FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Write Stuff - Issue 190, October 2005
In a world where popular culture tends to focus only on heterosexual norms, fiction has always been a way for lesbian and gay people to access identification and positive reflection. Despite a rise of queer visibility in other media, publishing for gay readers is still big business, and this year is no exception, with lots of new titles on the shelves. Let’s met some current authors, both legendary and brand new, with queer things on their minds. Interviews by Michael Wynne, Declan Marr, Jarlath Gregory and Áine Duffy
WHITE UNWASHED
Edmund White's (pictured) first memoir is held up on the presses in the US as its publishers guage the reactions of European readers to its ultragraphic sleaze, but the author himself isn't blinking an eye, as Michael Wynne found out.
"In America," says Edmund White in the 1994 introduction to A Boy's Own Story, "the best way to bury a secret is to publish it." This line is typical of White's prose: it's catchy, sexily truthful, easy on the eye and ear - even if it mightn't lend itself to too close a scrutiny. It gives something of an indirect clue to the nature of the status White occupies as the consummate, utterly confident authorial cannibaliser of his own rich and varied life. It's also a line that now appears somewhat ironic considering his publishers' refusal to go ahead with the American release of his new memoir, My Lives, until they see the kind of reception its graphic S&M sexual descriptions get over here. Not that this, surely, could possibly cause the slightest dent in his reputation at this stage in his career - after all, for 30 years he has celebrated his dedication both to promiscuity and to the cult of masculine beauty - marvels he's elsewhere made no bones about declaring the conviction it is worth dying for.
It's far from that mortal state he looks as he's led by his publicist into the foyer of the Clarence Hotel though, having just come from the airport, he does appear ever so slightly slovenly, hair uncombed, portly frame swathed in a loose, faintly striped pale shirt that has escaped the waistband of the dark slacks at the back. He's wearing a slightly bashful half smile and, as he takes my hand, his downslanting St Bernard eyes blink from humorously entreating to intent. I ask if he remembers our previous two meetings, the most recent in New York city.
"Yes, I remember, you worked in that gay book store in Chelsea. It's closed now. I was probably flirting with you..."
It would seem his memory as a rule is extraordinary, something that comes across with striking and hilarious force in My Lives, though he's somewhat modest about the extent of his gift of recall.
"Somebody said to me the other day how could you remember all those details about your first shrink? But when you're 16 years old, and you're in terrible pain, and you're going to a psychiatrist, and he's a total eccentric, with mad birds flying around, and a big Buddha sitting in the back yard - you're going to remember all that!"
Even by this age - 16 - White had for years been turning his life into fiction, a practice that, through constantly re-imagining and recycling the texture and the minutiae of his circumstances, his instincts, his desires, became an ongoing attempt to reach some sort of Proustian clarification and realisation of the self. Whereas in the last decade or so - perhaps showing how far he has come in this process - his prose has more and more attained a classic simplicity, the early books were written in an ecstatic, ‘heightened' manner that in some measure recalls the style of Jean Genet, a biography of whom earned White the National Book Award in 1993. Between the two men there are endless fundamental differences, not least in their approach to their homosexuality - though perhaps White's fondly portrayed sexually masochistic quests could be said to approximate the literary ballpark occupied by Genet's famous description of his enjoying the odour of his own farts in his prison cell. Since the publication of the biography he has been noticeably persistent in his productivity, releasing a stream of work as varied in form, if not in content, as it is steady.
"I think that all started with finding out I was HIV positive in 1985; first, I just pulled the covers over my head for a couple of years, and then I decided I should get down to it. But I was bogged down for seven years with the Genet biography. Finally, when that was done, I felt like a bird let out of a cage and I started writing - a lot. But all the time I was broke, so that's why I write so much." He pauses, then elaborates, "I mean I get paid well for articles. But since I started teaching I've stopped doing that much journalism."
After nursing his lover Hubert Sorin through his final sickness with AIDS 11 years ago - an experience given a memorably grim fictional treatment in the novel The Married Man - White was so convinced he himself had little time left that his 1997 novel The Farewell Symphony was planned as his literary swan song. However, he remained what is termed a non-progressor - though a month ago his T-cell count suddenly dropped, a circumstance which has required him to go on the virus medication for the first time. But he's well?
"Very well. It was hard to get used to the meds, and some of them weren't quite right and I was ill at first. But now I'm fine." And as hardworking as ever. He recently finished reshaping a play about Gore Vidal and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, who were friends. It had already been done on BBC radio with Ian McKellan playing one of the roles. Jocelyn Clarke, the Abbey Theatre dramaturge ("one of the brightest people I've ever worked with") helped him entirely rewrite it, and it was performed at Sundance this summer. Now he's waiting to see what Jocelyn thinks of another play he's written, which is still in the rough stage. He adds, "I had a play done years ago in the Granary, in Cork. It got very good reviews. I think everyone was sort of stunned by it - I mean baffled."
It might well be that the next role this quietly vigorous, variable, self-reinventing man takes on will be that of leading playwright.
