Who is a Gay Author? What is a Gay Book?

This the topic Christopher Bram and I will discuss at my reading/signing at Barnes and Noble next week (Weds. 11/3 at 7:00 p.m., store at 82nd and B'way; for complete info please look here). The character of Bob the Book is, after all, a gay book, born out of the old joke, "A gay book is a book that is attracted to other books of the same gender" - a joke Chris says gay writers make out of anxiety over the whole issue of being pigeonholed. You want to think your writing is for the widest possible audience. Chris's definition for a gay book is a book written by, for, and about gay men. He then immediately points out that the prepositions here are slippery, especially "for." All this happens, by the way, in Chris's excellent nonfiction collection Mapping the Territory, a consideration of gay life and letters that will teach you much about reading, writing, perception, community, and relationships. You can check out "Mapping" here, and of course check out "Bob the Book" here.

Until my preliminary discussion last night with Chris, I would have said a gay book is a book that it could only possibly be of interest to gay men or women. Theroretically, gay literary writing can and should be of interest to everyone, so the definition above would have to narrow the field of what writing is really and truly "gay" down to gay erotica. But, though neither is terribly explicit, the M/M and yaoi genres open the door to somewhat eroticized gay romance that is, in the first case, written by straight women, presumably for at least some other straight women; and in the second case, consumed by tweener girls, primarily in Japan. (I have seen some yaoi animations on YouTube that were quite compelling. A thesis could be written - and I am sure some have - on what 13-year-old Japanese girls are getting from seeing slightly older Japanese boys in the throes of physical love. There are also these things called yaoi paddles that the girls go around whacking each other with. No, really. Sometimes they get out of control and whack people outside their circle.)

So that leaves flat-out porn. With some odd exceptions, hard-core gay porn should be the one kind of "gay book" of interest exclusively to gay men. Everything else should be up for grabs. Unfortunately it is not. Some straight male friends of mine have read Bob the Book. But Bob, being a book, is sexually nonthreatening. More on my straight male friends' reaction soon.

Scary art and how to make it

The title of this post is misleading. But then, "A stroll through the Atlanta Botanical Garden" would also have been misleading. Their Botanical Garden, or any botanical garden, is a place for both tourists and locals to escape the reality of a place. In this case, the reality of Atlanta as a city belonging to its African American citizens, who look as though they have not taken possession of it yet but are waiting - tired, angry or bored - for the great come-and-get-it day when they will. My favorite site was the King Memorial and birthplace, located in golden lit, still scruffy Sweet Auburn. If you go, be sure to walk from the MARTA train. Be sure to pass through dilapidated neighborhoods where poor African Americans watch you, the privileged white tourist, on your way to pay homage to the Great Man. Their Great Man. But more on down-at-the heels Atlanta later.

For now, we are in the spiffy, lush, quiet, clean and orderly Botanic Garden, looking not at orchids (they have the biggest collection in the world, but at the messy, ragtag Halloween sculptures of Atlanta children, nestled in the bushes. Some, pictured here, are quite gripping and scary, more so than anything made by the professional artists also engaged for this seasonal show. The adults, the pros are studied and deliberate in their effects, the children random in ways that are much more celebratory and much more unnerving. How? You can not study to be unstudied. One scarecrow figure, created by a Cub Scout troop, wears a ball of feathers and other unidentifiable amulets on its chest, a proud, defiant display of masculinity that I find enthralling, together with the scarecrow's tattered head, built on a gallon plastic milk jug. The scarecrow's fatigue pants have assertive airplane silhouettes on them. Did the young artists know what they were doing? They certainly did not know the effect they were having on me. Still less did the preschoolers whose bluntly, randomly detailed brown bunny I also find disturbing. What rules did they follow? What rules do they know, even at that age?

Maybe Halloween is the best - maybe only - holiday for kid art. Because they are allowed to make it pure id. Bad behavior. You can't do that to Santa, but you are supposed to do that to skeletons and scare crows. That is why they exist. On the one holiday that is the child's portal to making real, true, scary art.

