LAST SPRING, Sarah Schulman came out with her eighth novel, The Child, published by Carroll & Graf, an imprint that almost immediately disappeared when the Avalon Publishing Group was bought in yet another corporate merger. The collapse of Carroll & Graf is a particularly harsh blow since its editor-in-chief, Don Weise, had made it, among New York mainstream publishers, the champion of GLBT books. For Schulman it is a particular disappointment, since it had taken her eight years to find a publisher for The Child, which is unquestionably one of Schulman’s finest works. I wrote to Schulman, and between July 3 and 17, 2007, we had the following discussion over the Internet. — DB
David Bergman: Sarah, The Child is a genuine achievement. It is funny, moving, and scary. You deal with subjects that no one seems to be dealing with, and the reviews of the book show that there’s a readership out there that appreciates your writing. You say that the reason editors gave for not wanting to publish the book was the “objective” way you treated the subject of teenagers having sex with older men in their thirties and forties. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “objective.”
Sarah Schulman: I did not come out against the relationship. I also was not for the relationship. I just revealed what it truly meant to the two people involved, from their points of view, without championing or moralizing. In my gay generation, many men that I came up with talked comfortably and casually about sex they had had with adults when they were teenagers. Now, because of the cultural shift to gay marriage and parenthood, those stories seem to have disappeared from public view. After I wrote the book and could not publish it, the priest scandal in the Catholic Church was exposed, and I thought, Okay, now America will realize that many teenage boys want to have sex with men. But they didn’t; every case was theorized as “abuse.” Ditto with the Congressional page scandal. What ever happened to human complexity and individual dimension? I don’t want to be too Wilhelm Reich here, but sexual repression is a tool that creates passivity to [support]totalitarianism. And in our time this cult of “protectionism,” the exploitation of people’s fear of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, etc., is rampant. Not, in the end, to actually protect anyone, but as a way of extending control and power over people’s lives.
DB: You’re right that men used to speak about the valuable experiences they got from their relationships with older men, and they don’t anymore. I used to hear women talking about the same sort of thing, being helped along by a female mentor-lover. It has bothered me about how age-stratified gay life has become. The only student in my Queer Theatre class who had a friendship with older gay men was one who identified as straight. But why would this “objective” account of intergenerational sex spook editors so much? Wouldn’t they find this edgy and transgressive? Wouldn’t it be a feature that would make the book stand out?
SS: Oh, David. there is zero interest in anything that actually matters, as far as the gatekeepers are concerned. Our government is so sick, and our country’s role in the world is primarily to cause pain. There is a fear of detail and complexity because truth is found there, and in this moment truth is a very implicating thing. The repression of ideas and experiences that could force accountability in a corrupt culture is enforced in most institutions, job sites, and even in personal relationships. We are in a moment where authorities, best friends, and lovers feel fine hiding behind e-mail, screening phone calls, refusing to have face-to-face uncomfortable conversations because they have cultural permission to abdicate responsibility. In America in the early 21st century, refusing accountability is a cultural norm. And the publishing industry is one of many implementers of this socio-emotional policy.
DB: Sarah, that’s why I think you have run into trouble with American publishers and why you have such dedicated readers. You’ve never stopped being an activist writer—insisting that readers take responsibility for their lives and for their country. You’ve never stopped believing that personal action can make a difference, and that group action can make even more of a difference. And you dare to be angry.
SS: You know, I am a very optimistic person. I’m funny and interested in the world and love to see and do. If a man said the same things that I say, in the same words, no one would describe him as “angry”; they might say he was “articulate.” I have enormous belief in other people, and I take people at their word—not only about what they say they feel, think, and will do, but I believe what they say about what kind of person they are. It is my experience that most people are not used to being listened to, and as a result sometimes don’t listen to themselves. So they may feel surprise that I expect them to be who they say they are. I admit that this conflict between how people wish to be and how they truly are, when illuminated, can create shame and anger in others. But it also provides a great opportunity. I think that deciding not to step up to that opportunity can make people project their feelings of inadequacy onto others. And because I have been able to achieve to a degree, in a community that does not have equal opportunity, I can become a projection screen for those kinds of feelings. Especially if the other has conflicted feelings about how they want women to appear.
DB: I think the problem is that we’re not supposed to be angry. People from oppressed groups especially are supposed to be nice, but as Isherwood in A Single Man points out, “while you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people making it happen.” Only conservative talk show hosts can get angry, and that’s because anger is one of their privileges of power. I think some of the frivolity of gay men’s culture—a frivolity that at times is wonderful—is a deflection of the anger we feel. I have a friend, an out lesbian politician who is also black, and she hates the word “articulate.” People are always calling her “articulate,” as if they are surprised that a black woman can actually speak coherently and passionately about the issues.
SS: The problem with your argument is that it implies that somewhere out there is an American writer with primary lesbian content, who is openly lesbian, whose work is accepted as regular American work because she has a tone that is more demure or less explicit and that fits gender expectations. But there is no one out there who fits this idea in the United States. British lesbian writers have been allowed by the media, the publishing industry, and the reward system in the arts to be seen as real writers. And once they have that currency, they are imported that way. But no American with primary lesbian content has had that experience. So, I think you are looking in the wrong place. It is not how lesbian writers behave that causes our marginalization. Our culture is hostile to the idea that a lesbian could have the authority of being a protagonist in authentic representation. That is the obstacle.
