A Statement by Lonely Christopher
For those of you unfamiliar with Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project congratulations for being so sheltered from all media, but it’s a YouTube video campaign designed as a reaction to the recent publicity over the bullying-related suicide deaths of gay teenagers across the United States. The idea being that, upon hearing stories of tormented LGBT youth who killed themselves out of despair developed through environments of homophobia, abuse, and anti-gay hostility, writer Dan Savage wished he could speak to the teenaged queer community to try and convince troubled youth that middle and high school is torturous, but life gets a lot better and is therefore worth sticking around for. Then he realized that he needn’t wait around for invitations to address this demographic, as YouTube offered him a platform to forgo traditional venues and speak to them directly. The It Gets Better Project began with a great video by Dan Savage and his husband Terry (watch it here) and then opened up the floor for other video contributions. Since then, hundreds of videos have been posted, including a humorous one by actor Jeffrey Self, a very moving one by a councilman in Fort Worth, and many others by regular folk and celebrities alike. While the furious stream of videos tends to become repetitious (the main message being “Don’t kill yourself, wait it out, because it gets so much better”), I feel the project is complicated and tremendously justified. Early on, I decided to create my own contribution for It Gets Better. After drafting a statement and filming it, though, I declined to submit it for several reasons. The project became a cause célèbre overnight and I felt my slightly academic tone was incongruous with the accessibility of the main and, considering the wealth of videos from everyday individuals as well as the slightly condescending ones from famous media figures, both gay and straight, the anti-suicidal musings of a frequently suicidal experimental poet named Lonely Christopher could be both inconsequential and confusing.
First of all, the idea of some weirdo calling himself Lonely Christopher trying to convince queer youth that one day they will not feel so alone is problematic. I felt like I had to address this situation before reaching the fundamental point of my statement, which resulted in an overlong, self-involved preamble. I explained, don’t worry! it’s only an arty pseudonym, I’m really a friendly, semi-adjusted, and sociable person. Wondering if that was really enough, I then went on to try to posit the concept of “loneliness” as a profound and positive characteristic. I attempted this by citing my favorite poem by Emily Dickinson (you can tell how the video is already derailing here). Here is the poem:
There is another Loneliness
That many die without –
Not want of friend occasions it or circumstance of Lot
But nature, sometimes, sometimes thought
And whoso it befall
Is richer than could be revealed
By mortal numeral -
I then attempted to pose this heightened concept of loneliness as a metaphor for queerness, in such a way that a traditionally negatively perceived disposition could be viewed as a liberatory, ultimately subversive, benefit. Like loneliness, queerness is also often viewed in an unfavorable, unhelpful way. But, as Dickinson proves in her poem on loneliness, there is also no singular definition for queerness, what it means to be gay, or whatever word one uses to identify as LGBT. That suggests that one can push past the stereotypes and cultural restrictions around being gay and understand queerness as a special opportunity --- a gift, even, that not everybody has, through which one can really actualize one’s self in a tremendous way. I ended this overwrought point with the only line in the statement I really like: “I guess this is an overly complicated way of saying that I think being queer is basically a super power.”
After that regrettable introduction, which was unnecessary and haughty enough to discourage me from posting the video, I got around to my main purpose (and drew my point out in such a way that my video would have been significantly longer than most offerings available through the project). So that my misguided efforts do not go completely to waste, I here offer the entirety of the rest of my statement (addressed directly to the hypothetical youth watching the video):
You have to celebrate yourself as a queer individual. I know that it’s hard --- and it doesn’t automatically entail coming out to your friends or school or parents, but what I really mean is that you not only have to accept yourself in your own mind, but you have to allow yourself to understand all the ways that you are valuable, unique, and gifted --- and how being queer plays into your perception of self and the world around you. Again, that’s an incredibly hard task. I know I didn’t understand how to view my sexuality in a wholly positive light for many years after I discovered I was queer. That was when I was maybe thirteen, if you can believe it. Many other LGBT people say that they knew at a much earlier age, but I don’t think I was situated in a cultural climate where I was able to understand that about myself preternaturally. It really took until puberty, when I began developing sexual attractions to boys instead of girls, when the possibility dawned on me. And when it did, it was very bad news --- a real private struggle that I was completely alone in and lacked the critical faculties to negotiate. Basically, when these attractions came to my attention, I thought, “Oh no! Please, no! Not another problem I have to deal with!” And this particular problem really did feel like the biggest one in the world --- and one I was experiencing in complete isolation at first.
When I was growing up, “the gays” were only discussed in what was perceived to be a negative context such as AIDS. Being gay was construed as such an unspeakable fault, it seemed almost like anybody so much as talking about it was under suspicion for being a sexual deviant. Sometimes it seems so easy to understand how silly and thoughtless this cultural taboo placed around homosexuality really is, and how insubstantial and indefensible. But that didn’t help me much in school. I was so afraid of being abnormal I really didn’t come out to anybody throughout middle school and high school. It was just inconceivable that something like that, an out gay kid, could actually exist and be in any way accepted or live a normal life. There was a definite environment of homophobia, perpetrated by the students and enforced by the adults, which kept all the queer kids at school very, very quiet about it. At the time, I had male friends who were very worried that I wasn’t taking the same interest in girls as they were. So they set me up with a string off blundering homecoming and prom dates, girlfriends who lasted about a week and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t interested in making out, all of that. And, of course, I had to suffer, day in and day out, hearing almost everybody my age using the word “gay” in a derogatory way, “That’s so gay,” accusing each other of being sissies or fags when they were acting stupid, and all the rest. And whenever I was suspected of being one of those unspeakables, a fag, there was verbal abuse and casual bullying involved.
It was just not a pleasant environment for me to grow up in. I hated school so much. And, you know, when I was a junior, at sixteen, I did try to kill myself. In many ways, first of all, not feeling able to be honest with my parents about who I knew I was, but also, the climate of abuse and mental torture which I experienced, and which I know is prevalent for many others even now, in many ways these were the major contributing factors to my decision to try and prematurely end my life. Fortunately, my attempt was nonfatal --- I was discovered and hospitalized. Being in the hospital, personally, didn’t help me, because even in that drastic situation I was not able to be honest with the doctors and with my family about my sexuality. So that wasn’t really addressed, but I survived, and went back to school --- and somehow I just got through it. And now, of course, it is very obvious that the idea of ending my life was the absolute wrong way to handle that situation. I know that now because, as they say, it gets better.
