Stonewall Triptych

John G. Lawrence is dead. He is the man who gave his name to “Lawrence v. Texas,” 

the case before the Supreme Court decided June 26, 2003 that invalidated all sodomy laws in the US. Lawrence was in his bedroom with another man, Tyrone Garner, having sex, when local police came in and arrested them for committing sodomy. Twice Lawrence and Garner were tried, and each time they sought to have the charges dismissed, claiming their constitutional rights under equal protection of the laws and substantive due process were being denied. Local courts disagreed and found them guilty. Appeals courts overturned their convictions, after which the State Supreme Court reversed the Appeals Court and reinstated their convictions. The US Supreme Court then took possession of the case, and, on June 26, 2003, issued their decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which voided the Texas sodomy law and all the other sodomy laws throughout the country and also overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, So now, we remember John Lawrence, who didn’t need to allow his case to be appealed to the Supreme Court and therefore didn’t need to get the kind of publicity in a conservative state that he got, putting himself in danger. But he did agree to have his case appealed to the Supreme Court and to run the danger that implied, and as a consequence, the nation is different now, and every time gay rights in the US are analyzed, historians and the rest of us speak of John Lawrence. 

This is an extremely important case for gay people, and if you don’t know about it, begin by clicking on the link above and reading what Ari Ezra Waldman, the legal scholar in residence at Towleroad, has to say about it. Then read about it everywhere. Many people say we wouldn’t have gay marriage anywhere if there hadn’t been a Lawrence v. Texas, and we wouldn’t have repealed DADT if we hadn’t had Lawrence v. Texas. So, in your personal list of heroic men and women of the gay community, please add the name of John G. Lawrence, and remember his courage.

Night before last I read something that was breathtakingly beautiful. In Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is sitting in the Opéra, observing the beautiful women in their parterre boxes above him.  “At first there were only vague shadows in which one suddenly encountered, like the gleam of an unseen jewel, the phosphorescence of a pair of famous eyes….” This is slow-going writing. Take it easy, give the writing time. Much of In Search of Lost Time is like this. Give in to it. And remember always that the author of this superb writing is gay.

“But in almost all of the other boxes [of the opera house], the white deities who inhabited these dark abodes had taken refuge against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Yet, as the performance proceeded, their vaguely human forms began to emerge in languid succession from the depths of the darkness they embroidered, and, rising toward the light, they allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge as far as the vertical surface of the half-light where their gleaming faces appeared behind the gently playful foam of their fluttering feather fans, and beneath their purple, pearl-threaded coiffures, which seemed to have been bent by the motion of incoming waves; beyond lay the front orchestra, the abode of mortals forever separated from the somber transparent realm to which the limpid and reflecting eyes of the water goddesses, dotted about on the smooth liquid surface, served as a frontier…. Within the limits of their domain...these radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile at the bearded tritons who hung from the anfractuous rocks of the ocean depths, or at some aquatic demigod, whose skull was a polished stone, around which the tide had washed up a smooth deposit of seaweed, and whose gaze  was a disc of rock crystal.They leaned toward these creatures and offered them bonbons; occasionally the waters parted to reveal a new Nereid who had just blossomed out of the shadowy depths, a late arrival who smiled apologetically; then, at the end of the act, with no further hope of hearing the melodious sounds of the earth that had drawn them to the surface, the divine sisters plunged back together and disappeared in the darkness. But of all these retreats to whose thresholds their idle curiosity to behold the works of man brought the inquisitive goddesses who let no one approach them, the most celebrated was the block of semidarkness known as the parterre box of the Princesse de Guermantes.”

The Princesse de Guermantes is one of the major characters in In Search of Lost Time. Her family—what happens to its members, what they represent for Proust—is one of the major subjects for Marcel Proust. 

“Like a great goddess who presides from afar over the sport of lesser deities, the Princesse had deliberately remained somewhat to the back of her box, on a side-facing sofa, red as a coral rock, beside a wide, vitreous reflection that was probably a mirror, and which suggested a section, perpendicular, dark, and liquid, cut by a ray of sunlight in the dazzled crystal of the sea. At once a feather and a corolla, like certain marine plants, a great white flower, as downy as a bird’s wing, hung down from the Princesse’s forehead along one of her cheeks, following its curve with flirtatious suppleness, lovingly attentive, as if half enclosing it, like a pink egg in the down of a halcyon’s nest….”