DB: You’re right. Most of the lesbian novelists in the U.S. who wrote explicitly about lesbian relations have either very much muted their representation or stopped writing fiction. I think much of the same thing has happened in gay fiction as well. Straight readers can’t get over the fact that Edmund White is still writing about sex, especially since he’s nearly seventy, an age at which they assume even heterosexuals should have given up sex. What do you think particularly disturbs editors about representations of lesbian characters?
SS: I have thought about this a lot. I think that it’s a conceit of privilege to see one’s supremacy as natural, neutral, and value-free, instead of imposed by force. When representation expands to include protagonists who don’t have full citizenship rights, it makes other people have to confront that their own, dominant point of view is in fact just one of many, instead of “the way things are.” This knowledge, that people do not earn or deserve their privileges, and that their power is constructed, not natural, makes people very angry. It punctures their façade that they didn’t know was a façade. It is unbearable news, and they will do anything to avoid hearing it. This means falsely creating other points of view as “wrong,” “second rate,” “special interest,” “didactic” and other descriptives used to demean human experience. The fact that the culture is obsessed with the story of the white male, repeating it over and over ad nauseam, describing every event from his point of view, and constructing an elaborate psychological and material apparatus to maintain his centrality to all expression, shows their desperate inability to see themselves realistically.
DB: This is what I meant by saying you were an “activist writer,” which was a wrongheaded way to say that you make it difficult for readers to weasel out of doing something about their lives. In The Child, Eva—one of the central characters, a lesbian, left-wing lawyer—goes cross country at the end to try to convince her ex-lover not to give up on making the world she wants, and not to fall back into the acceptance of things as they are. As a writer you demand something more than the æsthetic pleasure of reading your prose, which is so often hilarious and elegant, an achievement in its own. I can think of only [the late]Grace Paley, who caught that special blend of New Yorkese. I’m interested in Muriel Rukeyser, another New Yorker, and why critics have never known what to do with her despite her clear importance in American poetry, and I believe she poses the same obstacle for her reader. Rukeyser also won’t let the reader rest on the æsthetics of her work.
SS: That is very kind of you. Grace Paley was a personal hero and one of the first real writers to give me encouragement. I didn’t really know what an MFA was until I published my second novel, Girls, Visions, and Everything, in 1986. I was working as a waitress in the first coffee shop in Tribeca and started to learn a lot about the art business from my customers. I realized that MFAs helped people advance professionally, so I enrolled in the City College program. The first day I went up there and Grace Paley was my teacher. We went around the room and all read a little piece from our own work. The other students thought that my protagonist was a man, because they couldn’t understand the lesbian content. After class, she told me to come to her office. I sat there and she said, “You’re really a writer. You’re really doing it. You don’t need this class.” I never went back. A few years later I read with her and Sonia Sanchez at St. Mark’s Church. It was an incredible thrill.
DB: I spent only one afternoon with Paley, and she was one of the most luminous people I have every met.
SS: While there are sections of my novels that are written in a style that refers to the realist style Paley used, I don’t think any of my complete novels are similar to her work æsthetically. Stylistically, I am somewhere between Lydia Davis and Paul Auster.
DB: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed it. How do you see your work fitting between Lydia Davis and Paul Auster?
SS: I think that I have a very broad palette at this point and that the work ranges from traditional realism, heightened and stylized realism, genre work (all Auster traits) to multiple strategy experimentation and invention of language styles (Lydia Davis).
DB: What younger lesbian writers do you find particularly exciting, or what older ones have been strangely overlooked?
SS: My student, Angelina Price, just finished her first novel Bright Like Neon Love, which is a moving, smart, hysterically funny, totally modern novel in the tradition of Erika Lopez. My personal sentimental favorite lesbian novel is Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw. It is my dream to adapt it to the stage.
DB: A last question: What do you see as the future of lesbian fiction? Is there anything that can be done to make it brighter? I guess that’s two questions.
SS: Well, I am an optimist; I always believe that people can do the right thing. So, I believe that MFA programs can make a commitment to serving lesbian writers, not only by hiring lesbian writers but also by insisting that all faculty be well versed in world literature. That these new lesbian writers can continue to develop sophisticated, innovative work with primary lesbian content. That agents will have the guts to fight for these novels and put the discrimination issues on the table. That editors of all genders and sexualities will recognize their own prejudices and overcome them in order to be able to see the merit of these works. That marketing and publicity departments will have honest frank conversations with reviewing venues and bookstores. That well-known heterosexual and gay male writers will blurb lesbian novels, invite lesbian writers into the apparatus, advocate for and support openly lesbian work. That developmental and support institutions like residencies, grants, and fellowships will be consistently and actively inclusive. That this foundational infrastructure will convince book review assignment editors to integrate conversations around lesbian literature fully into their coverage of American arts and letters, insuring that the work is contextualized and treated with respect. This vision is totally achievable. But it depends on individuals making moral choices and following through.