One of the ways I got through it, I think, was with the Internet. This was a new instrument that just a few years before wasn’t really around. But since it was there, and I had access to it, I was able to discover whole worlds that existed outside of my drab small-town nowhere life --- worlds that were so much more vibrant, cultured, exciting, sexy, and filled with opportunity. I realize that the Internet is and always was a platform for hate and cyber-bullying, which is a problem it seems many teenagers deal with today, but it’s just as much, and I’m sure more, of a positive resource for intelligence, for learning, for communication. Online, I was able to connect with other queer kids my age, far away but in the same situation as I was in, and we were able to form a sort of way of supporting each other from a distance. Also I was afforded access, through the Internet, to forms of culture and troves of information that I would have not otherwise received. If you are watching this video right now, that means that you are utilizing the Internet as a tool to learn about what exists outside of your personal experience. And that’s fabulous.
With the Internet, and reading a lot, and watching lots of movies, and coming into contact with gay culture whenever I could, whether that meant watching Queer as Folk late at night with the volume turned down low so my parents wouldn’t hear or renting John Waters movies from Blockbuster, I gained a lot of perspective and realized that my world, the one I felt stuck in, was not the end of the world. So while my experience with boys was rather limited as a teenager --- and when I did have brief encounters with boys, usually boys from a few towns over, we had to sneak away to the isolated train tracks to even hold hands or briefly kiss --- while I didn’t have much in the way of boyfriends at that age, I did eventually grow comfortable with being more of myself more openly, and expressing myself publically. And although that still did not mean coming out to more than a few very close and understanding female friends --- it meant that I learned how to care less about how the bullies and dullards around me thought of what I did and how I looked or acted. So, with varying degrees of success, I tried to keep afloat during an extended period of depression, self-hatred, confusion, guilt --- all of which contributed to frequent absenteeism in school, plus alcohol and drug abuse --- and then, one day, it was all over.
I left town, went to college in Brooklyn, and never really looked back. And of course I’ve continued to have bad periods, and I make mistakes all the time, but… really, really… the struggle was worth it and the struggle was an education… and, very quickly after I left high school I was prepared to live out of the closest, even though it took me four more years to tell my family, I never again had to lie to my friends about who I was. Because I went to college, I went to art school, I went to the city, and found it very liberating, and found it a place where my queerness was a benefit rather than a deficit, and all sorts of wonderful things happened. I met so many fantastic friends, both queer and straight, who are very supportive, I read a lot of queer theory and became very interested in gay rights activism, I even met my beautiful boyfriend Ryan when we were both featured in a queer poetry reading --- and never again did I have to worry about those things that tormented me when I was younger on the overwhelming level which they were occurring at the time. The first time I held hands with another boy, in the city, and walked down the street without anybody batting an eye, let alone yelling “fag” at us --- it was a revelation. It gets better, seriously, and you’re going to see that so soon.
In conclusion, I want to return to the Dickinson poem, a little bit. Because there is another queerness that many die without. But not you. You have it. If you take anything from this statement, I hope it’s that being queer is whatever you can possibly define it as --- you. Nobody else has the right to define what your sexuality means to you, and the role it plays in your life. And nobody has the right to make you feel terrible about being LGBT. The reality is that we live in a heteronormative society, and that kind of violence and discouragement is still widely tolerated, and you are going to experience discrimination --- but we all face those challenges, we all have our stories, and when we’re determined to stick it out, to refuse to be beaten down by anti-gay abuse, we win. We allow ourselves to live, and to love, and to grow, and that makes us unfathomably lucky. And, you know, I think kids that are fifteen, sixteen, going to school right now --- you are the kids that are going to change the world. So much has happened for gay rights since I was that age --- just that it has become a topic of consistent national debate seems like a miracle to me (despite the vitriol over the issue that comes from certain, ignorant groups of people). So, please, think big, continue, and don’t let your present circumstances cloud your vision of the future.
***
That is the end of my statement. Reading it over again, I feel slightly sorry I wasn’t able to figure out how to reformat it to fit the general structure of the project, but I don’t think its absence on YouTube is a terrible detriment, especially considering all the great videos available on the It Gets Better channel. I recently visited my family, in Western New York, and regrettably dragged some of my old notebooks out of storage in the backyard shed. Reading my journals and letters from high school for the first time since I wrote them, I was struck by how absolutely miserable I felt. One friend with whom I corresponded at the time described my lengthy and tortured letters as a model in suicidal ideation. And, at the time, I absolutely lacked any foresight whatever, beyond the intense desire to leave my hometown surroundings as soon as humanly possible, so whatever happened in school, with being ostracized and mocked, and with my non-comprehending family, it all felt completely inescapable. But, of course, it wasn’t; that is the primary message the It Gets Better Project is delivering to our nation’s LGBT youth. And that is entirely admirable.
Showing posts with label queer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label queer. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
White Swallow
The White Swallow series, a queer literary event hosted by Angelo Nikolopoulos, will be featuring the following performers tomorrow (Monday the 9th) at the West Village’s Cornelia St Café: Lonely Christopher, Matthew Hittinger, Billy Merrell, and Paul Lisicky. It’s going to be great fun!
The White Swallow Reading Series
(featuring guest host Zachary Pace)
6pm-8pm
$7 (includes one house drink)
Cornelia St. Cafe (Downstairs)
29 Cornelia St.
New York, NY
MATTHEW HITTINGER is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip (Spire Press, 2007) winner of the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009), and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). Matthew received his MFA from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award for Poetry and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2005.
BILLY MERRELL is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir (Scholastic, 2003), and a co-editor for The Full Spectrum (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2006), which received a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. Most recently, he is co-author of Go Ahead, Ask Me (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University and is currently the Web Developer of Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.
PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review,StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU.
LONELY CHRISTOPHER will be presenting two arias from his new opera Stegosaurus (a collaboration with composer Reese Revak). Featuring pianist Jennifer Peterson, soprano Heather Green, and tenor Brandon Snook. Presented by The Walt Whitman Project.
The White Swallow Reading Series
(featuring guest host Zachary Pace)
6pm-8pm
$7 (includes one house drink)
Cornelia St. Cafe (Downstairs)
29 Cornelia St.
New York, NY
MATTHEW HITTINGER is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip (Spire Press, 2007) winner of the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009), and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). Matthew received his MFA from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award for Poetry and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2005.
