Scribble Scribble Scribble!

I couldn't catch up with gay male literature even in the 1970s.  This was partly because it was harder to find the older works, which were often out of print, published by small houses, or allowed to slip down the Memory Hole because of their scandalous nature. There were no sections of gay books in bookstores aside from the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City, founded in 1967, which felt too far away to be useful to me.  (Other people my age traveled freely around the country, but I was too unadventurous and frankly unimaginative to do that.)  A few gay writers wrote about the books that they'd read before Stonewall, which they could cover in one chapter; Roger Austen's Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Bobbs-Merrill) didn't appear until 1977, and I didn't read it until years later. But such proliferating resources, including friends in the field, pointed me to more works than I could read.  Much as I was interested, there were other areas I wanted to explore.

By now, LGBTQ+ books are a sizable market niche, and can be found even in small public libraries despite the efforts of bigots to remove them. I've become skeptical of complaints that we aren't represented, though I still see plenty of them. I don't mean to indulge in the old "You kids think you have it bad? Hah! In my day..." line. I'm actually saying the opposite: things are so much better now.  Mainstream publishers are putting out books in every imaginable category, to the point of self-parody: you want stories about disabled transgender Afro-Asian shapeshifters living in small US towns with their gay-sorcerer dads and their telepathic flying cats?  They're out there, and probably in your public library. They can also be found on TV and the Internet.  Sure, some kids are being held prisoner by their knuckle-dragging fundamentalist parents, and that's a real problem, but it's not because there aren't books about People Who Look Like You.  There are even books about People Who Look Like You Being Held Prisoner by Their Knuckle-dragging Fundamentalist Parents.  The problem is about finding ways to get access to them.

But back to me.  I'm a seventy-four-year old white American gay man.  I don't have any difficulty getting access to books or other media about people who look like me.  Nor am I interested in reading only about people who look like me; that hasn't been my goal, at least since I first read lives of George Washington Carver and Clara Barton in fifth grade.  My problem, insofar as it is one, is finding books that I consider worth reading. Self-publishing, including the self-publishing of ebooks, has produced a flood of works of varying quality ranging from the sublime to the dire. The conglomeratization of publishing has produced almost as many books that can't be faulted for bad writing, only for a boring mediocre professionalism and a focus on catering to market niches.  I see this not only in gay writing but in genres such as mysteries and fantasy/sf, which now (happily?) overlap with gay writing.

The strange thing is that this is not really anything new.  There have always been too many damned thick square books.  Sturgeon's Law has always applied.  It's the flip side of the complaint that there aren't enough damned thick square books about people who look like me.  I should make it clear that there are plenty of books that I do enjoy reading, far more than I can ever hope to read.  I'm just musing on the irony that my (and others') wish for more has been granted.  What we hoped for were more good books, and they're out there, lost in the crowd, but it has ever been thus.

What provoked me to write about this is Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by the Polish-German writer Tomasz Jedrowski, published by Morrow in 2020.  (He's reportedly working on another, but it's not done yet.)  It's a love story about two young Poles in 1980, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, and the upheavals by Solidarność were still to come.  The narrator, Ludwik, addresses his lost love Janusz in retrospect from the United States where he now lives.  They came together at a summer work camp after graduating from university, Ludwik unsure what to do next, Janusz ready to work for the government; after an idyllic month camping out in the countryside they must figure out how, if at all, to go on loving each other.  If you've read your share of gay fiction over the past few years, you should be able to predict the obstacles they face.  For me there were no surprises, but it might well be different for a younger, less experienced reader, so I hesitate to criticize too much.

What did surprise me is that Jedrowski, born in Germany to Polish parents, wrote the book in English: it's not a translation.  The reviews quoted on Amazon overpraise his writing, but he still did quite a good job.  As I say, though, I found the story familiar and predictable, except for its setting, which Jedrowski constructed as a historical novel; at most it reflects the world of his parents, not his own experience.  Even there, I had problems.  Jedrowski's characters must contend with life in a repressive two-tiered society suffering from economic austerity -- long lines for food, inadequate medical care, censorship of media both artistic and journalistic, police crackdowns on dissent -- though an elite few enjoyed luxury.  