My Lives by Edmund White is published by Bloomsbury.
STAYING POWER
The prolific novelist Stella Duffy has had to deal with more difficult life experiences in the past few years than most, but like the trooper she is, she's turned those difficulties into art, as Áine Duffy discovers.
When I first heard that I was going to interview Stella Duffy, I was terrified. Duffy on paper is formidable. Not just for what goes on in her head (given what she puts down on paper), but because she has accomplished so much.
My own interest in her was based originally on the fact that there was another dyke Duffy out there, writing, as one day I wanted to. So I read the first Saz Martin book Calendar Girl (1994). It started off slowly, then wham, it sucked you in, as surely and as slyly as a first lover. I was hooked. After that followed Wavewalker (1996), Beneath The Blonde (1997), and Fresh Flesh (2001). Then there are her non-Saz Martin books, Singling Out the Couples (1998); Eating Cake (1999); Immaculate Conceit (2000), adapted for the stage with the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain; State of Happiness (2004), and Parallel Lies (2005).
She is indeed, a very busy woman. We met in the bar of the Soho Theatre. It was mid-afternoon and the place was deserted. Just me, and a slightly camp bartender. Then Stella came in, and the place felt somehow full; the woman's energy has to be experienced to be believed. She was slightly out of breath, having rushed back from a lunch across the road - meeting to discuss a theatrical project. She was also slightly pissed, having polished off half a bottle of wine.
The first thing that strikes you about Stella Duffy is her eyes. She has these large, fascinating, almost cat-like eyes. Then there's her long reddish hair, and hands that are constantly in motion, always providing a counterpoint to what she's saying. At one stage in the interview I pointed out that it was marked that the dykes who inhabit her books are of the longhaired, skirt-wearing kind. Those hands stopped, and she leaned forward and said slowly, "Oh, but they have to be, because I want to see myself in books, and I never did before, not ever, not in any of the dyke books out there." I had the grace to look embarrassed.
But what was it like coming out in New Zealand in the ‘80s, I asked, looking the way she did? She said she tried the short hair route at first, but found it simply wasn't her. So this was why she left to come to London, to see if she could find other dykes like herself? Stella guffawed, "No, it was because I'd slept with everyone!"
A few years ago, a stranger stopped her at York Book Festival and said, "Good, about time you sorted your hair out, Stella Duffy!" Having completed the first course of chemotherapy to battle the cancer that had taken over her body, Stella's hair was just beginning to grow back.
"Well, that woman never knew what hit her - I told her exactly, and in full graphic detail, what six months of chemo did to a body."
Duffy comes across as remarkably upbeat, although she's had breast cancer, surgery, chemo, suffered several miscarriages, and lost her remaining parent - all in the space of five years. When she was first diagnosed with cancer she and her partner, the playwright Shelley Silas, were trying, as she puts it, to baby-make. They were due for their first visit to the IVF clinic when Stella woke up one morning with a sharp pain in her side. It was a large tumour. Babymaking was put on hold.
Then the death of Stella's mother and the loss of the last of her five frozen embryos came in quick succession five years later. One month after that she started her latest novel, Mouths of Babes, which features a searingly painful description of the immediate aftermath of the death of a parent. I asked her about this, wondering how she could manage to write such a raw, naked piece so soon after losing her mother. "That's how it is," she says. "You have to get up and function after death, you have to put your clothes on, and wash, and do all those things you have to do. Life goes on, it won't stop for you."
Having won the first battle with that cancer ("I'm not cured - after five years clear comes ten years clear. The chances of recurrence are fairly high."), Stella used her experience of disease to write the critically acclaimed State of Happiness, long-listed for the Orange Prize. I asked if being long-listed had changed the way she thought about herself. "Not at all," she says emphatically. I believe her.
Stella Duffy's Mouths of Babes is published by Serpent's Tail
AMERICAN GUYS
Screenwriter turned novelist Kevin Scott has injected plenty of Irish Catholic guilt into his soap operatic book about gay life in New York. It's all to do with his mother, he tells Jarlath Gregory.
In the flesh, Kevin Scott is less academic-looking than his cover photo would suggest. His new novel, The Boys in the Brownstone, follows the exploits of a group of misfit New Yorkers who have the love of a certain piano bar in common. Scott has a preppy enthusiasm you could more easily associate with his characters' lives than his day job as a screenwriting lecturer in NYU. Given his background, we decide that we'll chat over lunch at the IFI. We start with the obvious question - what prompted the change from screenwriting to prose?
"You know, it gave me more of a chance to explore the characters' inner lives. With screenwriting, you've got action, you see events unfold, but with novels, well, you get inside your characters' minds."
One of the main characters is an Irish-American priest who's got some well-deserved Catholic guilt going on, which prompts a funny little riff about the nature of the Irish when it comes to bearing grudges. So what qualifies Scott to slag us off so? "My mother was Irish! From Donegal. I don't know if you've noticed, but the grudges her people could hold were unreal! Maybe it's something to do with the dourness of the countryside back then. Her people became a little repressed and rigid." Ah, but she escaped.
