and exchange punches."
"At night the dormitories and the street above the kitchen become a kind of gay frontier town among the trees, a world of whoops and shrieks, blaring amplified music, taunting and towel snapping and "flashing," and, much later, quarrels and outright fist fights. There is a canteen, which straights avoid for the same good reasons a gay person might stay out of a bar in a small southern town.
There are two kinds of people in the Grove, those who like themselves and those who don't. It's as simple, and as complicated, as that. Among the members and guests, the first type predominates; in the kitchen, the second. Bob, the waiter who rooms with me, is fairly representative. Bob's in his early fifties, between regular jobs, working his second year at the Grove. In unsought idleness, he sips a joyless after-dinner beer and fantasizes an eden of available young men. "There was this young fellow the other night ni one of the shows, dressed as a woman, and he - she - well, it - was one of the most sexual things I've ever seen. He was the most beautiful woman - I mean the sexual appeal of the thing was tremendous. I'm assuming you're gay." "No, I'm not." "Well, three-quarters of the kitchen is. And half the members."
"Bob's sexual breakdown of the membership is a wild exaggeration, a wishful fantasy. His analysis of the kitchen is not. It's life upside down, where the sexual percentages are reversed and straights are freaks, and the prevailing tone is bitch-wit, one-joke flirtatiousness, and an unspoken misogyny more brutal than in any locker room or GI club. "Hi, you sluts!" sings Curt to a table of waiters and bus boys eating breakfast. And the whole table dissolves into simpering giggles."
Shortly after this segment, which includes much more homosexual innuendo:
"To come here as a member or guest is to share the assumptions of manners, secrecy, privilege. To accept or reject, but not to reveal. To anesthetize with sociability or booze or long walks beneath the trees the fidelity to what is real. And to acquiesce in the Club's wish to have life both ways: to be world-famous and, at the same time, unknown."
Wildly exaggerated, I'm sure. This, despite him pointing out that the majority of the Grove is entirely off limits to him, including River Road (of "AIDS put a damper on the pickup scene" fame).
One night while serving coffee, two men remark to Van Der Zee:
"We've just decided," says one of the men, head gently nodding, "that you're the most attractive person here." He beams condescendingly, the nobleman addressing the stable boy."
Van Der Zee introduces some interesting remarks from the Cremation:
"At times this remorse over what the world has made of Bohemians' innocence is exaggerated into an eerie self-denial and even self-rejection, as in this invocation from the Cremation of Care ceremony: "The Cremation of Care is not, gentlemen, the poetic cremation of a stuffed dummy... It is, for one thing, the shedding, from each of us, of the snake's skin we grow in the workaday world. It is a dropping, from each of us, of the mask of pride, of position, of self-importance, of greed and power. It is the cleansing of our hearts of selfishness and ugliness. It cannot last, we know that. It is only for a spell. But it is a magic spell, and we memorialize the beginning of that spell tonight."
I'll post some more later if I find any more good passages.
Here's the front and back covers of the book, scanned by me:
