I felt guilty packing a bunch of gay male novels and story collections from the 1980s and early 1990s into a couple boxes and putting them in the attic, but I need shelf space for books I regularly read. Once upon a time, I dreamed of writing a book about some of these novels and story collections, bringing attention to writers whose names are now mostly lost to time. What my exploration of the Men on Men anthologies taught me, though, is that I will never have the emotional strength to do that work. After reading only four volumes of the Men on Men series, I had to stop. The dark walls of depression and despair pushed in on me, infecting both my dreams and my waking hours.
Somebody less formed and deformed by the first decade of the AIDS crisis ought to do that work. In the boxes of books in my attic there’s some good work, a lot of mediocre but interesting work, and all of it historically important work. I can’t bring myself to get rid of these boxes, to let the books make their way through library sales or random gifting. I could try to sell them on eBay or something, but I don’t want to risk failure — most of these books have already been rejected by time and memory, and were they not to sell, I would be crushed. And so they sit in the attic. I’m glad to be the caretaker to these books, but I wish I knew some younger people who would be interested in the history and experiences those books chronicle, or some library that wanted to keep the collection together, an attempt at impossible permanence in a world of loss. Maybe one day.
A friend of mine, a gay man a decade or so older than myself, told me he has some similar boxes, similarlly stored away, similarly cherished. A lost history: personal, cultural, social.
Very few really excellent works of literature came out of the first decade-and-a-half of the AIDS era (roughly 1980-1995). The conditions didn’t exist for it. There was no time for the reflection and thoughtfulness great literature tends to require. The stories, poems, novels, and essays of that time from gay men and lesbians were written in crisis. They sometimes have a tremendous energy because of that, but it is a desperate, terrified energy. The poetry was generally better, in an aesthetic sense, than the short fiction and essays; the short fiction and essays were generally better than the novels. This is not surprising.
Nor is it surprising that this sort of material doesn’t seem to be of much interest to people under 40. Society changed, and the AIDS era is about as interesting to younger people as the Korean War era was to me when I was young. But how, I wonder, will anyone ever understand what it felt like when those books were new? Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps that time has passed, and there is never any actual recovering of the past. Nostalgia sands down the edges, forgetfulness diminishes the details, entropy waits for us all.
I’ve been thinking about this because I have been slowly reading the late Michael Denneny’s collected essays, On Christopher Street, a book about a publishing world I mostly never saw close up, but which, by the early 1990s, was vitally important to my life.
In one chapter, a set of notes hastily scribbled before an NPR interview in 1988, Denneny wrote: “I never thought I’d have regular discussions with authors about whether they would live long enough to finish their book — it’s a race against time and death — editing in hospital rooms after visiting hours were over, writing between funerals, etc.” In a 1989 lecture he said, of AIDS literature, “This is not strong emotion recollected in tranquility; these are reports from the combat zone.” He advocates for such literature as, like much ethnic or national literature, a form of bearing witness.
After a crisis has passed, or metamorphosed, what becomes of the witness statements?
*
Dan Sinykin has recently published a couple of interesting essays adapted from his new book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. For Slate, he wrote about Lester del Rey and the creation of fantasy as a marketing category; for The Nation, he wrote about the creation of the term “literary fiction”, another marketing category. I’ve just gotten a copy of his book and have enjoyed its first chapters, as well as these excerpts-as-essays, since they appeal to my historical-materialist preferences for literary history. Far less work has been done than needs to be done on the everyday realities of publishing that have shaped who and what gets published, distributed, sold, and read.
(Aside: Sinykin’s work is helping to begin what I hope will be a synthesizing trend, bringing together various types of histories. He lets his publishing-centric analysis be guided at moments by the work of Mark McGurl, particularly The Program Era (which I mentioned in 2010 at The Mumpsimus), a book about the ways academic programs in creative writing may have shaped the possibilities of American literary fiction. One day I hope someone will build from this sort of work and add another important academic element: the influence of Composition & Rhetoric programs and teachers, particularly figures like Donald M. Murray. But that’s a topic for another time…)
The strange thing for me in reading Sinykin’s work is that it is a history I have lived, mostly as a reader but sometimes as a writer. Though I never met Lester or Judy-Lynn del Rey, I know people who knew them, and Del Rey Books was the first publisher to put me on their publicity list in the early days of The Mumpsimus. (Thanks to their publicist Colleen Lindsay, who would soon become one of my closest friends in the publishing world.) I’m only a couple years older than Del Rey Books, and their dominance even in rural New Hampshire in the 1980s meant my perception of science fiction and fantasy was shaped by their editorial decisions and marketing.
These two poles — “literary fiction” as represented by the Vintage Contemporaries series and SF as represented by Del Rey — have structured my own approach to writing and, especially, criticism. Two anecdotes from childhood will show how deep it goes:
The summer between seventh and eighth grades (1987 or so) I attended a writing workshop for “gifted” students taught by college teachers. My own workshop was devoted to the rudiments of nonfiction (it was basically a first-year composition course), but I remember standing outside of another classroom, waiting for our teacher to arrive, and listening to a conversation between a student and a workshop leader for a fiction class. The workshop leader was admonishing the student for writing fantasy. “This is a course devoted to literary fiction,” the teacher said. I remember being completely puzzled. I had recently fallen in love with science fiction in particular and my greatest dream was to be a professional science fiction writer. What was this literary fiction thing?
(Right around the same time, I had a conversation with an English professor from the local college. My mother wanted me to talk with him about what “literature” is and whether science fiction can be literature. (I think she was worried I was going to read science fiction and grow up to be a juvenile delinquent. Her own father had prohibited comic books in the house, she said, because they “rot your brain”. She was apparently anxious that I not rot my own brain with something similar to comics.) This professor said that no, science fiction is not literature, it is formula fiction. I didn’t understand, but I was intrigued. Later, another college professor gave me a copy of Laurence Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, so I could try to learn on my own what literature is. I wrote about this all at more length back in 2010. It is no coincidence that my adult life has been devoted to pressing against and through various literary borders.)
I share this anecdote because it so encapsulates the forces that Sinykin identifies. The marketing category of literary fiction, made to save a certain type of writing from being erased by major publishers, became a hegemonic force through the collaboration of university creative writing programs. The career of Raymond Carver powerfully demonstrates this, but that’s only the most obvious one. And the effect lasted a long time — when I was first in grad school in 2005-2007, I took a novella writing course and the professor told us we would be writing literary fiction, which he identified with John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. A student asked if John Irving counted as literary fiction and our professor said no, John Irving is popular fiction. (As far as I could tell, to him everyone who was not Updike, Bellow, or Roth was not literary fiction.)
Sinykin recognizes that the borders between such things are now quite porous, but he doesn’t really know what to do with it. His Nation essay is good as far as it goes (aside from saying Jeff VanderMeer is published by Riverhead; his primary publisher in the U.S. is FSG), but within the limits of a short magazine piece he can’t really explore much of the meaning and implications of what he’s writing about, so ends with a pretty limp last paragraph that feels like a shrug of the shoulders.
There is a longer article or maybe even a book waiting for someone who wants to dig into more of the details, who wants to explore, for instance, how Jonathan Lethem went from publishing in Aboriginal SF and Asimov’s to The New Yorker; how ’90s magazines like Crank! and Century nurtured a hunger for genre-crossing work that McSweeney’s and Conjunctions (among others) would take up in the new century; how blogs and social media helped weaken some borders that once seemed impermeable; how a generation of writers who not only cut their teeth on the literary canon but also on D&D and Star Wars inevitably ended up writing books that challenged ideas of genre … etc. It’s a complicated story, and the implications of it are difficult to parse even now.
(In Sinykin’s book there is no mention of Kelly Link. Nor Octavia Butler. Both their careers have a lot to say about all of this.)