Someone in the narrator’s hearing says, “That’s the Princesse de Guermantes,” and the irony of this glowing portrait of her in public is that what her family represents is failure. Failure to produce, failure to thrive, failure to cope, failure to be on the right side of the great issues her generation confronted. The youngest member of her family is the Marquis de Saint-Loup, who is her husband’s cousin and who is to die on the Western Front before the end of World War I, before the end of In Search of Lost Time, and who is gay.

Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way, vol. III of In Search of Lost Time. Translated by Mark Treharne. General editor Christopher Prendergast. London, Penguin Books, 2002. 

Longtime Companion, the film by Norman René; is about a small group of men who know each other from the bars in NYC and Fire Island—that is, some of them know some of them—who are caught for a moment on Fire Island and at work and at home in the city as they digest the first news of the health crisis beginning to sweep the nation. Before any of them know what this crisis is, one of them dies, apparently of pneumonia. Then, in rapid order, we see one of these men after another sicken and die, until there are only two left—along with “Lisa,” played by Mary-Louise Parker—walking on the beach at Fire Island. 

Longtime Companion, first released in May 11, 1990, is about events in New York during the early eighties and the earliest stages of the AIDS epidemic. It is the first Hollywood film about the AIDS crisis and widely released in theatres. It was preceded by An Early Frost, directed by John Erman, which was a made-for-TV movie that first played on NBC in November 11, 1985, and by Buddies, directed by Arthur J. Bressan, which was distributed to a small number of art houses in 1985. I never saw Buddies, but I did see An Early Frost. Aiden Quinn plays a gay man who is infected with AIDS, who kicks out his lover, and  who comes home to his parents—Gena Rowland and Ben Gazzara—where he is taken care of as he sickens and then dies. At that time I was volunteering with the AIDS Action Committee, and while I was sure there were persons with AIDS who went home to their parents to die, I didn’t know any, and I never heard of any. Men’s birth families were largely outside the whole process of dying that gay men with AIDS were going through.

Longtime Companion, as I have said, was the first movie to get wide release, and it told the whole story that I was experiencing during those years in Boston. I remember being moved by it, as one after another of its principals suffered and died. The scene that people remembered was when Sean, whom we have known well since the earliest scenes on Fire Island, is in a hospital bed at the home he shares with David and is suffering badly. David seeks to relieve his suffering. He sends the nurse away, and he sits by the bed, speaking soothingly to his lover, who appears to be blind and to not know what is happening to him, and to be afraid. David speaks to him, “I’m here. I’m not going to leave you,” and then he says, “If you want, it is OK to go.” While Sean gasps for breath, David says, “It’s OK. You can go. You can let go of everything. Let go. All the pain.” And gradually Sean’s breath calms down—slows down—and the scene ends. David had eased Sean over into dying, releasing him from suffering. Some of us were sobbing. I can’t remember now whether I had heard about that happening before I saw this movie, but after I saw Longtime Companion, I heard about it happening with other men. In New York, in Boston, in other movies. 

All of the men in Longtime Companion get to know each other very well by the time the AIDS epidemic is in full blast, by the time the movie is really up and running. The audience gets to know these men too, gets to know them almost very well, and I think the audience has a sense of the men going too soon, dying before we have had a chance to really get to know them. That was the way AIDS was.  We all felt robbed. In the final scene in the movie, Fuzzy and Willy and Lisa—the survivors—walk on the beach at Fire Island and wonder what life will be like after the plague, and there, coming over the walkway, are all the guys who had died during the movie, restored to us, laughing, coming down onto the sand. It is an amazing wish coming true, at least here, in a dream. I think the scene focussed for many of us what we had lost during the epidemic—the people we had loved—when in the confusion of our lives during that time, it was possible to lose sight of what it was we had lost. This was about people and the loss of people we had cared about. All those people. 