BILLY MERRELL is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir (Scholastic, 2003), and a co-editor for The Full Spectrum (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2006), which received a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. Most recently, he is co-author of Go Ahead, Ask Me (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University and is currently the Web Developer of Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.
PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review,StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU.
LONELY CHRISTOPHER will be presenting two arias from his new opera Stegosaurus (a collaboration with composer Reese Revak). Featuring pianist Jennifer Peterson, soprano Heather Green, and tenor Brandon Snook. Presented by The Walt Whitman Project.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Questions/Examples
Queer Paragraphs
questions and examples in poetics
by Lonely Christopher
William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon… No/Yes
The Ambiguities. What is a queer poetics? Alice Toklas does not answer. “In that case, what is the question?” That is queer poetics. This paradigm is architected on a foundational ambiguity. Example: Amy King writes herself out of taxonomy as introduction to her queer poetics. She begins, “I do not…” A negative impulse pushes the question farther and further: outside. This is an adventure in negotiating away from taxonomy. The engine of negative capability. Amy King writes about what doesn’t define her: “Such frames, these houses, do not hold, do not truly shelter nor constrain, do not even do good work as metaphor for the storehouse of my body, my language as system.” The sign vehicle crashes into a telephone pole. Ryan Doyle May promises: “We will burn definition’s home.” Queer poetics is a measurement of measurement’s failures, the unanswered question: a messy celebration of the unanswerable. Where do we put this? Gertrude Stein: “Next to vast which is which it is.” Is it? No/yes --- it is and isn’t.
A Thematic. Queer poetics doesn’t mean entirely in earnest, it’s an amorphous rubric, no incumbent constitutionality. That is, it is not shaped by a coherent/canonized value system that’s purposed ideologically against a heteronormative poetic tradition. A queer poetics isn’t implicitly correlative to any particular politics and/or politic responsibilities and/or praxis. It should exist outside the power structure that contains that discourse, but become accessible by readerly politicized positions. Example: a queer poetry is not the gay poetry. And yes it can be, but the latter has to solicit the former and only borrow it like a costume. That’s why there’s a lack of representative anthologies of queer writing: editors grasp out for queer and sculpt the material snatched from the far corners of definition into a shape conditioned by hegemonic discourses. This problem is recognized by CAConrad thus: “How queer was the poet?” The queerness isn’t in the poetry, the poetry’s in the queerness. And furthermore: “Queer poets are poets who need to create the best possible poems they have to offer, and need to do so without the policing of how many queer items appear in a poem to be considered queer. The fact that you are a poet who is queer is enough. The experience your body has carried into time will create the poem. And the experience of being queer WILL be in the poem, whether it's automatically recognizable or not.”
The Complications. Restatement: queer poetics is not predicated upon a culture; culture is differently articulated through the processes of a (descriptive) queer grammar. Amy King, here again, posits a behavior: “In its mercurial condition, queer poetry may throw a wrench in the cogs of the white male heterosexual default setting.” This, however, arrives with the caveat: “A queer poetry may offer a few common features [but] there is no single identifiable trait that enables the culture-at-large to recognize, absorb, contain, and imprison it.” Stein instructs us: the change of color likely, the difference prepared, and sugar is not a vegetable. Queerness haunts the machine, articulating differences. We don’t know what it means totally but we think it’s without totality. Stein: “Do you know by what means rockets signal pleasure pain and noise and union, do you know by what means a rock is freed when it is not held too tightly held in the hand.” The value generation of normative poetics functions like a statement with an empty subject: It is.. In this example, the verb is linguistically considered “avalent,” but that’s a misnomer insofar as the directness of the statement operates as the valent curtain over a surface of its essential problem (“it” also isn’t); a valence, in other words, is a length of decorative drapery attached to a frame in order to screen the structure or space beneath it. Queerness introduces existential arguments that complicate the conceptual valency of the definable/singular --- queerness pushes the structure centrifugally in other territories.
A Form. How do queer “values” form and operate? An opera: “He asked as if that made a difference.” Burroughs wanted to discover what was not human, instead of asking after definition, in his treatment of what we are and why we do what we do to each other. The monster tells the truth because of the difference, the difference makes it monstrous. The operational form of queerness works as difference, as a difference engine, processing values analytically, chewing up judgments. That’s an asking of questions as if that makes a difference. The grammar of a queer poetics is an anti-lesson in morphology. The site of an application of queer grammar becomes a living difference. When a queer poetics, in its liquidity, pours into an ideological shape --- the result doesn’t re-form queerness, it queers the form. Amy King writes: “A queer poetics is not only about what is but is equally about what is not. We live in relation to each other, regardless of our best efforts to divorce and secede. The human species is a community that communes even beyond its species. We do so violently, sometimes kindly and in multiple capacities.” The form isn’t divorced from the relationship --- the relationship as a question of differences. Photographer Richard Avedon’s motto: The No forces me into the Yes. “I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and what happens between us.” Queerness reads the naked surface of form, what’s underneath the drape of it is, and examples the structures that define by negative process. Andy Warhol isn’t dead.
The Distinctions. Bourdieu: “I believe it is possible to enter into the singularity of an object without renouncing the ambition of drawing out universal propositions.” Queer poetry is the rhizome lurking within the normative order. The monster attacking an institutional address, &c. The outlaw mode troubling the dominant definition: quietly infecting the postures of the cultural logic that states “it is” --- with problems, multiplicities of “it is this and it is not and/or this is not this this and/or it is this and this is not not this and/or it is not this not this and this is this and not it and/or this is it… not…” The value will explode and flower. Queerness hacks the cultural code with difference. “Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make[.]” Queer poetry happens in the negative space of the distinctions. Queer poetry is not verse by heterosexuals. Nor is it fundamentally verse by homosexuals, its chief practitioners. Its subject is subjectivity; its author is a performance artist and a scientist writing out emotional math in the theater of meaning. “There is no there there,” an absent voice rises. Amy King responds the we know “that there is no there there, there is only now and then now, there is no permanence, and that knowledge encourages the exploration of what now really is beyond the false fences of security, of a center, a normal, for higher dreams and greater privileges that can be shared between us, among us, in our constant becoming, however fleeting, however impossible […]” Queer poetry is questions and examples, is a problematic’s florescence. There: there is a question/problem floating in space, waiting to become what isn’t what is, waiting to grow into a black hole of others’ actualization[s]. “The result is that they know the difference between instead and instead and made and made and said and said. / The result is that they might be as very well two and as soon three and to be sure, four and which is why they might not be,” quoth Stein again. There is no queer history that’s not the history of disturbing our convenient and singular drapes. The anachronistic possibilities of queer poetics are hidden like land minds across our retrospection: ahistorical resonances waiting to blow up the surface area of meaning’s government. We attempt to write/inscribe queer poetry onto the ideological domain of a systemic totalization --- regardless of normative context, which we understand as a suppressive agent, we interrupt again and again the scripted conversation and hold up a dark funhouse mirror to institutionalized perspectives. A sonnet by Shakespeare is a queer threat if the reader makes the distinctions. The queer library hasn’t been written yet, happens everywhere, and is not going to be finished, ever.
