The Publishing Triangle, the association of lesbian and gay men in publishing, have announced the finalists for their annual literary awards. Congratulations to all the nominees.
This year’s Triangle Awards ceremony will be held on be held Thursday, April 21, 2016 at the Tishman Auditorium inside the New School’s University Center Building, 63 Fifth Avenue (corner of 13th Street), New York, NY at 7 p.m. The ceremony is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow. The Bill Whitehead Award for lifetime achievement will be bestowed to poet and publisher Eloise Klein and the founders of Christopher Street Magazine will receive the Publishing Triangle’s Leadership Award during the ceremony. For more details click here.
Finalists for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf Press) Debridement, by Corrina Bain (Great Weather for Media) The Middle Notebookes, by Nathanaël (Nightboat Books) Trans/Portraits: Voices from Transgender Communities, by Jackson Wright Schultz (Dartmouth College Press)
Finalists for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, by Lillian Faderman (Simon and Schuster) Honor Girl, by Maggie Thrash (Candlewick Press) “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, by Marcia M. Gallo (Cornell University Press)
Finalists for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage, by Barney Frank (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) A House in St. John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents, by Matthew Spender (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality, by Michelangelo Signorile (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDS by Dale Peck (Soho Press)
Finalists for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry Bodymap, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Mawenzi House/TSAR) Fanny Says, by Nickole Brown (BOA Editions) Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat Books) No Confession, No Mass, by Jennifer Perrine (University of Nebraska Press
Finalists for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry Boy with Thorn, by Rickey Laurentiis (University of Pittsburgh Press) Chord, by Rick Barot (Sarabande Books) Farther Traveler, by Ronaldo V. Wilson (Counterpath Press) The Spectral Wilderness, by Oliver Bendorf (Kent State University Press)
Finalists for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction Blue Talk and Love, by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Riverdale Avenue Books) Bright Lines, by Tanwi Nandini Islam (Penguin Books) Hotel Living, by Ioannis Pappos (Harper Perennial) One Hundred Days of Rain, by Carellin Brooks (BookThug)
Finalists for The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction After the Parade, by Lori Ostlund (Scribner) JD, by Mark Merlis (Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press) A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday) A Poet of the Invisible World, by Michael Golding (Picador) Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/03/14/the-publishing-triangle-award-finalists-announced-4/#sthash.t2Lmqwfa.dpuf
Last year, renowned gay publisher and editor Don Weise, along with philanthropist Chuck Forester, launched Querelle, a small press focused on publishing new LGBT titles. Querelle was launched with the hope of establishing a press that cultivates a more personal connection between writers and the publisher’s editors, as well as opening up new opportunities for authors seeking to self-publish their work.
Weise took some time to talk with Lambda Literary Review about this new endeavor and what he is hoping to accomplish with the press.
What was the impetus in creating Querelle?
I transferred ownership of the name Magnus over to another publisher as an imprint more than three years ago, and I served as editorial director of that imprint for a couple of years before leaving the company in fall of 2014. I still own the dozen titles I published under Magnus LLC, and those titles remain in print and available as usual. But going forward, I no longer had a publishing outlet for any new projects that excited me so had to create something brand new. As luck would have it, Chuck Forester, the writer and philanthropist, approached me in May about launching a small press. Chuck is a book lover of the first order and wanted to get involved on the business end, particularly around LGBT titles. I don’t know anyone more passionate about gay books than Chuck. I welcomed the opportunity to work together, since he’s been one of my champions for so long, sharing complimentary comments about my work, which means a lot because, as a one-person operation it can be a lonely path.
So how does Querelle differ from Magnus?
First off, Querelle is truly small, just two new titles per year, whereas when I ran Magnus LLC I published twelve to twenty titles yearly, and all on my own. I still don’t know how I did it, or sometimes even why. Operating Magnus its first two years had rewards, but it was also tremendously demanding and depleting. Querelle is more of a part-time commitment at the moment, but I expect it to grow. I’ve been freelance editing full-time for the past couple of years and will continue to take on clients alongside the work I do for Querelle.
Which brings me to the second difference. The big departure is that Querelle offers self-publishing services. I’ve edited for the top self-publishing companies and while in my experience they all offer reliable and efficient services that I would recommend to anyone, they lack a personal connection between the author and editor. For me that connection is essential. It matters that there’s a creative dialogue back and forth between author and editor, as that establishes a rapport and that in turn leads to a better book usually. But working for self-publishers, I edit under a pseudonym and have no direct contact with authors other than my notes and an accompanying letter that outlines my edits. I realized that I wanted to work more closely with these writers—and not only that, but that I could offer writers the same services these companies offer (editorial, cover design, typesetting, file creation, even distribution to more than 35,000 retail outlets) and from a much more personal approach. Since Querelle has the means to publish, and because we’re doing just two books a year, it made sense that we would offer authors the same professional services we offer the writers we acquire and publish under the Querelle banner. I can now offer everyone a good home for their work when they’re ready. (For more details, please visit our site.)
How then is Querelle a departure from Magnus, or not, in terms of its publishing mission/aesthetics?
When it comes to content, wherever I’ve worked my priority has been to publish quality LGBT literature, and by quality I don’t necessarily mean high art. Yes, I have published books for a more upscale audience, so to speak, but the books not intended for that readership are no less valuable to me. I find that people frequently look down on erotica and sex writing in general. In fact, when I tell strangers I publish gay books, they can jump to the conclusion that I’m talking about pornography and be automatically dismissive. I continue to embrace sex writing as essential because it tells us about our lives as queer people. So to some degree Querelle’s mission will look a lot like Magnus’s when I ran it.
In terms of a mission, Querelle and Magnus LLC are also alike. I’ve said the role of both presses is to celebrate and challenge our views of LGBT life through literature. The celebrating part comes easy—as a marginalized group, we want to show the world we’re wonderful—but I like the word challenge because it calls into question our assumptions as a community, such as the notion that everyone is white or looking to settle down in a relationship or that sexual promiscuity is immature. My work over the years hasn’t always challenged these assumptions, but I hope that someone looking at my history as an editor would see a thread of quiet subversion.
What sort of titles are you seeking to publish?