The Boston Globe published a long article on Sunday, titled “A Computer That Thinks Like the Universe,” by Joshua Rothman. It’s interesting—it’s about quantum computing—and along the way to its conclusions, it discusses what the computers we use are and introduced Alan Turing, who is “the father of modern computing” and whose “theory of computability” is the basis for all modern computers. 

This posting isn’t about quantum computing, and it isn’t about Alan Turing and his contribution to the effort to win World War II, but it is about gay people and our tendency to forget our past. Alan Turing was a homosexual and in January, 1952, he picked up a man outside a theatre in Manchester, UK. After several aborted attempts at a date, and apparently one or two successful dates, the man robbed Turing, who went to the police and told them about the robbery and acknowledged his sexual relationship with this man. This led to Turing’s being charged with “gross indecency.” He was given a choice of imprisonment or chemical castration by estrogen injection.  He chose chemical castration. In June, 1954, he killed himself, apparently with a cyanide-laced apple.

But it is not enough to learn and to remember that another one of the great men of the twentieth century was one of us and whose treatment by British culture in 1954, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said, was “appalling.” It is necessary also to remember that Alan Turing was only the most brilliant of all those thousands of forgotten men and women who suffered the same consequences of having been picked up by the police. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of men before 1969 who were condemned to “chemical castration” or worse. Allen Ginsberg tells us something about another one in the opening lines of his poem, HOWL, where he declares to Carl Solomon, I am with you in Rockland. We have no way of knowing how many lives have been destroyed by this appalling cruelty. 

At least one of the questions that novels answer is How was it for you there? Our literature is almost entirely devoid of reference to this pain and suffering, much of it government inflicted. Chemical castration! There has been a TV movie about Turing’s life and a Broadway play, and now The Guardian says another movie on Turing’s life is planned with Leonardo di Caprio. But there are others besides Turing who suffered, and gay fiction is the art form ideally constructed for addressing this subject. Until it addresses this subject, the answer gay fiction gives to the question, How was it for you there? will be incomplete.

C and I have just come back from the eastern Connecticut shore where we joined extended family for Thanksgiving weekend. We had good food, good conversation, a good sense of belonging—all the things that are expected of such a weekend—and then we returned to Boston last night, and C returned to his job at a local gay bar. 

The interesting thing was how assimilated we were—relatively—during the weekend, at a house owned by a straight couple, surrounded by more than twenty people, also straight, and only one person winced when he overheard me recounting a portion of my sexual history to a straight female relative. In short, I felt pretty much at home with this group of relatives, and I didn’t feel constrained in any way by being one of only two gay people out of twenty straight people.

And yet, it was a huge relief when we got home, back to our books and DVDs, to our own things, our cat, our politics, and our community, and this made me think of the long-standing discussion in the gay community over assimilation or separatism. I wondered whether it was ever going to be possible for gay people to totally assimilate into the larger community. Aren’t we going to always be to some extent separate, divided from the larger community by all the things that have always divided us? And this because homophobia isn’t ever going to go away completely? And because the larger community isn’t going to recognize the value of what gay people have learned while wandering in the wilderness? We’re just still so far apart.

I hear or read how sad it is that the publishing industry is collapsing. People resist ereaders. “I stare at a back-lit LED screen enough already.” 

There are a few things to remember. The publishing industry has not worked well for a lot of people. It has not worked well for writers who are just starting out. It has not been receptive to writers who write in difficult or unusual styles. It has not been receptive to writers whose subject matter isn’t mainstream or doesn’t invite broad readership. It has not been receptive to writers who write for a minority population in the culture. In an industry dominated by a concern for the bottom line, there isn’t much place for the guy who, from the beginning, never thought his book would sell a lot of copies. In a rich and vibrant culture, many books, which may be very fine books and which may add immeasurably to the depth of the culture, may never sell more than a few copies.

In a culture such as ours in America, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, where publication decisions are usually made on the basis of what is going to sell the largest number of copies, it is the culture of minorities such as ours whose vitality is most in danger. The publisher can’t afford to publish a book which is content to remain in its niche. Yet often the book that is most productive of new ideas or of a new take on old ideas is exactly the one that is not a cross-over book and is content to be sheltered within the community from which it sprang. A book written by a gay author for a gay audience about a gay subject, with no consideration for straight people or straight concerns, is much like a dissent in the Supreme Court. It may not carry the day in the whole culture, but it has been written, and it exists, and it enters the discourse of the whole culture, and, if it is a good book, it exerts its influence, which may grow until it becomes dominant.