A Love.
“I do love roses and carnations. / A mistake […] / I call it something religious. You mean beautiful. I do not know that […]” All of this is a neologism meaning and not meaning love; love becoming its other, poetry’s description[s] blurring, this the flow of argot pushing and shoving the way “it is” out of itself, this a version of how queerness means not finally but now: when we pull back the decorative drapery obscuring this subject, this essay, and this terminally unfinished sentence […]
The Sources. The Ambiguities: Gertrude Stein’s last conversation reconfigured; “The What Else of Queer Poetry” by Amy King (Text); The Anatomy of Gray by Ryan Doyle May; “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein. A Thematic: “What’s a Queer Poem?” by CAConrad (Text). The Complications: Ibid by Amy King; paraphrased from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein; “An Instant Answer” by Gertrude Stein; “Valence” definition paraphrased from the Oxford American Dictionary. A Form: “Four Saints in Three Acts” by Gertrude Stein; Ibid. by Amy King; Richard Avedon interview, source unidentified (found here). The Distinctions: “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste” by Pierre Bourdieu; Ibid by Bourdieu; Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein; Ibid by Amy King; “Patriarchal Poetry” (again) by Gertrude Stein. A Love: quote re-contextualized from “Lifting Belly” by Gertrude Stein. Further Reading: Amy King’s essay (online) “The What Else of Queer Poetry,” excerpted here generously and probably beyond recognized allowance, is an intelligent treatment of the liberatory indeterminacy of queer poetics qua general term (the above was fully inspired/provoked by her text); see also: “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein.
questions and examples in poetics
by Lonely Christopher
William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon… No/Yes
The Ambiguities. What is a queer poetics? Alice Toklas does not answer. “In that case, what is the question?” That is queer poetics. This paradigm is architected on a foundational ambiguity. Example: Amy King writes herself out of taxonomy as introduction to her queer poetics. She begins, “I do not…” A negative impulse pushes the question farther and further: outside. This is an adventure in negotiating away from taxonomy. The engine of negative capability. Amy King writes about what doesn’t define her: “Such frames, these houses, do not hold, do not truly shelter nor constrain, do not even do good work as metaphor for the storehouse of my body, my language as system.” The sign vehicle crashes into a telephone pole. Ryan Doyle May promises: “We will burn definition’s home.” Queer poetics is a measurement of measurement’s failures, the unanswered question: a messy celebration of the unanswerable. Where do we put this? Gertrude Stein: “Next to vast which is which it is.” Is it? No/yes --- it is and isn’t.
A Thematic. Queer poetics doesn’t mean entirely in earnest, it’s an amorphous rubric, no incumbent constitutionality. That is, it is not shaped by a coherent/canonized value system that’s purposed ideologically against a heteronormative poetic tradition. A queer poetics isn’t implicitly correlative to any particular politics and/or politic responsibilities and/or praxis. It should exist outside the power structure that contains that discourse, but become accessible by readerly politicized positions. Example: a queer poetry is not the gay poetry. And yes it can be, but the latter has to solicit the former and only borrow it like a costume. That’s why there’s a lack of representative anthologies of queer writing: editors grasp out for queer and sculpt the material snatched from the far corners of definition into a shape conditioned by hegemonic discourses. This problem is recognized by CAConrad thus: “How queer was the poet?” The queerness isn’t in the poetry, the poetry’s in the queerness. And furthermore: “Queer poets are poets who need to create the best possible poems they have to offer, and need to do so without the policing of how many queer items appear in a poem to be considered queer. The fact that you are a poet who is queer is enough. The experience your body has carried into time will create the poem. And the experience of being queer WILL be in the poem, whether it's automatically recognizable or not.”
The Complications. Restatement: queer poetics is not predicated upon a culture; culture is differently articulated through the processes of a (descriptive) queer grammar. Amy King, here again, posits a behavior: “In its mercurial condition, queer poetry may throw a wrench in the cogs of the white male heterosexual default setting.” This, however, arrives with the caveat: “A queer poetry may offer a few common features [but] there is no single identifiable trait that enables the culture-at-large to recognize, absorb, contain, and imprison it.” Stein instructs us: the change of color likely, the difference prepared, and sugar is not a vegetable. Queerness haunts the machine, articulating differences. We don’t know what it means totally but we think it’s without totality. Stein: “Do you know by what means rockets signal pleasure pain and noise and union, do you know by what means a rock is freed when it is not held too tightly held in the hand.” The value generation of normative poetics functions like a statement with an empty subject: It is.. In this example, the verb is linguistically considered “avalent,” but that’s a misnomer insofar as the directness of the statement operates as the valent curtain over a surface of its essential problem (“it” also isn’t); a valence, in other words, is a length of decorative drapery attached to a frame in order to screen the structure or space beneath it. Queerness introduces existential arguments that complicate the conceptual valency of the definable/singular --- queerness pushes the structure centrifugally in other territories.
