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am a novelist! who sometimes writes essays and book reviews. It’s the sort of occasional prose usually described as done with the left hand, only I’m left-handed so the phrase doesn’t work for me. I’ve been producing these nonfiction pieces for thirty years now. They are more literally personal than my novels and I like to think they form an accidental autobiography, one of ideas and opinions as well as evenut/ I have written about coming out in Virginia and about sitting on my stoop in New York City, but I’ve
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also written about Henry James, children’s books, horror movies, straight male fiction, and gay marriage. Here are my favorite pieces, arranged in a kind of chronological order so that they might suggest a life story if you read the book from beginning to end. You are free, of course, just to skip around. I have resisted the temptation to add postscripts and updates other than those written at the time of first publication. I’ve been fortunate in the editors who asked for my work over the years. Patrick Merla invited me to write book reviews for Christopher Street magazine back in 1978, shortly after he published my first gay short story there. He was followed by Tom Steele. The late John Preston asked me to contribute to his nonfiction anthologies about gay life, Hometowns and Friends and Lovers, and Jim Marks frequently requested reviews for Lambda Book Report. The photographer Robert Giard invited me to write an essay about gay male literature for Particular Voices, his book of author photos, which is how “Mapping the Territory” came about; Joan Nestle wrote the essay about lesbian literature. (Giard too is now sadly gone.) Larry Mass asked for a contribution to his collection of essays about Larry Kramer. (This led to the inevitable second thoughts about Kramer, which I delivered at a public reading; they are printed here for the first time.) Ian Britain published an early version of my Henry James essay in Meanjin, the arts quarterly in Australia. Things came around full circle when I began to work with Patrick Merla again, first when I wrote “Slow Learners” for his collection of coming-out stories, Boys Like Us, and then, when he was editor of the James White | xii |
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Review, with three long essays: “Can Straight Men Still Write?,” “A Body in Books,” and “A Queer Monster.” I often joke that Patrick made me a gay writer when he first published my short story—if I hadn’t known gay work could actually be printed, I would not have written more. But I kept writing it, nine novels’ worth. So it feels only right that I dedicate this collection to you, Patrick. Thanks.
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y boyfriend and I have been together for twenty-five years. Neither of us is terribly excited by the idea of gay marriage. We have friends who love it and others who are appalled. Draper and I feel more casual about it. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to get married ourselves (we met with a lawyer fifteen years ago and he set up the necessary wills and legal protections), but weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not going to stop you. All right, we is a highly unstable word, and Draper and I are not one homogenized mind.
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We agree more than we disagree, but I should focus on my own thoughts here. As our country goes marriage mad, I wonder why I am so nonchalant, curious yet detached. I’m going to explore a few ideas in an attempt to discover what I really think.
1 A sort of friendship recognized by the police. —robert louis stevenson (on marriage)
Until recently, late in the twentieth century, marriage was virtually mandatory for everyone. The West was as adamant about it as the Third World. A man without a wife was not a real man. A woman without a husband was a nonperson. That’s no longer true in secular countries. More and more people live alone or in nonromantic households. More and more straight couples live together without the blessing of church or state. Not only is marriage no longer required, there are fewer benefits to being married. Not enough companies offer decent health care to their employees anymore, much less to their employees’ spouses. Most couples, straight as well as gay, include two workers, so individuals have their own Social Security accounts. And so on. (One exceptional benefit, however, is when your lover is a foreign national. Straight people can turn lovers into citizens simply by marrying them. We can’t.) Now that marriage is no longer a necessity, it’s become more important as a symbol. And symbols are very interesting, not least because we are free to choose or reject them. | 222 |
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1 Love is not so much an emotion as a situation. —laurence sterne
The world is an unreal place. We want companions to provide a few landmarks to let us know where we are. Friends help but a longterm mate is even better. Yet a mate can be just as unreal, so we often require some kind of act or rite or magic words to make the bond less ephemeral, less existential. Progressive types who oppose any kind of marriage argue that it brings the church and state into our bedrooms. Which it does, but that’s not how it feels. The experience of getting married is more like a social ritual that pins down a slippery emotion. Such as a funeral. I’m not being satirical. Love is as powerful as grief; a wedding can shape and name love just a funeral can shape and name loss. A wedding is a beautiful thing, and much less conclusive than a funeral.