Mainly nonfiction, with an eye toward a commercial market. I seldom acquire a book with the intention of selling only to gay readers. I prefer works that are broad enough to cross over into other audiences while not watering down gay life. For example, one of my first titles from Querelle is The Faun of Grey Gardens, Jerry Torre’s touching memoir (written with Tony Maietta) about the years he spent with “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” in their now-famous mansion chronicled in the acclaimed documentary film Grey Gardens. Fans will recall Jerry as the teenage caretaker, and his stories about life with the Beales before the filmmakers came along, the weeks of shooting Grey Gardens (Little Edie insisted on a musical number and got it), and how the Beales’s strange and private world changed with the movie’s release allow readers to see the film in a new, revealing light. I was so moved by Jerry’s story—the lives behind and beyond the movie—that I’ve been talking about it continuously since I first read it. There’s a hilarious story about Little Edie being courted by Howard Hughes back when she was a debutante, but she decided to stop seeing him because, as she told her mother, “He’s just too crazy.” There’s also a wonderful scene about the day Jacqueline Kennedy showed up at the house unannounced to help her aunt and cousin, but Little Edie defiantly wouldn’t allow her inside for reasons known only to her. The book is due out in June, timed for the new production of the Grey Gardens musical in Los Angeles later this year.
I’d love to see more memoirs, biographies, histories, self-help, or most areas of nonfiction. Of course there’s also room for exceptional fiction, too. Chuck and I are especially excited about discovering new voices. I’ve published quite a few and love the enthusiasm of first-time authors. It keeps publishing fun. Submissions can be emailed to [email protected].
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/03/13/don-weise-on-his-new-publishing-endeavor-querelle-press/#sthash.Vy3Kwrbx.dpuf
Beijing Comrades is a beautifully written love story that features characters who are fully developed, complex, and believably human. (A reviewer must sometimes be forgiven for coming straight to the point.) The book is remarkable for this realistically rendered romance, its explicit sexual encounters, and the elaborate, heartbreaking power-plays between the characters. Handong Chen, a powerful businessman in late-1980s China, and Lan Yu, the bright but naïve architecture student whom Handong tries to control like a concubine, remind us of people we have known. We feast on a rich slice of Chinese culture while watching these men grow over a ten-year period. And we submit to the suspenseful drama of political upheaval surrounding the 1989 Tian’anmen Square massacre, which plays a vital role in the love story.
A beautiful tale, well told, can be sabotaged if it arrives in the reader’s life embedded in a book that the world considers socially, politically, and culturally “important.” How many of us have avoided writers like Colm Tóibín or Virginia Woolf because of their reputations as—Yawn!—“important authors,” only to stumble eventually across wonderfully accessible books like The Story of the Night or Mrs. Dalloway?
Thus, I have been determined to introduce this review with what is truly important to me—that Beijing Comrades is a good read, an inspiring and tender but unpredictable love story, rendered very gracefully into English. But now I must acknowledge that this—the only English translation since the book’s original 1998 online publication, a feature film adaptation, and two print editions—does indeed happen to be an “important” publishing event. Beijing Comrades is both a valuable piece of global gay history and a political phenomenon.
With the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party adopted the Soviet template and treated homosexuality as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. Gay people were harshly punished during the 1960s national purge of the Cultural Revolution. Vaguely defined “hooliganism,” laws employed biblical-sounding condemnations of same-sex acts and equated them with prostitution. These laws were repealed in 1997, but many LGBT people in China continue to live in fear of blackmail and ruin. Ancestor-worship officially ended in China in 1949, together with the abolition of institutional religion. But ancient tradition, which continues to dictate that a child’s primary duty is to provide heirs, embitters many families against their gay offspring, and causes them grief for these children—who, according to the tradition, will grow old with no one to care for them.
Gore Vidal admonished us to remember that “sex is politics,” and Beijing Comrades starkly brings home this simple dynamic. Handong and Lan Yu must navigate the treacherous waters where money and love crash on the rocks of a society newly acknowledging the realities of wealth and inequality.
Handong’s exalted social position tragically blinds him to the possibility of loving another man in any way that isn’t primarily physical, emotionally exploitative, and founded on financial inequality. Lan Yu, his young lover, is determined to maintain his autonomy and self-respect, and must resist the older man’s attempts to buy his love, even as his own love for Handong deepens.
Handong narrates the book, and thus controls how we see him. He is a man accustomed to carefully managing his relationships and everything else he touches. He lets us see his control begin to crack, when his love for Lan Yu surprises and even frightens him, and our understanding of his panic catches us off guard. Unlike most control freaks in literature, he earns our empathy. In Lolita, Humbert’s self-awareness appalls us. Here, Handong’s gives us sad hope. He describes to us how he ridiculed Lan Yu’s political fervor, then agonized over the fate of the students at Tian’anmen.
*
The Chinese government continues today to suppress any mention, online or in print, of the events of June 4, 1989, when troops opened fire on unarmed student pro-democracy demonstrators. By official tally, the soldiers killed 291 demonstrators—but, according to observers, as many as 3,000 people died. Beijing Comrades covers the Tian’anmen massacre in personal detail. What first caught the attention of the West were televised images of young people erecting a 30-foot statue from styrofoam and plaster—the “Goddess of Democracy,” who bore a striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. We watched those students camped in Beijing’s central square, and in horror, on live television, we saw them being beaten and shot. The TV broadcasts abruptly stopped. In those days before the internet and camera phones, reporters used fax machines to send reports to worldwide news organizations. We learned that the bodies of the martyred students were piled together, soaked with gasoline, and burned.
Among the many things we take for granted in an open society is the freedom to pursue notoriety. When an author publishes under a pseudonym, our Western drive for recognition is confused. Why does someone go to the trouble of writing a book only to put an assumed name on it?
The author’s pen-name, Bei Tong, is a shortened version of “Beijing Tongzhi”—incorporating the word for “comrade” that roughly translates as “same aspiration” and, increasingly, is used to mean “gay,” in the way that we in the U.S. use “family” to make the same implication. Whoever the real Bei Tong may be, he or she is not playing coy like Stephen King and other successful Western writers who launch fresh franchises under their pen names. Beijing Comrades may be a collaborative effort, the work of a collective called “Queer Comrades,” whose website announces that it is “China’s only non-profit LGBT webcast.” The website of the book’s English-language publisher, The Feminist Press at City University of New York, explains that “the pseudonymous author’s real-world identity has been a subject of debate since the story was first published on a gay Chinese website over a decade ago.”
The book’s title, like the author’s pen-name, works as code. In the way that “Boston Marriage” and “Fellow Traveler” have long held special meanings for select U.S. readers, meanings obscure to the uninitiated, “Beijing Comrades” refers to an understanding of “homosexual lovers” in contemporary Chinese culture.
The book’s translator, Scott E. Myers, traces in his introductory note the twists and turns of Beijing Comrade’s online Chinese-language edition, the two subsequent Chinese print editions, and the 2001 film Lan Yu, which was based on the online edition of the book and honored at China’s first LGBTQ film festival. Rather than settle on a single edition of the book for his translation, Myers carefully culled material from the original online manuscript, with its raw sexuality, while drawing on the maturity of the characters that he found in the two print versions, from which the author had removed some explicit sex scenes possibly in the hope of winning government approval for publication. Finally, he included new material that the author submitted to him only for the English-language edition—presumably through email, because Myers claims not to know whether Bei Tong is a man or a woman. For this reader, the translator’s devotion was well worth his considerable effort.
