Why the Trashy Novel is So Essential to Life
February 2005
There are so many darned crappy queer books out there. But I don't care: I love my trash.
Dallas Denny, editor in chief of the quarterly glossy Transgender Tapestry Journal, once dismissed a vast swath of the writing she gets in the mail from hopefuls seeking a publishing credit: "There is a genre of transgender fiction that is primarily wish fulfillment," Denny said to me a few months ago. Such works "are about seeing in the mirror a person (cross dressed) who approximates to some extent the internal reality of the individual. I believe many of our readers would just love for us to stuff this sort of thing between the covers, but I won't do it. I want to expose the readers to good work."
Same deal with gay and lesbian lit -- the dreary coming out novel, say. Every one seems to feel the need to write down their story of first crush, first time, first confession to friend or family. Ninety-five percent of it is absolute garbage.
And yet... if books are the continuations of the conversations we have with each other, the tedious and repetitive coming out story is an integral part of our personal and cultural awakening. I sniff at most of those stories today, but by gum I devoured them, needed them desperately, when I was a 16-year-old.
Jim Marks, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based
Lambda Literary Foundation, says, "The role of queer books in our lives has clearly changed over the past 30 years. At that time, there were virtually no portraits of gay men and lesbians in the popular media and public discourse except in very negative terms."
When there's nothing to start with, it's hard to be picky.
The foundation has recognized fluff since its beginning. I'm sure Marks will send me a note insisting that the Lammies are given out to a superior species of work, but some would say there are no superior mysteries, for example. Crabby Catholic critic Edmund Wilson once dismissed mystery novels in a famously vitriolic essay ("Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd," a reference to an Agatha Christie whodunnit): "The addict reads not to find anything out, but merely to get the mild stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and of the suspense itself of looking forward to learning a sensational secret.... With so many fine books to be read, so much to be studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish....
"We shall do well to discourage the squandering of this paper that might be put to better use."
Yet 17 years ago, when the very first Lambda awards were handed out, there was a combined category for Lesbian Mystery/Science Fiction, and another for the men. They were dropped in there along with the more substantial genres -- like poetry and AIDS writing and the non-fiction that rescues our history.
These days, there's also a Lammy kudos for snazziest romance novel. The mystery and sci-fi category was eventually split apart, with each genre getting its own recognition. And somewhere along the way, horror got added to the sci-fi section.
Why the heck is garbage so important and so popular?
Wilson had a point: Mysteries are grounded in the contradiction of the expected surprise. But good queer mysteries are also grounded in life, in reflecting back our own universally nasty human nature (rather than an identity seen through the lens of homophobic bigotry). Mysteries are social commentary.
Marks says of queer fiction in general: "You can have gay sit com characters ("Ellen," "Will and Grace"), but I would say that stereotyping remains the norm in mainstream media depictions of our experience. So books still remain the one place where the full range of LGBT experience find representation."
We all need a novel with one butch, one femme, one latino, one drag queen, one fill-in-the-blank.
But there's nothing wrong with the grander allegory, either. "Brothers of the Night," a 1997 collection of vampire stories (anthologized by Michael Rowe and Thomas S. Roche), "is about us," write the editors. "For the vampire's story, like our own stories, celebrates the erotic power of ritual bloodletting -- even, and perhaps especially, in a cultural landscape blasted by AIDS and social alienation.... 'for those who crave blood, and whose craving sustains them through a thousand midnights, these nights of passion can never be over. As long as the moon shines, the bloodlust will rise again.' The vampire is queer, by definition."
"Science fiction," according to Toronto writer Nalo Hopkinson, "says the oppressed don't have to be oppressed. Gender is a matter of personal choice. Things don't always have to be the way they were." (Hopkinson shared these ideas during a reading in Montreal in February.)
This self-described "fat queer woman from a Third World country" says that sci-fi is a way of revisiting and recalling a people's history and folklore.
A brief explanation of the title of her 2001 book of short stories, "Skin Folk," notes: "Throughout the Caribbean, under different names, you'll find stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these skin folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. They may be owls. They may be vampiric balls of fire. And always, whatever the burden their skins bear, once they remove them -- once they get under their own skins -- they can fly."
These words remind me of the stories told and retold by black slaves in the United States. I'm certainly not saying that 2005 gay North American reality is the same as that of the slave of pre-civil war United States. But those who are run down by the world in any age share small things in their seditious revolt. There are physical acts of resistance, of course. But something else, too.
In the introduction to a collection of African and Portuguese black slave tales which she has rescued from obscurity, American folklorist Virginia Hamilton writes: "[N]o amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination." The title of Hamilton's book? "And the People Could Fly."