According to publishers, the market for gay books has “vanished.” I can’t believe this is because today’s gay people are less intelligent or less interested in good books. This is the result of the publishing industry giving gay people sillier and sillier books so that gay people learn that if they want a serious and hefty book, they needn’t look for it in the gay section of Barnes & Noble.

We—gay people—are being disenfranchised. Publishers are not adding gay books to the culture at the rate our numbers would suggest, and our reading is being censored. 

eBooks in ePUB, like my own novels known collectively as the Stonewall Triptych, break through this censorship, give an outlet to gay writers for the publication of their books, and restore to gay people the power of the pen and of the press and restore to us the freedom, which is inherently ours, to choose our reading from all the books that are being written. 

Marcel, the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is in Balbec, a resort on the north coast of France. We read this:

One very hot afternoon, from inside the dining room [of the hotel], which was in half-darkness, sheltering from the sun behind drawn curtains, which were a yellow glow edged by the blue dazzle of the sea, I saw, traversing the hotel’s central bay, which extended from the beach to the road, a tall slim young man with piercing eyes, a proud head held high on a fine uncovered neck, and with hair so golden and skin so fair that they seemed to have soaked up the bright sunshine of the day. In a loose off-white garment, the like of which I would never have believed a man would dare to wear, and which in its lightness was as suggestive of the heat and brilliance of outdoors as was the cool dimness of the dining room, he was advancing at a quick march. His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the color of the sea. We all sat there intrigued, watching him as he passed, knowing that we beheld the young Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, famous in the fashionable world.

Marcel is more than “intrigued.” The young marquis, in his early twenties, is only a few years older than Marcel, and Marcel is seeing him the first time. In this glowing, highly charged portrait, we see how Marcel sees the marquis and the beginning of the intense friendship between the two men which, for the next five volumes, is going to totter on the edge of erotic fantasy. 

Even if we didn’t know that Marcel Proust was queer, and even if we didn’t know that the marquis turns out to be queer, this description of the marquis—so charged with the beauty of men—is the kind of thing that makes us know this is a queer book.  

       In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust (Penguin, James Grieve, translator, 2002)

Sometimes a work of art does not present itself so that we know who it is about. Maurice, by E. M. Forster, seems to be about Maurice Hall, and then it seems to be about Maurice and Clive Durham together, and it is only later that the reader discovers the novel is about Maurice, and about Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder. This is important because Maurice isn’t about failure between Maurice and Clive but about success between Maurice and Alec.

The Law of Desire, by Pedro Almodovar, seems at first to be about Pablo, the director, and his love for Juan, and it is only late in the movie that it begins to be apparent that Law of Desire is about Pablo and Antonio and what they can learn from each other, which happens in the final minutes of the film. Again, it’s not about failure, it’s about triumphant success.

The Skin I live In seems to be about Dr. Robert Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas, the doctor who runs the research institute trying to develop an artificial skin, but it is only in retrospect that it becomes clear that the movie is about Vera Cruz, played by Elena Anaya, and that the “skin” which Vera lives in is the artificial skin of gender and that the movie is “about” her discoveries and not about the doctor’s madness. 

All this is to say that we have to discover things slowly. The Dancer from the Dance, by Andrew Holleran, which seems to be about Anthony Malone, the principal dancer in this particular dance—Lower East Side and Fire Island in the seventies—is only apparently about the beautiful dancer whom everyone fell in love with. The book is really about the world that Malone inhabits, the dance nobody can separate him from. And it is also to say that we ought to understand these works of art slowly. And not rush. Or jump in, because long after Malone has walked into the bay, men are still writing letters trying to determine what it all meant, and Paul writes the concluding lines of the novel: “No, darling, mourn no longer for Malone. He knew very well how gorgeous life is—that was the light in him that you, and I, and all the queens fell in love with. Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn’t last beyond the morning, then know I love you.” It is the dance that we have to see and not the dancer.