A Form. How do queer “values” form and operate? An opera: “He asked as if that made a difference.” Burroughs wanted to discover what was not human, instead of asking after definition, in his treatment of what we are and why we do what we do to each other. The monster tells the truth because of the difference, the difference makes it monstrous. The operational form of queerness works as difference, as a difference engine, processing values analytically, chewing up judgments. That’s an asking of questions as if that makes a difference. The grammar of a queer poetics is an anti-lesson in morphology. The site of an application of queer grammar becomes a living difference. When a queer poetics, in its liquidity, pours into an ideological shape --- the result doesn’t re-form queerness, it queers the form. Amy King writes: “A queer poetics is not only about what is but is equally about what is not. We live in relation to each other, regardless of our best efforts to divorce and secede. The human species is a community that communes even beyond its species. We do so violently, sometimes kindly and in multiple capacities.” The form isn’t divorced from the relationship --- the relationship as a question of differences. Photographer Richard Avedon’s motto: The No forces me into the Yes. “I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and what happens between us.” Queerness reads the naked surface of form, what’s underneath the drape of it is, and examples the structures that define by negative process. Andy Warhol isn’t dead.
The Distinctions. Bourdieu: “I believe it is possible to enter into the singularity of an object without renouncing the ambition of drawing out universal propositions.” Queer poetry is the rhizome lurking within the normative order. The monster attacking an institutional address, &c. The outlaw mode troubling the dominant definition: quietly infecting the postures of the cultural logic that states “it is” --- with problems, multiplicities of “it is this and it is not and/or this is not this this and/or it is this and this is not not this and/or it is not this not this and this is this and not it and/or this is it… not…” The value will explode and flower. Queerness hacks the cultural code with difference. “Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make[.]” Queer poetry happens in the negative space of the distinctions. Queer poetry is not verse by heterosexuals. Nor is it fundamentally verse by homosexuals, its chief practitioners. Its subject is subjectivity; its author is a performance artist and a scientist writing out emotional math in the theater of meaning. “There is no there there,” an absent voice rises. Amy King responds the we know “that there is no there there, there is only now and then now, there is no permanence, and that knowledge encourages the exploration of what now really is beyond the false fences of security, of a center, a normal, for higher dreams and greater privileges that can be shared between us, among us, in our constant becoming, however fleeting, however impossible […]” Queer poetry is questions and examples, is a problematic’s florescence. There: there is a question/problem floating in space, waiting to become what isn’t what is, waiting to grow into a black hole of others’ actualization[s]. “The result is that they know the difference between instead and instead and made and made and said and said. / The result is that they might be as very well two and as soon three and to be sure, four and which is why they might not be,” quoth Stein again. There is no queer history that’s not the history of disturbing our convenient and singular drapes. The anachronistic possibilities of queer poetics are hidden like land minds across our retrospection: ahistorical resonances waiting to blow up the surface area of meaning’s government. We attempt to write/inscribe queer poetry onto the ideological domain of a systemic totalization --- regardless of normative context, which we understand as a suppressive agent, we interrupt again and again the scripted conversation and hold up a dark funhouse mirror to institutionalized perspectives. A sonnet by Shakespeare is a queer threat if the reader makes the distinctions. The queer library hasn’t been written yet, happens everywhere, and is not going to be finished, ever.
A Love.
“I do love roses and carnations. / A mistake […] / I call it something religious. You mean beautiful. I do not know that […]” All of this is a neologism meaning and not meaning love; love becoming its other, poetry’s description[s] blurring, this the flow of argot pushing and shoving the way “it is” out of itself, this a version of how queerness means not finally but now: when we pull back the decorative drapery obscuring this subject, this essay, and this terminally unfinished sentence […]
The Sources. The Ambiguities: Gertrude Stein’s last conversation reconfigured; “The What Else of Queer Poetry” by Amy King (Text); The Anatomy of Gray by Ryan Doyle May; “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein. A Thematic: “What’s a Queer Poem?” by CAConrad (Text). The Complications: Ibid by Amy King; paraphrased from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein; “An Instant Answer” by Gertrude Stein; “Valence” definition paraphrased from the Oxford American Dictionary. A Form: “Four Saints in Three Acts” by Gertrude Stein; Ibid. by Amy King; Richard Avedon interview, source unidentified (found here). The Distinctions: “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste” by Pierre Bourdieu; Ibid by Bourdieu; Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein; Ibid by Amy King; “Patriarchal Poetry” (again) by Gertrude Stein. A Love: quote re-contextualized from “Lifting Belly” by Gertrude Stein. Further Reading: Amy King’s essay (online) “The What Else of Queer Poetry,” excerpted here generously and probably beyond recognized allowance, is an intelligent treatment of the liberatory indeterminacy of queer poetics qua general term (the above was fully inspired/provoked by her text); see also: “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Scotch Slam
An announcement via Broooklyn the Borough:
The Scotch Slam 2010 at the Bowery Poetry Club is meant for drunken intellectual types, but anybody can come! Bob Holman and Robert Fitterman host this crew of vagabonds and have matched each writer with a single-malt beverage. You can pick your favorite match at the end, but by that point it might be a tall order. Featured authors include Kriten Prevallet, Steven Zultanski and Matvei Yankelevich. Standout Lonely Christopher of The Corresponding Society is an adventurer of queer politics and cliché. Christopher’s editions of “Gay Plays”, “Satan”, and “Wow Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” can all be found at Vanderbilt Avenue’s own Unnameable Books if you're looking for a head start. The drinks will be neat, the authors will be drunk, and so will you! Attend in person at 308 Bowery or catch it live online. Get into it and sit down for a warming bevy and some words in the air.
Sun 10 Jan at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery). $20 to drink $5 to listen sober.
The Scotch Slam 2010 at the Bowery Poetry Club is meant for drunken intellectual types, but anybody can come! Bob Holman and Robert Fitterman host this crew of vagabonds and have matched each writer with a single-malt beverage. You can pick your favorite match at the end, but by that point it might be a tall order. Featured authors include Kriten Prevallet, Steven Zultanski and Matvei Yankelevich. Standout Lonely Christopher of The Corresponding Society is an adventurer of queer politics and cliché. Christopher’s editions of “Gay Plays”, “Satan”, and “Wow Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” can all be found at Vanderbilt Avenue’s own Unnameable Books if you're looking for a head start. The drinks will be neat, the authors will be drunk, and so will you! Attend in person at 308 Bowery or catch it live online. Get into it and sit down for a warming bevy and some words in the air.