*
I wonder if there is anything to be said about the rise and fall of the gay male reader as a target audience for marketing, particularly the marketing of fiction. From the late ’80s through the ’90s, it was a thing, likely primarily the result of gay white men moving from pariah status to being seen as more affluent than their straight peers, their wealth less tied to children and suburbs. But books? Men, generally speaking, have long been less voracious, less consistent readers and (most importantly) buyers of books than women. What madness would make a profit-motivated business market books to men and not women? (Could it be … sexism?!) There was, of course, the basic sexism that lesbians still suffer from, and which explains a lot of how things have been structured. But the publisher’s weren’t wrong that this was, in fact, a market. If you wanted stories about gay men, and not just porn, you didn’t have many other options.
I’ve often wondered, though, if there was anything other than sexism that made gay male fiction more of a mainstream market than lesbian fiction. There were major novels by lesbians — Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) was one of the important works of fiction of the 1990s — but less of a separate category, at least from the big publishers. Michael Denneny’s Stonewall Inn Editions books were not limited to men, but the line’s fiction was strongly dominated by male writers. Or take another prominent example: Despite their founding editor’s death after a few books, the Men on Men series of anthologies put out more than twice as many volumes as the Women on Women anthologies.
I wonder what the literary landscape would have looked like if the Women on Women anthologies had been more successful and long-lasting, if the various anthologies and magazines had promoted and cultivated lesbian short fiction more, if lesbian novelists had been more strongly and prominently marketed toward lesbian readers — if there was Lesbian Fiction as much as there was lesbian fiction. In what ways might the sorts of writing we got, and the careers that writers got, have been better? In what ways might they have been worse?
The dominance of men as writers of queer fiction during the ’90s made Gay (Male) Fiction a legible marketing category, just as the smart editing and marketing of the Vintage Contemporaries books made Literary Fiction a legible marketing category. In both cases, the marketing efforts not only made some things visible (and others invisible), it gave us something to think against.
Just as I wanted to write and not write Literary Fiction, I wanted to write and not write Gay Fiction. I wanted to exist in the interstices, to be suspended between the is and the not, taking what seemed best from either, a middle way. Some of the books in the Stonewall Inn series were important to me, but ultimately my aesthetic sense got most excited by things like the High Risk Books series, a series I’m pleased to see now was relatively well balanced with regard to gender, probably because it was not a determinedly gay/lesbian series, but, though its focus on transgression, ultimately ended up being perhaps the queerest collection of fiction in the ’90s.
Similarly, Literary Fiction has always seemed most exciting to me when it’s working against the mode’s supposed seriousness and respectability, just as genre fiction excites me when it pushes against expectations rather than running toward them, which is what a lot of genre readers want — it’s why they go to a genre in the first place, that sense of familiarity. This, too, is legibility: genres and marketing categories are about managing and leveraging reader expectations, and readers can’t expect what is unknown. (Even if what they want is the strange and unknown. That, too, has a genre and market: The Weird.) Legibility, then, allows push and pull. The push toward and the pull away.
*
A couple days ago, I was talking about age and queer writers with a friend who has published novels both for adults and teens. He pointed out something that never occurred to me, though ought to have: queer fiction today is most strongly marketed and identified within the Young Adult (YA) fiction umbrella, and a lot of that has to do with libraries. For most libraries, it is the children’s and young adult sections that get the most traffic, the most use. The librarians for the youth and teen collections can justify ordering lots of queer books because those books are published for youth and teens, so the order is part of a larger order of middle-grade and YA books. It is also easier to justify because liberal-minded parents and librarians know that young people questioning their sexuality and gender need support they don’t have to ask for, need to be able to roam the stacks and find some books that represent at least some of their experience. This is a vital service libraries provide. (I’ve written about the importance of library books in my own recognition of queerness.) Offering books for queer youth feels urgent in a way that allows some bookstores and libraries to prioritize it, some publishers to justify it. The sense of urgency contributes to the legibility of that type of writing, just as the sense of urgency around gay liberation and then the AIDS crisis made the queer fiction of the later 20th century visible, possible, known, desired, marketable — legible.