1 Two heads, four arms, four legs— Such a delicate monster. —the tempest
When Caliban, a very rough monster, speaks these words in Shakespeare’s grand play about love and forgiveness, he’s referring to two men lying in a heap on the ground, but one can’t help thinking of a married couple. | 223 |
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Shakespeare is full of great marriage matter. There’s “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” from Sonnet 116, for example. His comedies often end in multiple weddings. The entire state of Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, when gay people were suddenly free to marry, resembled nothing so much as the finale of a Shakespeare comedy. My cousin Maureen got married to Meg, her lover of many years, that morning in a city hall on Cape Cod. Their stories about the festive day were absolutely exhilarating. But the wonderful metaphor of marriage is also a legal fact, and legal facts involve lawyers. I like lawyers. Some of my best friends practice law. My sister-in-law, whom, I adore, is a lawyer. However, I get very nervous whenever an enterprise requires an attorney. A few years ago a friend was involved in a small business contract that bound him to a financial partner he came to despise. It took them forever to dissolve the contract. And what is marriage but a very small, very personal business? More than one gay or lesbian attorney has quipped in recent years, “When gay marriage is legal, I’m getting out of legal aid into divorce law. That’s where the money will be.” This spoils the metaphor for me.
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1 It is not good for man to be alone. —genesis, 2-18
One thing I love about gay marriage, without reservation, is how the very idea of it infuriates Christian conservatives. Liberal Christians respond more loosely and sanely, but conservatives—evangelicals, fundamentalists, Mormons, and so on—go bananas. That’s because the concept strikes not just at their idea of gay people, but at their idea of themselves. The human race is full of sin, but conservatives have somehow decided that the gravest sin is homosexuality. Since they’re not homosexual themselves, they can feel assured they are among the righteous, even if they sometimes think impure thoughts, cheat in business, cheat on their spouses, neglect their children or skip church on Sunday. Suddenly, gay people can marry too, and the good Christian must ask him or herself, “Is my life so different from theirs? Am I really so much better? Can I still count on heaven?” It has to hurt, to have your chief guarantee of eternal life snatched away, leaving you with the fear that you still might burn in hell after all.
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1 Marriage is a fine institution—but who wants to live in an institution? —groucho marx
I must confess that, as a novelist, I love gay marriage. Novelists tend to be descriptive rather than prescriptive in our morals. All we want is a good story. Where would the Victorian novel be without marriage? Where would postwar American fiction be without divorce? I can’t wait to see what new plots and story lines gay marriage will provide. However, I don’t expect it to produce a radical change in perception or behavior. That’s probably the chief reason for my laidback attitude. The change in perception has already occurred. Twenty years ago, gay marriage would’ve overturned American assumptions about gay people: oh wow, they love and live in couples, too. Now, however, many straight people, especially those who can look honestly at their own marriages, know gay couples are often like straight couples, no better and no worse. People will behave much as they did before, only under different names. Some gay people will marry, others won’t. Some marriages will work, some will go down in flames. Love is difficult with or without lawyers. A few years ago Andrew Sullivan argued that gay men needed marriage so we would learn to keep our dicks in our pants. Since then we have discovered that Andrew—with his love of chat rooms, sex lines, and testosterone injections—is the one with the wandering penis | 226 |
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problem. However, I can’t imagine a wedding ring will make him or anyone else more restrained than they already are. (A straight woman friend recently confessed that she found married men’s wedding rings very hot—when they weren’t married to her anyway. Some gay people are sure to find the band of gold even sexier than tattoos or pierced nipples.) Marriage has loosened up in this country without disappearing. Now it’s loose enough to include us. It’s neither the end of civilization, as many Republicans claim, nor the guarantee of equal rights and domestic happiness that its giddier celebrants (often single) hope for. But gay marriage is going to happen, no matter what you or I or Jerry Falwell say. I wish the new couples all the happiness in the world, warn them they will have bad days as well as good days, and hope they understand that it never hurts to know a good attorney. 2004
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