by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, September 29, 2014

Our lives our literature, part 2

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Publishers are businesses and so need to make money. Nobody disagrees with this. As Dan D’Addario said in Salon  last year,  “Publishing is not a charitable endeavor.” Publishers choose book manuscripts to publish and market to a public that it hopes will buy, so the publisher can make a profit. But this is difficult. How can you be sure that you know what the public will buy? 

In 1912, Marcel Proust submitted the first volume of In Search of Lost Time to the Parisian publisher Eugene Fasquelle, who turned it down, saying “he didn’t want to risk publishing something ‘so different from what the public is used to reading.’” (Lydia Davis, “Introduction,” Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, ebook, Penguin Books, 2002). Fasquelle’s fears neatly encapsulate the whole process of publishing.

We have the writer, the book, the publisher, and the reader. Here, the publisher is afraid of not giving the reader what he wants, which is admirable. But it is not clear that the publisher knows what the reader wants. A best seller? Something new and utterly different? Something major? In the 100 years since In Search of Lost Time was first turned down by a fearful publisher, it has been all of these things, sometimes at the same time. What is clear is that if the publisher asks that the manuscript be a “best seller,” then small minorities like LGBTQ are not going to be able to make it be a “best seller” without significant help from other minorities or the dominant culture. The point here is that all LGBTQ books that get published are going to have to be, to some extent, cross-over books. 

This is where we are now, and it is a terrible place for us to be. Our LGBTQ writers cannot write for us without also writing for a certain percentage of straight people. The financial demands put on each book by the publisher make it impossible to publish a gay novel. What if what the writer wants to say amounts, in effect, to a severe criticism of the straight community? Or, what if what the writer wants is to write a book for us alone. 

Dan D’Addario summarized what the publishers want in a manuscript: nothing controversial. Controversy reduces sales, apparently. They want cross-over books. And they don’t want gay characters who are angry. Reading that, I thought, Ah ha! So that’s why no publisher bought any of my books in the last twenty-five years. Since I believe that many gay people are angry—and have deep reason to be angry—that’s what I write about. And here is the reason that New York agent said, “This is a wonderful book. But no publisher in New York will publish it.”

Holy shit. What’s to do? Ebooks. It may happen, in this current surge of support for the LGBTQ community, that eventually other communities aside from our own will come to understand our anger and therefore give us access to American publishing. Until that happens, we can do it ourselves. Ebooks. And we can learn how to explore our own lives and to discover that our lives are more than merely coming-out stories, more than merely adolescent fictions, more than merely beach reading.

As I said two days ago in my last post,

 "We  are serious people. We confronted AIDS. We survived Reagan and Bush (1) and Bush (2), we have learned to work the political system, we have gotten gay marriage in some places, and we have fought against DADT and are fighting against DOMA. We are transforming what marriage means in this country and what this country considers a family. As gay people, we have fought in the great battles of our time. We have been heroic and successful. We have been fighters. We have preserved those aspects of ourselves which were unique. But our literature doesn’t reflect those things."
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Waldman on the Supreme Court right now

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Ari Ezra Waldman has put up a post on Towleroad discussing what’s happening at the Supreme Court right now (3:35 pm, September 29, 2014). They’re meeting for the first time since June to consider petitions for certiorari. Seven of these petitions concern marriage equality from various states. Waldman’s post is informative and something to keep track of while we wait to find out what SCOTUS decision is, apparently sometime next week.

Here is the link.
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Saturday, September 27, 2014

Our lives, our literature

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“Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.”  Edmund White

This is not a new idea: people have written about it before. I wrote about it in one of the earliest posts to this blog, here. 

"We are serious people. We confronted AIDS. We survived Reagan and Bush (1) and Bush (2), we have learned to work the political system, we have gotten gay marriage in some places, and we have fought against DADT and are fighting against DOMA. We are transforming what marriage means in this country and what this country considers a family. As gay people, we have fought in the great battles of our time. We have been heroic and successful. We have been fighters. We have preserved those aspects of ourselves which were unique. But our literature doesn’t reflect these things."

We haven’t learned how to get the real quality of our lives into our literature, and we seem to be content with light beach reading, adolescent coming out stories, gay sex-and-romance stories that all seem to have been written for the young adult market. That’s not what we are.