The book, then, is a record of social upheaval and evolution, and Myers shows us its vital place in Chinese culture and history. But let us not forget that if the book were poorly written, and told the story of unbelievable characters engaged in inconceivable endeavors, it would be tedious to read, however “important” a role it might play in the history of LGBT rights in China. Instead, it is a book from which we can learn much about Chinese culture even while we identify with its human themes. The book educates us, certainly, but it also entertains, moves, and thrills us.
*
In an erudite afterword, professor Petrus Liu of Singapore’s Yale-NUS College analyzes the book’s “cultural politics” and its role in defining an entire generation. He considers Beijing Comrades, with its “complex cultural fantasy of the separability of human connectedness (gay or straight) from economic entanglements,” a “refreshing work that covers uncharted territory in Chinese queer writing.”
Analyzes of this sort surely will help guarantee that Beijing Comrades will be read and discussed, and even taught in cross-cultural queer studies courses, years from now. But the universal themes, and the deeply personal rendering of the story, endear the characters to us in ways quite distinct from the book’s importance as a monument of literature and queer theory.
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/03/13/beijing-comrades-by-bei-tong/#sthash.JyKZYCOu.dpuf
It could be argued that this book doesn’t count as an “LGBTQI book,” so to speak, and part of me agrees—I, too, get frustrated when LBGTQI-oriented spaces feature icons, allies and vaguely hot men over folks in the community. I do have few arguments in favor of me writing about it. The first is that Michelle came up through the New York ball scene of the 1980s and 90’s and she knows she owes her career to her fellow voguers. The second is that this site does queer looks on cis/het literature and features those considered icons/major figures from time to time. The third is that one major target audience of this book is gay men.
Besides, an advice book is very “new year, new me.”
For the uninitiated: Michelle Visage is RuPaul’s right-hand gal and fellow judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race and has recently made a turn on a season of Celebrity Big Brother over in the UK. I personally don’t care for some of RuPaul’s politics and the quality of Drag Race as of late, however, I still maintain a very special affection for Michelle. Perhaps it’s because we’re both of the bridge-and-tunnel sort, but from different sides. Perhaps it’s because she reminds me of aunts and other relatives on the Italian-American side of my family. Perhaps it’s because she’s very accessible, either on social media or on tour. Perhaps it’s simply because I know some of her story already.
The story of the lady who becomes Michelle Visage begins with her being born to a young Joanne in New Jersey and being adopted by Marty and Arlene of South Plainfield. She graduates high school with dreams of becoming a Broadway star and attends the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. Encouraged by her mother to get out in the world and into the clubs, she goes to The Underground and ends up finding her crowd which includes Cesar Valentino and Willi Ninja. Soon, she becomes a member of the House of Magnifique and competes in the Vogue and Face categories. (Her stage name comes from the fact some of her friends used to call her “Cara,” Spanish for “face.” Tired of other people thinking her name was actually Cara, she went with the French translation: Visage.)
From there she gets noticed by the Queen of NYC nightlife, Susanne Bartsch. While working for her, she first encounters her future friend RuPaul, and Madonna sees her and friends perform at the first Love Ball. After college, she gets a day job working as a receptionist for a clothing showroom, doing auditions when she can. Hearing from a friend about a girl group being formed, she wows the producers and thus Seduction is born. The group lasts a year, due to in-group tensions and touring with the infamous Milli Vanilli, but puts out the hit single “Two to Make It Right.” (There’s also her stint with The S.O.U.L. S.Y.S.T.E.M. and the hit “It’s Gonna Be a Lovely Day.”) Looking for work, she almost auditions to be a stripper, but ends up as an emcee for the strip joint instead. Through her connections, she lands a radio gig that leads to various other radio and television hosting gigs.
Eventually, she and RuPaul find each other again and start working together. However, when the chance to be on Drag Race comes around, her boss doesn’t let her take time off to be on it, because he doesn’t want to “harm the station’s image.” The situation temporarily sours her and Ru’s relationship. During this time, she also suffers a major anxiety attack that prompts her to change some things in her life. When the chance to be a judge comes around again, she’s able to get it with a little pep talk from her friend, Leah Remini. The rest you’ve probably you’ve seen on television.
Michelle is arguably on her third career, having been a singer, then a radio and TV host and now a TV personality. (Most people usually only have one or two, at best.) I think it’s inarguable that she’s a celebrity now that she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, since it’s right there in the name. But even if Drag Race wasn’t a breakout hit, she would still be a gay cult figure / icon, only lesser known.
What is interesting to me is that she has become popular during this period of renewed interest in LGBTQI-originated and oriented nightlife of the 80s and 90s with a new reverence for its importance. While she is most known because of the show, she is also part of RuPaul’s and World of Wonder’s Oprah-esque media empire that includes and features personalities from the club scene such as James St. James. Her career has come full circle in a way.
But beyond my musings is an important question: Will you enjoy this book? Depends.
Do you like Drag Race? Because reading this book is a bit like marathon-ing all seasons of the show, even All-Stars. It’s a show that hasn’t met a pun or innuendo it won’t make and Ms. Visage is no slouch in this department either. (Another reason she feels like an aunt of mine.) Sometimes these jokes fall flat on the page, because what often makes these jokes work is how they are said. Arguably, I’m just making the case for listening to the audiobook version.
Also, are you in the mood for advice? There’s good and bad advice, but good portion of advice’s power comes from a person being open to it. Michelle’s advice ranges from general platitudes with a fabulous twist to the very practical. It helps that her “diva rules” are given alongside the story of her life so far. It’s not presented as “Do this!” but instead as “Here’s what I did in this situation, it might work for you too.”
Occasionally, I found the “my gays” and “my people” rhetoric a bit tired; it made me feel like a brand was trying engage with an audience. However, when it came to specific people in her past, they are handled with more sincerity. She recognizes that she—a straight white girl from Joisey—was taken in by folks of vastly different circumstances than hers and writes of her friends of the balls and piers with both affection and honesty.
But, dear reader, let me tell you that something magical happened to me after finishing this book. For the most part I enjoyed the book, even if it’s a bit eyeroll-worthy with the deluge of puns, innuendos and references, and containing some side-eye worthy phrasing. However, in the process of writing the review, I thought about Visage’s interesting career path. A little bit unsure of my own next steps, looking at her career helped put mine in perspective; I learned that a career path doesn’t necessarily need to be in a straight line to be successful. And for that, Michelle, I thank you.