Ludwik remembers furtively listening to Radio Free Europe as a child with his mother and grandmother, for example.  I immediately thought of something the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson wrote in the 1980s, I think in Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), about his interaction with Soviet dissidents: they were properly scornful and skeptical of official propaganda, but completely credulous of the Western propaganda they heard on Radio Free Europe.*  I felt the same way about Jedrowski's two-tiered society.  Americans have rarely had to wait in lines for groceries except in wartime before the lifetimes of most of us, but poverty and hunger were serious problems here, and exacerbated by the contemporary Reagan and Thatcher regimes, which wanted to eliminate the social safety nets that alleviated them, how ever inadequately. Those programs, come to think of it, also involved waiting for hours in lines or in grim office waiting rooms, trying to appease grim bureaucrats. As for health care in the US, I don't really need to detail that, do I?  Or police crackdowns on dissent in the land of the free?  Young Ludwik couldn't have known about all this in 1980, but older Ludwik doesn't seem aware of it either.

Nor could young Ludwik have known about the long history of antigay repression in the West, though a major prop in Swimming in the Dark is the illicit copy he acquires of James Baldwin's gloom-and-doom gay classic of 1956, Giovanni's Room, over which he and Janusz bond.  He's also aware of US racism; the Soviet bloc made sure its citizens were well-educated about it, much to our government's indignation.  Older Ludwik doesn't seem to have learned much, and I wonder about Jedrowski himself.  Yes, it's difficult to balance all these things in a work of art, and Swimming in the Dark is his first try.  Still, the over-familiar features of its love story left me paying more attention to the background, which I think needed work.

And you know, I feel the same way about books by more experienced gay writers, including some of the most acclaimed.  I haven't been reporting here on my reading as I should, so let me mention quickly a couple.  Andrew Sean Greer's Less (2017) was praised to the skies, but I found it a slog: it relies on a type of protagonist who I believe was introduced by Stephen McCauley but picked up by others, the uncloseted but socially awkward gay nerd, with a close straight woman friend and even some gay male friends. He can't get a date, but he wants a boyfriend, and eventually he stumbles across one -- sometimes literally.  Then there was Andrew Holleran's latest, The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022).  It features another Holleran doppelganger, enduring gay old age and not enduring it very well.  The main thing I got from it was the urgency of finally getting the shingles vaccine, after reading the book's lengthy account of another elderly gay character's suffering from the disease. So that's taken care of. The novel is Holleran's unrelentingly downbeat (but yes, very well-written, as his books always are) take on aging as a single gay man with no evident support network, and he's entitled to it.  

It's worth comparing the prolific Edmund White's experience as he recounts it in his brand-new The Loves of My Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), which I read just last week. White has plenty of health problems, but he doesn't wallow in self-pity, and though as always his curmudgeon routine can be annoying, he's good company on the page.  It's a matter of temperament, I guess: Holleran's temperament is one of what "the Jesuits call 'morose delectation' -- an addiction to melancholy", as he once put it with perverse pride. But we must be tolerant of others' kinks.

I could also mention Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers (Vintage, 2007), a historical novel about the relationship between two gay men in McCarthy-era Washington DC, recently adapted as a Showtime miniseries.  It has some points of comparison with Swimming in the Dark, come to think of it.  It too received higher praise than I would give it, but it was worth reading and I intend to try some of Mallon's other work; again, it's not fair to compare this experienced writer's work to a first-timer's.  It's foully depressing, given the situation, but that's okay - I don't demand happy endings.  Also there's Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician (Scribner, 2021); it's brilliantly done, but I didn't get the point of doing it. (Though it does show that one can write interestingly about homosexual life in the past and in other countries.)  I've liked some of his other writing, including his essays, though, and I mean to read more.