A cursory look at our literature suggests what we’re not focussing on—gay romantic relationships between mature adult gay men and women in love, gay social relationships, gay family relationships all of which move way beyond “coming out” issues, gay men and women in communal situations. Christopher Isherwood wrote about grief in A Single Man, and then Tom Ford, in 2012, made a perfect book into a perfect movie, about a man grieving for his lover in a culture that won’t recognize how deeply he is wounded. See here, and here. For predicaments that gay people find themselves in today, think of the Catholic Church. What crisis of faith are men and women—priests and nuns as well as lay people—in the Catholic Church experiencing as a result of the abuse of gay people by the Church? What gay person in the hierarchy of the church is experiencing what crisis of faith as marriage equality moves to more and more states? The church is in a bind from which there is no exit. More and more gay people are coming out, they are demanding equality, they are not going to accept the kind of solution the Church seems to be offering or can offer,  given its current doctrines. And yet the Church has no where to go to escape the vast tidal wave of dissent that is approaching it. Then there is the part of our lives where we feel most acutely that we have been stigmatized or subjected to anti-gay violence. This is the part of our lives which is the subject of my novels, Ceremonies, Race Point Light, and Adam in the Morning.  For several hundred years of the modern world gay people have been abused and stigmatized and, as a result, shown heroism and nobility. And where, as a consequence of all this, is our literature? 

This is the way it works. A reader, seeking to buy a book on a particular subject, goes to his local bookstore and, not finding it, asks for it. “I’m looking for a novel about a gay priest and his crisis of faith.” When he doesn’t find it, the reader can ask the guy behind the desk. Eventually, his request—and his dissatisfaction with the books available to him in his local bookstore—make their way up the chain to the person who buys for that particular bookstore, and then perhaps further up the chain to the distributor (“These are the books I will offer to the bookstores in my district”) and finally to the publisher, who learns, “Customers are asking for novels on a gay priest and his crisis of faith. 

If there actually are books about gay priests and their crisis of faith that the distributor can find and sell to his bookstores, then the problem is solved. But if there is no book that fits this description in the publisher’s list, this news must be passed to writers, who say to themselves, “It’s an interesting subject. I actually know a gay priest. I must spend some time with him and find out more about his life.” 

To address the fact that our literature doesn’t reflect our lives, the reader has  responsibilities. If he is not satisfied in the bookstore, he ought to tell someone. “I want a big serious book that addresses the issues that I have to address!” But there is more to it than that. The reader has to know how to read. This weekend, I read a posting on DailyKos titled, “Books Go Boom! Why I fell in love again with the novel.” It’s a wonderful read. She says, “I found it an arduous mental trek to get all the way through a novel. Mostly because my attention span was shot.” Reading is work—it’s a collaborative effort between the reader and the writer that produces the narrative. She says, “My favorite novels contain more humanity, story, meaning, and the potential to imagine in every direction my mind can turn to.” It’s incumbent on the reader, holding the novel in his hands, to make an effort to match the writer’s imaginative suggestions, to be receptive to what the author is doing, to bring to this collaboration something commensurate with what the writer has offered. 

A number of years ago, in the early nineties, OutWrite, the gay writer’s conference, was held in Boston, and a friend told me that, after the last session, eight or ten writers and agents and publisher’s representatives were having lunch. Somebody posed the question, What are the books that haven’t been written but should be written? A number of possibilities were tossed out, and then an agent from New York spoke up.  “Somebody ought to write a novel about the murder of Charles Howard in Maine in 1984. He was chased and beaten and thrown off a bridge into a river, where he drowned.” My friend said, “But I know a man who has already written that book.” So this friend put me in touch with that agent, and it would have been a fairy-tale, if it had ended this way, because the agent read my book and told me on the phone, “This is a wonderful book.” 

But it wasn’t a fairy-tale, because the agent then drew a breath, and the next thing she said was, “But no publisher in New York will publish it.”

And this takes us to the next part of this discussion of Edmund White’s comment on our current gay literature and how it has not done more than merely to scratch the surface of our lives.

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Monday, September 15, 2014

The future we face, after we are married

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While something like half of the commentariat is predicting that the Supreme Court will choose, in its late September 2014 conference, to take marriage equality cases in some form or other, and will give marriage equality in its June 2015 decision to every mother’s son not to mention to every mother’s daughter in the US, there is a minority of the commentariat that is focussing on the other aspect of the future: What will a Tea Party Member feel when he wakes up the morning after SCOTUS gives everybody marriage equality? (More on this one in a moment.)