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/oped/03/02/michelle-visages-the-diva-rules-serves-up-advice-from-a-queerly-tinted-career/#sthash.B4TY8Ekc.dpuf
In 1969, queer children’s/YA librarian John Donovan had his ground-breaking novel, I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip published by Harper. It was the first book I, as a twelve-year-old, had read that in any way raised the issue of homosexuality, though it never did so with that word or any of its synonyms. But its story of Davy Ross, living with his single mother, who forms a strong friendship with another boy that culminates in a drunken kiss (and the requisite subsequent death of his beloved dog in a car accident) broke barriers for what was called the “juvenile” market—and I remember a friendly and sympathetic youth librarian handing it to me to read, without a word, other than, “I’d like to know what you think of this.” I am eternally grateful to her forever for this act.
Donovan’s novel became a kind of template for a couple of generations of queer-driven novels aimed at youth readers that required some kind of tragic climax, even if one or more of the protagonists lived to walk into the sunlight as a secure, gay teen. Justin Sayre’s new novel, Husky, I am delighted to say, takes the archetype of the tween-age boy coming to an understanding of his sexuality (and gender-nonconforming personality and avocations) into a new era. What is so exciting about Sayre’s novel is that it does so in a way that is accessible for and feels genuine in its representation of the experiences of an audience of boy (and, no doubt, girl) readers difficult to write for on sexual identity: the tween-agers. Husky is not a “chapter book” (the current term for beginner novels aimed at primary grade students), such as Alex Gino’s equal revolutionary novel about a transgirl, George, nor does it delve, except in very appropriately tentative and almost preconscious ways into the romantic plots of the typical YA queer novel, such as those of David Levithan and others. Not unlike Donovan’s novel, it barely mentions the words “homosexual” or “gay,” and then not until the last pages.
Husky tells the story of Davis, an overweight, smart, likeable, and genuinely decent boy on the cusp of facing middle school, where a whole new set of rules, rituals, and priorities face him and his cohort of friends, all girls who accept and love him for the non-masculine (but cis-gendered) boy he is. He lives with his single mother, his irascible granny (who, for once, is not merely a plot device or cliché, but a genuinely multidimensional character, amusing and annoying at the same time), in Brooklyn, where he must help out with the family bakery and confront his mother’s developing romance with a sympathetic male worker in the bakery. Davis follows his own drummer in many admirable ways—he is already a baby opera queen and does not try to hide his love of the extravagant and emotional dimensions of that art form. Most difficult for him is the transition from the comparatively undifferentiated world of the early years of school, where his all-female posse does not make him the object of ridicule (or comparatively little) to the more gender-polarized jungle of middle school (and what is to come beyond), where the rules of boyhood and girlhood are more dictatorially articulated and enforced. We feel Davis’ pain when new girl, Allegra, who would appear to be the “mean girl,” enters the picture and plans a “spa party” for one of Davis’ best friends and to which Davis is not invited. He is by no means shunned by his mostly sympathetic and warm female friends, but they are themselves growing into the world of attraction and flirtation with boys, a world Davis cannot enter. One thing that is refreshing in Sayre’s use of Davis as a first-person narrator is that he makes it clear that what Davis is experiencing is not guilt about “unspeakable” desires, but confusion as to where in the world he might fit and find his people (without giving away too much of the plot, safe to say that the novel hints at possibilities Davis may have in front of him, if he indeed comes to a gay identity). And even the supposedly “mean girl” has a few surprises that remind Davis (and us) not to assume too much about who is in our corner and who is not. Even the putative bullies Davis encounters are more thoughtless than malicious (and recognize their thoughtlessness and apologize for it), and the novel ends on a positive note, providing hope for our hero and for the young readers who may identify with him (as this 58 year old reader did).
Sayre has a wonderful feel for how boys this age—particularly boys who are likely to identify at some point as gay—see the world and how they struggle to make sense of it through their own narratives. There is not a false note in the writing—the voice feels so real that we can hear Davis talking to us and thinking to himself. It is refreshing to find a novel which does “push” a boy this age into romantic and sexual situations he may developmentally not be ready for, but which allows his journey into selfhood to seem natural and unforced: there is melodramatic car crash or suicide from which Davis needs to contemplate whether he might be gay. Middle school and its challenges does a perfectly good job of that on its own.
I wish the twelve-year-old me (who was also confined to the “Husky” section at Sears) had had Davis rather than Davy as my model of working through the difficulties of becoming a sexual and gendered self (as much as I admire Donovan’s bravery). And an added plus: no dogs are run-over in the making of this novel! In its own brief and somewhat quiet way, Husky is a revolutionary book in queer youth literature, precisely because it understands the lived experience of the boy at his specific age. And we older readers may look back with some gentle laughter, a few unexpected tears, and deep admiration for protagonist and author.
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/12/23/husky-by-justin-sayre/#sthash.uu6aYqIx.dpuf
Do you remember the first book that changed the way you looked at the world? The one that made you question the status quo and your place in it? For Juliet, a chubby 19-year-old Puerto Rican queer girl from the Bronx, it’s Raging Flower: Empowering your Pussy by Empowering your Mind by Harlowe Brisbane. Juliet comes out to her family just before leaving to intern with Harlowe in Portland. She’s excited to learn more about radical feminism, women’s bodies, and the actual practice of being a badass queer lady, even if it means spending the summer all the way across the country from her girlfriend, Lanie.
Juliet Takes a Breath is the kind of book that gets the bittersweet pain and longing of growing up exactly right. It’s about the reality of your heroes being human, falling in and out of love, the fierce unconditional love of family, and learning to navigate the world in a way that allows you to retain your humanity. There’s a lot to love about this book, and especially about Juliet, who is at once fierce and vulnerable. None of the characters are bad people. They’re all complicated and sometimes they do things that hurt other people. There are a lot of interesting take-aways from this incredible debut–lots about white privilege and unintentional racism especially within feminist circles. Rivera makes a strong point about education and class within social justice communities as well, when Phen, Harlowe’s previous intern, scoffs at her for not knowing what a preferred gender pronoun is.
Juliet builds a lot of relationships during her time in Portland–with a cute librarian, with Harlowe’s primary partner, Maxine and Maxine’s secondary partner, Zaira. And it’s all a whole lot to take in–the questions about identity, gender, race, and relationship status. Rivera has done an impressive job of capturing the confusion and tender distress that comes with joining a community of people who are older and more experienced than you. To say nothing of the familial relationships that are often forged by arguments and hard times.
One of the most important things the book addresses is the racial dynamics in Juliet’s relationships with both Lanie and Harlowe. How do you react when the person you’re in love with won’t introduce you to their parents? Is it because Lanie’s afraid of how her parents will react? Or because she doesn’t want to introduce them to a girlfriend who isn’t white? And how will Juliet reconcile her place within the feminist community surrounding Harlowe’s book when its primary demographic seems to be white hippies? What does that imply about Harlowe?