Death

In the Quaker meetinghouse a blank, pointless, purposeless wall rises and curves out, appearing to separate from the western wall behind it, cresting like a frozen wave, and across its blankness are projected squares of moving light, faint or glaring depending on the season and the hour, sliding slowly down and disappearing. "Death, like an overflowing stream," the Puritans sang, "Sweeps us away; our life's a dream." How much longer? When I open my eyes the wall is blank, the light gone. How much longer? When I open them again the light has changed. A square of sun blazes in an upper window, but the wall is still blank. The most joyous, affirming moment of the hour was when we pressed our shoulders gently together. And they stayed that way several minutes before we separated.

All That Jazz

I was gut punched by this "It Gets Better" video created by members of the current Broadway cast of Chicago. It is supposed to encourage young gay women and men (and other misfits) having a rough time of it, but the stories of bullying, one after another, eight minutes of them, are immensely sad. The fact that the protagonists all ended up on Broadway - plus some with relationships and one with a child - seems beside the point, of little comfort. The service this video performs is that, as the stories pile up, you feel the hopelessness, you understand why suicide would seem like a relief. (Sad music in the background was no help. It's Chicago for Heaven's sake; I kept wanting to hear the opening vamp from the show, building up to a rousing chorus of, "Oh, I'm no one's wife, and oh, I love my life!") As well as these people's lives have turned out, one sees in their faces that you never get over it. The Ambassador Theater is just a better class of refuge, not a winner's circle.

After this I watched a similar, shorter video by the cast of the national tour of "Wicked," which video is also peppier, sexier, and more fun. And it affected me much less. No one seemed permanently scarred. And I like permanently scarred. I think John Kander and Fred Ebb, the creators of Chicago, like permanently scarred. (I think of the late Fred Ebb in the present tense.) Think about it: they also created Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman and the brand new Scottsboro Boys. Their specialty is making permanently scarred sing. Certainly Bob Fosse, Chicago's original director/choreographer, liked permanently scarred. He made permanently scarred dance. He splashed permanently scarred across movie screens. Lenny Bruce reading court transcripts to a dwindling, hostile audience in Lenny. The graphic death of a Playboy bunny in Star 80. (Yes, I liked that film.) I once heard a Russian theater director tell of a meeting of Russian actors at which salaries were at stake. "How much," one actress demanded, "are our wounds worth?"

From a friend

My high school friend Kim was inspired by Bob to write me the following. Kim and I served on the board of the school literary magazine. Her thoughtfulness and erudition were always appreciated then. And they still are.

"I feel a bond with your book premise -- I work third shift at a college library, where one of my nightly routines is to prepare/pack books for morning shipment for an interlibrary lending consortium the school belongs to. I have a tendency to "anthropomorphize" my charges (strange things happen to the mind when you're working alone on the third shift). I package them carefully (of course) so that they don't become bruised (bent, torn or mutilated) in transit, but beyond that I like to imagine I'm preparing them for a grand expedition.

"Sometimes books that belong to our library get misshelved at the borrowing library and remain on the borrower's shelves for months, even years. I correspond with the partners in the exchange program to follow up on missing books, and when they apologize for misshelving/misplacing a book, I absolve them by inventing stories about the books taking a vacation to visit their friends or taking a sabbatical to do research at the other library. It's exciting to know that you have spent so much time thinking about the secret life of books. I wish you and Bob the Book much success.

First review!

Buy Bob here!

"Bob Comes Out"

So this blog was created to talk about “Bob the Book,” possibly the only gay anthropomorphized book novel ever written, so I guess I had better write about it. Last night at the Cornelia Street Café was our – Bob’s, my, Jim’s, Rogerio’s – first reading, although I was the lone soul up there, feeling very strange, like I couldn’t take up too much of people’s time and attention. The audience was wonderful – small, as I am steering as many as possible toward the B&N reading on November 3, but full of people who mean a lot to me. Two comrades were there from the days when my LGBT reading group, Three Hots and a Cot, used to hold readings downstairs at Cornelia Street. The downstairs space has been spruced up quite a bit since then, with coordinated saturated colors, mirrors, anti-wobble tables, etc., and new theater lights. Also on hand were Rosemarie and Marlene, both thanked in my acknowledgments for being at pretty much every reading and performance ever (and in Roe’s case in some of them), old friends I hadn’t seen in maybe 16-17 years, a friend from grad school who hauled ass in from Edison…well, you don’t need to hear me enumerate my friends. What’s important is that, on an occasion such as this, one understands what true friendship is, and what friends will do for you, what they WANT to do for you, because it’s like doing it for themselves, too. Plenty of perfectly true friends missed, too, because sometimes that happens, and others, as I said, are being steered to later readings. So it’s true of many people who keep clicking “like” to FB posts and coming through wind and rain to hear me and their other friends read, play, act, and so on.