To return to my original point, though, I'm not as impressed as I feel I should be by some of the prestigious gay (or straight) fiction being produced in our supposedly more enlightened times. Maybe it's just me, a consequence of having read too many other books. I'm not sure, in fact, what I'm looking for - but I'll know it if and when I find it.

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* I think this is the passage: "I have spoken in East Europe with courageous men and women, whose persistent integrity in their daily tense confrontation with a brutal security service humbled me; and yet they had constructed in their minds a whole illusory view of 'the other world', made up from 'Radio Free Europe' and a habit (indeed, a dogma) of believing always the opposite of whatever official Communist propaganda stated to be so."  [Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon Books, 1982), 87-8]

And Consequently Meant for Publication

Back in 1921, Dorothy Parker was reviewing Broadway plays.  She panned a musical called The Right Girl, for (among other offenses) featuring "a song which exploits the rhyme:

I wouldn't give five cents
For a marriage license."

I'd thought rhymes like this were an innovation of rap; I guess it's worth knowing that they were sung on the legitimate stage a century ago.

Last night I went to a poetry slam at a local venue, mainly because a friend wanted to go, under the impression that it was going to focus on work by LGBTQ youth, which sounded interesting.  It turned out he was wrong -- the youth slam had taken place elsewhere, earlier in the evening -- and he decided not to go anyway.  Though I've been to numerous poetry readings, professional and amateur, I don't think I've ever actually attended a poetry slam before, so I paid the $5 cover.  (The event was a benefit for undocumented youth, so I don't regret the money I spent.)  I don't like the idea of poetry slams, which seem to be an attempt to win an audience for poetry by foregrounding the worst kinds of macho poetasting, combined with competition: poetry reading as pro-wrestling.  That's a doubly toxic cocktail as far as I'm concerned.  I have watched a video of a West Coast semiprofessional slam, which confirmed my bad impression.  But hey, give the kids a chance.

In a way it was reassuring: bad poetry is forever.  (Or as Christ might have said, the bad poets you will always have with you, and they'll be first in line for the open mike.)  First up was an avowed straight white boy who announced that he usually writes depressing stuff, but had decided to give the audience a break by reading something humorous.  He then warned about content, the poem was about sexual objectification, but it was a joke, right?  He was right: it was a bad joke, the content could have come straight from some asshole's Twitter feed, and you don't get a pass for sexist objectification just because you know what you're doing and admit it in advance.  I was depressed; maybe some of what he thought was his "depressing" stuff would actually have been funny.  But, happily, he did only the one.

Next up was another skinny white boy.  He did two rapid-fire raps of no distinction, and wanted to do a third but the MCs called time on him.  (I must give the organizers credit: the event was well-arranged, and it seemed they were not going to allow the great pitfall of many open mikes: the poet who bogarts the mike to read one dreadful screed after another.)   He surrended the stage readily, to his credit.

Next was a young woman in a buzzcut whose poem, she informed us, was about "trans identity."  (I'm referring to her as "she" because she didn't specify a pronoun, and it wasn't clear whether the poem was about herself -- she left that vague.)  The poem was undistinguished, and could have been written by any of the myriad poet-wannabes I've heard at open mikes over the past five decades.  One innovation: she read the text from her phone.

Finally (for me) a "proud bisexual" male poet took the stage.  His contribution was also a collection of cliches; sincere and well-meant, no doubt, and well-done for what it was, but basically it was MFA fodder.  No doubt he'll go far.  Next up after him was an acquaintance of mine, a local politician around 50 whom I've known since he was in college.  That confirmed my feeling that maybe I should have signed up to read myself -- I could have read a poem from my tablet, since I have most of my work on this blog.  But I had other things to do with the evening, and scooted out, freeing my seat for someone else.