This book was a lot of fun to read, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that means it is fluff. Rivera does a great job of illustrating the ways in which contemporary feminism fails to be intersectional, while offering her own perspective on how to begin the arduous task of fixing it. She uses Juliet’s relationship with Harlowe (and, to a lesser degree, Harlowe’s relationships with Maxine and Zaira) to imply that a great place to start is with clear and transparent communication. As with most coming of age stories, there isn’t much in the way of a driving plot–the action is in character development and growth. This is something the author does well. Her dialog crackles with wit and good humor, and her landscape descriptions are brilliantly coded to compare the diversity of the Bronx and the lack thereof in Portland. The title is also a clever nod to the main character’s asthma. Juliet Takes a Breath is an impressive first effort from Gabby Rivera, whose perfect prose and gorgeous characters took my breath away.
Juliet Takes a Breath
By Gabby Rivera
Riverdale Avenue Books
Paperback, 9781626012516, 193 pages
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/02/21/juliet-takes-a-breath-by-gabby-rivera/#sthash.640H3l0k.dpuf
The distinctive voice narrating Black Deutschland compels an audience to listen. Coupled with the foregrounded erudition and the seen-it-all, felt-it-all, tried-it-all, and lost-it-all world-weariness, there’s a nocturnal theatricality in ample evidence, a stylized posture that would not seem out of place in a cabaret performance. “Guten abend, meine Damen und Herren,” the well-past-youthful performer might begin, spotlit on a bar stool but otherwise unaccompanied on a tiny curtained stage. “Let me tell you of my former days, of my not untroubled stay in a grey and wintry German city, of fleeting love and enduring loss, of the night the Wall fell. Long ago, I foolishly dreamed of being Christopher Isherwood’s spiritual heir and becoming a rootless stranger in Berlin who seduced tough German boys. But. Ja, natürlich, there’s a but. We’re all aware of the best laid schemes of mice and men. With that perennial theme now introduced, drink up! Let your time here tonight be well spent as I reveal my artful tale of woe.”
That voice is intriguing all the more because Pinckney doesn’t reveal much about its circumstances relative to the episodes being described. Belonging to Jedediah ‘Jed’ Goodfinch circa 2014, the voice is recalling a shuffled series of events (from childhood to the late 80s) that mainly took place over a handful of years, right after Jed left behind family, excesses of drugs and alcohol, rehab, failure, shame, and a completed but best forgotten stage of adulthood in Chicago. What happened between 1989, the year at which Jed’s reminisces formally conclude, and the present day he narrates from remains a mystery. He’s clearly looking back without much nostalgia or even fondness at his younger self, his bad, misguided, and impulsive choices, and the indifferent cities that housed him. Despite closing in on sixty and having moved on, he’s also stalled and solitary, “one of the black American leftovers who sit by themselves” in the once-divided city. The mature man who’s scrutinizing actions over two decades in the past appears ambivalent—disdainful and unforgiving without a doubt and yet drawn to sifting through the rubble nonetheless. It’s dramatically fruitful strategy on Pinckney’s part.
To simplify a complex and multifaceted story, Pinckney’s second novel (his first, High Cotton, appeared in 1992) traces an iffy journey of questionable rehabilitation. “I may have fallen apart in the city of my birth,” Jeb remarks, “but the city of my rebirth would see me put back together.” Beckoned by the glowing Mercedes star in the city’s Zoo Quarter, Jeb expects to become “the black American expatriate,” a historically unburdened, if imaginary, figure he admires. This former fat kid with a voracious taste for white wine and cocaine is thirty-three days sober. A drop out who’s no example of “Negro Achievement,” a quality much praised (and desired) by his politically active and expectant parents, he arrives with romantic faith in “Isherwood promises” of freedom grasped and erotic desires realized. Jeb’s sure he’s about to begin an “adult life” marked by seriousness, accomplishment, and cultured successes.
Soon hired to work on a book with an acclaimed architect who’s spearheading West Berlin’s makeover, Jeb resides with his imposing, well-connected, and AIDS-fearing cousin Cello and senses he’s at “the gates of international cool.”
Nothing’s that easy, of course. Frightened by his weaknesses for “disco trash” and intoxicants (but proud that he’s no longer “white wine’s bitch”), Jeb turns his back on the gay “city of orgies and joy.” Sober, though, he “disappeared into the cushions”; he rightfully questions what the monkishness is in fact attaining: “I had not had a drink in more than a year, but I was twenty-eight years old and I had not been naked with another human being in an even longer time than I’d not had a drink.”
Despite AA meetings, A-list connections, and myriad good intentions, he begins sleeping from couch to couch and visiting the ChiChi, a never-closing bar specializing in “life-changing mistakes”: “It was the sort of place where people experiencing a bad night strayed in to finish things off with meltdowns, blackouts, fistfights, seizures. Sex was just a message afterthought, something to do when daylight hit.” Opportunities slow, friendships and family ties explode, drug use spikes upward, and “screwing above [his] sex grade,” Jeb loses a lover.
Clever, arch, bitter, thoughtful, sophisticated, and delightfully jaded, Jeb-the-elder makes what could be a real downer of a downward trajectory into a mesmerizing performance. Bad things keep happening to difficult, petty, conflicted, vain, and contradictory people, and thanks to Jeb’s carefully modulated voice, the tangles are also human messes to savor.
Black Deutschland
By Darryl Pinckney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover, 9780374113810, 304 pp.
February 2016
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/02/13/black-deutschland-by-darryl-pinckney/#sthash.MH2z4rXd.dpuf
In the 1970s, editor and writer Jack Fritscher offered solace to masculine identified gay men around the country within the pages of the San Francisco based magazine, Drummer. His aim was to inform and empower the closeted readers to exit the solitude of their leather fantasies and seek real life encounters with other men. It was a publication that liberated generations to come by offering an image that they could finally identify with.
“There was leather culture in San Francisco for years and years,” says Fritscher, “but it really grew exponentially as leather folk from around the country sought sexual refugee immigrant status from the creeping fundamentalism that was pulling off these Anita Bryant anti-gay bills.” With this mass migration of men was an influx of radical sexual behavior imported from all over the country. Fritscher frequented the bars and baths to observe the regional behavior and keep an eye out for new trends that others haven’t thought of, which he included in the magazine.
As a teenager, the young Fritscher had searched for a refuge of his own to give context to his sexual identity. “At eighteen in 1957, I began coming out in magazine shops and bookstores in Chicago and Greenwich Village, camouflaging my emerging queerness via the more acceptable pop-culture labels of ‘Beatniks’ and ‘Hippies,’” he says.
Like many youth of the time, he rebelled against the strict conformity of the 50s. In 1958, he dyed his hair red, bought a book on yoga, and walked around Greenwich Village looking for the Beatniks. “I found them, I became one, and I was happy, which is one of the reasons why I couldn’t wait to get to San Francisco in 1961 when I had my first chance.”