Sometimes all of science fiction converges to give us a glimpse of the future.  This week, an example. On September 8, 2014, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Washington Bureau Chief, Stephen Koff, writes an essay for their site cleveland.com, which suggests this sequence of events next year:  (first) Late June 2015, SCOTUS strikes down all marriage equality bans around the country. (second) Senator Rob Portman (conservative Republican, Ohio) who came out for marriage equality when his son, Will, came out to him. (third) This means SCOTUS makes Senator Portman’s position on marriage equality the only one it’s legal to have in the Republican Party. (fourth) In consequence, and a few other factors, for which see Koff’s essay on cleveland.com, Senator Portman wins the Republican nomination in November 2015. Stephen Koff says, “Rob Portman could be the Republican Party’s first post-gay marriage presidential candidate.” He is serious, too. 

On the same day, September 8, 2014, hunter, the frequent diarist on DailyKos, writes an essay under the headline, “Could marriage equality help the presidential dreams of Republican Rob Portman? Um, no.” You might think that this headline nailed it and that there is no reason to read further. But you would be wrong. Both of these posts are very long posts, filled with disagreement about a lot of things, but with agreement on a few things, the biggest of which seems to be that, somehow the radical right is going to be emasculated by SCOTUS and by their failure to boss around the Republicans in 2016.

The result of this sequence of events—which didn’t seem to effect either the Washington Bureau Chief of the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the frequent diarist of DailyKos with the same corrosive effect that it had on me—is that after we get marriage equality, the moderate right, moderates, and the activist left agree that we’re going to defeat the Republican Party but not the radical right. That is, we’re not going to defeat the radical right. After everybody can be married who wants it, we are, all of us, going to be subject to attacks from the radical right, who, cut loose from any moderating influences from a national party, are now free to be the savages they are. 

We’re going to get the radical right (in hunter’s charming phrase) in their frothing fits. And you thought that getting marriage meant boxing up the wedding clothes and writing thank-you notes and moving on. Silly you. Would it really be better to get out your ole machete and put it under your pillow?

Could it possibly be true that marriage equality enrages them even more than an abortion? Was Justice Ginsberg right all along? This is the first prediction  I’ve made on this blog that I really believe. Shit. They’re going to be enraged. And that’s going to be dangerous for all of us, married or not.

This post was put up ten hours ago. Corrections were made just now to the links and to the font. DC September 16, 2014, 11:02 am.

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Friday, September 5, 2014

Being gay, being out, playing cards

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Coming out is a big subject, it’s important to just about all of us, it means many different things to different ones of us, and it’s changing all the time.

I had a friend in college—we never talked about our sexuality back in 1957—and at first we took the same path after graduation. He went to graduate school and I did, and then I got married to a woman and went into teaching in the midwest. I had children. He came out during graduate school, started a small business, and had a group of people he worked with who were gay or gay friendly and who knew he was gay. He made a success of his business and is still there now. I left teaching, divorced my wife, and came out. I started writing. Occasionally I exchange letters with my friend from college. We write about being gay and coming out and our lives now.

Now, even though we are the same age (75 years old) and both out, the quality of our being out is very different. I think that probably it has been hard for each one of us. Being gay was hard in our generation. But it’s been hard in different ways for the two of us. He was out far longer than I was, and I think it must have been hard for him being gay in the South. It may be that he had to develop protective measures in his business and in his social life. Today he is an admired, successful business person, working largely within the system. When I divorced my wife and came out, I began to become a rebel, very publicly violating closely held values in the community I lived in at the time. My birth family were  deeply offended by my coming out, and for a long time I lost my place in that family. (I must say I managed—because all three of us wanted it—to maintain a close, loving relationship with my two children, which I still have.) It may be that once one becomes a rebel, it is difficult to stop being one. At least, I have not found a way to make that difficult transition. The only way I could come out was to get to a point where I no longer cared very much what other people of my generation thought about gay people. I’ve have been out for thirty years now, and I can’t imagine going back to a place where I cared very much what people think about me. I am not a part of the community of straight white people that I used to be a part of. I had to fight to get where I am, and some of that residual anger still hangs around me, like the odor of tobacco hangs around a person who has recently smoked a cigarette. It is my rebelliousness that fueled my drive to write my novels. My friend from college and I differ, at least in part, because of the way we came out, and when we did it, and where we did it, and, of course, why we did it.
None of us are given entire freedom to choose the moment or the conditions under which we come out. It is apparent that Matthew Shepard did not choose that moment—tied to a rail fence on the prairie above Laramie—to come out, and Jason Collins and Michael Sam were careful even while they were courageous. It is true for gay people, as for every other person in the world, that we have to play the hand we’re dealt. That’s what makes my coming out so very different from yours and is a major part of what makes me different from you. 
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