We’re seeing an unprecedented and authoritarian backlash against the freedom of libraries, a backlash with one big component being fear of queer and trans books. As nauseating and destructive as the backlash is, it does provide a certain energy that can fuel book sales, reading, and discussion.
There is a certain overlap between the pro and con in their concern for the children. Maia Kobabe, author of one of the most-banned books in the country, Gender Queer, identified it: “I can absolutely understand the desire of a parent to protect their child from sensitive material. I’m sympathetic to people who have the best interest of young people at heart,” Kobabe said to The Texas Tribune. “I also want to have the best interest of young people at heart. There are queer youth at every high school — and those students, that’s [who] I’m thinking about, is the queer student who is getting left behind.”
While I’m sure Kobabe would prefer that Gender Queer not be such a lightning rod, not be so condemned and villified and misread, it has also become vastly better known, and sold far more copies, than it would have if it had been ignored. That’s always true for books well-known for controversy. Controversy is great for sales. Controversy itself creates a chaotic, sometimes dangerous kind of legibility.
However, to be banned is not always to be legible as controversial. Sometimes, to be banned is just to be disappeared. My friend who chatted with me about age and queer writers has books on the Texas and Florida lists for banning, but those are long lists, unlikely to help his sales. Lesser-known books quietly removed from the shelves get no benefit from banning, they just go out of print faster. When groups of book-banners create lists and distribute them to libraries and school boards, the books the banners want to destroy do not all get media attention. I expect that’s part of the strategy. “Here are 800 ‘problematic’ books,” they might say. Depending on how such a list is received, it could have devastating consequences for sales.
Consider what Scholastic has reportedly done recently, essentially creating a removable bookcase of books that might cause controversy. Want to be able to remove from your library order or book fair any titles that might cause parents to complain? Now Scholastic has made it easy for you. And suddenly a whole swathe of books have less distribution than others. Thus, an iceberg tip of well-known controversial books sell an order of magnitude more copies than they would have otherwise, while a mass of others disappear, rendered illegible, the ink on their pages washing away in the waters of oblivion.
*
I’ve been writing these words for a week now. Tonight, I attended a communal reading of LGBTQ+ poetry put on by our university’s diversity center, the students’ writing club, and the queer club. It was in honor of LGBTQ+ History Month, and they did a really good job, selecting a wide variety of poems from around the world by various sorts of people, trying also to continue honoring National Hispanic American Heritage Month as well. People went around reading from a laptop with copies of the selected poems on it. There was a lovely informality to it all, but also seriousness, earnestness (This, friends, this is queer community: informal, spontaneous, flexible, supportive, earnest.) From the texts selected by the students, I read a lovely Lorca poem (though I was not brave enough to read the original Spanish, which was there on the page and I should have, since I do, after all, read Spanish a bit, but have zero confidence in my ability with it).
Before I knew it, I’d stayed longer than I ever intended to. One colleague left, then another, off to responsibilities and families. My office was near the space of the reading, and I scooted over to it and grabbed a few books from my shelves, including Poets for Life, an early anthology of poetry addressing the AIDS crisis. As the only person over 30 left in the room, as far as I could tell, I was the only person there with any living memory of those years. The book itself, published in 1989, was older than the students. I am probably something of a broken record, always harping on the AIDS crisis years, but LGBTQ+ history without 1980-1995 is not a history I can recognize. So I went up and I read Mark Doty’s “Tiara”, a poem I hadn’t read in a long time but remembered vaguely. It seemed appropriate, especially since Doty read at our university in 2016 as part of a poetry reading series founded by Donald Hall, and I spent some time talking with him, time I remember with fondness (we talked about his essay for Granta about Walt Whitman, Bram Stoker, and Dracula).