One of Fritscher’s many inspirations was Malcolm Boyd, a radical Beatnik priest who read poetry to packed coffee houses. Boyd was named one of the 100 most important young men and women in the United States by Life magazine in 1962. Having become a Catholic seminary student himself, Frischer was excited to see his vocations as writer and priest come together.
From Catholic seminary to San Francisco, Fritscher continued the search for an image to identify with. There was then yet another cultural shift: “The Beats of North Beach begat the Hippies of the Haight who begat Folsom Street and its cultural ‘roots’ magazine of record, Drummer.”
Having gone through various iterations, Drummer’s first issue was in June 20th, 1975 in Los Angeles. The following year, publisher John Embry fled to San Francisco after the L.A.P.D. busted the Drummer Slave Auction for practicing “slavery.” Friend and founding San Francisco art director, Al Shapiro, introduced Embry to Fritscher. “Embry had arrived knowing no one in the City, and we two seemed to know everyone from the bars, baths, and bruncheries,” says Fritscher. It was a no brainer—he was hired in March 1977, and mostly wrote issues 18 to 33.
Drummer
“[Drummer] was kind of an instruction manual on how you might maneuver your own ‘homomasculine’ identity in a world of straight people who didn’t believe there were masculine gay men,” explains Fritscher. “Drummer was a magazine of gender, stating, identifying and defending masculine identity by masculine identified homosexuals who nobody expected to come out of the closest because nobody knew they existed.”
Fritscher and Shapiro pulled the L.A. panties off Drummer, as he puts it, and pulled up its San Francisco leather pants. In the process, they successfully transformed Drummer from a bar rag into a leather magazine for national and international consumption, helping to create the very leather culture that it reported on.
“I tried to catch that lightning in a jar in Drummer,” he says as he reminisces about the city’s leather-sex scene. “It really was wild; it was beyond anything any of us had experienced.”
They knew it couldn’t last forever though, figuring they’d either outgrow it or they’d grow old but it was the AIDS plague that finally slammed the window shut on that unique time and place.
“We were trying to get over being the best little boys in the world,” says Fritscher. The collection of writers that were the Drummer salon were sexual soldiers, inspiring the curious and closeted with their “war tales” that were printed in the pages of the magazine. They were doing what the majority of people were too terrified to do, just like true radicals would. And it all happened in 1970s San Francisco—an era lost.
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/01/20/jack-fritscher-on-editing-drummer-magazine-in-the-1970s/#sthash.pXSb8T8Z.dpuf
There’s a postcard I sent to a friend once, which reads: “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.” If karma is a boomerang, nostalgia is a noose. The urge to look back, revisit the past, to try to relive or unravel it, is often the dangerous realm of unfinished business. Paul Russell’s startling and incisive new novel, Immaculate Blue, brings back Anatole, Lydia, Chris, and Leigh–the four characters he introduced in his first novel, The Salt Point, as they come together almost 30 years later to exhume remnants of their past with each other.
The convocation takes place over preparations for the wedding of Anatole to his future husband, Rafa. The setting is once again Poughkeepsie, New York, the place where all four of the friendships began, changed, and survived, though not un-scarred. They each loved someone who didn’t love them back, or who did but couldn’t say it, or were loved and then left abruptly. And now each of them are still trying to understand the constancy with which love is never what you expect; that perhaps it only drops down from the immaculate blue. And what better place than the packed arena of a wedding for trusts to falter, revelations to be had, or old wounds to reopen. Russell has the insight and instinct to use with precision the gathering’s convolutions, eroticism, and just-under-the-surface heat in which all the characters come together in a potent, surprising, and also humorous night.
The young and beautiful Leigh was the great catalyst in their early lives; the single being that would change each of them, as Anatole muses:
A boy came between us. Can we even remember his name? But of course we can. At the time he seemed as auspicious as a wounded angel fallen out of Heaven. Our Boy of the Mall, Anatole christened him. How vividly he remembers that first glimpse, one September afternoon on the pedestrian mall, Leigh on a bench eating an ice cream bar. He wore jeans, a white t-shirt, loafers without socks. His profile was perfect.
When we last saw him in The Salt Point, Anatole, laughing through his tears, broken by love but filled with it too, drunkenly jumps up and down repeatedly answering back his complaining downstairs neighbor’s voice: “I’m just trying to stay alive up here! Don’t you understand? I’m just trying to stay alive!” And that too, is what everyone is still trying to do as the new novel’s prismatic sense of reconnaissance meets the surgical precision with which each of the friends conduct various autopsies of each other’s hearts and actions. But it is that very need to live, to go forward to the future in whatever capacity and shape they have now found it. That is the real testament to what was so important as they look behind them. The road ahead is always in the rear-view mirror.
As the novel opens, the years of music by Bronski Beat and Jimmy Somerville have given way to Lady Gaga; trickle-down economics have done their damage in Poughkeepsie and elsewhere, with occasional hamlets of wealth. Irony and caution are the better barometers of all states of affairs. Anatole is still working at Reflexions, which he has made a successful business, still coloring and cutting the hair of his “republican wives” heads. Lydia, now married and with a son–the deaf, beautiful, perceptive, and young musician Caleb–enjoys the mundane though happy constructs of being a wife and mother; she has earned her hetero-normalcy by never giving up her individuality. Chris, invited by Anatole in the second it takes nostalgia to hit the ‘send’ button too quickly, is now a private contractor for oil-controlled, covert military operations in Port Harcourt, in Nigeria. He’s seen his gore. He watched “. . . two soldiers–eighteen or nineteen–handsome as all get out, kids bored and scared and very far from home,” videotaping a lip-synch to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.” Three days later, “the prettier of the two,” steps on an IED, blowing off his legs and genitals. And Leigh? Our Boy of the Mall? Leigh is still the mystery of the novel; the one in the back of everyone’s mind, and in the front of all of their suddenly reawakened attention to the past. Immaculate Blue is really Chris’s story. Like the eponymous music store of the book’s title, it is he who is the center now of everyone’s questions, musings, and observations; where visitors gather to peruse his collection of thoughts. Chris is defined by observation: watching and being watched, whether with the boys he hires to have sex in front of him, or the beautiful young Caleb and Elian at the wedding reception, Chris is the constant eye; holding his cards close but always on the lookout for fire, for the sound of guns–that thing the Nigerians name “scatter,” to mean the complete ruin of all things. He always needs a way out. His chapters, which Russell titles “Night Music,” are startling codas to the other chapters. In them, Chris reveals the past–his own great mistake in love that predicated the result of all his future interactions. As he ponders, upon finally at last meeting up with Leigh–no longer Our Boy of the Mall, or the It Boy, “Is it possible to be aroused by nostalgia alone?”