When I saw Law of Desire, in 1987, I was a couple of years into writing Ceremonies. I think one of the reasons the movie was so exciting to me--so thrilling—was that Almodovar was showing me something that I hadn’t seen before. I know now that Proust had written about it in In Search of Lost Time, and Christopher Isherwood had written about it in A Single Man, and André Gide in just about everything he wrote. But at the time I hadn’t read all those books—hadn’t read them with understanding—and what I had in front of me was Almodovar’s movie, Law of Desire, with its incredible concluding image.

In 1987 I was writing my book about what happened to all of us in Bangor Maine, during the summer of 1984 after Charles Howard was murdered. But aside from the immediate task of turning our 1984 experiences into a book, I didn’t have an idea of what I was about. I had always had a sense that the book I was writing was not like any other gay books. But different in what way? How? Why?

When Pablo cradled Antonio’s naked body at the end of Law of Desire, the image they make—pieta in front of the altar, the one still alive sobbing with grief—echoes back as far as the Bible and the Gospels, and, of course, courses through six hundred years of Western art. Pablo and Antonio do not make reference to a particular religious image or even to anything religious. What they do, when Pablo cradles Antionio’s body, is to express forgiveness, understanding, regret, gratitude and grief, in the context of the powerful symbolism of a moment of love, in which the younger person has sacrificed himself for the good of the older. 

Law of Desire, with its luminous concluding image, urged me to expand my horizons, seek more, attempt larger things, make bigger bets, and change the kind of literature that gay fiction might be, in my novel Ceremonies. 

About midway through Law of Desire, the movie by Pedro Almodovar (1987), Antonio, played by a young and beautiful Antonio Banderas, asks Pablo, a movie director who is very self-centered and seems always to be doing lines of coke, “Who is the boy in the letter, that Juan?” 

It is a moment in the movie when Antonio, who says, “I’m what I should be,” is trying to manipulate himself into Pablo’s bed. 

Antonio continues. “He seems very much in love with you.”

Pablo answers. “He isn’t.” Then he says, “That letter is a joke.”

Antonio has been stalking Pablo since the beginning of the movie. He says, “Love is never a joke.”

In a culture in which Pablo finds it impossible to treat seriously what Antonio is offering and in which the love between two men is often treated exactly as a joke, the work of this movie is to show how very serious love between two men can be. This movie moves toward tragedy, and its method is operatic.

Eventually Antonio kills Juan, the boy that Pablo has been toying with—throws him off a cliff in the moonlight—and then, after an hour with Pablo, Antonio kills himself—sacrifices himself to Pablo’s learning what love means. 

The concluding image of the story is of Pablo, kneeling on the floor in front of a May Cross, cradling the naked body of Antonio and sobbing.

And now, Pedro Almodovar’s new movie, The Skin I Live In, opened in the US October 14, 2011, but has not come to Boston, so I haven’t seen it yet. 

Some ideas are unthinkable, then they become thinkable. This happens all the time. I suspect that for the vast majority of people in this country, same-sex marriage was unthinkable right up to the moment they had to start thinking about it. They had never seen it, they had no history of thought about it, no experience with it. This happened to me around the fact of my being gay. I couldn’t think that I had rights. Every time I thought about my being gay, I thought about the stigmas we carried—criminals, mentally ill, sinful—but Stonewall said gays have rights. This was a whole different story.

I was forced into thinking about these matters by an article on the death of Frank Kameny, the founder of Mattachine Washington, and a participant in the Stonewall Riots and, it seems, in every significant gay rights action for decades after. The article is by David Carter, who has his own claim to our gratitude, since he is the author of the book-length study of the Stonewall Riots, Stonewall. Kameny had been a cartographer with the Army Map Service and in 1957 was fired for being gay. Kameny sued and took his case to the Supreme Court. He wrote a classic statement of the case for gay rights under the constitution, but, according to Carter, “in 1961, the Supreme Court was not ready to hear this analysis, and it did not take the case.” Carter quotes Barbara Gittings, who was also there at the beginning of Mattachine, saying, "before I met Frank ... I had a very inchoate idea of how we could solve our problems. ... Frank came along and he had this very strong, very definite philosophy, and it crystallized my thinking. 'Well, yes, of course. If you take the position that Frank has taken, then you get a very clear view of what you have to do, and you don't have to fumble around anymore.' “

How does an idea become thinkable? 