Sun 10 Jan at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery). $20 to drink $5 to listen sober.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
This Is Going To Be Fun
Here is an announcement about an exciting event coming soon to Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books (one of the city’s best literature merchants, which, incidentally, stocks all three titles of the Corresponding Society’s “No Know” chapbook series, fyi):
Gay Play 3
a new play by Lonely Christopher
presented in a dramatic reading at Unnameable Books
25 September, that is Friday, 8pm, free and one night only!
600 Vanderbilt (at St Marks), Brooklyn
This is going to be fun. Lonely Christopher presents a dramatic reading of the third installment in his internationally produced Gay Play trilogy. Gay Play 3 is something like a closet opera about queer history, shortly before Stonewall, made into a soupy meal using leftovers of Beckett, “The Boys in the Band,” a textbook on structuralism, and Greek tragedy. One day it will be staged entirely in an inflatable pool. Each entry in the trilogy is a standalone piece; familiarity with the previous installments is not required for enjoyment. Gay Play 1 was first staged last summer at the Bowery Poetry Club, Gay Play 2 premiered in dual Mandarin/English productions this August in ChengDu, China, and this event marks the first ever presentation of Gay Play 3.
a dramatic reading featuring:
Jake Abrams
Taylor Derwin
Sam Kline
& Lonely Christopher
Gay Play 3
a new play by Lonely Christopher
presented in a dramatic reading at Unnameable Books
25 September, that is Friday, 8pm, free and one night only!
600 Vanderbilt (at St Marks), Brooklyn
This is going to be fun. Lonely Christopher presents a dramatic reading of the third installment in his internationally produced Gay Play trilogy. Gay Play 3 is something like a closet opera about queer history, shortly before Stonewall, made into a soupy meal using leftovers of Beckett, “The Boys in the Band,” a textbook on structuralism, and Greek tragedy. One day it will be staged entirely in an inflatable pool. Each entry in the trilogy is a standalone piece; familiarity with the previous installments is not required for enjoyment. Gay Play 1 was first staged last summer at the Bowery Poetry Club, Gay Play 2 premiered in dual Mandarin/English productions this August in ChengDu, China, and this event marks the first ever presentation of Gay Play 3.
a dramatic reading featuring:
Jake Abrams
Taylor Derwin
Sam Kline
& Lonely Christopher
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Straight Proust
Shelf Space
On Qualities and Locations of Queer Literature
by Lonely Christopher
What is queer literature? I think this is an important question and a stupid one. In the “gay fiction/non-fiction shelves at Barnes and Noble” sense, “gay lit” is a minoritizing concept. I have never plucked a title off the “gay fiction” shelf; to do so seems unfortunately tacky (considering my snobby bias re the quality of writing that is typically relegated there, possibly correlative to chick lit). About the only text I’ve taken home from the “gay non-fiction” shelf is Epistemology of the Closet. In that book, Sedgwick discusses “the contradictions […] internal to all the important twentieth-century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition,” which include “the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority […] and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities[.]” But, of course, we have all read Epistemology of the Closet --- which is why I find it so queer the issue of themes of non-normative sexuality in creative writing is treated with a minoritizing disdain, in casual conversation, by my closest friends. I am not arguing against the organization of texts by subject --- without which Mr. Dewey weeps and I get confused at the library --- but it’s undeniable that a social stigma is attached to what is essentially the ghettoization of queer writing. Notably, reputable queer authors do not usually languish in the “gay fiction” section: you’ll probably find City of Night and the oeuvre of Burroughs in regular literature. Although the pessimistic view might be that those guys became institutionalized enough to receive honorary-straight status, which comes with admission to the grown-ups table; just as reasonable, and more positively, it might also be that important literature is important literature. We’d love to claim the latter the case here in our progressive day. So why is it, then, that certain of my peers continually express concern that I am running the risk, in foregrounding queer themes in my own work, of losing their interest by esoterically going gay? I posit the answer relates to a kind of latent homophobia that’s ubiquitous in contemporary literary discourse. Despite familiarity with all the trendy texts of queer theory --- Sedgwick, Butler, Foucault --- straight-identified writers and readers (that I know) can’t help finding queer material in literature kind of boring and gross. Although I don’t feel comfortable organizing myself under the cultural rubric of the “gay” construct, my non-normative sexual identity (or: queerness) still came with implicit subscription to a rich and fascinating gay canon of creative texts and critical perspectives. My interest in certain dimensions of art and theory (that is, the gay dimensions) presupposes my access to queer tradition. I had to struggle out of a stuffy heteronormativity before I learned to love queer culture. This is the result of the minoritizing influence built in to normative discourse, which sets apart anything articulating a strong queer perspective. (Such values also make you straight until proven otherwise, so many queer boys and girls tend to be raised straight, which retards them culturally.) I mean to say: queerness isn’t implicitly just for gays, but cultural hegemony ignores this and enforces ghettoization. So friends squirm when my writing swerves into fag land. Most of what I’ve been doing for about a year results from a project of queer investigation. Previously, the attention of my creative writing has been more scattered. When peers began to notice the unfamiliar direction my work was heading in, the reaction was almost unanimously suspicious (turning negative). There was an audience for my chamber drama Gay Play when I staged it last year --- but when I wrote a sequel, kids started worrying. When I ended up with Gay Play 3, some reactions were outright hostile: I was turning into a “scene queen.” The primary response I’ve been getting is that I shouldn’t write about queer themes all the time because that runs of risk of making me a “special interest” writer. A friend recently complained over the intellectual poverty of art about same sex relationships; I pointed out my unpublished novel focuses on a straight married couple. He said, correction, he didn’t like any art about romantic relationships --- we went home and watched a Woody Allen movie, which we enjoyed. That is an irony of straight discomfort with queer lit --- it doesn’t go both ways: queers don’t seem to have much of a problem with appreciating all the fine heterocentric art in the world. In fact, I quite love Woody Allen, for example, even though I do not relate at all to his hetero treatment of love and sex. Weirdly, a whole bunch (most?) of the heroes of the normative canon, which have become the favorites of my straight peers, are total homos. I have another friend who used to really want to erase that unfortunate detail. When we were young we were crazy about Rimbaud. Despite the whole Verlaine fling --- which, you know, gave us some pretty good poetry --- and the evidence Arthur had a kept boy when he quit the writing game for business, according to this friend Rimbaud wasn’t “technically gay” because he doesn’t fit neatly under the contemporary gay construct; thus, his sexuality is unimportant in the consideration of his work. Next came Proust, which my friend tried to prove was actually straight because he wrote so well about heterosexual relationships and penned a few flowery letters to his women friends. Never mind, you know, the overwhelmingly queer bent of In Search of Lost Time or any of his fancy gay love. It went on like that --- I think Whitman came next --- although this fellow is very intelligent and his attitude might be different now. I think Sedgwick makes an important case for reading literature from a queer perspective, which is a practice often considered useless, extraneous folly by even those straights who’ve read Sedgwick. When arguing defensively against the validity of queer perspectives in art, my straight friends often resort to a few stances exampled in Epistemology of the Closet. The list of possible attacks is sort of lengthy, but it’s worth representing here in full: “1. Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion --- and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or 2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion --- but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless. Or 3. Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike now --- so people probably didn’t do anything. Or 4. Prohibitions against homosexuality didn’t exist back then, unlike now --- so if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or 5. The word 'homosexuality' wasn’t coined until 1869 --- so everyone before then was heterosexual. (Of course, heterosexuality has always existed.) Or 6. The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an attachment to someone of the other sex --- so their feelings about people of their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Or (under perhaps somewhat different rules of admissible evidence) 7. There is no actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another woman --- so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort) 8. The author or the author’s important attachments may very well have been homosexual --- but it would be provincial to let so insignificant a fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project of life, writing, or thought.” To Sedgwick, this puritanical outrage at the canon being reconfigured along queer lines evinces, beyond sheer homophobia, a hegemonic ignorance necessary in sustaining the established order: “Don’t ask; You shouldn’t know.” There is the additional fallacy of misunderstanding the divisions between popular and literary writing when it comes to queer texts (like mine). My treatment of queer themes, its centrality in my recent work, gets conflated by friends with the production of the low paperbacks shoved out of the literary discourse to languish on the dusty “gay fiction” shelf. Thus, writing about queerness at all is the same thing as writing for the supposedly non-critical popular gay audience (and we know they don’t even read, pity). The situation is probably a little different right now in China, where the first two Gay Plays are being published and staged. The communal homophobia doesn’t seem to have been internalized and caked over with organized defenses there as it has here stateside. When casting the English production of Gay Play 2, I’m told it was impossible to convince noncitizens (expatriates and the like) living locally to participate because of the social fear that, I guess, ultimately implies the punishment of deportation for subversive activities. In climates of more direct sociopolitical repression, any conception of queer literature is disallowed from validation or even existence; in cultures of internalized homophobia the dominant critical discourse substitutes in the government’s role in authoritarian censorship. When it comes to the troublesome attitudes of my friends here in the US, I think I should make an important distinction clear because it’s probably not terribly considered from a straight perspective. Straight writers focus on themes of sexuality frequently and sans compunction --- this is because sexuality is fascinating and complex. A straight-identified writer has implicit access to her life of experiences parsing the complications of sexuality from her own vantage. This fundamental catalog of conceptualized sexuality is obviously available to the gay or queer-identified writer as well. There’s something else, though, that influences the queer writer, problematizing and inspiring his work: his subjugated position in a heteronormative social grammar. There is no aspect of the queer subject that’s structurally inherent (thereby inalienable) in our literary or social formations. This is evidenced in how a queer writerly focus is so easily suspect: there is no right to a gay literature within the intellectual framework we operate in as artists. A straight writer writing straight work writes literature; a queer writer writing queer work writes queer literature, which doesn’t exist. Maybe, to restart, the question is, rather: What should queer literature be? Does it belong outside the normative canon, within it qua subspecies, or should there even be a designation distinct for it at all? I know the gay canon did form outside normative discourse --- it had to because of where its subscribers were: the institution of the closet. I suppose I’d like to see something suggested by the “universalizing view” identified in Sedgwick: a queer literature different from the established and ghettoized gay canon, something that’s not as minoritized but in active conversation with our normative canon. When somebody picks up a volume of Proust from the “literature” shelf, for example, she understands the text simultaneously as a great novel and a great queer novel. I like the duality there. A critical engagement with queerness in treatments of literature is undeniably important --- not only from a gay perspective, or from wherever I’m located personally, but for all writers and readers of creative texts (that’s us). Queer has value. As Annamarie Jagose writes, “Queer is not outside the magnetic field of identity. Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally."
On Qualities and Locations of Queer Literature
by Lonely Christopher
What is queer literature? I think this is an important question and a stupid one. In the “gay fiction/non-fiction shelves at Barnes and Noble” sense, “gay lit” is a minoritizing concept. I have never plucked a title off the “gay fiction” shelf; to do so seems unfortunately tacky (considering my snobby bias re the quality of writing that is typically relegated there, possibly correlative to chick lit). About the only text I’ve taken home from the “gay non-fiction” shelf is Epistemology of the Closet. In that book, Sedgwick discusses “the contradictions […] internal to all the important twentieth-century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition,” which include “the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority […] and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities[.]” But, of course, we have all read Epistemology of the Closet --- which is why I find it so queer the issue of themes of non-normative sexuality in creative writing is treated with a minoritizing disdain, in casual conversation, by my closest friends. I am not arguing against the organization of texts by subject --- without which Mr. Dewey weeps and I get confused at the library --- but it’s undeniable that a social stigma is attached to what is essentially the ghettoization of queer writing. Notably, reputable queer authors do not usually languish in the “gay fiction” section: you’ll probably find City of Night and the oeuvre of Burroughs in regular literature. Although the pessimistic view might be that those guys became institutionalized enough to receive honorary-straight status, which comes with admission to the grown-ups table; just as reasonable, and more positively, it might also be that important literature is important literature. We’d love to claim the latter the case here in our progressive day. So why is it, then, that certain of my peers continually express concern that I am running the risk, in foregrounding queer themes in my own work, of losing their interest by esoterically going gay? I posit the answer relates to a kind of latent homophobia that’s ubiquitous in contemporary literary discourse. Despite familiarity with all the trendy texts of queer theory --- Sedgwick, Butler, Foucault --- straight-identified writers and readers (that I know) can’t help finding queer material in literature kind of boring and gross. Although I don’t feel comfortable organizing myself under the cultural rubric of the “gay” construct, my non-normative sexual identity (or: queerness) still came with implicit subscription to a rich and fascinating gay canon of creative texts and critical perspectives. My interest in certain dimensions of art and theory (that is, the gay dimensions) presupposes my access to queer tradition. I had to struggle out of a stuffy heteronormativity before I learned to love queer culture. This is the result of the minoritizing influence built in to normative