I gather there will be another slam in a month, so maybe I'll sign up for that one.  I would not spend any time introducing my poem, as the other readers felt compelled to do.  That's another cliche of poetry readings that is still evidently with us.  (I began that post with an explanation, because the poem included has confused many people over the years.  It's atypical of my poetry posts here.)  One that wasn't in evidence last night was audience members chattering while the poets read: the audience was quiet and attentive, which was gratifying and a nice change from what I've observed in the past.

So, I'm venting.  But on the whole I was relieved to find that the college poetry scene has not changed, that Sturgeon's Law still applies.  I don't think I've succumbed to old-person nostalgia (which as Adrienne Rich said is just amnesia in reverse), since as I say, only the styles of body ornamentation have changed since the 70s.  Maybe if I'd stayed longer someone would have provided the surprise and revelation that you get when a really good poet, something with something of their own to say, takes the stage.  If I go to another of these, I'll stay for the duration and find out.

You Know, I Learned Something Today

One of the disadvantages of reading a lot, over a period of years, is that I become a bit harder to impress. Not impossible to impress: I still find a good many books that delight me, and I never forget how ordinary the vast majority of published writing is.

There's a famous principle, Sturgeon's Law, named after the science-fiction writer who, when told that ninety percent of science fiction is crap, retorted, "Ninety percent of everything is crap!" It's a snappy comeback, but in fact, ninety percent of everything is just ordinary, run-of-the-mill, average, mediocre. There's no reason why it shouldn't be; the really important thing is that you never know in advance where the extraordinary, head and shoulders above the rest, above-average, brilliant work will come from. And one of the wonderful things, to my mind, about writing is that you don't need special training to do it well, nor do you need to come from a long line of writers. All you need is access to books that other people have written, followed by the conviction that you want to do it too; and after that, five hundred pounds a year and a room of your own.

It seems to me, however, that the level of mediocrity in science fiction and fantasy has risen in the past fifty years. By that I mean that even today's ordinary writers write better than ordinary writers did in the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. It's partially a result of rising standards among editors and writers alike, plus writing workshops and classes, and perhaps just that a lot more people are writing. What can't be taught, though, is originality -- let alone brilliance.

But readers change too. I didn't know, when I began reading science fiction about fifty years ago, that many of the stories I encountered were reworkings of themes that were already old: the first time I encountered them, I thought they were new. Partly because of the relatively limited amount of sf available to me, I read older work, including Golden Age SF from before I was born, and some of the first critical and historical work on the genre was also being done in the 1960s. So I began to get a sense of where SF had been before I started to read it.

Nor is it a bad thing to take another crack at an idea or theme that's been done before. SF has a number of basic ideas, and I think it was the Noble Engineer Heinlein who argued in the 50s that there are only three or four basic plots. In SF, writers often tried to write the definitive Time Travel Paradox story, for example. When Isaac Asimov began writing robot stories, he was aware of what other writers had done, and tried to put his own spin on the subject. The idea of extraterrestrials coming to earth to bring us the benefits of their millions of years of civilization was also old hat when I first read Edgar Pangborn's 1953 story "Angel's Egg," though I didn't know how old hat it was at the time.

As I got older, though, I began to notice recurring themes and cliches. I liked William Gibson's Neuromancer, for example, but I soon recognized it as refurbished noir, like a lot of SF: just put your hardboiled private investigator on another planet or in another galaxy, give him a blaster and a space suit instead of a .38 and a fedora, let the femme fatale be a Catwoman, and voila. (SF readers had been complaining about that syndrome for decades before Gibson updated it a bit.) I also recognized that, contrary to what a lot of people were saying, Gibson wasn't writing "hard" SF, the kind that's based in some scientific knowledge and extrapolation: Gibson knew nothing about computers when he began writing his cyberpunk stories. That didn't make them less fun to read: they were very well written and imagined. But they were no more 'about' computers or technology than a Philip Marlowe story: they were about male anxiety.