One of the important questions of our time is just this one. Even before the governments could think about marriage and the military and adoption and the rest of them, majorities have formed to demand these changes. How did this happen? What did we do? 

I got an email two days ago from a man whose name I haven’t heard in fifty years. The email said, “Are you the Dwight Cathcart that was stationed in Yakima, Washington. 1960-1961?” This man and several others and I were in the Army together and formed a little group who went into town drinking and sometimes went on passes together. One of these guys was married, and we spent a lot of time at his house in town. We were close friends. I didn’t tell any of them that I was gay.

Now, it’s fifty years later, and everything is different. Before this man even found me, he found my web page advertising my gay novels, so when I wrote him back and outlined what I had done in the last fifty years or so, I told him, “In 1983 I separated from my wife and got a divorce in 1984, and then I came out.” I told him about my partner for the last twenty-one years. 

I was interested in the way I felt about that exchange. I found that I felt apprehensive, a little, about what he was going to say. We were friends fifty years ago. We liked each other. I think we had each other’s back, as the saying is. I suppose all of those guys must have suspected something about me, and there was nothing that I knew about them that would lead me to think that any of them would attack me now for being gay. But there was something else. This man might say, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I was surprised at my anxiety. Is this guy going to understand why I didn’t tell him back then? I didn’t know. He went hiking in Arizona before he could respond to what I had told him.

But what I do know is that, at least in my generation, coming out is still a big fucking deal. 

The direction we should be going toward is toward freedom. We need to remember this at every step, so that when somebody takes us in the wrong direction, we will know it immediately. 

In the contemporary world—the one outside my window—I am free to walk down the street and to drop into any bookstore I pass and buy a book, and if I can read the language the book is written in, I am able to read the book. But that world appears to be ending, and something very different is happening with ereaders and ebooks.

On Wednesday, Amazon introduced four new Kindle models—Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, and Kindle Fire—at a range of prices, from $79 to $199. For Amazon to make money off the Kindle, it has to link each Kindle to its resources in the Kindle store and not let the reader buy his books anywhere else. Amazon makes money off the trapped reader.

Most manufacturers of ebooks do this—link their ereaders to a book store and not let the reader buy his books anywhere else. This is less freedom, not more, than we had under the old publishing.

To get us going in the right direction again, manufacturers have formatted books in ePUB. ePUB is a free and open ebook standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum.This is a significant step in the right direction. But manufacturers add DRM to their ePUB, and now, none of them can read each other’s files. This needs to change. What we want is to be able to buy an ereader that can read a book from any source. We want to have these DRMs removed.

At this moment, a writer can take his or her novel and format it in ePUB without a DRM, sell it on the web, and all ereaders can read it except the Kindle, which will not read ePUB from any source. But purchased books from the big book stores can still only be read on that book store’s  ereader. This is not freedom.

As long as we are not free, it doesn’t matter how many models Kindle brings out, we are still trapped by the Kindle store and the taste of its buyers. Or the iBooks store. Or the Barnes & Noble store. Yesterday I checked these three book stores for the titles of five books I read during the summer of 2010. Even now, a year later, two of the books were not available in any bookstore in any ebook format. Three of the titles were available only on Amazon.com for Kindles. As the print-publishing industry continues to collapse, we are going to be more and more dependent on ereaders and the ereaders’ stores, and the ereaders’ buyers, and instead of being more free—this is what the digital revolution promised, we thought—we will be less free. There will be just us, our ereaders, and our ereaders’ bookstores, and the books their buyers choose for us to read. This is not a situation gay readers want to be caught in.

Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a big one for me. I served in the Army in the late fifties, and I remember condescending sergeants talking about the “pitter patter of little feet in the barracks” and claiming to know everything that happened in their barracks. Other soldiers—a few of them—called me “queer.” When I asked a man I knew where I could go and be homosexual and also be respected, I was told that maybe I ought to go live in Europe. But in any case, I got through my two years without being put out. 