As the progression of the wedding nears its penultimate revelations, the characters spend time with each other in a variety of settings. Each of them grasps a chance to know something, or to get information from someone else, or to be told a secret. They parse out old loves, pay homage to wrong moves and recalcitrant affections. Because they are all looking at the past, they often cannot reconcile the faces and actions with the people they’ve now become. What once seemed so close in each other–the cognizance of the known thing that mattered, even if it was pain–is something they can’t help but revisit. They can’t change the past; they can only look at it with new eyes.
Paul Russell’s innate knowledge of these characters is so much of what makes the novel compelling. Immaculate Blue can be read alone, and it suffers no missing pieces. Yet, read as a sequel, it contains the dimensional depth of a family album: the history there, as people look at themselves, at a moment in time, when they were on their way to becoming someone else. Russell populates the story with some extraordinary smaller characters–all of whom, in even the smallest context, lend the book a progressive drama, color, and superb narrative.
The main characters come to their final acceptances: Lydia and Anatole have joined the ranks of the wed. Chris and Leigh, however, are still the outsiders. There is an extraordinary final meeting between Leigh and Chris, in which questions of who loved whom, and why or why not, are set to be answered as they ineluctably veer toward the events of the past. But answers are nowhere to be found. Sex is still an option. But it will be the one thing that brings everything to ruin. Chris, able to outmaneuver his present, in sex or liquor, cannot outmaneuver the past–“. . . sorrows of a certain kind have always been an aphrodisiac.” He looks with a slanted eye at everything and realizes how, among everything that has moved forward, he’s still locked into his running. Russell shows us with such depth, the essential human emotion that has taken all of the friends to their current state of the heart: years and distance hold few things intact. One cannot ask the past to reveal anything, it can only offer up its shards. You can’t ask, “Did you love me?” without the risk of hearing the answer. With Immaculate Blue, Paul Russell brings to a close four memorable friendships that loved deeply enough to always risk its often faltering arrows–they still risk it as a means of trying to stay alive. It reminds us once again why he is one of our best gay novelists exploring the nature of the heart and its resting places.
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/01/25/immaculate-blue-by-paul-russell/#sthash.p3kXnXTb.dpuf
It’s not easy to have a tête-à-tête with writer Garth Greenwell. Not because his growing list of successes—articles in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and a short story in The Paris Review—have gone to head. On the contrary, he’s as warm and lighthearted as he is pensive.
No, the only reason it’s hard to have a sit down with Garth is because, at the time of this interview, he is living far away in Bulgaria. He was, however, in New York City during November 2015, and we took advantage of the situation to discuss his much anticipated debut novel, What Belongs to You(FSG), the follow-up to his novella Mitko. The novel is an emotionally charged exploration of lust and longing, that centers on the relationship between a gay American teacher living in Bulgaria and a charismatic local young hustler.
The conversation went on after the recorder was turned off, but here is what we got on record.
I think it’s fair to say What Belongs to You is a semi-autobiographical novel. To what extent?
That’s genuinely a hard question to answer. I mean, in some sense, the division between genres seems kind of arbitrary to me. Both fiction and nonfiction can be more or less interested in invention. Invention is less interesting to me as a writer; though I love it as a reader. It’s less interesting to me as a writer than trying to approach experience, whether imagined or not, in a way that goes into the greatest possible depth. So that’s more interesting to me than a fecundity of invention.
I’m drawn to books that play with a narrator who invokes the author, and that is certainly the case in What Belongs to You. I think all of the biographical facts we have about the narrator map onto my life more or less directly. And certainly it is in some way an attempt to put my experience of consciousness on the page. Part of the aesthetic pleasure I take from reading W.G Sebald, or Thomas Mann, in certain of his books, or Proust, is the pleasure of never being sure whether something is autobiographical or not. All of which I think sounds coy and not directly answering the question. But it does seem to be kind of an unanswerable question. I guess I would say this: the distinction for me that does feel meaningful between fiction and nonfiction is that nonfiction has a kind of greater allegiance to the truth, to a kind of fact-checkable truth. The reason that I call what I write fiction is that, in my book, when I make use of that kind of fact-checkable [information] it’s totally without allegiance to the truth.
You emailed me some stories that have recently appeared in other publications—The Paris Review for one—and you indicated that they are part of project that extends What Belongs to You. Can you elaborate on that?
Yes. The book I’m working on now is a collection of short stories, some of which I actually wrote in breaks between writing the three parts of the current novel. They’re in the same narrative voice, and they’re all set in Bulgaria. A character who appears in the third part of What Belongs to You, the narrator’s boyfriend, is a main character in many of these stories. A whole section [of the next book] will be about their relationship. So in that sense I am working on a book that does feel like the same project as What Belongs to You. I have no idea what will come after that book. I am drawn to writers whose work is in some ways one big book. To me, Sebald reads that way. Proust is another great example. That said, I also do love reading books that are deeply inventive. But right now, what I’m working on does seem like a continuation of the same project.
I think that What Belongs to You is really going to resonate with gay readers, partly because of its many insights about being gay, about desire, some of them downright philosophical. How did you arrive at such wonderful epiphanies?
There’s a weird writerly history with this book because I had never written fiction until “Mitko,” the first part of this novel. Before that, I’d only ever been a poet. I did an MFA in poetry 15 years ago, and half of a Ph.D. where I was focusing on poetry as a scholar. And so a lot of the writers who really shaped my sense of what I want to do in literature are poets. That said, even though I’d never studied fiction as a writer or a scholar, I’d always read novels voraciously.
I feel very strongly that this is a gay book and that it participates in a recognizable delineated tradition of gay writing, and that’s a tradition that has been absolutely crucial to me as a writer. I get impatient with people who say that placing a book in that kind of tradition is a limitation, that it diminishes a sense of a book’s universal reach. I think that is just wrong. I think the way that literature works is by deeply investing in individual experience as a way of reaching a kind of universal resonance. And I think that to ascribe diminishment to that is nothing other than homophobia, really—a sense that in some way queer experience has less access to the universal than straight experience or white male experience, etc…. There’s no question to me that the gay tradition is important to this book and to me those crucial writers are people like Edmund White, people like Proust. And then there’s also a way in which the novel, I hope, is participating in the tradition of the novel of consciousness, which is that philosophical bit. Which is also, really, when you look at it, a very queer tradition. Proust is a forefather here. Henry James is queer and wrote novels of consciousness. Thomas Mann, too. The three prose stylists who I think of as my kind of holy trinity are Thomas Bernhard, who also is quite queer, and then W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marias, who is a living Spanish writer. The three of them take a fairly European tradition of the novel of consciousness and bring into it contemporary concerns with identity and with history in a way that feels very compelling to me. And also just in term of the shapes of their sentences, which I think are extraordinary.