“Tiara” is an astonishing poem, a beautiful mix of memory, humor, honor, pain. I wasn’t really thinking and wasn’t prepared for how the poem would sneak up on me. (That’s what poems do, the good ones.) I read it, finished, left some silence, thanked the group and made a quick gesture of needing to go. I told them to keep the books I’d brought, leave them out on the tables, I’d pick them up in the morning.
I forget sometimes how hard we yearned for the younger generation not to go through what we did, what our elders did. That’s what made so many fights worthwhile. Yes, we fought for our own survival, but what I most remember is fighting so other people might not have to in the future. What a blessing have been the bits of progress we’ve been able to hold onto! We need more. We need a way to reverse the backlash and find our way toward pleasure, joy, liberation. Small victory by small victory.
I was glad to have brought the important viewpoint of “Tiara” to the group, but also questioned myself, wondered if it wouldn’t be better to leave it all to archives, let history’s dust accumulate on the tombtones we older folks carry in our hearts. I don’t know. Memory and witness, progress and hope… Do I believe in any of them?
When I got home, poet Donna Stonecipher’s new book waited in the mailbox. The Ruins of Nostalgia: 64 prose poems titled “The Ruins of Nostalgia 1, 2, 3…” The fiftieth begins:
It got harder and harder over the years to keep the ruin kept as a reminder of the horrors of war in its designated state of ruin. With time, the ruin did what ruins do: kept further ruining.
It ends:
The healing is regularly postponed in the ruins of nostalgia.
I think of John Weir’s recent story collection/novel Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me. Weir is one of the survivors. His 1989 novel The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket won the second annual Lambda award for Best Debut Novel (Alan Hollinghurst’s now-classic The Swimming-Pool Library won the year before.) As a member of ACT UP, Weir participated in the protest of CBS News on January 23, 1991; he briefly appeared on screen, interrupting the daily report of the world’s big events.
In 2007, writing about Weir’s second novel, I said: “The past in What I Did Wrong has meaning and effect, yes, but indefinite and shifting ones — it’s a past to be cogitated rather than digested, a past with pull, like a moon or a trawler. It’s full of algebra rather than arithmetic.”
In a 2022 interview, Weir explained some of the origin of the title of his new book:
In 2013, in the middle of winter, a bunch of queer people in the US and Canada jumped online and had a 24/7 days-long fight about whether or not ACT UP New York, and AIDS activists who were (at the time, in 2013) in their 50s and 60s, had co-opted the “AIDS narrative” so thoroughly that people in their twenties and thirties were living with a kind of erasure of their lives and diagnoses and experiences. …
I saw everyone’s point.
ACT UP, Queer Nation, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, GLAAD, the Lesbian Avengers, the Radical Faeries, and others all helped make queerness visible, helped make AIDS victims people to be empathized with rather than shunned, helped overcome some of the most vicious behaviors of a vicious culture. Telling the story of how that legibility happened is important, but it cannot be at the expense of the present. The history was messy. Any well-made plot tells it wrong.
We can hold in our minds the truth that a generation of writers, artists, musicians, people got absolutely eviscerated by a brutal disease while also recognizing that, even with tremendous medical, technological, and social gains a catastrophic number of people are still dying with HIV in the world. We can hold onto the heroism of the history while also celebrating and empowering the young heroes in our midst. We who were alive then can speak of the unfillable absence in ourselves, the deforming forces that we never really escaped, without setting ourselves up against the young, who have their own scars, their own deformations. Solidarity matters.
We dreamed a future of liberation. We knew it was utopian. We knew we would never live in it. The dream kept us going, and it may still yet. We can share the power of that dream, we can demand that liberation remain possible.
We can render liberation legible.
given the ordinary marvels of form
and gravity, what could he do
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it?
—Mark Doty, “Tiara”
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image by Anastasia Saldatava via Unsplash