It never did really have to do with unit cohesion. There are too many studies out there telling the Pentagon that unit cohesion would not be affected. What it had to do with was stigma. A certain kind of straight man wanted to keep gay men stigmatized, which put us off limits, and made it seem safe to straight men. I’m a man, and you’re a queer. 

The other great stigma from the post war years was imposed by psychiatrists. That one—that we were mentally ill—was lifted in the early seventies through the action of the Gay Activists Alliance.

The goal of gay liberation since Stonewall has been to lift these stigmas and to make it OK to be gay, and we’ve been doing that, one stigma at a time. The next one, I think, is going to be DOMA, which doesn’t have to do with marriage so much as it has to do with their wanting to assert that we’re unworthy. It’s a way of their saying, I’m worthy, You’re queer. 

The big gay rights organization have been sending out emails today, all saying, there’s a lot left to do. They’re right. There’s still a lot to do, but after today, less than there was yesterday. I feel better, don’t you?

“Mommy!”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know how you can say that.”

“What?”

“That you love me, but you don’t care what I am.”

“Well, I do. I love you, and I don’t care whether you like boys or girls.”

“But it’s different, liking boys and liking girls. And if you love me, I want you to know that it’s different and why it’s different.”

“I do. Of course I do.”

“Then you need to say it.”

“Say what?”

“That you know how it’s different, and you love that too.”

“Oh, Victoria, you know I do.”

“You tell me you do, but you don’t say it.”

“Say what,Victoria.”

“That you know how it’s different and that you love that too”

“Victoria, you are never satisfied. You are always asking for something else from me. Something more.”

“Mommy. I’m just asking you to say it.”

“Say what?

“That you love what I feel, too.”

“Well, I do.”

“And not say, you don’t care.”

“Victoria, what’s the difference?”

“It’s the way I feel. I’m afraid there’s a difference and that we don’t know what it is, and that we don’t see it and are missing it and that it’s really important.”

Last week, Ewan Morrison, writing in The Guardian, asked, “Are books dead?” and “Can authors survive?” He was writing in the context of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and his belief that the “publishing industry is in terminal decline.” It is an interesting article, different from anything else I’ve read, and worth wide distribution for the questions it raises.

Morrison says that big sellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon are now selling more ebooks than paper books. What are the consequences of this momentous fact? Morrison notes that the major publishers are all suffering financial straits and not giving writers their accustomed advances. Many writers already are skipping agents and publishers and publishing their ebooks on the internet. He looks down the road a generation and finds “the book” surviving but writers, oddly, not. If, today, a bookseller can sell a million copies of one book, one of the Harry Potter books for example, in the future that same bookseller may be able to make the same amount of money by selling ten books each from one hundred thousand authors, a situation we are now beginning to approach with the small sales of hundreds of thousands of authors on Amazon. This phenomenon is called the “long tail”—those hundreds of thousands of authors each selling ten books, all on the intenet, their sales showing on the “long tail” of the graph. Eventually, he believes, writers will be infinitely numerous and none of them will be paid for their work, a situation which he believes has almost arrived in the music industry.

If he is right, this is as depressing as hell. 

But there are some significant omissions in his argument. He says, “Most notable writers in the history of books were paid a living wage.” This is not true. In our own history, Emily Dickinson was not, Herman Meville was not, and while Morrison scorns the Romantic myth that writers must survive in a garret, I would guess that most American writers are fairly poor people. There are only a few in every generation who actually make a substantial income from their writing. Writers get by on grants, or by teaching creative writing at the local college, or by some other income-producing work. A writer whose career I have followed since 1963 has never earned a living wage from her writing, but she has been a publishing writer for all of those years. The class of people that Morrison seems to be concerned about—professional writers of literary fiction who live on the income from their writing—seems not to have existed as a class until recently, and it may be entirely the creation of the new mega-publishers. 

The questions that Morrison raises—the future of the book and of publishing in the age of the ebook and of epublishing—are important because my blog, the Stonewall Triptych, exists to bring attention to my three ebooks which I have collected under the name, the Stonewall Triptych. Morrison’s essay skips over the extent to which the publishing industry of the last fifty years created the situation in which writers like me are doing what I am doing, that is, using the internet to publish their books.

More on all this in my next posting.