Coming home, we saw the supposedly pink lights strung on the George Washington Bridge. They really look more lavender because they are bluish with pink gels. Though they are really meant to be for Breast Cancer Awareness, we could not help but think of their appropriateness as a memorial to the Rutgers student who jumped last week.

But first this note from my conscience

I created this blog in part so that I could tour others’ blogs in support of my novel, “Bob the Book.” And I will get to “Bob.” (I’m no fool. Marketing trumps everything.) But in creating the blog I called myself “Man Above Bridge” – that is, man living on 189^th Street in Manhattan, above the George Washington Bridge – and so I was inescapably reminded, as if need be, that two days before my book was to be published, an eighteen-year-old boy jumped off that same bridge because two classmates exposed his sexuality on YouTube.

“This wouldn’t have happened without YouTube.” Please. Lacking YouTube, those classmates would have found another way. We used to bully in person. Yes, “we.” I have been bullied and I, in turn, have bullied others weaker than I. I have been victim and perpetrator. This does not excuse me, but it is interesting: had I been bullied because I was short or disabled or had an accent, I might not have turned so fast on those who were weaker. But I was bullied over my sexuality and that terrified me. I had to defend myself immediately and vigorously, to lash out in order to survive psychically. And I did. A fat, pink, lisping rabbi’s son paid the price. But that is still not the full story. The rabbi’s son and I were also sort of friends. I liked him. Sort of. We had things in common. He was smart. But given that I had a more masculine, athletic friend from Boston, a boy I could never be like, the boy I actually was like lost out. Got pushed up against a wall. Got verbally harassed, by me, when he had done nothing to deserve it.

At any rate, YouTube, my ass.

I am also impatient with cries of “All this bullying has to stop!” Yes, it does, but the people crying out across the Web and the cable channels are mostly focusing, as they usually do, on the actual bullies that posted the actual video. One grand act of bullying does not a suicide make. It takes years – years of put-downs, years of being excluded, years of remarks by people who “didn’t mean anything by it,” years of remarks by people who did, years of ads and TV shows and movies, years of being ignored. Let’s focus on that last one. Maybe, like my parents, the dead boy’s parents were proud of having a rule: “We never, ever ask about our kids’ personal lives.” Maybe like my mother they thought that, “Anyone who did well in school was all set.” (She had not done well, a victim first of being skipped ahead twice and then of diphtheria.) But whatever the reason, dozens of adults decided dozens of times not to talk to this boy, not to get to know him, not to ask anything. It is true, this happened within the first month of school; even the most conscientious RA might not have had the hours in a day to get around to this boy, though no doubt RAs can be taught to recognize at-risk freshmen and keep an eye on them from day one. But there is a contradiction here: those who become RAs are those who are extraordinarily capable socially. They are good not just with some kinds of people, but with all kinds. (So my college dean told me when I was eliminated from being an RA in the first round. No bitterness here: I should have been eliminated; I wanted it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to be liked and looked up to and to be considered special in someone’s life; things would have gone better if I had just wanted it to put on my law school application). So does the typically mature, capable, outgoing RA personality really understand that personalities like the Rutgers suicide really, actually exist? Can they begin to identify with them? Can they ever like them? Mostly, the socially talented wish the socially untalented would just go away, the way the intelligent wish the not-so-intelligent would go away, the way the white wish the black would go away and the rich wish the poor would go away.

And the Rutgers boy did go away, just as everyone wished.