"But she still carried some of that mindset to America. My family were Irish through and through."
I suggest that it's all good material, and Scott cheerfully volunteers the information that most writers dread admitting - "Oh, lots of my friends have made it into the book! Yeah, there are some real lives in there. I hope it's done respectfully."
It is. One notable feature of The Boys in the Brownstone is that every character is well-drawn, despite their wide variety of background and circumstance - from the Brazilian father-of-two who has just come out to his wife, to the vaguely suicidal middling-successful executive, to the diamond-inthe-rough plumber whose relationship with a Catholic priest threatens to land him in trouble.
One of the characters has written a thesis on how comedy should be subversive - and how cosiness is wrecking American culture. As Scott's own novel is comedic, I wonder if he intended it to be subversive?
Scott thinks about this one for a while. He eventually decides that, "What I was really getting at with that theory is that when comedy is episodic, and inside half an hour everyone lives happily ever after again, it becomes too... reassuring. Something like Frasier is subversive in the sense that it's obviously written by two gay guys, but the characters onscreen are straight, and it's funny to see them rhapsodising over wine and all that. But nothing really bad ever happens. In my book, bad things do happen, though the characters might have a wry outlook on life and see the ridiculous side of their problems."
This is a kind of ‘yes' then, in the sense that The Boys in the Brownstone manages to be both deeply serious and funny at the same time. Characters teeter on the brink of self-destruction but are not pitiful - they are human, recognisable and, while you're never sure a happy ending is on the way, you can laugh along with them while they live their complicated lives.
The Boys in the Brownstone by Kevin Scott is published by Harrington Park Press. Jarlath Gregory is the author of G.A.A.Y, currently published by Sitric Books
MAN ROMANCE
Romantic partners Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier spotted a gap in the fiction market for gay men and promptly filled it with boy-on-boy bodice rippers where the prince always gets his prince. Declan Marr meets two passionate publishing phenomena.
Romantic partners in real life, Scott Whittier and Scott Pomfret have married their skills together to write and self-publish a line of bodice rippers for gay men called Romentics and hit the big time Stateside. It's only a matter of time, they believe, before the global gay market wakes up to the joys of shamelessly romantic fiction.
"The world appears ready to embrace the concept of gay men in love," says Pomfret. "You see that obviously in the Canadas and Spains, with their embracing of gay marriage."
"Also, this is something gay men just don't get in the book shops," says Whittier. "You have plenty of humour, self help and erotica, but you don't really have viable, happily-ever-after romance."
Both men are speaking on a conference call from their home in Boston, bright and cheery at their own ungodly hour of 7am, but then again the Scott & Scott household seems to be a hive of artistic activity.
"We are constantly writing two books at the same time," says Pomfret. "We usually work together on plot ideas and brainstorm books. Eventually we each choose one plot to write and when we run out of steam or it seems like a good point for the other person to take over, we swap manuscripts."
On top of all this, both men have day jobs - Whittier is an advertising copywriter, while Pomfret has a career as a journalist and erotic fiction writer. So, how did they come to writing and publishing their own romantic fiction?
"We got together in 2001," explains Whittier, "and we actually started writing the novels about a year later."
"Before we even took pen to page we read at least a dozen Harlequin romances to get a feel for what it was they were trying to achieve and how they were achieving it," adds Pomfret.
"Then," says Whittier, "we did little adjustments. You have to make it palpable for the male reader, so there's more action, more sex. Our books are fairly explicit, but always with relationship in mind. For the most part there is a love and tenderness involved."
It's a mix that has caught the imagination, certainly of execs at publishing giant Time Warner. Pomfret takes up the story. "We launched our first two books in November 2003 and within a month we began to look for an agent. When we found one, she pitched to Time Warner Books and within another month they were onboard, buying one of the books which we had written, Hot Sauce.
"They committed to that one book," adds Whittier, "and we put out the next two of the series with our own publishing company sometime in early 2004. We are currently in talks with Warner and other publishers to carry on the line. Warner obviously make their decisions based on money. I don't think they'll have firm enough figures by the time we're hoping to get them to sign on for more, but we'll see what happens."
As an American corporate, Time Warner will, however, be closely watching the social climate before making any further decisions, and, despite the 2003 Massachusetts ruling, all is not well for same sex couples Stateside. As Supreme Courts in New York State, New Jersey and Washington State gear up to make judgements on gay marriage cases, last week the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed gay marriage legislation, pushing the issue towards that state's Supreme Court.
"If Canada were in a warmer place we might be moving there!" says Pomfret. "Most of this Romentics project is about fun, about love, about dreams, but part of it is about a political element. I think hearing our kinds of voices for people who aren't living in Massachusetts, who are living in Texas for example, is a good thing both for gay people and for straight people. We are getting the word out there that essentially that men in love are here to stay, so deal with it."
To find out more about Romentics Fiction, visit www.romentics.com