What Belongs to You
The middle section of What Belongs to You is a single paragraph. There are lots of people who write block paragraph books, to me the two most important are Bernhard and the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. And a tradition of poetry quite queer that extends to devotional poetry from the 17th century, which is what I focused on a scholar, and the person who for me is the most important living American writer, Frank Bidart. My teacher at Washington University was Carl Phillips, who was very important to me, particularly in terms of thinking of the elasticity of English syntax. Henri Cole was a teacher of mine. I think he’s master. Those are some of the influences. And then going further back I think the ur-text for the novel of consciousness and the novel of consciousness approach through sexuality is Saint Augustine’s Confessions. That’s a book I lived with for a long time. Augustine makes a statement, interrogates it, and therefore remakes it; that motion of consciousness is something you find exquisitely in Proust, in James and in Elizabeth Bishop, in John Ashbery, and Frank Bidart, and Carl Phillips. That sense of a mind in motion, of someone who’s not making assertions but trying to feel his or her way forward through an understanding of experience—that’s the motion of mind I want to capture on the page.
The only writer you didn’t mention that I thought you might is D.H Lawrence.
That’s an interesting case. Why did you think that?
Because Lawrence, like James, though he has very different style, is concerned with desire and looks really deeply and psychologically into emotions and motivations as they’re mitigated by the power differentials.
That’s very true. I love Lawrence. When I was doing my PhD. general exams where we had to sit at a table with a professor who quizzed us on the history of literature from Beowulf to Salman Rushdie—a horrible experience. Actually it was fine. But during the preparation for it, one of the ways we kept ourselves sane was keeping a list of the hottest moments in English literature. And one of them is in Sons and Lovers and it’s when Paul has sex with an older woman in the bushes by the side of the road and they’re listening to people pass by. Which is hot enough. But the sexiest part of it is after the sex when he switches from calling her “you” to calling her “thou.” He goes into dialect. The whole temperature of their relationship changes. That’s one of the key moments in literature, given how such a small shift of addiction puts you in a different world. But I often feel that there’s a kind of confidence that Lawrence has in the experience of sex and the experience of desire. There’s a confidence about the rightness of desire and how desire becomes this source for transcendental meaning. And that’s just diametrically opposed to my experience which, you know, has always been an experience of desiring something I shouldn’t desire. And desire has always carried with it, for me…
Shame and guilt…
…shame and guilt! I was raised in Kentucky, first generation off the farm, so I don’t have to look far to see where that shame and guilt comes from. But even when you get past that part of it, the part about being raised in a deeply homophobic culture, I just feel deeply suspicious of the idea that the fact I desire something means that I have any kind of claim to it. Desire gives Lawrence access to this sort of self that is so incredibly authentic; it becomes mythic. Desire gives him access in a very affirmative way to this sort of universal assertion. For myself, desire gives me access, in this very complex and self-contradictory way, to the universal experience of ambivalence and doubt. In that way, I feel very different from him, but I love those books.
Poetry? Any plans for a book of poems or is it not where you’re at at the moment?
It’s not; I haven’t written a poem since I started writing prose. I went to Bulgaria in 2009 and the first couple of months I was there I finished this poetry manuscript that I had been working on for years. And it was after I finished it that I had this weird experience that I still don’t fully understand, of sort of hearing language that I knew would not work in the lines. And I started writing prose, not having any idea what I was doing. But it was clear to me when I finished the first piece of prose that it was better than any of the poems I’d written–that it, in a way, demolished the poems. And since then, really, everything has come to me in prose. It seems all the things I wanted to do in poetry [I was able] to do in prose. For a long time I felt really distant from poetry. And then, when I went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, in my first month in the town this totally bizarre thing happened which was I was set up with this poet, a Spanish poet named Luis Muñoz, who’s my boyfriend.
I didn’t know he’s a poet.
He is a poet and he’s actually a kind of fancy poet.
Fancy, meaning his style? Or fancy meaning a good publishing history?
He’s had a big career in Spain. And he’s really known in Spanish language poetry which I had no idea about it until I did that creepy Google-stalking thing and found all these articles about him. Iowa has one of three Spanish-language MFA programs in the United States. And Luis is the poetry professor in that program and he has this extraordinary unbelievable knowledge of the poetry of the Spanish tradition. I mean, he just quotes at impossible lengths the work of Federico Garcia Lorca. He introduced me to a whole sort of world of poetry that I had only the most glancing acquaintance with before knowing him, including poets who have become really deeply important to me. Being in a relationship with Luis is like having your hand on this live wire of poetry all the time.
I read your article on Spanish writer Pedro Lemebel and I haven’t read the one on A Little Life yet, because I want to finish reading the book first. But what about other projects that bring LGBT or LGBT-related voices forward? That seems to be an enterprise for you. Are you working on any other projects in this regard?
There are two things I sort of champion, and it’s great when they come together like they did in Lemebel, and they are gay literature and then literature in translation. I care deeply about those two things and I think American readers don’t care enough about them. So any chance I have to advocate for those writers is one I want to take. I don’t know if I have a sense of any large project. I always keep an eye out for any gay books that are coming out in hopes that they provoke me to write a piece in which I feel I can provide a kind of map for a body of work that seems significant to me and for readers who don’t even know the territory exists. That feels like a much more meaningful piece of writing for me than just a review.
I really feel that Lemebel is one of the greater writers of the 20th and early 21st centuries and that he is a heroic figure. His significance is absolutely recognized in the Spanish-speaking world. It’s not in the English-language world and I think that’s because even though his very great novel, My Tender Matador, is available in English, his real body of works were the crónicas he wrote over his entire working life and in which he really wrote about Santiago for Santiago. That’s very different from a writer like Pablo Neruda, who conceived of himself as a world writer. Neruda was interested in connecting not only with Latin American poetry but with European poetry and American Poetry. And he’s a great poet, in that way. But Lemebel is the opposite. With Lemebel you really feel like he’s writing for a coterie of his best friends. He’s writing for drag queens in Santiago. He doesn’t give a fuck if anyone else is going to read it. The last thing Lemebel wants is to be commodified in a way that allows him to be sold as Neruda was sold. And this gets back to the very first things we were talking about. Lemebel’s pieces about drag queens in Santiago are to me as great and as universal as literature gets.Those pieces need to exist in English and there needs to be some awareness among English readers about what a great writer he is. I’m going to Santiago for the first time, hopefully next month, and I would like that to be the beginning of some kind of larger project about Lemebel and his significance. Because to me his writing doesn’t get any greater.
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/01/18/garth-greenwell-on-his-new-novel-and-the-universality-of-the-gay-experience/#sthash.UzgXBYSl.dpuf