David Pratt's Blog - Posts Tagged "gay-books"
What to Curl Up With (Part Two)
More desert island books…!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
Out of the Sublime, the Ridiculous
Writing a novel is a ridiculous undertaking. I spent two years writing Looking After Joey, the story of a gay porn character (not actor -- character) who steps out of the TV into the real life of a single accountant in New York City, and he gets stuck there. It's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" with lube and jockstraps. The accountant’s best friend decides to teach this boy, Joey, all he needs to know about being a gay man in the "real" world, then take him to a fabulous Fire Island party and show him off. So now it’s My Fair Lady with lube and jockstraps (don't think about that too long). Our heroes just have to get invited to said party, a process so wonderfully, absurdly complicated that I will not attempt to describe it. But I will describe the result. The accountant, his friend, the porn character and his eventual real-world boyfriend—become a family. It took me two years to get these howler monkeys to form a family. Ridiculous!
No.
Not if you are in love with story. Not ridiculous, if what makes you weak in the knees is knowing you have created something that will to make someone laugh. You feel that laugh coming. And you laugh, too. Not ridiculous, if you go weak in the knees knowing you will bring tears to someone’s eyes. And you tear up, too. And the two years are not ridiculous if you go weak in the knees knowing you’re going to surprise someone. Laughs and tears and surprises are gifts, and you are as excited as a kid on Christmas to give them to readers and have readers open them. It is indeed more blessèd—and more fun—to give than to receive.
I’d love to give samples from the book, but I don’t want to spoil the fun. I’d also have to give you the backstory on each sample, and honestly, I love piling on characters and incidents so much that any scene after about page 17 would require just too much set-up. You really should just read it. Now. This summer. In a hammock with a glass of lemonade, or at the beach. You can polish it off in an afternoon, and I promise: if you have a twisted sense of humor and you like love and family and stuff, you will have a wonderful time. Pitch done.
This love of laughter, tears, surprise, characters and story, like all loves, makes you do crazy things. Write novels. Make films. Paint paintings. All to animate persistent phantoms in your head, phantoms more real and important than many people you see day-to-day. Heroes and villains, triumphs and defeats, thrills, chills and spills growing in your head until you have to bring them into the world, even though the world has so many already. We keep creating because if we stopped… Well, for me, there is no if. Take everything from me, and I would still create. I would memorize everything! There are parts of "Joey" I have virtually memorized, out of love. As an artiste, I am supposed to be dissatisfied with my work, so excuse me for having enjoyed it -- not just because my imagined readers might laugh or cry, but because I myself was entertained. Satisfied. Fulfilled. And I thought, if I was fulfilled, others would be. But as I actually spun the tale, I did not think of my eventual readers. I edit for the eventual reader, but I create for myself, and the multitudes I contain.
So, two years: not so ridiculous after all. In fact, maybe essential. In fact, I guess I just talked myself into the next book!
If writing books is ridiculous, running a bookstore is ridiculous, too. More ridiculous, because it’s real estate. To the short list of inevitable things—death and taxes—add a third: real estate. Stuff takes up space. (Corollary: to get stuff, you have to cover distance.) Outcasts—queers and other oppressed minorities—in order for their voices to be heard and their priorities to be honored, must find ways around the real estate imperative. They must find literal spaces in which they can experience who they are, spaces maybe know one else wants, spaces no one else knows are there, and they must find ways to hold onto and expand those spaces. As an adolescent I had my own room. It helped a lot. I had used book stores. I had my imagination. Now we have cyberspace, physically limitless but limited functionally. We need our physical spaces. Some are still there. Some are transforming. Some are disappearing. All belong, to some degree, to a shadow economy.
Think of favors exchanged. People gathering windfall fruit or growing vegetables in abandoned lots. Debts excused or overlooked. Review books given to a bookstore. Someone eats. Someone reads, nestled deep in that shadow economy the real world ignores. Queers often live this way. Those deemed unemployable by others or even by themselves survive on temporary jobs, on tips, on what they can make with their hands and what they can do with their bodies. Once, when all they wanted was someone to speak to them as though they were real, they went to the bookstores: Oscar Wilde in New York; Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia; Glad Day in Toronto; Common Language in Ann Arbor; Outwords in Milwaukee, whose owner brews you a cup of coffee, too, because the wind blows hard and cold off Lake Michigan, and you might stay inside a little bit longer. Calamus in Boston. Outwrite in Atlanta. Proud in Rehoboth Beach. Some are no longer with us. A few still are.
When Giovanni’s Room held its fortieth anniversary celebration in 2013, former owners came, as did current owner Ed Hermance. As they all spoke, it became clear that no one had made from the store what the world calls a living. Especially in the down-and-out seventies, people went without insurance, savings, new clothes, new shoes, even went without food in order to support the gay rights, civil rights and women’s rights movements. (“There were times I bought film before food,” a lesbian photographer friend once said.) People lived on the edge in order to see those movements gain momentum and produce results. There was no money in pamphlets and chapbooks, in marches and signs. Even queer publishers complained. The only sure money was in the physical printing and shipping of those books. Production and distribution. Everyone else ate peanut butter and showered with cold water—and were so alive with the electricity of the cause that they barely knew the water was cold. Eventually, maybe even printers and shippers ate peanut butter. The caviar was for those who owned the buildings they printed in and shipped from.