discourse, which sets apart anything articulating a strong queer perspective. (Such values also make you straight until proven otherwise, so many queer boys and girls tend to be raised straight, which retards them culturally.) I mean to say: queerness isn’t implicitly just for gays, but cultural hegemony ignores this and enforces ghettoization. So friends squirm when my writing swerves into fag land. Most of what I’ve been doing for about a year results from a project of queer investigation. Previously, the attention of my creative writing has been more scattered. When peers began to notice the unfamiliar direction my work was heading in, the reaction was almost unanimously suspicious (turning negative). There was an audience for my chamber drama Gay Play when I staged it last year --- but when I wrote a sequel, kids started worrying. When I ended up with Gay Play 3, some reactions were outright hostile: I was turning into a “scene queen.” The primary response I’ve been getting is that I shouldn’t write about queer themes all the time because that runs of risk of making me a “special interest” writer. A friend recently complained over the intellectual poverty of art about same sex relationships; I pointed out my unpublished novel focuses on a straight married couple. He said, correction, he didn’t like any art about romantic relationships --- we went home and watched a Woody Allen movie, which we enjoyed. That is an irony of straight discomfort with queer lit --- it doesn’t go both ways: queers don’t seem to have much of a problem with appreciating all the fine heterocentric art in the world. In fact, I quite love Woody Allen, for example, even though I do not relate at all to his hetero treatment of love and sex. Weirdly, a whole bunch (most?) of the heroes of the normative canon, which have become the favorites of my straight peers, are total homos. I have another friend who used to really want to erase that unfortunate detail. When we were young we were crazy about Rimbaud. Despite the whole Verlaine fling --- which, you know, gave us some pretty good poetry --- and the evidence Arthur had a kept boy when he quit the writing game for business, according to this friend Rimbaud wasn’t “technically gay” because he doesn’t fit neatly under the contemporary gay construct; thus, his sexuality is unimportant in the consideration of his work. Next came Proust, which my friend tried to prove was actually straight because he wrote so well about heterosexual relationships and penned a few flowery letters to his women friends. Never mind, you know, the overwhelmingly queer bent of In Search of Lost Time or any of his fancy gay love. It went on like that --- I think Whitman came next --- although this fellow is very intelligent and his attitude might be different now. I think Sedgwick makes an important case for reading literature from a queer perspective, which is a practice often considered useless, extraneous folly by even those straights who’ve read Sedgwick. When arguing defensively against the validity of queer perspectives in art, my straight friends often resort to a few stances exampled in Epistemology of the Closet. The list of possible attacks is sort of lengthy, but it’s worth representing here in full: “1. Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion --- and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or 2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion --- but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless. Or 3. Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike now --- so people probably didn’t do anything. Or 4. Prohibitions against homosexuality didn’t exist back then, unlike now --- so if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or 5. The word 'homosexuality' wasn’t coined until 1869 --- so everyone before then was heterosexual. (Of course, heterosexuality has always existed.) Or 6. The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an attachment to someone of the other sex --- so their feelings about people of their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Or (under perhaps somewhat different rules of admissible evidence) 7. There is no actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another woman --- so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort) 8. The author or the author’s important attachments may very well have been homosexual --- but it would be provincial to let so insignificant a fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project of life, writing, or thought.” To Sedgwick, this puritanical outrage at the canon being reconfigured along queer lines evinces, beyond sheer homophobia, a hegemonic ignorance necessary in sustaining the established order: “Don’t ask; You shouldn’t know.” There is the additional fallacy of misunderstanding the divisions between popular and literary writing when it comes to queer texts (like mine). My treatment of queer themes, its centrality in my recent work, gets conflated by friends with the production of the low paperbacks shoved out of the literary discourse to languish on the dusty “gay fiction” shelf. Thus, writing about queerness at all is the same thing as writing for the supposedly non-critical popular gay audience (and we know they don’t even read, pity). The situation is probably a little different right now in China, where the first two Gay Plays are being published and staged. The communal homophobia doesn’t seem to have been internalized and caked over with organized defenses there as it has here stateside. When casting the English production of Gay Play 2, I’m told it was impossible to convince noncitizens (expatriates and the like) living locally to participate because of the social fear that, I guess, ultimately implies the punishment of deportation for subversive activities. In climates of more direct sociopolitical repression, any conception of queer literature is disallowed from validation or even existence; in cultures of internalized homophobia the dominant critical discourse substitutes in the government’s role in authoritarian censorship. When it comes to the troublesome attitudes of my friends here in the US, I think I should make an important distinction clear because it’s probably not terribly considered from a straight perspective. Straight writers focus on themes of sexuality frequently and sans compunction --- this is because sexuality is fascinating and complex. A straight-identified writer has implicit access to her life of experiences parsing the complications of sexuality from her own vantage. This fundamental catalog of conceptualized sexuality is obviously available to the gay or queer-identified writer as well. There’s something else, though, that influences the queer writer, problematizing and inspiring his work: his subjugated position in a heteronormative social grammar. There is no aspect of the queer subject that’s structurally inherent (thereby inalienable) in our literary or social formations. This is evidenced in how a queer writerly focus is so easily suspect: there is no right to a gay literature within the intellectual framework we operate in as artists. A straight writer writing straight work writes literature; a queer writer writing queer work writes queer literature, which doesn’t exist. Maybe, to restart, the question is, rather: What should queer literature be? Does it belong outside the normative canon, within it qua subspecies, or should there even be a designation distinct for it at all? I know the gay canon did form outside normative discourse --- it had to because of where its subscribers were: the institution of the closet. I suppose I’d like to see something suggested by the “universalizing view” identified in Sedgwick: a queer literature different from the established and ghettoized gay canon, something that’s not as minoritized but in active conversation with our normative canon. When somebody picks up a volume of Proust from the “literature” shelf, for example, she understands the text simultaneously as a great novel and a great queer novel. I like the duality there. A critical engagement with queerness in treatments of literature is undeniably important --- not only from a gay perspective, or from wherever I’m located personally, but for all writers and readers of creative texts (that’s us). Queer has value. As Annamarie Jagose writes, “Queer is not outside the magnetic field of identity. Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally."
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