All this is just prologue to some comment on a new anthology I just finished reading, Human for a Day, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek, published a couple of months ago by DAW Books. It's an "original" anthology, in that none of the stories has been published before. I presume they were solicited to deal with the overall theme, that of non-humans who become human for a day. (Unlike many such anthologies, there's no introductory material at all, just writer bios at the very end.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room.

I'm not sure what I was expecting or hoping for, but I was let down. Of the writers I'd only heard of Tanith Lee before, but according to the bios they're all well-established and some have won Hugo and other genre awards. The trouble as I see it is that almost none of them have anything to say about the unifying theme. The stories are mostly ideas rather than stories, which set out their situations and characters, describe how the protagonist became "human for a day", and then turn him or her back; finis. One or two even feel like the opening chapters of novels, rather than stand-alone stories, which isn't good.

Almost all the stories are fantasy, rather than SF, which isn't bad in itself -- I like and have read a lot of fantasy. Still. If I'd been editor, the third story ("Cinderella City" by Seanan McGuire) would have opened the book. Here the being that becomes human for a day is the city of San Francisco, personified and humanized by an evil sorcerer, and even in human form followed everywhere by rats and pigeons. It's well done, and it entertained me better than the actual openers did. Ian Tregillis's "The Mainspring of His Heart, the Shackles of His Soul" (gratuitous Harlan Ellison allusion there) is set in an alternate universe where Dutch alchemists learned to build metal clockwork slaves with magical souls, and so came to dominate Europe and the Americas; the theme is the slave's desire to be free. The second story, "The Blade of His Plow," by Jay Lake, is about an effectively immortal soldier who'd been present at the crucifixion of Jesus and so must wander the world for thousands of years until he's set free. It's just military fantasy, full of details about soldiers' gear over the centuries. Several stories are built around war or swordplay, with severed limbs and blood geysers for the younger set. Anton Strout's "Tumulus" flaunts its writer's research on Celtic religion and magic. Tanith Lee's contribution, "The Dog-catcher's Song," is a cut above the rest in execution; Lee has been writing for a long time, so it should be. But the story itself didn't do much for me.

I was entertained by Laura Resnick's "Mortal Mix-up," in which a sophisticated New York vampire finds herself the victim of a body switch with a spoiled teenager. The spell is reversed, of course. I was not entertained by "Band of Bronze" by Jean Rabe, in which several statues from Central Park become animate for a day. Narrated by the Mad Hatter, who's accompanied by William Shakespeare and a soldier from a World War I memorial, it tells how the three take on muggers and purse snatchers, culminating in an exchange of automatic weapons fire and grenades with Crips and Bloods. Rabe has Shakespeare ("Bill") quoting his own plays, probably because she can't imitate Elizabethan English herself: she gets it wrong every damn time she tries, though I'll blame a subliterate copyeditor or a spellchecker for the time "Thou" is spelled "Though." ("Though abominable doghearted hedgepig!") The Hatter, for some reason, speaks slangy turn-of-the-21st century American English instead of the 19th-century British English I'd expect. There's a zombie story too.

I should stop to praise David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension," which I hesitate to summarize here because I really don't want to spoil it. It verges delicately on camp without quite crossing over the line, and sweetly confirms what you always suspected about certain comic-book characters. There are a couple of stories in this collection with passing gay content: it's not their central point, just something that happens to be there, and I appreciated that. On the other hand, it's another of the stories which can't conform to the overall subject, but maybe that's the fault of the subject.

Praise be once again to public libraries, the training grounds of socialism. Someone (I can't remember who, but it was online) recommended Human for a Day, and I'm glad I could check it out to read, instead of spending money on it. Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe to some thirteen-year-old just discovering SF and fantasy, these stories will be small revelations. Don't take my word for it; read it yourself if you want. Some negative reviews absolve me of any obligation to read a book; others make me want to read the book myself, because I can tell that I'll like what the reviewer didn't. I'd like this post to do both, or either, as the reader finds useful.