The Internet has now given us a vast, if in some ways limited resource for being heard, for spreading our gospel. I am grateful that, for many, that gospel is gay books. I have been able to tell about my book and my self on a number of blogs over the past month. For me, for my personal satisfaction, the publicity is only a part of it. Perhaps the greatest gift has been the opportunity to talk about why I write what I write, and who my forbears have been. It has hardly escaped me that most of my opportunities have come from women. Women have been there at crucial junctures in my life, specifically, in my gay life. They have understood what men, straight or gay, could not or would not. They have supported what men could not or would not. Their more inclusive, more open, more accepting and more trusting world view has allowed me space and has given me inspiration. Because of women in my life, there has always been a place to go and a reason to go on believing. Ridiculous? Never. Essential to life? Always.
No.
Not if you are in love with story. Not ridiculous, if what makes you weak in the knees is knowing you have created something that will to make someone laugh. You feel that laugh coming. And you laugh, too. Not ridiculous, if you go weak in the knees knowing you will bring tears to someone’s eyes. And you tear up, too. And the two years are not ridiculous if you go weak in the knees knowing you’re going to surprise someone. Laughs and tears and surprises are gifts, and you are as excited as a kid on Christmas to give them to readers and have readers open them. It is indeed more blessèd—and more fun—to give than to receive.
I’d love to give samples from the book, but I don’t want to spoil the fun. I’d also have to give you the backstory on each sample, and honestly, I love piling on characters and incidents so much that any scene after about page 17 would require just too much set-up. You really should just read it. Now. This summer. In a hammock with a glass of lemonade, or at the beach. You can polish it off in an afternoon, and I promise: if you have a twisted sense of humor and you like love and family and stuff, you will have a wonderful time. Pitch done.
This love of laughter, tears, surprise, characters and story, like all loves, makes you do crazy things. Write novels. Make films. Paint paintings. All to animate persistent phantoms in your head, phantoms more real and important than many people you see day-to-day. Heroes and villains, triumphs and defeats, thrills, chills and spills growing in your head until you have to bring them into the world, even though the world has so many already. We keep creating because if we stopped… Well, for me, there is no if. Take everything from me, and I would still create. I would memorize everything! There are parts of "Joey" I have virtually memorized, out of love. As an artiste, I am supposed to be dissatisfied with my work, so excuse me for having enjoyed it -- not just because my imagined readers might laugh or cry, but because I myself was entertained. Satisfied. Fulfilled. And I thought, if I was fulfilled, others would be. But as I actually spun the tale, I did not think of my eventual readers. I edit for the eventual reader, but I create for myself, and the multitudes I contain.
So, two years: not so ridiculous after all. In fact, maybe essential. In fact, I guess I just talked myself into the next book!
If writing books is ridiculous, running a bookstore is ridiculous, too. More ridiculous, because it’s real estate. To the short list of inevitable things—death and taxes—add a third: real estate. Stuff takes up space. (Corollary: to get stuff, you have to cover distance.) Outcasts—queers and other oppressed minorities—in order for their voices to be heard and their priorities to be honored, must find ways around the real estate imperative. They must find literal spaces in which they can experience who they are, spaces maybe know one else wants, spaces no one else knows are there, and they must find ways to hold onto and expand those spaces. As an adolescent I had my own room. It helped a lot. I had used book stores. I had my imagination. Now we have cyberspace, physically limitless but limited functionally. We need our physical spaces. Some are still there. Some are transforming. Some are disappearing. All belong, to some degree, to a shadow economy.
Think of favors exchanged. People gathering windfall fruit or growing vegetables in abandoned lots. Debts excused or overlooked. Review books given to a bookstore. Someone eats. Someone reads, nestled deep in that shadow economy the real world ignores. Queers often live this way. Those deemed unemployable by others or even by themselves survive on temporary jobs, on tips, on what they can make with their hands and what they can do with their bodies. Once, when all they wanted was someone to speak to them as though they were real, they went to the bookstores: Oscar Wilde in New York; Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia; Glad Day in Toronto; Common Language in Ann Arbor; Outwords in Milwaukee, whose owner brews you a cup of coffee, too, because the wind blows hard and cold off Lake Michigan, and you might stay inside a little bit longer. Calamus in Boston. Outwrite in Atlanta. Proud in Rehoboth Beach. Some are no longer with us. A few still are.
When Giovanni’s Room held its fortieth anniversary celebration in 2013, former owners came, as did current owner Ed Hermance. As they all spoke, it became clear that no one had made from the store what the world calls a living. Especially in the down-and-out seventies, people went without insurance, savings, new clothes, new shoes, even went without food in order to support the gay rights, civil rights and women’s rights movements. (“There were times I bought film before food,” a lesbian photographer friend once said.) People lived on the edge in order to see those movements gain momentum and produce results. There was no money in pamphlets and chapbooks, in marches and signs. Even queer publishers complained. The only sure money was in the physical printing and shipping of those books. Production and distribution. Everyone else ate peanut butter and showered with cold water—and were so alive with the electricity of the cause that they barely knew the water was cold. Eventually, maybe even printers and shippers ate peanut butter. The caviar was for those who owned the buildings they printed in and shipped from.
The Internet has now given us a vast, if in some ways limited resource for being heard, for spreading our gospel. I am grateful that, for many, that gospel is gay books. I have been able to tell about my book and my self on a number of blogs over the past month. For me, for my personal satisfaction, the publicity is only a part of it. Perhaps the greatest gift has been the opportunity to talk about why I write what I write, and who my forbears have been. It has hardly escaped me that most of my opportunities have come from women. Women have been there at crucial junctures in my life, specifically, in my gay life. They have understood what men, straight or gay, could not or would not. They have supported what men could not or would not. Their more inclusive, more open, more accepting and more trusting world view has allowed me space and has given me inspiration. Because of women in my life, there has always been a place to go and a reason to go on believing. Ridiculous? Never. Essential to life? Always.
